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J. Forbes Munro: Colonial rule and the Kamba: social change in the Kenya highlands, 1889–1939. (Oxford Studies in African Affairs.) ix, 276 pp., 2 plates. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. £7.50.

Fosbrooke and Jacobs have shown, the agegrade system provides a framework for at least the past two centuries, but this has yet to be fully demonstrated in print. Among the Jie, it is a sequence of generation sets which provides such a framework, and Lamphear, by patiently collating the testimony of over 200 informants, has pieced together a coherent analysis which traces the emergence of Jie identity back to the earlier eighteenth century. Such an exercise, of course, only makes sense if seen in a much wider context of migration, social assimilation, and cultural adaptation. This is just what Lamphear gives us: he interviewed many non-Jie, and the history of the Jie, few as they may be, is related at every step to that of their neighbours. He thus makes a major contribution to the history of a very large region, extending from the southern Sudan across northern Uganda and into western Kenya. This has long been the scene of large-scale movements by people and cattle, and in trying to answer questions in Jie history Lamphear has thrown much light on the history of the Langi, Acoli, Turkana, and Karimojong. The stuff of history in this part of the world is the struggle to maintain a workable balance of crops and livestock on very varied terrain that is subject to periodic drought. This fact is kept firmly in view as the reader pursues the far from unrewarding gyrations of the Jie and their neighbours. Surface archaeology is adduced to corroborate oral evidence for phases and places of intensive agriculture. The iron industry of the Labwor is seen as a critical factor in the political history of the nineteenth century: it was Labwor spears, bought from the Jie, which made possible Turkana expansion, and it was this in turn which provoked the coalescence of the Karimojong and opened up a period of intense competition for livingspace between them and the Jie (who only then acquired this name). In the last years of the century, the herds of both peoples were ravaged by disease but eventually restocked by purchases from Ethiopian and Swahili ivory traders. The Jie themselves were almost wiped out by drought, locusts, and smallpox, but a military genius, Loriang, reorganized the remnants and won back much territory from the Karimojong. Thanks to his diplomacy, British occupation confirmed these Jie gains and some at least look back to the colonial era as ' days of peace and rain' in contrast to recent climatic disaster and the heavy hand of the Uganda army. All in all, Lamphear is to be congratulated on a notable extension, not simply to our knowledge of Uganda's past, but to our awareness of the possibilities of African history. When the going gets rough, and the patterns of long-term change are clouded by the dust of ancient conflict, he rescues the reader with a helpful generalization or a vivid quotation from an informant: indeed, one of the best things about this book is the extent to which the Jie are allowed to speak for themselves. To be sure, there are failings. With the advent of British overrule, the book just stops: there is no attempt to review ite main conclusions in any sort of comparative