Iris Publishers- Open access Journal of Agriculture and Soil Science | Foragers and Food Production in Africa: A Cross-
Cultural and Analytical Perspective
Authored by Robert K Hitchcock
Virtually all hunters and gatherers in Africa today not only depend
on foraging for their livelihoods but they also engage in
food production and trade of domestic crops, livestock, and other
resources. Many of them also take part in various kinds of work
for other people in exchange for cash, food, and other goods. Drawing on
case studies from western, central, eastern, and southern
Africa, this paper assesses the causes and consequences of the shifts
from hunting and gathering to agriculture, pastoralism, and
small-scale business activities. Today, there are few ‘isolated
hunter-gatherers’ who depend completely on foraging and are not
enmeshed in the global, national, and local socioeconomic systems.
Climate change, globalization, and the expansion of markets
are leading to significant changes in local subsistence and livelihood
strategies. These and other factors are also contributing to an
expansion of innovative efforts to cope with the many serious challenges
facing Africa’s indigenous peoples. Foragers and Food Production in Africa: A Cross-Cultural and
Analytical Perspective. Paper for the 48th annual Society for Cross-
Cultural Research (SCCR) meetings, Jacksonville, Florida, February
13-16, 2019. In Africa today, there are approximately 533,850 huntergatherers
in 24 different countries on the continent (which
contains a total of 54 nation-states) (Table 1). Some of the people
who have been defined as hunter-gatherers or foragers include the
Batwa (Pygmies) of Central Africa, occupying a dozen countries
in the Congo Basin and its surrounding areas. In southern Africa,
the San (Bushmen), reside in 7 countries, a large proportion of
them in the Kalahari Desert, but some of them are also found in
Afromontane areas such as the Maluti-Drakensberg Mountains of
Lesotho and South Africa. There are also sizable numbers of former
foragers who reside today in Central and East Africa, from the
Haddad of Chad [1] to the Hadza of Tanzania [2] and from the Ogiek
of Kenya to the Eyle of Somalia [3,4]. Virtually all of the huntergatherers
and former foragers in Africa obtain a portion of their
livelihoods from agriculture or from trade of wild meat and other
forest products for domestic crops. A substantial number of former
foragers raise their own crops, as seen, for example, among virtually
all San, eastern African hunter-gatherers such as the Chabu and the
Boni, and most if not all Batw
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