BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century, the Nunu had occupied all of the micro-environments that they found hospitable. Each micro-environment had imposed its own rules and had thus forced settlers to alter their goals, strategies, and tactics in the competition to become big-men. Life in the swamps was dominated by two variants of water lord competition: the flooded forest variant, based on ponds, and the flooded grassland variant, based on dams. In the farmlands of Nkuboko, men had tried to create a form of the water lord competition based on control of small streams, but the yield was meager, and household economies depended largely on the agricultural production of women. The final variant was played out along the river. Based on luck and the modest yield of nets and traps, the river variant bore scant resemblance to the water lord competition in the swamps.

The process by which new forms of competition had emerged was, in theory, relatively simple: changes in the rules forced people to develop new tactics and strategies, thereby creating a new form of competition. What made the process complicated in practice was that a variety of factors could influence the rules. Environments, as has been pointed out, impose their own rules. But so do markets, which set the values of commodities; political authorities, who regulate behavior through formal laws; technologies, which determine the limits of production; and religious beliefs, which define the limits of acceptable behavior.