Boma (enclosure)

For other uses, see Boma (disambiguation).
A boma in the forest. This one is a fortified African village. Illustration published in 1892 in Paris in Édouard Charton's Tour du Monde magazine ('Around the World'), to go with an article on the Stairs Expedition to Katanga written from the journal of explorer Christian de Bonchamps.[1]
Msiri's boma at Bunkeya.

A boma is a livestock enclosure, community enclosure, stockade, corral, small fort or a district government office, commonly used in many parts of the African Great Lakes region, as well as Central and Southern Africa. It is particularly associated with community decision making. The word originally may be from Bantu or Persian, and it has been incorporated into many African languages, as well as colonial varieties of English, French and German.

As a livestock enclosure, a boma is the equivalent of kraal. The former term is used in areas influenced by the Swahili language, and the latter is employed in areas influenced by Afrikaans.

In the form of fortified villages or camps, bomas were commonplace in Central Africa in the 18th and 19th century. They were commonplace throughout Africa, including in areas affected by the slave trade, tribal wars and colonial conquest, and were built and used by both sides.

Picture of a boma enclosure constructed as a cicle of thorny acacia tree branches in a Kenyan village.
A boma constructed from thorny acacia branches in a rural village in Isiolo County, Kenya in 2018.

Apart from the neatly built stockades shown in illustrations of bomas, the term, in practice, more often resembled the structure shown in the illustration accompanying this article. In that form, they often were referred to by the likes of J. A. Hunter[2] and Henry Morton Stanley.[3][4]

  1. ^ René de Pont-Jest: L'Expédition du Katanga, d'après les notes de voyage du marquis Christian de BONCHAMPS, in: Edouard Charton (editor): Le Tour du Monde magazine, also published bound in two volumes by Hachette, Paris (1893). Also available online at www.collin.francois.free.fr/Le_tour_du_monde/ Archived 2010-02-05 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ Hunter, John G. (2000). White Hunter. Long Beach, CA: Safari Press. ISBN 1-57157-122-1.
  3. ^ Stanley, Henry M. (1988). Through the Dark Continent, or, The sources of the Nile around the Great Lakes of equatorial Africa and down the Livingstone River to the Atlantic Ocean. New York: Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-25667-7.
  4. ^ Stanley, Henry M. (2010). How I Found Livingstone; travels, adventures, and discoveries in Central Africa, including an account of four months' residence with Dr. Livingstone, by Henry M. Stanley. HardPress Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4076-3041-0.