ABSTRACT
The former has been explicit in much of the journalistic writing on the 1980s famine, which, though sometimes acknowledging that serious famines have a long history in northeast Africa, has assumed an unchanging and static pattern of rural life from one generation to the next. Seasonal cattle camps may keep herders far from centres of population, and settled agriculturalists may farm inaccessible parts of the highlands, but for all their apparent isolation communities throughout northeastern Africa invariably devise and maintain links of various sorts with their neighbours. The realities of ecological change, social adaptation, and the relationship between the two in the history of northeast Africa are ignored in the schema, while the expansion of cultivation comes to be promoted as the panacea for a multitude of rural ills. Networks of obligation and social contact with neighbouring societies are, at one important level, a form of insurance against the vagaries of environmental adversity.
