The African HusbandmanThe African Husbandman helped a generation of scholars and officials to appreciate that Africans' agricultural practices were both more complex and more malleable than was often thought. Allan's work also pioneered research methods that wedded ethnographic and ecological fieldwork in ways that demonstrated the inextricable links between social arrangements, environmental conditions, and land use patterns. If certain facets of Allan's analysis have now come under scrutiny, his general tenet that to improve agricultural prospects in Africa one first has to understand it from the cultivators' point of view has only been strengthened with time. As long as there are individuals struggling to make sense of African agricultural productivity, The African Husbandman will remain a classic. |
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Common terms and phrases
acreage African agricultural Allan arable average bananas carrying capacity cash crops cassava cattle cent Chagga citemene climate cocoa coffee Congo cotton Critical Population Density cultivable land culture Dagomba district dry season East Africa economic environment erosion estimate European extent factors fallow periods farmers farming fertility figure finger millet food crops forest gardens Ghana grass grassland grazing groundnuts head of population herds increase Kenya Kikuyu labour Lala Lamba land requirements land shortage livestock loams Lozi mainly maize Mambwe manure Masai ment mounds Native Ngoni Northern Rhodesia pastoral pastoralists pattern permanent planted plateau population densities practice probably problems production rainfall rains Recurrent Cultivation regeneration region Reserve resettlement scheme Serenje Shifting Cultivation social soils sorghum southern square mile subsistence surplus survey Swaka system of land-use Tanganyika tion Tonga Trapnell trees types Uganda valley vegetation village woodland yields zone
Popular passages
Page 283 - That the Petitioners believe that if the said concessions agreements grants and treaties can be carried into effect, the condition of the natives inhabiting the said territories will be materially improved and their civilisation advanced...
Page 335 - ... husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale: yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it for a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly pardy be hanged, or else go about a begging.
Page vi - ... relevant texts, in English and the various vernaculars, were needed too. For this purpose the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures was set up with the linguist Dr Diedrich Westermann as the first Director. Hence, after the Journal, the Institute's very first publication, in 1931, was Thomas Mofolo's novel, Chaka, translated into English from Sotho. Subsequently an annual prize was awarded to the best work in a vernacular by an African (over 200 manuscripts were submitted...
Page 331 - I, your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, now, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and . „ swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities.
Page 38 - It would appear to be a reasonable — if not axiomatic — proposition that subsistence cultivators, dependent entirely or almost entirely on the produce of their gardens, tend to cultivate an area large enough to ensure the food supply in a season of poor yields. Otherwise the community would be exposed to frequent privation and grave risk of extermination or dispersal by famine, more especially in regions of uncertain and fluctuating rainfall.1 One would, therefore, expect the production of a...
Page 283 - ... his country in a steady, laborious way as do the Oriental and the European; if he will not apply himself zealously under European tuition to the development of the vast resources of Tropical Africa, where hitherto he has led the wasteful unproductive life of a baboon; then force of circumstances, the pressure of eager, hungry, impatient outside humanity, the converging energies of Europe and Asia will once more relegate the Negro to a servitude which will be the alternative — in the coming...
Page xvi - Speaking in a broad general way, all these races have similar faults regarded from the agricultural point of view. In particular, they may all be justly accused of what we may perhaps term in a general way indolence. However hard they may have to work upon their own properties to make a livelihood, the general principles upon which they act would seem to be — to do no work that can possibly be avoided, never to do to-day what can possibly be put off until to-morrow, and to do as their great grandfather...
Page vi - We are of the oponion that no education which leads to the alienation of the child from his ancestral environment can be right, nor can it achieve the most important aim of education which consists in developing the powers and character of the child.
Page v - new branch of anthropology'1 prior to their doing field work; the second in the 1950s, when further money for publications from Carnegie and research funding from Ford enabled a new series of publications and a second field research programme to get under way, this time under the overall direction of Daryll Forde...