Cows and the economy in East Africa

In pastoral areas of Africa, cows are an integral part of the life of communities. Families give cows to children to raise, the animals are used as dowry payments, and a family’s wealth is often measured by the number of cows they own. In Sudan, however, as in other countries in East Africa, the government is now trying to convince villagers that cows can be more valuable to their communities if they are seen as a marketable commodity. As this article in the Washington Post shows, it’s not an easy sell.

Romeo Lomunyamoi sat on a rock in the late morning sun, his sizable herd of cattle lumbering around the yellow-green field before him. In the next few days, he said, he had a momentous decision to make, one he had been turning over in his mind for weeks like a stressed corporate executive: whether to sell a cow.

“I am always very sorry to sell a cow,” he said, explaining that in his entire life he has sold exactly two. “Loboloka and Wanamute,” he said, easily recalling the black heifer with a white-striped head and the red bull with white spots. “Everyone was so sad.”

That is the common sentiment about selling cattle in this cool, hilly region of southern Sudan, where pastoralists whisper and sing to cows they name and know like family members. Around here, cows are the social currency that binds communities together, and selling even one is considered a grave matter forced on people mostly by unwanted circumstance — in Lomunyamoi’s case, his family’s looming hunger.

In the next few months, the nascent government of semiautonomous southern Sudan plans to conduct an ambitious, if controversial, experiment that has been tried with varying degrees of success in other sub-Saharan African countries, including neighboring Kenya. Government workers will fan out into cattle land in a studied attempt to undo traditional communal thinking about cows and replace it, slowly, with a more profit-driven, market-oriented mentality…

Meanwhile, the southern Sudanese government faces a daunting fact: Here in one of the cattle capitals of Africa, cows are so rarely sold that they are imported from Uganda to meet local demand. Extra milk, instead of being bottled and sold, is often given away or poured into the sand…

In pastoralist societies … cattle not only provide precious milk and meat. They also amount to a four-legged monetary, banking, insurance and social security system. Cows are used for dowries, the traditional negotiated payment that a young man’s family makes to that of his bride and that weaves extended families together over generations. A cow might be used to settle a dispute or as a kind of savings account. In one traditional practice, a family might give a bull to another family, with the expectation that in coming years it would be repaid in cows, with interest.

Accordingly, a family that sells cows in large numbers is generally viewed as poor or foolish.

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