Crisis and Decline in Bunyoro Population and Environment in Western Uganda, 1860-1955 (review)

Abstract

resources are managed by clans rather than by the community as a whole. Difference between the two groups extends to the ways in which they interpret and seek to deal with misfortune. While Pokot make a clear connection between internal strife and external threat and stress the importance of community rituals in maintaining social harmony and cohesion as a defence against disaster, Himba tend to accept that natural hazards are largely unfathomable and must simply be endured with the support of patrons and lineage. Pokot see themselves as active agents, responsible for their own fate and able up to a point to predict and ward off misfortune. They raid and are raided by the ‘enemies’ that surround them, and their perception of the world is shaped by a recognition of its volatility. Himba, however, see themselves as peaceable people inhabiting a stable environment that is threatened only by the incursions of others and the unpredictability of nature. One disadvantage of the comparison is that, despite their wide geographical and cultural distance, both societies share a common marginality. This tends to exclude consideration of other factors, such as the differential access to ‘national’ political or economic resources, to wider markets and to non-pastoral options that are now characteristic of more incorporated and stratified pastoral communities. However, the book is structured in such a way as to make it possible for readers familiar with other societies to include these factors and ask their own questions of them. Pastoral specialists will probably find Bollig’s conclusions solidly based and well-argued rather than surprising, but some challenge more widely held assumptions about the fate of pastoralism. The discussion of the difficulties of resource protection should be required reading for environmental NGOs, and Bollig is surely right in downplaying wealth as a factor in itself. Poorer herders seem able to survive as well as the rich. Indeed, the fact that poorer households are not expelled from pastoralism may be an important cause of the population pressure and proliferation of small units that is perhaps the major threat to Pokot survival. Specialists will also find the sheer mass of detail in the case studies intriguing and valuable, but more general readers will appreciate the first and last chapters that provide first a lucid discussion of the concepts of risk, hazard and uncertainty on which much recent discussion has centred and then a balanced comparative overview of pastoral risk management. While aimed at specialists, the book is accessible to aid personnel – a not unimportant consideration since one of the hazards faced by pastoralists is development initiatives that ignore, bypass or undermine the coping strategies that Bollig discusses. The book would, however, have benefited from tighter editing to eliminate omissions and repetitions and to focus the short summary sections more sharply.