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East African Dryland Pastoralism: Some Methodological Anxieties

 Mustafa Babiker, University of Khartoum

Introduction | The Crisis Scenarios  |Pastoralism-Agriculture : A Complex Relationship |  Concluding Remarks | References   

Introduction

The deriving force behind much research on East African dryland pastoralism is a set of powerful, widely perceived and, at times, emotional images  about its future. Alarms as to the approaching end of pastoralism have been repeatedly sounded by many anthropologists sympathetic to pastoral peoples.  In most cases, any  trend towards integrating animal husbandry with crop cultivation is interpreted as  a loss of resources necessary for pastoral survival.

 However, such interpretations and associated  worries about the future of pastoralism are, of course, not without reason.  In the Sudan, for example, the 1944 Soil Conservation Committee had recommended that where pastoralists are in direct competition for land with cultivators, it should be the policy that the rights of the cultivator be  considered paramount because his  crops yield a bigger return per unit area (quot. El Tayeb, ed., 1985: 35).  This view echoes  Sir Charles Eliot’s, then High Commissioner to the East African Protectorate, who, more than 50 years earlier, strongly announced the demise of pastoral people in Eastern Africa, predicting that their way of life would not be sustained in the face of the advances  of Western ideas and technologies; the future, asserted, Eliot, lay with the cultivator, not with the herder (quot. Anderson, 1993: 121). 

Moreover, worries about the future of pastoralism were further consolidated by the observed  tendency in post-colonial development policies that invariably displayed a strong bias in  favour of arable cropping in terms of jurisdictional, technical and economic assistance.  The official engrossment with the question of  how to restrict pastoral mobility and the associated settlement schemes, added a further dimension to the concern about the future of pastoralism.  The implications of such developments for the ‘traditional’ systems of pastoral production and resource management were posited as one of crisis : a ‘crisis in survival’.  The recurrence of droughts and famines in recent decades has lent great support to the prediction that pastoralism is in the verge of extinction (cf. Baker, 1977; Carr, 1977; Morton, 1988,1993).

This paper attempts  to contribute to the ongoing effort to obliterate perhaps the two major hurdles in the progress of our understanding of the dynamics of human adaptation in East African drylands. These are  the persistence of ‘crisis scenarios’ and the insistence on a ‘herder/farmer’ dichotomy when the future of pastoralism is considered in the context of a resource competition and conflict conundrum .  Thus, the following section of the paper questions the methodological foundations of the ‘crisis scenario’ .  The section  that follows examines the relationship between farming and herding  and shows how it is far more complex to be captured in a simple ‘herder/farmer’ dichotomy. The final section provides some concluding  remarks and their implications for future research and policy.  

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The Crisis Scenarios

In recent decades more and more optimistic scenarios  about the future of pastoralism began to emerge.  This is especially true in the case of research inspired by the revival of ‘actor-oriented’ perspectives and the academic recognition of the so-called ‘indigenous knowledge’ systems as opposed to the different brands of structuralism which dominated research in the 1970s. Although it is admitted that the “…pastoralists have historically experienced many cycles of herd growth and collapse, good weather and bad weather, and high and low prices for their products” (Barfield, 1992 : 216); yet, the “...pastoralists have proved remarkably resilient in the face of both natural and man-made disasters and there is no reason to believe that the end of  pastoralism is near” (Hogg, 1992: 135). Despite this optimism, gloomy scenarios are persistently adhered to by quite a good number of students of pastoral  societies :  “…many an anthropologist is deeply concerned about the fate of the people among who her or his work was done but still say that those people can take care of themselves.  This view is nonsense: in every case that I know of, pastoralism is losing ground” (Aronson, 1984:74). 

Many of the crisis scenarios, however, are rooted in a narrative that tells how things were  in earlier times when the pastoralists lived in harmony with their environments; how the state, aid agencies and the pastoralists themselves have undermined that harmony. The persistence of the crisis scenarios is, therefore, attributed to the assumption that it serves well the interest of donor agencies and national governments in perpetuating various forms of planned development interventions :“…the dependence of weak African government departments on official development assistance; and the political and moral pressures on donors to be seen to respond to their domestic constituencies and to act quickly… create a policy-making environment within which… ‘crisis narratives’ … can flourish” (Leah and Mearns, 1996:23).

