This paper aims to describe ethnogaraphically a system of land use
and some aspects of the social relations found in an irrigated agricultural
area along the Nile river. Most of the data I present here was taken during
my field research in 1986-87 and 1989 in a village belonging to the
Nile Province of the Republic of the Sudan.
The land around the village is divided into four categories according
to the ways of water supply and the forms of land ownership. The first
category, jarif, indicates the long strip of the land along the Nile. Since
this area is regularly flooded and completely covered with the Nile water
for several months in the rainy season, an owner of the land can cultivate
it without special irrigation. Next to the fanif land, fertile fields extend
widely. That area is called jazira and has been the main portion of the
cultivated lands the villagers personally owned. Farmers used to exploit
it by making use of the water wheel, which had been turned by cattle for
irrigating from the Nile. Today pumping machines worked by a diesel
engine take the place of the old apparatus and efficiently supply a large
quantity of water from the Nile to the jazira land.
The introduction of pumps in the irrigation system, which started in
the middle of the 1940's in this village, changed drastically the activities
of agriculturists in this region, because it transformed a vast land beside
the jazira into cultivable fields. The area called kari-4, which had been uncultivated
due to lack of water supply and being owned by the government,
was turned into a large scale farm under supervision of the village
leader, then Mr. HA, who registered at a government office to obtain a
right to use the land as a field. He also bought two pumps with the financial
help of the Mandist office in the capital and set them up at an appropriate
site of the Nile bank. This project, which has been called the
HA Pumping Scheme, started to work in 1951 and is nowadays managed
by HA's son, Mr. AH.
Besides the Scheme, some of the well-off families in the village, who
separately purchased a pumping machine and gained a right to use a portion
of the government-owned land, managed to dig a well to supply
water to the field around it. The field irrigated from the well is called
matara. We now find newly cultivated matara fields even in the desert
area called khaki, far from the village as well as in some parts of the karu
land.
Based on this system of land use, farmers make peculiar arrangements
to divide the crop among the land owner (in the case of the
jazira) or the registrant (in the case of the kari4), the man providing water
to the field (that is, the owner of a pump), and the cultivator. In case of
the karii belonging to the HA Scheme, Mr. AH, who is a registrant of the
land as well as an owner of the pumps, divides fifty-fifty on the harvest
with a cultivator who agrees with Mr. AH about his right to cultivate the
allotted portion of the karft land.
In the jazira, where a system of the private land ownership has been
established for a long time, Mr. AH, who supplies water, and a
cultivator who owns the field personally share the crop after deducting
necessary cultivating expenses from it. If the owner of the land cannot
work his field for some reason, such as a migration to one of the oil-producing
countries and if he asks a reliable person to cultivate his land, he
can obtain one-eighth of the crop as a right of the land owner. This portion
he would receive is called karij. The cultivator and Mr. AH, a provider
of water, share the rest of the crop.
I also discuss variations of arrangements, as a kind of sharecropping
system; cooperative activities among villagers, called nafir; and a significant
role of agricultural workers recruited from the outside of the
village.
ナイル川流域における土地利用と灌漑農業をめぐる社会的諸関係 : 北スーダン・ナイル県の一村落の事例報告
KH_016_1_003.pdf
(4.26MB)
