Boma (enclosure)



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. 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 and Henry Morton Stanley.

Etymology and backronym
A popular myth told to tourists in the African Great Lakes states that BOMA stood for 'British Overseas Management Administration' or 'British Officers Mess Area' during the colonial era in Africa. The myth holds that the term has since been adopted into Swahili and several other vernacular Bantu languages of former British East Africa (for example, Chichewa and Chitumbuka in Malawi) to mean government in general, or locations of governmental offices, such as district centers.

In fact, the word boma has much deeper roots in languages spoken in the Africa Great Lakes, whether as a word of Bantu origin or a loan word from Persian. The Oxford English Dictionary ascribes the first use in written English to the adventurer Henry Morton Stanley, in his book Through the Dark Continent (1878): 'From the staked bomas..there rise to my hearing the bleating of young calves.' The term is also used throughout Stanley's earlier book How I found Livingstone(1871) '...we pitched our camp, built a boma of thorny acacia, and other tree branches, by stacking them round our camp...' Krapf's A Dictionary of the Suahili Language (1882) defines boma as 'a palisade or stockade serving as a kind of fortification to towns and villages...may consist of stones or poles, or of an impenetrable thicket of thorns,' though he does not give an origin for the word. Boma also appears in Band's 'Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon' (1920), which indicates the word was in use in Tanganyika long before it fell under the control of the British. Johnson's Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (1939) suggests boma comes from a Persian word, buum, which he says means 'garrison, place where one can dwell in safety.' In Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History, Nurse and Hinnebusch (1993) give iboma, 'defended area,' as either a Great Lakes Bantu innovation or a borrowing from Persian (p. 295). At any rate, the word was in circulation before the British Empire began colonizing.

Moreover, no such entity as the 'British Overseas Management Administration' ever existed.