Herders, Warriors and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa (review)

Book Reviews 185 Herders, Warriors and Traders: Pastoralism in Africa John G. Galaty and Pierre Bonte, editors Boulder, CO: Westview Press, African Modernization and Development Series, 1991. In their conclusion, the editors ask the familiar and usually rhetorical question: What lessons for pastoral development can be drawn from this book? Not many in this case. This is not because of the contributors —the chapters include some excellent summary pieces and a comprehensive and useful introduction—but because, as a collection, Herders, Warriors and Traders lacks coherence and any sense of overall editorial command. Virtually none of the general ideas raised by individual authors are addressed by the editors and so dialogue between authors and cases fails signally to emerge. Incoherence extends to the choice of illustrations which sometimes do not match, let alone enhance , the text. The chapter on Kanem, for example, is illustrated by a Tuareg sword dancer and a Fulbe herder in Niger. "Illustration" of this kind is pointless, especially when the reproduction is so bad that many of the photographs appear to have been taken in thick fog—or possibly during a partial solar eclipse. Moreover, the editors have failed to make clear that the original conference from which the book derives took place in 1985. Some, if not all, of the chapters are thus less than timely. Indeed, two of them (Comaroffs and Johnson) have already been published elsewhere, as has Wilmsen's book. No doubt there are good reasons for the delay but it does the contributors a serious disservice not to give dates of final drafts here. That being said, the individual chapters are often very useful, either as concise summaries of existing work or as "new" contributions. Wilmsen contributes a neat summation of the historical basis of his now-notorious thesis concerning the modern construction of "Bushmen ." The controversy is not addressed, however. Turton brings together ethnographic data and analysis drawn from his own work (Mursi) and that of Tornay (Nyangatom) and Almagor (Dasenech) to argue convincingly for a reassessment of population movements and warfare among small-scale societies. The Comaroffses draw on their work on Tshidi history to examine the relationship between the value 186 Book Reviews of cattle as social and political signifiers and as objects of gendered production and economic exchange. Conte's chapter on the history of Kanem makes a body of interesting work accessible in English. Edited collections can cohere if there is either a clear editorial mind and agenda or sufficient common ground between contributors for shared concerns to emerge. To some extent, this volume falls in the latter category. The three chapters by Johnson, Sobania, and Turton hang together not just because they are dealing with rather similar social and economic phenomena in related areas of the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya but because the authors seem to be on the same wavelength. Johnson's notion of the "common economy" in the southern Sudan can clearly be seen in Sobania's discussion of socio-economic transactions within a varied ecological and ethnic context; and ideas of changing ethnicity are set in motion in Turton's study of shifting identities and political ecology on the Omo River. Taken together, the three chapters constitute an intellectual unity. Their perspective would have greatly enriched Galaty's study of Maasai expansion, a compilation of historiographical sources informed by what the author mystifyingly calls "ethnographic analogy," but Galaty seems unwilling to deal with the difficulties inherent in assuming the continuation of discrete social entities through time—something that clearly worries Conte as he deals with constructions of "Sao" groups. There is no sense here that the historical reality he sets out might be problematic or constructed. Again, the Comaroffs' chapter—which attempts an understanding of what it is about cattle that makes them so symbolically important, able to bear the impress of the personality of their owner and thus to stand for, and not merely cement, political and social exchange—leads to a crucial distinction between cattle as objects and subjects and pastoralism as a mode of subsistence shaping social and economic structures. A general discussion of this would have enlivened the book and, in particular, would have helped Bonte in his...