The term cattle complex derives from Melville Herskovits’s PhD thesis, which the American Anthropologist serialized as ‘The Cattle Complex in East Africa’. Herskovits adapted a method, developed by Clark Wissler and others, which sought to classify the different American Indian cultures according to the complex of traits which each demonstrated, to understand the diffusions and mixings of those traits and to map the areas in which they were found. The method derived from attempts to bring order into the arrangement of museum exhibits but attributed equal importance to myths, ceremonies and ‘psychological elements’. A culture trait, it was argued, is not static and, as it moves from one region to another, may often change both its form and its function so as to become almost unrecognizable; so, in order both to isolate it and classify it, each has to be examined comparatively and contextually as part of a culturally integrated cluster or ‘complex’. Herskovits continued to extend the concept.
Cattle-keeping in itself, however economically important, was not sufficient for inclusion in the ‘cattle complex’. Cattle, above all else, had to give meaning to the life of the people; to be their solace and passion and the source of the images which express their social and imaginative lives. Cattle, the providers of milk, should only be slaughtered to mark the great transitional events of life, from birth to final funerary rites. Cattle were known by their individual attributes. Cattle raiding according to prescribed conventions was general. The special honour accorded to cattle often created both a simple and sparse subsistence system based on crop cultivation, in which women did much of the work, and a prestige system based on cattle ownership restricted to men. Most enduring social relationships were mediated through the loan, gift or exchange of cattle. Marriage required their transfer in the form of bridewealth. A cattleless man could enjoy neither social position nor respect. In some societies, such as Rwanda, cattle ownership was the source of political power and the prerogative of the rulers. The ‘cattle complex’ was assumed to overlay agricultural cultures which had preceded it.
Using the ‘cattle complex’ as his criterion Herskovits delimited an East African Cattle Area, extending from the Nilotic Sudan through the Great Lakes to the Cape: excluding the pastoral peoples of the eastern Horn but including, as an extension, the cattle-keepers of southwestern Angola.
What Lucy Mair (1985) called this ‘mouldering cliche’ has had little influence on anthropological thought. Unfortunately it was misused by some White settlers in Kenya to suggest that Africans suffered from a complex about cattle in the way that some people do from an inferiority complex. This patronizing reversal of meaning has led some Africans and some development practitioners, who have never read Herskovits, to accuse anthropologists of cultural arrogance and misrepresentation. This is ironic because Herskovits was the only anthropologist invited by Kwame Nkrumah as an honoured guest at the celebrations for Ghana Independence Day.
