Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa: Age systems in transition

EISEI KURIMOTO and SIMON SIMONSE (eds), Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa: age systems in transition. Oxford: James Currey; Nairobi: East African Educational Publishing; Kampala: Fountain; Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1998, 270 pp., L40.00, ISBN 0 85255 252 1, hard covers, L14.95, ISBN 0 85255 251 3, paperback.

Conflict, Age and Power in North East Africa is a book that emanated from a 1995 symposium, conceived by Kurimoto and Simonse and sponsored by the Japanese Taniguchi Foundation, in which Japanese and European and American scholars participated to discuss age group organisation, a classic topic in Africanist anthropology. The subject is approached through the prism of contemporary problems in Africa: conflict, violence and the radical transformation of rural societies. The discussions tie in with wider processes of political conflict (the Sudanese civil war), growth of regional market economies and state expansion but have a solid foundation in the anthropological approach of detailed field research and regional comparison without which it would be very difficult to make sense of what is happening in these societies.

The empirical studies of the `age systems' (the term preferred by the editors to group together the various types) themselves are very detailed, and are perhaps primarily accessible for advanced students, like regional specialists on the ethnology of North East Africa and anthropologists interested in the comparative and theoretical study of this type of socio-political organisation. The fascinating case studies presented in the work suggest how complex and intricate these African age system societies are, and perhaps also how the common discourse of the mass media, political analysts and also of NGO or government agents-owing to unfamiliarity with the relevant background and `lack of time' to acquire it-routinely misses essential points about the meaning, causes and ramifications of violent conflict and cultural complexity in some parts of Africa.

The societies under discussion are predominantly located in southern Sudan and northern Kenya. The cases are the southern Sudanese monyomiji age systems (treated in the chapters by Simonse and Kurimoto), the Nyangatom (Tornay), the Gada systems of the Boran, Gabbra and Garre in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya (Schlee) and some groups in Kenya, like the Chamus, Rendille, and Kipsigis (by the Japanese researchers K. Kawai,...