Games against Nature
An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa

Robert Harms explores nature and culture in the story of the Nunu.

Robert Harms (Author)

9780521655354, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 October 1999

300 pages, 1 b/w illus. 10 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.44 kg

Africa's equatorial rain forests cover an area roughly the size of continental Western Europe, and yet the history of this area remains largely unexplored. Robert Harms makes an important advance in this book toward recovering that history by telling the story of the Nunu, who live in and around the swampy floodplains of the middle Zaire River. A key element in Nunu history has been the small-scale, short-distance migrations that continually led individuals and groups into new micro-environments. When an increasing population impinged upon the limits of available resources in the late eighteenth century, a crisis characterized by drastic change and incessant conflict ensued. The Nunu abandoned their ancestral estates to take up new forms of competition in river towns, causing a conflict of identity which culminated in civil war in the 1960s.

1. Introduction
2. The antecedents
3. The tactics
4
The strategies
5. The Drylands
6. The river
7. The core
8. The region
9. The traders
10. The troubles
11. The opportunities
12. The battle
13. Conclusion: nature and culture.

Subject Areas: Ethnic studies [JFSL], African history [HBJH]