The Farmer and the Cowman Can't be Friends?

Yet another chapter in a five or six thousand year old drama between farmers and herders is playing out in Nigeria today.  From the NYT:
Across parts of Nigeria, conflicts that mirror the 20th Century range wars in the American West have broken out between farmers and herdsmen vying for land, leading to bloody battles.
Twentieth Century?  Sure you don't mean largely in the late Nineteenth Century?  Nevermind.  This war started when the early Indo-Europeans overan Europe and Asia.

The core problem, though, is as modern as it is ancient (NYT again):
Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Kenya and other areas across the continentwhere populations are rising struggle with the problem as well. Here in Nigeria, where the population has quadrupled in the past 60 years to nearly 200 million, the fighting has been so fierce that the government deployed the military to contain some of the battles.
It might be more efficacious to deploy birth control pills and education for women.


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