Pastoralist Resilience to Environmental Collapse is a long history of transformation in pastoralist activities of the Borana of northern Kenya–southern Ethiopia borderlands. Gufu Oba argues that contrary to scholarly debates that view pastoralism as a highly compromised system likely to buckle under ecological crises and dependence on state emergencies, evidence suggests that the Borana pastoral system and related customary institutions have over the centuries adjusted to shocks and volatile environments, enabling society to survive through adaptation and resilience over the decades (2). The book adopts the Annales School’s longue durée methods to offer explanations for successive events that triggered change in Borana pastoralism, and to provide insight into mechanisms of human adaptations to external shocks.
Concepts relevant to the book’s argument are defined in Chapter One, which also serves as the introduction. The concepts include adaptation, the strategies adopted by Borana pastoralists to maintain resilience in the pastoral system, and resilience, the unpredictability of cyclic changes in a state of disequilibrium.
Chapter Two recaps these concepts, if only in more detailed ways. They include the reconstruction of the Borana traditional historical calendar through social memory, and its salience in evaluating pastoralism’s performance through adaptation and managing resilience (23). Oba articulates how these adaptive strategies have evolved through socio-ecological and political-ecological methods that capture long-term responses to environmental disturbances induced by imposition of colonial rule and national boundaries (26–28).
In Chapter Three, Oba uses Borana social memory to reconstruct cyclic disasters in Borana country from 1500 through to the 1900s regarding droughts, pandemics, wars, and locust invasions, and demonstrates how adaptive strategies to these disaster events transformed Borana pastoral practices. He maps out these events based on the Oromo gada (generation classes). He also considers the value of environmental proxy indicators (“paleoenvironmental archives”) embedded in lake and terrestrial ecosystem changes for reconstructing the climatic history of a region lacking reliable climatic data (45).
Colonial encapsulation of Borana pastoralists after the 1890s prompted them to devise adaptive strategies to cope with ecological and political risks in exploiting frontier resources. This is the subject of Chapter Four, in which Oba demonstrates how state regulation of access to grazing and water undermined the coping strategies to rainfall variability resulting in livestock mortalities and famine. Borana resilience to these shocks included increased mobility within the Northern Frontier District of northern Kenya to access any pasture and water (83).
The rest of the chapters focus on the postcolonial period (1960s–2000s). Chapter Five analyzes how a secessionist (shifta) war in northern Kenya collapsed, then transformed, Borana land-use patterns. Herders were displaced into security settlements, thereby shattering grazing patterns and the livestock economy. Borana pastoralism transitioned into a new land-use system including settled agriculture and the enclosure of communal grazing lands for private use (90–91). This also marked the emergence of an agro-pastoral system based on private land tenure.
In Chapter Six, Oba pivots to individual herd drought management strategies during six regional droughts that collapsed pastoralism in the postcolonial period. He focuses on individual drought management decision-making such as whether to relocate. Such decisions are dictated by household herd size, wealth, labor, distances to be traveled, and social relations (114–15). Decisions made are calculated to reduce detrimental impacts on existing herds. Wealthy households preferred long-distance herd mobility or intensive local management compared to middle-to-poorer herd owners who preferred local adaptive drought management strategies (122–30).
In Chapter Seven, Oba investigates the impacts of five decadal droughts on cattle demography, as well as trends in household wealth in terms of cattle ownership between 1982 and 2012. Livestock population fluctuated, so that recovery rates were dependent on the reproductive capacity of female stock. Household wealth also reflected these trends, largely determined by cattle susceptibility to climate variability, with rank in wealth shifting depending on herd mortality (153).
Chapters Eight and Nine elaborate on social capital networks in enhancing resilience among the Borana. Chapter Eight stresses the significance of social capital in sustaining resilience of Borana pastoralism by providing insurance against disasters. Households have achieved this through “horizontal structures” at household, community, and regional levels, and through “vertical structures” like hierarchical leadership organizations (163). Through these structures, stockless households (qollee) have been rebuilt through livestock redistribution (165, 180). Chapter Nine elaborates on how women’s social capital networks have ensured food security through maaro (“giving in turn”), an institutional sharing of foods (183–84). Women have also forged relations with faith-based relief organizations by provisioning labor and fuel in return for food and market for local poultry. Women networks have also expanded and participated in marketing of agropastoral products in both rural and urban areas (195).
In Chapter Ten, the author concludes the book by synthesizing the main themes including disasters, community reorganization, adaptation, collapse, and social capital networks. He vouches for integrating Borana institutions and practices in predicting and mitigating droughts, and resource management. Conversely, Oba reflects on the economic benefits for Borana agro-pastoralism from adopting modern practices such as fodder banks, the M-Pesa mobile and digital financial technology, and boda boda transportation.
This book is a masterful account of Borana pastoralism, including related knowledge systems and indigenous institutions. The author succeeds at telling how these elements have survived cycles of crisis and change. Qualitative and quantitative methods aid in weaving through the historical narrative. However, the book’s title reference to “East Africa” rather than “Kenya-Ethiopia borderlands” gives an impression of general coverage of the broader geographical expanse of East Africa; instead, it masks the author’s focus on a local agropastoral community. This shortcoming is mitigated by the author’s ability to draw from broader influences and patterns external to the Borana community. The book’s analysis benefits from frameworks informed by recent scholarship regarding pastoralism, ecology, and state actions. Furthermore, each theme and chapter are deeply grounded in robust literature review drawn from multiple disciplines, rendering it a must-read for historians, anthropologists, ecologists, developmentalists, and policymakers.
