著者

大塚 和夫

出版者

国立民族学博物館

雑誌

国立民族学博物館研究報告 (ISSN:0385180X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.16, no.1, pp.p159-212, 1991

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This paper aims to describe ethnogaraphically a system of land useand some aspects of the social relations found in an irrigated agriculturalarea along the Nile river. Most of the data I present here was taken duringmy field research in 1986-87 and 1989 in a village belonging to theNile Province of the Republic of the Sudan.The land around the village is divided into four categories accordingto the ways of water supply and the forms of land ownership. The firstcategory, jarif, indicates the long strip of the land along the Nile. Sincethis area is regularly flooded and completely covered with the Nile waterfor several months in the rainy season, an owner of the land can cultivateit without special irrigation. Next to the fanif land, fertile fields extendwidely. That area is called jazira and has been the main portion of thecultivated lands the villagers personally owned. Farmers used to exploitit by making use of the water wheel, which had been turned by cattle forirrigating from the Nile. Today pumping machines worked by a dieselengine take the place of the old apparatus and efficiently supply a largequantity of water from the Nile to the jazira land.The introduction of pumps in the irrigation system, which started inthe middle of the 1940's in this village, changed drastically the activitiesof agriculturists in this region, because it transformed a vast land besidethe jazira into cultivable fields. The area called kari-4, which had been uncultivateddue to lack of water supply and being owned by the government,was turned into a large scale farm under supervision of the villageleader, then Mr. HA, who registered at a government office to obtain aright to use the land as a field. He also bought two pumps with the financialhelp of the Mandist office in the capital and set them up at an appropriatesite of the Nile bank. This project, which has been called theHA Pumping Scheme, started to work in 1951 and is nowadays managedby HA's son, Mr. AH.Besides the Scheme, some of the well-off families in the village, whoseparately purchased a pumping machine and gained a right to use a portionof the government-owned land, managed to dig a well to supplywater to the field around it. The field irrigated from the well is calledmatara. We now find newly cultivated matara fields even in the desertarea called khaki, far from the village as well as in some parts of the karuland.Based on this system of land use, farmers make peculiar arrangementsto divide the crop among the land owner (in the case of thejazira) or the registrant (in the case of the kari4), the man providing waterto the field (that is, the owner of a pump), and the cultivator. In case ofthe karii belonging to the HA Scheme, Mr. AH, who is a registrant of theland as well as an owner of the pumps, divides fifty-fifty on the harvestwith a cultivator who agrees with Mr. AH about his right to cultivate theallotted portion of the karft land.In the jazira, where a system of the private land ownership has beenestablished for a long time, Mr. AH, who supplies water, and acultivator who owns the field personally share the crop after deductingnecessary cultivating expenses from it. If the owner of the land cannotwork his field for some reason, such as a migration to one of the oil-producingcountries and if he asks a reliable person to cultivate his land, hecan obtain one-eighth of the crop as a right of the land owner. This portionhe would receive is called karij. The cultivator and Mr. AH, a providerof water, share the rest of the crop.I also discuss variations of arrangements, as a kind of sharecroppingsystem; cooperative activities among villagers, called nafir; and a significantrole of agricultural workers recruited from the outside of thevillage.