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Africa Today 48.1 (2001) 145-147



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Anderson, David M., and Vigdis Broch-Due, eds. 1999. The Poor are Not Us: Pastoralism and Poverty in East Africa. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 269 pp.

In recent decades, pastoralists in Eastern Africa have been under extraordinary stress, due to a powerful cocktail of factors: loss of pasture to expanding farms and national parks; commoditization of livestock and land; livestock enclosures; drought; warfare; ill-advised development schemes; environmental degradation and overgrazing; population growth; a growing gap between rich and poor pastoralists; and the breakdown of traditional coping mechanisms. Reasonable people can disagree on which of these factors is most to blame, but all agree that pastoralism now constitutes an increasingly vulnerable and impoverished sector.

Local and external perceptions and misperceptions of pastoralists and poverty are the subject of The Poor Are Not Us, a collection of eleven essays written mainly from a historical and/or anthropological perspective. Inasmuch as edited volumes such as this can possess a common theme, the core theses of this collection can be summed up as follows: (1) the conventional view held by "developers," that pastoralism is a flawed and doomed mode of production, is wrong; (2) the crises pastoralists are experiencing have been mainly the result of externally imposed constraints, especially including flawed development policies, not the result of dysfunctional and/or conservative pastoral practices; (3) those flawed development policies are produced by misperceptions of pastoralists, ignorance of their culture, bias against nomadism, and mistaken presumptions about pastoral poverty. The Poor Are Not Us more or less explicitly embraces the role of defender and advocate of "the cause of the herding peoples" (p. 241).

The case studies in this collection are, with one exception, based entirely on pastoral and agropastoral communities in Kenya and Tanzania, with particular emphasis on the Maasai. This limits the book's ability to generalize, and leads the collection to embrace some generalizations that are not in fact universal to all eastern African pastoral groups. This is particularly evident in the volume's tendency to portray pastoralists solely as victims; had a broader sampling of cases been included, the book's findings might have revealed instances of clever diversification of economic activities by risk-managing pastoral households, and astute exploitation of newly accessible urban and international markets. The exclusion of cases from Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia (one case study is from southern Somalia) is in some ways unfortunate, since the book's stated purpose is as a corrective to misperceptions of poverty and pastoralism in famine and war areas--a situation that pastoralists in the Horn of Africa have far more experience with than do the nomadic peoples of Kenya and Tanzania.

Still, the volume constitutes a rich collection of well-researched ethnographic, historical, and socioeconomic studies, nearly all of which are based on extensive fieldwork or archival research. The value of each of these chapters as stand-alone pieces makes the book a worthwhile read for those [End Page 145] interested in East African pastoralism or development and culture. Richard Waller's historical review of changes in Maasai pastoralism, poverty, and public policy is a very useful, carefully crafted, and well-researched contribution. Bernhard Helander's study of the agropastoral Hubeer clan of southern Somalia is a revealing example of the fluidity of ethnic identity and its relationship to wealth and poverty. Chapters by Aud Talle, Ole Rekdal, and Astrid Bylstad give voice to local pastoral and nonpastoral perceptions of poverty and development. Fred Zaal and Ton Dietz's study of the impact of the market on Kenyan Maasai highlights the very important aspects of risk and adaptation, and of the market's role in growing wealth differentiation within pastoral groups. Tomasz Potkanski provides an informative and closely researched case study of the erosion of mutual assistance customs among the Maasai. David Anderson's critical review of development interventions in the pastoral sector, including a case study of an Oxfam restocking project, includes a useful typology of various approaches to aid to the pastoral sector. The book also includes...

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