be settled by acts of compensation so as to conserve, rather than disturb, the relative strength of gols and wuts.
None of this should be taken to suggest that Dinka were some kind of moral or legal automata bound blindly to their rules. As in every human community, individuals could exploit or try to bend the rules to personal or joint advantage. This actual variety of choice is reflected in many and perhaps all African societies by the often contradictory advice of proverbial wisdom; and it helps to explain how individual wit or ambition, working within new pressures or conditions, could repeatedly modify these systems. Yet the variety of choice of action had to remain, or at least appear to remain, always within the limits of the ideal equilibrium: outside them, choice could only be antisocial and condemned. Political and religious theory, in short, arose from a specific adaptation to ecology.
But the ideology has seen things the other way round: it has seen the adaptation as a product of the theory. Among the Dinka this comes out emphatically in attitudes to cattle. The cattle are there because of the people. Yet the very predominance of cattle in Dinka life has given them an ideological status which can often appear to suggest the reverse. ‘All important relationships between members of different agnatic [father-related] descent groups, and all important acquisitions for any particular group, may be expressed in terms of cattle.’ Cattle are the subject of a capacious imagery, often subtle and imaginative, poetic and allusive, which refers to every aspect of Dinka thought about what life is and what life should be.
The Dinka carry this very far, and reveal in doing so how closely their system fits them. Thus the proud owner of a black ox may not be content, in singing with his friends, to be called by the basic name for such a beast, ma car, ‘but will be known by one or more other names, all explained ultimately by deriving from the blackness of his ox when seen in relation to darkness in other things. He may therefore be known as tim atiep, “the shade of a tree”; or kor acom, “seeks for snails,” after the black ibis which seeks for snails; or bun anyeer, “thicket of the buffalo”, which suggests the darkness of the forest in which the dark buffalo rests; or akiu yak thok, “cries out in the spring drought,” after a small black bird which gives its characteristic cry at this time of year; or arec luk “spoils the meeting”, after the dark clouds which accompany a downpour of rain and send the Dinka running for shelter.’
Diagram of Dinka distribution of a sacrificial beast.
Obsessed by cattle? The familiar remark of travellers who have passed this way has substance. But it happens to be a logical obsession. The Dinka have become obsessed by cattle as the ‘modern man’ by money, and for comparable reasons. The one, like the other, confers status as well as livelihood, and is thought of as unique in doing so. Wander through any modern conurbation, and you will be able to describe the houseowners by income group, or simply by the things that only money can provide. In the case of the Dinka and their cattle, however, a good deal of the ‘obsession’ is the optical illusion of observer’s ignorance. An example from a country further to the south, offering in some ways an environment still more difficult, makes the point.
The Karimojong are a cattle-raising people who live in northern Uganda. They inhabit about 4,000 square miles of grassland parched by frequent drought, and number some 60,000 souls. Karimojong behaviour, like Dinka behaviour, is closely geared to cattle which form the mainstay of their livelihood. Reputedly a difficult and unpredictable population during colonial times, they have followed rules of their own. Sometimes these rules have seemed perverse or pointless. Imperial authority clashed often with these restless drovers.
Many of these clashes arose because the Karimojong would insist on moving into a certain area of grazing that lies to the east of their main homeland. There ‘they encounter and often fight with other tribes who are exploiting the same general region’. Logically from its own point of view, colonial government wanted the ‘cattle obsessed’ Karimojong to move not east but west, where they would avoid trouble with neighbours. Just as logically from theirs, the Karimojong insistently refused. But the logic of their refusal emerged only in 1958 when a government agronomist demonstrated what the Karimojong, it is now accepted, knew already: that ‘the grasses of the west are deficient in minerals . . . and stock herded there lose condition’.
Often, it is argued, the cattle are too many. But too many for whom? Colonial administration, looking at the problem from outside, saw only that a given square mileage could support a given density of stock. The Karimojong possessed more than this desirable maximum. Some cattle ought therefore to be culled. But the Karimojong looked at the problem from inside, from their own balance with nature, and disagreed. Thus a Karimojong herd large enough to feed a family in the rains may not be adequate in time of drought. ‘In the rainy season a cow may give four or five pints of milk a day and still rear a healthy calf; in the dry season it is often possible to take only a quarter of a pint or so a day without risk of losing the calf.’ Then the Karimojong, like other pastoral folk, use ox blood as a food. They know that ‘a large ox will yield seven pints at a single bleeding in the rains, and five months later will be fit for bleeding again’; yet ‘to take a similar amount in the dry season would be to risk losing the animal altogether’. An adequate herd at one season might undoubtedly be more than enough at another. But this, with Karimojong experience of drought, was clearly no reason for culling it.
I make these points only to demonstrate that peoples such as these could have logical and meditated reasons for doing what the uninstructed observer must regard as unnecessary or plain foolish. No doubt, like other peoples, they often behaved foolishly. But judgment should wait upon information. Where the logic seems to fail it may only be because the observer has insufficiently observed. One can make the same kind of point about African farmers who have practised what has been called ‘shifting cultivation’ or, more contemptuously, ‘slash and burn’.
This shifting cultivation has been widely condemned by visitors to Africa, but not always, it would seem, from knowledge of what it was they were condemning. More usually, this was and is in truth ‘recurrent cultivation’ which had and has a sense and logic of its own. As, for example, with the Bemba. This people began farming in the grasslands of north-eastern Zambia soon after 1650. These grasslands are poor in soil fertility and other resources. Bemba farming equilibrium has required them to move a garden every four to six years at best; even then the yield capacity of the land may support no more than about ten people to a square mile. Another reason why they have had to move their gardens every few years is that they could cultivate successfully only if they fertilised with wood-ash. Their habit, consequently, has been to lop and burn trees around their gardens. Once the trees are cut the possibilities of fertiliser will be exhausted for a decade or more, and the garden must be left fallow.
Apparently very wasteful for the visiting expert: but what else could he have done in Bemba shoes? In contrast to what Polly Hill has called the ‘generalised nonsense’ that is often written about African economic conditions, there is the judgment of the good Bishop Mackenzie among the Chewa, neighbours of the Bemba, a hundred years ago. ‘When telling the people in England,’ he wrote, ‘what were my objects in going out to Africa, I stated that among other things I meant to teach these people agriculture; but I now see that they know far more about it than I do.’
Those who find shifting cultivation feckless must therefore show what other or different forms of cultivation could have yielded more food. They will not find it easy. Of shifting cultivation in forest areas, the soil scientists Nye and Greenland, who are among the few who have yet devoted serious attention to the matter, reply that ‘so far as we know the system is the best that could have been devised’. Even in grassland areas, such as where the Bemba live, Nye and Greenland question how far it really ‘squanders the resources of the land’. It certainly ‘checks the growth of shrubs and trees and encourages erosion on all but gentle slopes’. Yet ‘the systems of cultivation and cropping are
