Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Warrior Herdsmen

The absorbing chronicle of an expedition to the tribesmen of northern Uganda.

The Dodoth—a tall, handsome people of the northern tip of Uganda—are a tribe in transition. They are proud, often cruel, warrior herdsmen whose oldest members live just as they did hundreds of years ago, but whose younger members sometimes learn to read and write and have brushed against the modern world. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas accompanied three anthropological expeditions to Africa and lived among the Dodoth. She displays a remarkable ability to communicate with the tribespeople and describe their lives and customs.

"Mrs. Thomas is an exceedingly useful sort of person, a kind of 'half-professional' who has developed a flair for talking anthropology to a general audience and thus bridging the gap between overspecialized 'expert' and the ordinary layman. . . . The book does not read like an anthropological account at all. It contains few ethnographic facts of the more conventional sort, it is more life the personal journal of an exciting adventure and it has a lightness of touch which makes it everybody's reading. Yet the underlying anthropological understanding is there. . . . The Dodoth are real people of the twentieth century caught up in the trials and tribulations of emergent Africa." —Edmund Leach, New York Review of Books

"Warrior Herdsmen is written with the same clarity of tone, the same selflessness and the same extraordinary sense of human dignity that marked Mrs. Thomas's earlier book." —Virgilia Peterson, New York Times Book Review

"The reader is instantly charmed by her warm humanity on the one hand, and the lyrical quality of her writing on the other." —James Wellard, Nation