Posted on 07/11/2007 3:10:40 PM PDT by blam
Bedouin Culture in Egypt Dying in Drought
By Cache Seel
Shalatin, Egypt
10 July 2007
Facing Drought and the loss of grazing land for their herds, many Bedouin of southeastern Egypt are giving up their traditional lifestyle. The Egyptian Government and aid organizations have stepped in to help, but critics claim they are doing more harm than good. Reporter Cache Seel has details from Shalatin.
The sword dance of the Ababda is performed in celebrations and is used to welcome guests. Two men with swords and shields dance in a circle around each other to a drum beat while the gathered men chant and the women ululate. As the music ends the dancers lay down their swords and back away from each other with their hands held up to show it was all in fun.
The Ababda are one of two main tribes that make up the Bedouin population of Egypt's southeastern desert. The other is the Besharin. Although their traditional lands reach from the Red Sea to the Nile, differences in language and their nomadic lifestyle kept their culture intact and distinct from the rest of Egypt. Until recently these nomadic tribesmen were little changed by the millennia. Today their culture and even their language are dying.
Taha is an Ababda man living in an area called Gambeet.
Taha is explaining to an aid worker that his tribe's once large herds are gone. Now he says the average family owns at most six goats.
Taha is the only man present in Gambeet when we visit. The other men are out collecting wood to turn into charcoal. The charcoal will be sold in Shalatin, the largest town nearby and four days journey by camel. Charcoaling has become increasingly important as their herds continue to grow smaller.
Taha says things were not always this way.
In 1964, the Aswan High Dam was completed. Six years later the reservoir, called Lake Nasser, was full. An estimated 90,000 people were displaced and more than 5,000 square kilometers of land was submerged.
The only permanent grazing areas of the Ababda and the Besharin were left under water and the remainder of their lands have suffered from a decades-long drought.
Their camel herds, the traditional measure of wealth for the Bedouin, were decimated and the Ababda and the Besharin were left among the poorest of Egypt's poor.
Two years ago, the Egyptian government and the World Food Program began agricultural projects to offer the nomads an alternative to life in the desert.
Khaled Chatila, the Project Director for the World Food Program, has worked on numerous Bedouin settlement programs across Egypt, but the Ababda and the Besharin are unique in the problems they present.
"Because one of the problems we were facing is that they do not speak Arabic. Most of them will speak the Rotana which is the native language of the place," Chatila said.
The Ababda and the Besharin speak a dialect of Beja called Rotana. Beja is an Afro-Asiatic language that is spoken among nomadic peoples from Egypt to Eritrea.
Origins of nomadic peoples are difficult to trace as they leave little evidence behind for archaeologists. The history of the Ababda and the Besharin has been pieced together from travelers accounts and clues from their culture and language.
Accounts of their lives and customs date back to the ancient Greeks. The 'Lost Book' of Ibn Selim al-Assouani, written in 971 AD, contains similar descriptions of the Ababda and Besharin as those of anthropologists in the 1970s.
Anthropologist Shahira Fawzy lived with the Ababda and the Besharin from 1970 to 1985 and retains close ties. She witnessed the flooding of their homeland and lived with them through much of the drought. Fawzy is a critic of the agricultural programs and denies the premise that they are necessary.
"Those people have lived for thousands of years with droughts and with rains," said Fawzy.
As proof of the tribes long existence in the region she says that even today many of their utensils and fashions are exact copies of relics found in the tombs of Pharaohs. Fawzy says the programs designed to give the Ababda and the Besharin a reliable livelihood are having the opposite effect.
"In whose interest is it? What will they gain by switching people who have their own income into beggars? That's what you do when you change nomads into farmers," Fawzy said.
In Shalatin, the Ababda and the Besharin live in makeshift houses on the outskirts of town. Most of the men work as laborers in the camel market, earning less than six dollars a week. In order to survive this is supplemented with food aid and welfare.
In the past it was governments who relied on them. They were famous warriors. Pharaohs and Sultans paid them to keep the caravan routes open. The Beja speaking tribes were the only indigenous people to ever break the British infantry square, a feat immortalized in Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Fuzzy-Wuzzy.' The last Khedive of Egypt gave them a portion of the road tax to keep the Hajj route safe.
