Kofyar

The Kofyar are a population in central Nigeria numbering around 50,000. This group comprises three different "tribes" as designated by British colonial officers: the Doemak (or Dimmuk), Merniang, and Kwalla. However the three groups have a common language, economic pattern, and origin myth, and had formed into a union called the Koffyer Federation in the 1940s; they have therefore been referred to an a single group by anthropologists.

When first described by anthropologist Robert Netting in the early 1960s, the Kofyar resided in the southernmost hills of the Jos Plateau and around the plateau base. Population densities were high, approaching 500/km² in many areas, and agricultural methods were highly intensive. Much of the land was in annual cultivation, with animal herds providing dung compost for fertilizer, and steep hillsides were intricately terraced. Netting's Hill Farmers of Nigeria, a classic book in the field of cultural ecology, showed how social institutions such as household form and land tenure had adjusted to the intensive cultivation system.

During the 1950s, the Kofyar began to settle in the fertile plains of the Benue Valley to the south of the Jos Plateau. Pioneering farms there used extensive slash-and-burn methods, but with rising population density and market stimulus, intensive methods were gradually introduced. By the 1980s, Benue Valley Kofyar were producing considerable surpluses of yams, rice, peanuts, pearl millet and sorghum using generally sustainable methods -- an interesting contrast to the externally-supported agricultural development schemes in the region, which have all failed.

Although most Kofyars now live in the Benue Valley (or in cities), the Jos Plateau homeland is still inhabited largely because of the Kofyars' efforts to maintain it as a cultural and economic resource.

References

*Netting, Robert McC. 1968 Hill Farmers of Nigeria: Cultural Ecology of the Kofyar of the Jos Plateau. Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle.
*Stone, Glenn Davis, Robert McC. Netting and M. Priscilla Stone 1990 Seasonality, Labor Scheduling and Agricultural Intensification in the Nigerian Savanna. American Anthropologist 92:7-23.
* Stone, Glenn Davis 1996 Settlement Ecology: The Social and Spatial Organization of Kofyar Agriculture. University of Arizona Press, Tucson.
* Stone, Glenn Davis 1998 Keeping the Home Fires Burning: The Changed Nature of Householding in the Kofyar Homeland. Human Ecology 26:239-265