 Moreover, the pastoralists themselves, in their attempts to secure development benefits and relief assistance, were seen by many commentators as contributing to the crisis discourse by  exaggerating their  actual or assumed predicament .  However, the reasons why the crisis scenarios have proved so resistant to change have  to do with much more than the priorities of national government departments, the interest of the donors or the  aspirations of the pastoralists.  Rather, the reasons are rooted in a particular approach for the generation of knowledge including timing of observations, procedures for investigation and objectives of research :  “… In virtually and discipline particular methods            come to acquire credibility and authority, and it can be the inheritance of  such methods… that explains the persistence of some received ideas. By defining what is acceptable as evidence, certain privileged methods also act to exclude  other sorts of data.  It is in this way that certain questions remain unasked, and certain types of evidence are ignored or dismissed as invalid” (Leach and Mearns, 1996:14).        

A common methodological problem in much of the literature on African drylands is therefore relates to making assumptions about the future of  pastoralism on the basis of short-term observations and taking these as evidence of long-term trends, when they may simply describe one phase or a low point of some climatic cycle of aridity.  As Barfield  (1992 :216) puts it : “… the focus has been on what is observable in the short term and using that data to extrapolate current trends into the future”.  Thus, one major methodological trap associated with the  crisis scenarios is rooted in attempts to discerning processes from forms which combine to give convenient and emotional but highly misleading impressions about the destiny of pastoralism at the beginning of the Third Millennium.

Another methodological trap encountered in the crisis scenarios could be gleaned in the tendency for a general preoccupation with the ‘fate of the pastoralists’ rather than the ‘future of pastoralism’ : “…the collective future of traditional pastoralists is..at risk in East Africa.  By the end of the century (20th) they may belong merely to memory, as traditional African hunter-gatherer populations do”  (Dyson-Hudsons, 1982:213).  In this way the pastoralists are “…too easily made the  symbol of a past world, representing… a romanticist ideal of Africa’s pre-modern values and aspirations, as people whose way of life should be protected against the  assault of modernization” (Anderson 1993:122).  It is therefore not particularly surprising that the anthropological defense of the pastoralists in this context has been scornfully described as an “ethnic preservationism” since it sounds like a call for “...a tribal reserve system in which the ethnic group is kept in a kind of living museum status” (Bennett, 1988:46).  Of course, no one would dispute the justification for opposing the  deliberate extinction of traditional pastoralism.  This is certainly consistent with international morality as to the rights of self-determination of peoples, rights to cultural survival and individual human rights to opportunity and to freedom to practice chosen occupations.  However,  and by the same logic, it would be naive, if not hypocritical, to insist that everyone borne into a pastoral society should inevitably  remain pastoralist.  Less than 200 years ago, more than half the American population lived on farms and now less than three per cent do, but no one considers this to be evidence of an agricultural crisis or decline (Barfield, 1992 :218).

A further methodological trap in the crisis scenarios  relates to the use of the term pastoralism to designate a ‘way of life’ rather than an ‘economic activity’. This designation “...bears the danger of misleading the non-specialist            into the belief that animal production and husbandry-herding, broadly-is all that pastoralists do. The trap is then set for outsiders to focus entirely on herding activities as they think about pastoralists’ future” ( Aronson 1980:175)   

The fact that most rural societies in East  African drylands have agricultural and pastoral, but mainly agro-pastoral, groups and changing from one mode to another has been more common than believed, provides yet a further justification for our earlier call for rejecting the preoccupation with the ‘fate of pastoral people’ in favour of a focus on the ‘future of pastoralism’.  In this fashion it would be possible to ask questions about the ways in which pastoralism has changed to make it more or less competitive in the modern world.  There is ample evidence to suggest that rather than being static, pastoralism have adapted to new socio-economic and bio-physical conditions and found a niche in the modern world.  Perhaps the most significant change pastoralism is experiencing in many parts of the world is the increasing importance of raising animals for exchange rather than for sheer subsistence (cf. Barfield, 1992; Behnke, 1983; Kavoori, 1996.) 

Finally, in most crisis scenarios, the pastoralists are invariably remaining silent and impotent .  As Anderson (1993:122) puts it : “…debates about the past, present and future of pastoralism in Africa have been ( and perhaps remain) largely academic battles, wars  of words, in which the voices of ‘outsiders’… have invariably been heard to the exclusion of pastoralists themselves”.  Thus, rather than the dreadful sense of  fatalism  that taints the crisis scenarios, the present paper calls for a balanced outlook in the  sense that the state, the market, drought, agriculture, etc., should be viewed not only as constraints, but equally as opportunities that generate  differential but purposeful responses on the part of individual as well as groups of pastoralists. This can only be achieved if one forsakes the ‘crisis in survival’ frame of mind in favor of a ‘survival in crisis’ perspective.     

