The conflict between settled societies and nomads is as old as Cain and Abel. But now it threatens to destroy nomadic societies. Wayne Ellwood explores the accelerating antagonism and suggests that we would do better to preserve our differences.

The Great Wall of China is one of history’s boldest and clearest symbols of a frontier. Erected over 2,000 years ago this colossal piece of engineering snakes hundreds of miles across the undulating plains of China’s Northwest. Gazing towards the horizon from the walkway on top of the wall the grassy steppes seem to stretch on forever, to the rugged mountains of Mongolia and beyond to the endless Siberian taiga. When it was built the Great Wall symbolized the outer edge of civilization, a clear demarcation between the nomadic bands of barbarians beyond and the first unified Chinese Empire.

One Chinese Imperial Secretary, fearful of invasion by the warlike Mongols, described the nomadic horsemen as wild animals: ‘In their breasts beat the hearts of beasts,’ he wrote. ‘From the most ancient time they have never been regarded as part of humanity.’ 1

Today the Great Wall is a relic of history and an obligatory stop for foreign tourists on package tours. Buses disgorge swarms of visitors from New Jersey and Tokyo while industrious hawkers pitch postcards of Genghis Khan and bottles of Coca-Cola. The Mongol land north of the Wall (known as Inner Mongolia to distinguish it from the Republic of Mongolia) is now controlled by China. The nomads are still there, but they are a threat no longer.

The Chinese have discovered a way of keeping them in their place. Since 1949, when the Communists took control, millions of Han Chinese, with government encouragement, have flooded onto the steppes – with the result that Mongols are now a minority in their own country. There are 20 million Chinese in Inner Mongolia and barely four million Mongols. Thousands of acres of former pasture have been turned into irrigated farmland and leased to outsiders, disrupting centuries-old migration routes in the process.

Traditionally, Mongols are pastoral nomads: that means they move their animals in a predictable pattern according to the seasons and the availability of forage. In the summer they travel to high ground where rain is heavier and grasses more luxuriant; in the harsh winter, when temperatures may drop to minus 40ºC, they retreat to sheltered valleys.

This mobility is absolutely critical to Mongol culture – as it is to all nomads. But like governments the world over, the Chinese are suspicious of this central core of nomadism, this incomprehensible, alien urge to move. So they’ve set out to do something else about it. With the introduction of post-Maoist economic reforms herders no longer have customary rights to land. Instead they have to bid to win grazing rights to specific parcels, called kulums (enclosures). In return the Mongol owners are obliged to erect a house and dig a well. These ranches are big, often 20 or 30 square kilometres, but they are rarely vast enough to have both good summer and winter pastures.

What this means is that the Mongols have little choice but to plant crops to use as forage for their stock over the scarce winter months. Beijing has also demanded that the herders abandon their subsistence approach (essentially producing for themselves, selling animals when and if they need to) and enter the modern market economy – a shift which has led to much larger herds. With more animals the nomads now find themselves both cut off from their traditional migratory routes and increasingly hemmed in by expanding agriculture. The result? Serious over-grazing, soil compaction and, inevitably, advancing desertification.

Elsewhere this process of making nomads settle down (what is sometimes referred to as ‘sedenterization’) has been carried out with force. When Stalin imposed collectivization (making nomads into ranchers) on Kazakh herders in the 1930s, as many as half the population are estimated to have died fighting the change. Forty years later in Somalia forced settlement, influenced by the Soviet collectivist model, proved disastrous. After the drought of 1974 Somali planners attempted to move 120,000 camel herders from the north into four villages on the Indian Ocean coast. The goal was to train them to be fishermen and small farmers, not an easy task in a region where pastoralism is considered nothing less than a divine calling and camels are fussed over and loved like children. No points for guessing the scheme was a flop.2

Modern services

The desire to control nomads politically and to incorporate them into national (ie non-nomadic) culture has always been strong. By their very nature nomads rub nation states up the wrong way. They don’t fit neatly into national boundaries and they tend to look and behave differently from majority populations. In post-colonial states run by bureaucrats wedded to the modernist vision of national progress, nomads are seen as distinctly ‘unmodern’ – an embarrassment, rather than productive members of society.

Whether we’re talking about small bands of nomadic hunters in the Amazon Basin, Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic or nomadic pastoralists in East Africa, there is strong pressure from governments everywhere to make nomads stay put. The reasons are varied, sometimes benevolent, usually patronizing. They need to be brought together for their own good, government officials claim – so they can be educated, taxed and given proper health care, electricity and roads.

‘We want, as a democratic government, to give all citizens the modern services that a state should give its citizens,’ the Israeli advisor on Arab affairs said in 1978 in an effort to justify settlement of Bedouin nomads.3 The same rationale was widely shared by African countries like the Sudan, home to nearly three million nomadic herders from various tribal groups. Efforts began to ‘modernize’ the livestock sector 30 years ago. One of the first goals of the (mainly Arab) Government in Khartoum was to settle the (mainly Black) nomads in the south. In the soothing words of a Government report of the time: ‘sedenterization... is a means of improving the economic and social conditions of those communities... to integrate them into the life of the nation and to enable them to contribute fully to national progress.’4

If not for their own good, then nomads must be settled for the good of the nation. State planners claim that wandering pastoralists are inefficient and that they are ignorant of modern animal husbandry. Their irrational tendency to increase herd numbers threatens to turn delicate rangeland into unproductive wasteland.

These assertions are bolstered by a theory known as the ‘tragedy of the commons’, a rationale which has shaped government and aid-agency attitudes to nomadic herders for the last three decades. Briefly the theory says this: lands held in common, rather than privately-owned, will inevitably suffer environmental degradation since it is in each nomad’s interest to maximize returns by adding more animals to the family herd.