Economic and Social Effects in Africa

Abstract

Cattle are not the recent introduction to Africa that historians of a few decades ago supposed. We know now that in the African Iron Age, from about 200 bc to ad 400, sheep were kept in both Namibia and Zimbabwe, and cattle were present on the edge of Botswana’s Okavango Delta slightly before ad 300. In the central Sudan, cattle were present by 3500 bc and in Kenya possibly by 4000, perhaps 5000 bc (Gowlett, 1988). Import of Asian humpedback zebu cattle is believed to have occurred 2,000–3,000 years ago, and this would have been via northeastern or eastern Africa. The impression is that pastoralism arrived in East Africa after the onset of drier climates to the north and spread to the south as drier climatic conditions permitted. Predating Bantu entry into the region, cattle are known to have been present between central Africa and the Cape from before ad 300, and may have been present at the Cape by the 4th or 5th centuries (Smith, 1992). Herskovits (1926) has evaluated in detail the former significance of cattle in African cultures in eastern and southern Africa, where, above all, they signified wealth, providing milk for consumption cattle were rarely used as a source of meat, and their loss following the rinderpest panzootic had its effect primarily upon the social order.