Pamela Kea's book about female farmers in a periurban area of The Gambia, West Africa, contributes important insights to the complexity of social relationships involved in temporary agrarian production. First of all, she convincingly argues against stereotypes about female African farmers as a homogeneous group always short of land rights, credits and other agrarian inputs. Rather, she shows how women are differently positioned, depending on whether they belong to the founding lineages as ‘hosts’ or if they are ‘strangers’ without rights to land. Although the ‘strange farmer’ labour system has been well known for men, Kea's book gives a rare description of how women establish such relationships in their own right. Strangers approach female hosts and beg them to become their ‘mother’ and to lend them land to cultivate. In return they offer both agrarian and domestic labour. In typical arrangements, the stranger helps the host growing rice during the rainy season, while she borrows land to grow her own vegetables during the dry season. A small part of the crop is given to her host as a gift, but this amount is substantially smaller than the one tenth that is usual in similar arrangements among men.
Because women are differently positioned they also have different views of development projects such as establishing communal vegetable gardens. Despite the fact that such projects may bring benefits, the hosts often are against them as they fear the loss of control over the land. The strangers, however, are generally positive about them as it would give them easier access to land. Kea discusses how agrarian transformations involve changes in the social relations of production, particularly how the changes from subsistence crops to cash crops (groundnuts) have involved changes in the gendered division of labour and a move towards increasingly individualized production systems. This implies that one cannot count on family labour, but instead needs contributions from ‘strange farmers’ and members of the woman's informal organization (kafoo) and paid labour.
Women need help from their daughters in the rice fields and in the vegetable gardens, but due to an increased emphasis on girls' education, most girls spend the day at school rather than in the fields. Women find themselves in a dilemma; on the one hand they want their daughters to help them work their land (both for practical and cultural reasons, such as preserving the Mandinka tradition of growing rice), while, at the same time, they realize that their daughters' future options are brighter with formal education. Women may thus rely on labour input derived from clients as well as other members of the family, the kafoo, or paid work.
In one of her chapters Kea discusses narratives about the founding of Brikama town; she shows how certain hegemonic representations of ownership and rights to land prevail, and are rarely challenged. Rather it is the actors' positions and sequence of actions that may be disputed, and a number of local traditions and principles may be used in the claims to land by the different actors.
The book's title promises an emphasis on entrustment among women. As Kea mentions, the concept of entrustment (karafoo) is an important Mandinka concept, in which people or goods are entrusted to others for safekeeping. Unfortunately, it never becomes really clear how the principle of entrustment is acted out in the relationships between the female hosts and strangers. Several strangers apparently appeal to their potential hosts to become their ‘mother’ as they are alone and have no mother in The Gambia. The hosts on their side define the relationship as friendly or as fellow ‘club members’ (kafoo), but rarely refer to the stranger as a ‘daughter’. One host argues that she attends the name-giving ceremony of her client, but otherwise does not interact socially; another helps her client in her vegetable garden as they have become friends. It would have strengthened the book if more empirical detail of the interaction between the hosts and strangers had been shared with the reader. From the material presented we don't know if the entrustment of a stranger implies obligations for the host, beyond the reciprocity normally involved in receiving gifts (in the form of labour or goods). Whatever entrustment there is, can it possibly be misused by one of the parties and can the trust be broken and the relationship end?
At the end of the book Kea compares host–stranger relationships with those of capitalist forms of production, but systematic comparisons with other local clientelist relations are missing. Clientelist relations between freeborn/owners (forro) and former slaves (jongo) or griots (jalilu) imply sets of rights, duties and claims in each other. Compared to these, the ‘strange farmers’ seem to enjoy a wider set of options.
The book is fluently written and based on several data sources, including long-term participant observation. It should be obligatory reading for everybody with an interest in African women's position in farming and development.