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Pastoralism-Agriculture : A Complex Relationship

The interaction between pastoralism and agriculture in East African drylands is an extremely complex issue.  Despite the considerable amount of literature which has been accumulating on the subject, there is still very little agreement as to the nature, the forms, and the outcome  of that interaction.  This lack of consensus has, in turn, created a climate of uncertainty that  casts grave doubts on the potential role for  anthropology land other social sciences in influencing national policy-making and development planning for the sustainable use of resources in East  African drylands.

The fact that the literature is replete with varying descriptions of the interaction between pastoralism and agriculture has been noted by many scholars (cf. Toulmin, 1983a : 33-41; Little, 1987: 195).  What is lacking is a wider debate by which to explain those variations. Indeed there appears to be a general tendency for ignoring debatable  issues in the study of East African pastoral societies  relative to the literature on peasant societies : “… scholars who have studied herding groups are at least partly to blame for their inability to  engage in larger debates on agrarian transformations” (Little, 1992: If).  This is perhaps one of the reasons why our understanding of the interaction between pastoralism and agriculture is still as uncertain as it was when Camilla Toulmin, more than 15 years ago, first called for the need to develop a new vision that would take full  account of the historical experience and the socio-cultural complexities of African rural societies (Toulmin, 1983b).                                          

A possible explanation for the lack of significant progress on the subject could perhaps be traced in the general tendency for research to focus on “… a herder/farmer dichotomy  drawn along ethnic lines and phrased, for example, in terms of Kikuyu farmer versus Maasi  pastoralist (Kenya)… or Hausa cultivator versus Fulbe herder (West Africa)” (Little , 1987 : 195), and I would add, Nuba agriculturist  versus Baggara nomad (Sudan).  In this way, the arena for  resource competition and  resource conflict were entirely  confined to those related to “ inter-group rather than intra-group” interactions and that “…land tenure and land use problems in pastoral areas are seen as stemming from outside factors, such as farmer encroachments, rather than from processes within the  pastoral community” (ibid : 195).  Even in those cases when internal competition  and conflict area adverted to, as tended to be the case in the literature on the “new pastoralism”, the discourse on the interaction between herding and farming is always loaded  with  populist  sentiments .  As  Ramisch  ( 1996 : 5 )  puts  it : “… the populists provide a convenient and emotional focus on the fate of pastoralism at the end of the twentieth century.. pastoralism is dead, long live the pastoralist”. 

This is perhaps nowhere clear than in some of the literature that attempts to look into the problems of resource degradation and the usual conclusion of pointing a finger of blame.  In some cases the finger of blame was pointed in all directions, albeit with variable force.  In the Sudan , for example, environmental problems in the semi-arid parts of the country were blamed in one occasion on peasant farmers and pastoralists but “… the major culprits are both the urban merchants… and the national and international decision makers” (Ibrahim, 1988:229). Only the researchers are left out ! In another occasion, the usual culprit was singled out : the ‘rich’ farmer.  Thus, “… accumulation and increased social differentiation…are positively correlated with increased degradation”, since “… the long term concerns of affluent tenants are not primarily in agriculture. Although most  of  them are farmers ,  they aspire  to educate  their  children  for other careers” ( Salim-Murdock , 1988:337 f). Following this line of reasoning, one might suggest policies that ban rich farmers from sending their children to school. Moreover, “… most of the land these people farm is rented, not owned, and they see it in their interest to use the land for short-term gains without concern for longer sustainability” ( ibid. : 338) . However, when one affluent tenant displayed consciousness of soil quality and the importance of resting the land, which he actually practices by renting in more and more land, the researcher was not impressed since that was “not the only reason”.  Rather, this rural tycoon, persistently  denied any credit, is getting more and more land because, in the Scheme administration “… he has many friends who  come and see him several nights a week, and for whom he provides food and drinks” (ibid. : 344 f). One really wonders if there is any researcher in the field who has not been occasionally entertained, if not fully accommodated, some times including transport, by a rich farmer, an affluent pastoralist or an urban merchant. However, such otherwise informative accounts are, unfortunately, self-undermining and, in the process, their utility for policy making (or unmaking) is severely constrained.

