Overview

This is the personal journal of a young American woman, living for six months amongst the Dodoth cattle-herdsmen in Northern Uganda. It is also an adventure story, for during this period the Dodoth were caught up in an escalating cycle of violence with their age-old rivals, the Turkana tribe. The animating tension of this feud was the tradition of cattle raiding, but it escalated to unprecedented levels of violence when the new nation states of Uganda and Kenya were drawn in to police these ancient clan frontiers.  Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's total immersion in the life of this tribe in 1961 takes us with her, as with clarity and a lyrical eye for detail she brings their whole culture alive. For though she was not an academic herself, she had spent much time in the field with her mother, who was the world's leading authority on the Bushman of the Kalahari. So it was natural for Elizabeth Marshall Thomas to take her own young children on this adventure, where she proves herself such a brave, humane, and unshockable witness to the life of the warrior herdsmen. 'Unforgettable... lingers in my mind like a dreamlike sense. She has an extraordinary ability, far beyond mere description, to evoke the atmosphere of this strange world.' Rachel Carson 'Blessed with a mind as tranquil as her nature is alert - who manages to be serene about adventure, simple about beauty, and direct about human experience.' The Queen

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9781780601106

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Warrior Herdsmen is written with the same clarity of tone, the same selflessness and the same extraordinary sense of human dignity that marked Mrs. Thomas's earlier book. --Virgilia Peterson Mrs. Thomas is an exceedingly useful sort of person, a kind of 'half-professional' who has developed a flair for talking anthropology to a general audience and thus bridging the gap between overspecialized 'expert' and the ordinary layman. . . . The book does not read like an anthropological account at all. It contains few ethnographic facts of the more conventional sort, it is more life the personal journal of an exciting adventure and it has a lightness of touch which makes it everybody's reading. Yet the underlying anthropological understanding is there. . . . The Dodoth are real people of the twentieth century caught up in the trials and tribulations of emergent Africa.--Edmund Leach The reader is instantly charmed by her warm humanity on the one hand, and the lyrical quality of her writing on the other.--James Wellard Warrior Herdsmen is written with the same clarity of tone, the same selflessness and the same extraordinary sense of human dignity that marked Mrs. Thomas's earlier book. --Virgilia Peterson

Author Information

Born in 1931, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas s is best known for her writings on animals. As she has said One of the things I learned from the Kalahari is that we are animals; the Bushmen lived as other savannah animals do, and we as a species come from that Old Way.

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