Could there be a link between being violent to Herdsmen? According to research there could be, and based on what I found out, men who demonstrate violent tendency, especially toward their wives, may have been descendants of herdsmen by inference of correlation. My thought is based on the theory of hereditary. According to research, some of our behavioral trait is environmental as well as biology- behavioral trait that is then passed down through our genes to our offspring even as we evolved from one generation to another and scattered throughout the world.
According to some theory, some men who have violent tendency do so because of hereditary factors that is latent in them are predisposed to violent outburst- especially where there is a childhood trauma like child abuse. According to this research, where herdsmen use violence to protect their herds against thieves, men who violently abuse their wives do so when they feel the need to control their wives or assert a strongly held opinion of themselves”.1
According to the study by Jacobson & Gottam, in Anatomy of a Violent Relationship, the husbands in this study, when challenged by their wives, felt their persons and integrity was threatened, as such, resulted to violence to control, dominate and silence their wives. It could then be inferred that when men who have the tendency to be violent feels threatened either to their person or property, they result to aggression in order to control- as do the herdsmen depicted in Richard Nisbett & Dov Cohen’s study on Violence and Honor in the Southern United States. Richard E. Nisbett & Dov Cohen’s report on Herding Economies, inferred that, “if there is one economy that is associated worldwide with honor and readiness to commit violence to conserve it- is the herdsmen economy.”(p. 158) They further stated that ‘there are some interesting natural experiments that show that people who occupy the same general region but differ in occupation also differ in their predilections toward toughness, violence, and warfare.
How is this correlated to men with violence tendency towards their wives? Well, according the study performed by anthropologist, Robert Edgerton, (Richard & Cohen, p. 156), on two neighboring tribes in East Africa, a group of herders and a group of farmers- Edgerton reported that in both tribes, the herders exhibited a behavioral syndrome described as machismo,” that is, “a strong sense of masculinity, usually entailing aggressiveness or physical domination of women,”2, whereas the farmers manifested the insistent need to get alone with their neighbors. (Nisbett & Cohen, pp.158). What this means is that based on documented facts dating back to slavery and warfare in Europe as well as in Africa, and in America, men who were herders, are more likely to use violence to protect their animals, than farmers. Animal is a property, and to the herdsman, he is protecting his property. And based on studies conducted on different parts of the world, the same result was derived from herders’ tendency to perpetuate violence where there is a need to protect their property or their honor. The trait underlying violent behavior in some men could also be explained by the theory of Freud in personality development, which states that, ‘the ego is an aspect of the subject that emerges from the id, the biological, inherited, unconscious source of instincts, and irrational impulses.
The instinct in order to act is prompted by an external variants- in this aspect, when a man feels threatened or insulted, the instincts to act becomes automatic- and when this applies to husband and wife, the husband, when provoked or challenged by his wife, feels that he must uphold his honor by trying to control his wife either through the act of violence or verbal abuse (Jacobson, & Gottman, 1998). An example of one too many domestic abuse is that Mr. John Onwuka, in Hampton, VA, who stabbed his wife, Mrs. Gloria Onwuka fourteen times. Why would a man stab his wife to death? What would prompt a man to become so animalistic, if not to dominate the one thing that seems to threaten his ego? Perhaps the challenge that his wife is doing fare better than him, provoked Mr. Onwuka to act, and to secure his honor, Mr. John Onwuka may have acted out a trait that dates back to the time when his fore, forefathers were herders.

Bess JT