ABSTRACT
Mali is one of the Sahelian countries in which over large areas the principal economic activity is livestock rearing. The Central Census Office was forced to face the many problems associated with the enumeration of sparsely distributed mobile groups for the 1976 General Census of Population. It proved necessary to learn a good deal about the traditions and usual migration routes of the pastoralists during the preparatory period for the census of December 1976 In order to try and achieve a reasonably complete coverage of the entire population. The zone in which pastoralism predominates is huge, including large parts of the country to the north and north-east of Bamako; in all, twenty-five Cercles distributed in five Regions. Thus, the Census Office, at the same time as it began the conventional cartographic work for the census, dispatched several research teams to some of the localities involved and to other agencies of the central government in Bamako to bring together what was known about nomads and semi-nomads in the country. In what follows, the information we were able to collect is summarized, before turning to some of the characteristics of the nomads and semi-nomads themselves.
