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Kuria Cattle Raiding: Capitalist Transformation, Commoditization, and Crime Formation Among an East African Agro-Pastoral People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2000

Michael L. Fleisher
Michael L. Fleisher*
Affiliation:
Utah State University
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Extract

Among the agro-pastoral Kuria people, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya, many young men are actively engaged in an illicit livestock trade in which cattle stolen in Tanzania—from other Kuria, as well as from neighboring peoples such as the Luo, Ngoreme, and Maasai—are sold to buyers, mainly butchers, inside Tanzania or else are run across the border for cash sale in neighboring Kenya. Kenya is a more affluent country than Tanzania—consequently, the demand for beef is greater there and beef prices are considerably higher. The beef and hides from these stolen Tanzanian cattle also fuel Kenya's meat-packing and tanning industries, and live animals as well as canned beef are reportedly also shipped to buyers in Scandinavian countries and the Persian Gulf.

Type
Capitalist Transformations
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , October 2000 , pp. 745 - 769
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 2000

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References

References

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Baker, E. C. 1935. “The Bakuria of North Mara Tarime, Tanganyika Territory.” Manuscript. Rhodes House Library, Oxford.Google Scholar
Kjerland, Kirsten Alsaker. 1995. “Cattle Breed; Shillings Don’t: The Belated Incorporation of the abaKuria into Modern Kenya.” Ph.D. diss., Department of History, University of Bergen.Google Scholar
Prazak, Miroslava. 1992. “Cultural Expressions of Socioeconomic Differentiation Among the Kuria of Kenya.” Ph.D. diss., Department of Anthropology. Yale University.Google Scholar
Ruel, Malcolm J. 1959. “The Social Organisation of the Kuria: A Field-Work Report.” Unpublished manuscript. Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi.Google Scholar
TNA 13747 [Secretariat] 7/26/29: Extract from a note taken at a meeting at Arusha between the territorial governor of Tanganyika and the combined Associations of Arusha.Google Scholar
Abrahams, Ray. 1987. “Sungusungu: Village Vigilante Groups in Tanzania.” African Affairs 86:179–96.Google Scholar
Anderson, David. 1986. “Stock Theft and Moral Economy in Colonial Kenya.” Africa 56:399–415.Google Scholar
Avirgan, Tony, and Honey, Martha. 1982. War in Uganda: The Legacy of Idi Amin. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House Ltd. Google Scholar
Bukurura, Sufian Hemed. 1994. “The Maintenance of Order in Rural Tanzania: the Case of Sungusungu.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 34:1–29.Google Scholar
Bukurura, Sufian Hemed. 1996. “Combating Crime Among the Sukuma and Namwezi of West-Central Tanzania.” Crime, Law & Social Change 24:257–66.Google Scholar
Engels, Frederick. 1969. The Condition of the Working Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources. London: Panther Books.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Engels, Frederick. 1953. Kinship and Marriage Among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Fleisher, Michael L. 1998. “Cattle Raiding and Its Correlates: The Cultural-Ecological Consequences of Market-Oriented Cattle Raiding Among the Kuria of Tanzania.” Human Ecology 26:547–72.Google Scholar
Fleisher, Michael L. 1999. “Cattle Raiding and Household Demography Among the Kuria of Tanzania.” Africa 69:109–51.Google Scholar
Fleisher, Michael L. 2000. Kuria Cattle Raiders: Violence and Vigilantism on the Tanzania/Kenya Frontier. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Fukui, Katsuyoshi, and Turton, David. 1979. “Introduction.” In Katsuyoshi Fukui and David Turton, (eds.), Warfare Among East African Herders. Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1–13.Google Scholar
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Hendrickson, Dylan, Mearns, Robin, and Armon, Jeremy. 1996. “Livestock raiding among the pastoral Turkana of Kenya: redistribution, predation and the links to famine.” IDS Bulletin 27:17–30.Google Scholar
