Familiarizing livestock advisory services to reduce cattle raiding in south Sudan

In South Sudan, cattle raiding is an enduring practice among many communities and leads by cultural norms and customs. The issue has become challenging to the development of the livestock sector in the country. For the last 5-6 years 2015 to 2020, thousands of cattle heads were stolen from the cattle camps, many life were lost during the raid, and many developmental projects were immobile. Extension in reducing cattle raiding has been seen as significant by the government, community chiefs of the rural areas, youth leaders, women, and NGOs working in the livestock sector. The improvement of the extension's role is an essential factor for reducing cattle raids among South Sudan communities. The extension can bring development opportunities, facilities, and empowerment. Accordingly, by reviewing the literature, this paper fact out which asset is necessary to reduce cattle raids. Also, the paper examines how an extension could mitigate cattle raiding through mediation. The recompenses of extension as the solution for competing cattle raids have been emphasized. The paper recommends that advisory service should have extensive training program on. on social change, building resilience through community-enhancing livelihoods, and shifting their mindsets from cattle raiding to accumulate wealth to ensure productive asset creation. The Advisory services should work as alarming tools for any expected raiding casualties in their working area.

CHALLENGES AND POSSIBLE IMPROVEMENT OF LIVESTOCK SECTOR IN SOUTH SUDAN: REVIEW PAPER

South Sudan has agrıculture as one of the main contributors of her economy since the vast majority of the households engage in different agricultural activities. Among which is Livestock and it is mostly done on small scale. Cattle keepers are faced with challenges like political instability, civil conflicts, cattle raiding, Continuous uncontrolled pastoralism and poor record keeping by stakeholder with less or no initiatives from gov’t to combat the above short comings. The above loopholes among others retard the improvement of the livestock sector. This paper however is meant to highlight the most challenges affecting livestock production, and possible suggestions that can be of use for the organization and the improvement of the livestock sectors. Although South Sudan is considered to be one of the highest Cattle keeping country in Africa, this may be just a mirth once the above issues aren’t timely addressed.

Changes in pastoralist commons management and their implications in Karamoja (Uganda)

This article analyzes the progression from traditional to current pastoralist practices and the contemporary diversification of livelihoods of the Jie group of the Karimojong in the Kotido district in Karamoja (Uganda). the focus is on changes of land use, framed by the commons debate. We identify factors that have forced the Karimojong to abandon their traditional mobile pastoral lifestyle and to adopt new income-generating activities, including charcoal production and brick-making, which may have detrimental effects on local forest and soil cover. These have included repeated enclosure of common grazing lands by colonial and postcolonial governments. We conducted empirical research (interviews and focus group discussions) in 2012. They confirm the superiority of traditional pastoralist practices (in terms of safeguarding sustained productivity of pastures) compared to the current situation. An important factor leading to current unsustainable pastoralist practice involved the mass acquisition of firearms by the Karimojong in the 1970s and 1980s, violent cattle raiding and subsequent unequal disarmament and establishment of army-controlled cattle herding. This radical enclosure of the commons by the government, linked to impoverishment of a large part of the population in terms of cattle numbers, has necessitated the emergence of new, potentially environmentally detrimental livelihoods for the Jie. However, the escalation of the firearm crisis cannot be seen in isolation from a century of commons enclosure by governments, curtailing traditional practices and leading to insecurity and impoverishment of the Karimojong. The situation is exacerbated by current policies of the Ugandan government, geared to agricultural sedentarization, which may be unsustainable given the local natural and climatic conditions. Key Words: Pastoralism, Karamoja, environmental degradation, commons, political ecology, colonialism

Cattle, raiding and disorder in Southern African history

Cattle raiding is iconic of the colonial frontier in Southern African history and historiography. Incorporating settlers and Africans as aggressors and victims alike, archives and ethnohistories depict raiding as thieving, subverting authority, and inciting conflict. Despite the in-depth anthropological attention given to ‘Bushman raiding’ and frontier commandos, comparatively little work has focused on the social and cultural function of cattle raiding within chiefdoms: that is, examining cattle raiding as socially embedded rather than simply transgressing authority and property ownership. This article explores how these narratives of ‘disorder’ have been constructed, and some alternative perspectives on nineteenth-century cattle raiding as a social institution. Through vignettes drawing on archival, archaeological, ethnographic and folkloric evidence, this article offers glimpses of what narratives of the recent past could look like if views of raiding-as-disorder were revisited and revised. I draw attention to where raids were illegal versus illicit, the role of cattle as social agents, and the logic underpinning designations of raiding as resistance. Developing a view of raiding as social practice permits us to interrogate archival perceptions of raiders as outlaws and raids as analogues for warfare, thus enabling more nuanced investigations of conflict in Southern Africa's past.

The ‘dark Welsh’ as slaves and slave raiders in Exeter Book riddles 52 and 721

Chapter three argues that a group of Old English riddles located in the borderlands between Anglo-Saxon England and Wales reflect a common regional culture by depicting shared values of a warrior elite across the ostensible Anglo-Welsh divide. These riddles, which link the ‘dark Welsh’ to agricultural labour, have long been understood to depict the Welsh as slaves and thus reflect Anglo-Saxon awareness of both ethnic and social division. Drawing upon understudied Welsh legal material, this chapter argues that these riddles have a multilayered solution in which the Welsh are both slaves and slave traders, complicating readings of negative Anglo/Welsh relations. This polysemic solution reveals that the Welsh, like the Anglo-Saxons, were stratified by class into the enslaved and a warrior elite with less distance from the Anglo-Saxons than has been understood. The location of these riddles on the mearc further characterises the Welsh borderlands in the early period as a distinctive region which was notorious for cattle raiding. These riddles counter the common perception that the Welsh borderlands were defined by Offa’s Dyke, suggesting that this region is better understood as a space which both Anglo-Saxons and Welsh permeated on raids.