The position taken here should by no means be construed as a total negation of the importance of the herder/farmer dimension when one analyses issues of resource competition and conflict.  The point is that the complexity of interaction between pastoralism and farming cannot be adequately understood by basing one’s inquiry on a herder/farmer dichotomy.  In most parts of East African drylands the herder farmer distinction is progressively breaking down and farmers are investing more of their surpluses in livestock and herder are more relying on farming, i.e. they are becoming “herder-farmer” or “farmer-herder” in the sense those terms were used to describe the blurring of occupational categories previously assumed to be distinct (Toulmin, 1983b).  One really wonders if this is an entirely new and recent phenomenon.  Ibn Khuldun Muggaddima aside, there is ample historical and anthropological evidence to suggest that groups, and individuals within the same group, have shifted between pastorlaism and cultivation where and when the ecological and political-economic conditions demanded and allowed  (cf. Mace, 1993; Anderson, 1988; Holy, 1988.  Khazanov, 1984; Spaulding , 1979; Haaland, 1972).  Thus, pastoralism and cultivation, on the ground, are not discrete and static objects for academic analysis.Rather, they are dynamically interrelated and it is this very dynamism that determines the forms  and outcomes of the processes of transition between pastoralism and cultivation over time and in different socio-ecological settings.

Thus, the focus on the herder/farmer distinction would render the comprehension of the complexity and the dynamics of resource competition rather inadequate for a number of reasons.  First, it ignores the importance of scale and the multiplicity of levels of analysis. Recognising the difficulties associated with combining levels of analysis, claims for access and control of resources are usually contested, negotiated and settled at different levels (e.g. household, village, region, nation), whereby individuals and groups may be directly or indirectly involved in one or more level.

Second, the herder/farmer distinction distracts attention from the importance of processes of social differentiation in understanding the dynamics of resource competition and conflict (Little, 1985, 1987,1992).  Even when such processes are taken into consideration, in a multi-resource economy , it would be insufficient to treat the question of herder differentiation on the basis of livestock ownership alone. Access to the state, control of land, the degree of involvement in trade, etc.., might be as equally as important.

Finally, the assumption that the state’s influence in pastoral areas is a relatively recent phenomenon, although unsustainable on the basis of historical evidence, it is yet another legacy of the focus on the herder/farmer dichotomy. Although there were instances where the colonial and national governments introduced explicit policies not favouring herding group (Hjort, 1981; Sobiana, 1988; Waller, 1984), these should be distinguished from the more indirect policies not favouring pastoralism.  The failure to make this distinction is perhaps one of the reasons why past indirect policies in other sectors of the local economy with important feedback into pastoralism, were overlooked by those who entertain the idea of the state’s recent interventions into pastoral areas . In Kordofan , for example , the administrative and land tenure policies were intelligently articulated by the British in a way that encouraged the production of gum arabic for export and the settlement of the population with far reaching implications for the patterns of access and control of resources, pastoral mobility and pastoralism in general (Babiker, 1998).

Thus formulated, attention should not have been directed initially and only at the herder/farmer dichotomy.  In the first place, rather than as a priori assumption, the analytical utility of the herder/farmer distinction should be considered as problematic in the sense that it can be accepted, modified or rejected on the basis of the social and temporal specificity of the case under consideration.  That is, the nature, the forms, and the  outcomes of resource competition and conflict, at any point in the history of any group , is invariably the product of the total system in which they live, rather than of any particular aspect of it . Social reality is far more complex and the interaction between pastoralism and farming involves complex relations  of competition, co-operation and complementarity within, as well as between, each.  Only in this way could one adequately capture the forms, dynamics, and outcomes of resource competition and conflict in any particular context.  This should by no means be construed as a startling revelation.  Few but forgotten anthropological accounts have long ago documented the complexity of  interaction between farming and pastoralism (cf. Barth. 1981; Ahmed, 1973).  