Herzfeld, Michael. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1972. Bandits. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Huggins, Martha K. 1991. “Introduction: Vigilantism and the State—a Look South and North.” In Martha K. Huggins (ed.), Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America: Essays on Extralegal Violence. New York: Praeger, 1–18.Google Scholar
Huntingford, G. W. B. 1953. The Nandi of Kenya: Tribal Control in a Pastoral Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Alan H. 1975. “Maasai Pastoralism in Historical Perspective.” In Theodore Monod (ed.), Pastoralism in Tropical Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 406–22.Google Scholar
Kitching, Gavin. 1980. Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoisie, 1905–1970. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kowalewski, David. 1982. “Establishment Vigilantism and Political Dissent.” Armed Forces and Society 9:83–97.Google Scholar
Lancaster, William. 1981. The Rwala Bedouin Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Linebaugh, P. 1981. “Karl Marx, the Theft of Wood, and Working Class Composition.” In David F. Greenberg (ed.), Crime and Capitalism: Readings in Marxist Criminology. Palo Alto: Mayfield, 79–97.Google Scholar
Mair, L. 1974. African Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally, and Puritt, Paul. 1977. The Chagga and Meru of Tanzania. London: International African Institute.Google Scholar
Murmann, Carsten. 1974. Change and Development in East African Cattle Husbandry: A Study of Four Societies During the Colonial Period. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.Google Scholar
O’Malley, P. 1980. “The Class Production of Crime: Banditry and Class Strategies in England and Australia.” Research in Sociology and Law 3:181–99.Google Scholar
Peristiany, J. G. 1939. The Social Institutions of the Kipsigis. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Ruel, Malcolm J. 1991. “Kuria Seers.” Africa 61:343–52.Google Scholar
Rwezaura, Barthazar Aloys. 1985. Traditional Family Law and Change in Tanzania: A Study of the Kuria Social System. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.Google Scholar
Spencer, Paul. 1973. Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and Growth Among the Rendille and Samburu of Kenya. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sweet, Louise E. 1965a. “Camel Raiding of North Arabian Bedouin: A Mechanism of Ecological Adaptation.” American Anthropologist 67:1132–50.Google Scholar
Sweet, Louise E. 1965b. “Camel Pastoralism in North Arabia and the Minimal Camping Unit.” In Anthony Leeds and Colin M. Turnbull, 1972. The Mountain People. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Tanner, R. E. S. 1966. “Cattle Theft in Musoma 1958–59.” Tanzania Notes and Records 65:31–42.Google Scholar
Tobisson, Eva. 1985. Family Dynamics Among the Kuria: Agro-Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania. Goteborg, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.Google Scholar
Vayda, Andrew P. 1968. “Hypotheses About Functions of War.” In Morton Fried, Marvin Harris, and Robert Murphy (eds.), War: The Anthropology of Armed Conflict and Aggression. New York: Natural History Press, 85–91.Unpublished documentsGoogle Scholar
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Baker, E. C. 1935. “The Bakuria of North Mara Tarime, Tanganyika Territory.” Manuscript. Rhodes House Library, Oxford.Google Scholar
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Ruel, Malcolm J. 1959. “The Social Organisation of the Kuria: A Field-Work Report.” Unpublished manuscript. Institute of African Studies, University of Nairobi.Google Scholar
TNA 13747 [Secretariat] 7/26/29: Extract from a note taken at a meeting at Arusha between the territorial governor of Tanganyika and the combined Associations of Arusha.Google Scholar
TNA 13747 [Secretariat] 7/26/29: Extract from a note taken at a meeting at Arusha between the territorial governor of Tanganyika and the combined Associations of Arusha.Google Scholar

Tanzania National Archives

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TNA 36704 [Secretariat] 2/10/48: “[E]xtract from the minutes of the Provincial Commissioners’ Conference held at Tabora in January 1948.”Google Scholar
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