Gufu Oba. Pastoralist Resilience to Environmental Collapse in East Africa Since 1500. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. xxii + 254 pp. £109.99. Paperback. ISBN: 9783031482939.

Pastoralist Resilience to Environmental Collapse is a long history of transformation in pastoralist activities of the Borana of northern Kenya-southern Ethiopia borderlands.Gufu Oba argues that contrary to scholarly debates that view pastoralism as a highly compromised system likely to buckle under ecological crises and dependence on state emergencies, evidence suggests that the Borana pastoral system and related customary institutions have over the centuries adjusted to shocks and volatile environments, enabling society to survive through adaptation and resilience over the decades (2).The book adopts the Annales School's longue dure methods to offer explanations for successive events that triggered change in Borana pastoralism, and to provide insight into mechanisms of human adaptations to external shocks.Concepts relevant to the book's argument are defined in Chapter One, which also serves as the introduction.The concepts include adaptation, the strategies adopted by Borana pastoralists to maintain resilience in the pastoral system, and resilience, the unpredictability of cyclic changes in a state of disequilibrium.Chapter Two recaps these concepts, if only in more detailed ways.They include the reconstruction of the Borana traditional historical calendar through social memory, and its salience in evaluating pastoralism's performance through adaptation and managing resilience (23).Oba articulates how these adaptive strategies have evolved through socio-ecological and political-ecological methods that capture long-term responses to environmental disturbances induced by imposition of colonial rule and national boundaries (26-28).In Chapter Three, Oba uses Borana social memory to reconstruct cyclic disasters in Borana country from 1500 through to the 1900s regarding droughts, pandemics, wars, and locust invasions, and demonstrates how adaptive strategies to these disaster events transformed Borana pastoral practices.He maps out these events based on the Oromo gada (generation classes).He also considers the value of environmental proxy indicators ("paleoenvironmental archives") embedded in lake and terrestrial ecosystem changes for reconstructing the climatic history of a region lacking reliable climatic data (45).Colonial encapsulation of Borana pastoralists after the 1890s prompted them to devise adaptive strategies to cope with ecological and political risks in exploiting frontier resources.This is the subject of Chapter Four, in which Oba demonstrates how state regulation of access to grazing and water undermined the coping strategies to rainfall variability resulting in livestock mortalities and famine.Borana resilience to these shocks included increased mobility