ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author carries out fieldwork among the Boran, one of the Oromo-speaking people of the Horn; he spent most of his time in Marsabit District in Northern Kenya. Every family owned some cattle and sheep and goats, and an increasing number were acquiring herds of camels. A village of milking cattle, then, was also an assembly of elders, each of whom was, as it were, the center point of a set of specialized herding units; the members of any specialized unit were much more likely to visit the milking village than they were any of its satellite camps. The famous amole, or salt bars, which were traditional articles of exchange, and were still occasionally to be seen in markets in southern Ethiopia in the 1960s, have no connection with either the salt trade or the collection and distribution of cattle-lick.
