“Johan Helland’s paper discusses the Borana pastoral society of southern Ethiopia, and asks questions about the longterm viability of such communities in the context of various development efforts. Boku Tache’s paper on the Borana raises many of the issues through greater ethnographic detail of both the social organisation of the Borana and the ILCA/CARE-introduced water cisterns in the area as well as cases of the ongoing establishment of private enclosures.
Assefa Tolera’s paper on the Karrayu also shows how a pastoral group is being marginalised through government interventions like the introduction of mechanised farming of a sugar plantation in the area, and the establishment of national parks along the Awash River. Salah Shazali’s paper is a general overview of pastoral developments in Eastern Sudan. He relates his discussion to the paradox in which, from 1975 until 1985,the country moved from being a “breadbasket of the Middle East” to a
famine-struck country. Omer Egeimi presents a kind of a “counter-case” to Salah Shazali. Also focusing on a Sudanese agro-pastoral
group, his paper on the Bishariyyn Beja of Eastern Sudan shows how a group which, for various reasons,has been marginally involved in the dynamics discussed by Shazali generally seems to fare better than other groups in the Red Sea Hills.”