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 Concluding Remarks 

The future of pastoralism in East African drylands is largely contingent upon the flexibility with which it is able to withstand periods of ecological disaster. Secure pastoral systems are those which are able to link with economic activities occupying other niches, where alternative production regimes are able to compensate for the loss of livestock.  The basis of this relationship in most East African drylands over time had remained remarkably constant, although pastoralism has gone through marked fluctuations.  Pastoralism has thrived, declined and flourished again as periods of ecological  disaster have set in and then retreated. This pattern has closely corresponded to periods of climatic fluctuations.  During drier phases most East African dryland economies appeared to be  predominantly agricultural, and in the wet phases looked more pastoral. But political economic factors also acted to alter the balance between, or the relative importance of, pastoralism and farming. Ecology and political economy are equally important in comprehending the dynamics  of human adaptations in East African drylands.

 The recent drought in many East African drylands have been hounded by new development initiatives that invariably geared towards the revival of agriculture (seed provision programmes, animal traction, agricultural  credit schemes, etc.). In such an endeavour, pastoralism was completely neglected. Whether  such a bias is deliberate or based on false assumptions about the future of pastoralism, the strategy of most rural societies in East African drylands is to combine herding and cultivation, and to sustain the linkages between the two.

However, the arguments advanced here should in no way be construed as a negation of the fact that pastoralism has always been experiencing massive transformations.  Thus, the main feature of East African  dryland pastoralism in the beginning of the Third Millennium is rooted in the intensification of livestock concentration within a network controlled by  economic agents who are for the most part from outside the  local communities (commercial banks, livestock traders, bureaucrats ) . However, this in itself has not fundamentally transformed the internal organization  of the pastoral economy. What is happening is that new external technical factors, such as technological innovations, commercial credit facilities, intensification of veterinary care, and secured water supplies, are all combined to facilitate the imposition of a modern marketing operation on an essentially traditional pastoral production system. 

Thus, pastoralism and farming in most East African drylands are no longer total ways of life but technical activities the role of which in the local economy has always been increasing or decreasing both in absolute terms and relative to each other.  In most cases, the movement between pastoralism and farming is often a voluntary response to changing constraints and opportunities in the bio-physical and socio-economic environments.  Moreover, the movement between pastoralism and agriculture is a two-way process in the sense that it is not necessarily unidirectional or irreversible.  Furthermore, such changes in orientation of activities from more to less pastoral and more to less agricultural , are often shifts of emphasis between patterns present in the local economy, rather than a radical transformation from one activity to another. 

The foregoing discussion also suggests that in a multi-resource and multi-actor economy , where the level of functional specialisation is very low, issues of resource competition and conflict are better analysed and adequately comprehended in the context of distinctions categorised  on economic sector basis such as pastoralism and agriculture, rather than on occupational labels such as herder and farmer or trader and administrator. This is perhaps the main reason why Fredrik Barth , more than  a quarter of a century ago, called for “a general perspective on nomad-sedentary relations”, whereby the focus should be, at least initially, on types of activity rather than on groups of people. Otherwise, the illumination of the complex relationships between “the ‘desert’ and the ‘sown’ ” might not be forthcoming (Barth, 1973). 

Thus formulated, the diversity and multiplicity of resources can be mapped out and important questions associated with access and control, such as how claims are contested, negotiated and settled, and who are involved, can be raised. Moreover, although difficult to sustain in practice, in this way one might be relieved, at least for the moment, from the obligation of taking the side of those among whom he or she has conducted field research.  In many occasions this burden and the associated populist sentiments have, in the process, seriously undermined , the findings and the conclusions of high quality research. 

Moreover, there is a general tendency in many East African countries whereby pastoralism and agriculture are considered as discrete objects for national policy-making.  This is very clear in the fact that the tasks of agricultural, livestock and forestry development in most cases are compartmentalised and  entrusted to different government institutions without any formal mechanism for co-operation and co-ordination.  This, more  often than not, has resulted in contradictory, and at times conflicting, policy goals and objectives.  In some way, this state of affairs could be considered as a further legacy of the herder/farmer distinction which excludes any possibility for appreciating the complexity of  interactions between economic activities previously assumed to involve different actors. The fact that the livelihoods of many rural communities are based on agro-silvi-pastoral systems of production calls for a reconsideration of current policy-making frameworks.  The objective should be to attain the highest possible level of harmony in policy formulation and programme implementation of otherwise sectorally-segregated development initiatives. 

If the argument presented here makes any sense then, when confronted with a complex situation, such as East African drylands , one should avoid getting entrapped into categories and distinctions of his or her own creation.  Having done that, one is, of course, free to choose with whom to take side.

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