Though some of the Ababda and the Besharin cling to their traditional way of life, the lives of most of them have been as drastically altered as their homeland.
Rahman is Besharin, like all the tribesmen he only offers one name. For the tribes of the desert names betray family and tribal allegiances which can obligate two strangers to settle a centuries-old blood feud. To avoid trouble the Ababda and the Besharin offer only their first names to strangers.
Rahman is translating Arabic words into Rotana. Rotana is his first language and his Arabic is accented. His children, however, were born in Shalatin and don't even speak basic Rotana or know the customs of their people.
Still some customs remain. They still greet their guests with a ritual serving of thick, ginger flavored coffee called Jabana and honored guests are still invited to watch the sword dance which only ends when the dancers lay their swords on the ground. The dance is a ritual greeting for the Ababda but it could also tell their story.
The Ababda and the Besharin who fought off the Pharonic, Roman, and British empires have finally been forced to lay down their swords by the weather.
intr.v. ul·u·lat·ed, ul·u·lat·ing, ul·u·lates
To howl, wail, or lament loudly.
GGG Ping.
Leaving their herds and taking up suicide belts perhaps?
So that’s what my wife does when I come home............
Somehow, I just don’t find myself getting disturbed by this news. I know, that’s a terrible thing to say. But I will not take it back.
We still have the Nomads living in Los Angeles, only there we call them migrant workers. And the drought in LA is in its 300th year now.
Man, we got to preserve the Bedouin culture at all costs.
Are they more important than the Somali farmers in Darfur?
Must be global warming. Egypt has never had a drought before
It’s about time they assimilated.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
http://wiki.vocamania.com/Bisharin.aspx
The Bisharin are a Sunni Muslim tribe of the Beja nomadic ethnic group in the eastern part of the Nubian Desert in Sudan; they live in the Atbai between the Nile River and the Red Sea, north of the Amarar and south of the Ababda. Population of about 42,000. “Bisharin” is also the name of their spoken dialect.
The Bisharin tend animals, including camels, sheep, goats, buffalo, and cattle. For those along the Nile River, farming is way of life; they grow cotton, sugar cane, corn, dura, wheat, sesame, fruits and vegetables, and raise poultry.
...He frequently purchased high-quality, fast camels in Diraw for which the Ab bda are famous, as well as direct from Bisharin breeders in the Atbai, and learnt to distinguish their superior qualities. At one time he was allocated £1000 and bought seventy-five camels in two weeks in Dar w through prolonged auctioning and discussion. Dar w, is four miles south of Kom-Ombo and twenty-three miles north of Aswan on the railway, ‘a large village with several mosques, marks the boundary between the Arabic and Nubian language ... Tuesday a large and interesting market to which Bisharin and Ab bda bring hundreds of camels to be sold’. It is the nominal headquarters of the Khalifa family, chieftains of the Amelekab- Ab bda who fought with the British against the Dervishes in Sudan. They also owned the great caravan road from Korosko to Abu Hamed which was so important before the railway was built from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum. As von Dumreicher describes Dar w, it was the only important camel market in southern Egypt, especially visited by Bisharin and Ab bda who exchanged their camels for other goods including corn, beans, dates, linen, leather, daggers, swords, shields etc...
Amalek!
.....To avoid trouble the Ababda and the Besharin offer only their first names to strangers.....
Such is the way of the modern world where many with I have telephone business contact seemingly have only first names.
Bedouin of southeastern Egypt are giving up their traditional lifestyle
There was something there besides sand?
Tjamls. Whoops, right fingers, wrong keys. Thanks.
The article indicates this has more to do with Aswan Dam flooding their “permanent” pastures than the weather.
Yeah, it’s one of those global warming shill pieces. The MSM has bedouin that for a while now.
You see this? This is sand, Nothing grows in it, It’s always gonna be sand. We have deserts in America but we DON’T LIVE IN THEM! BECAUSE NOTHING GROWS THERE!! GET YOUR STUFF AND MOVE TO WHERE THE FOOD IS!!!!!!!!! <—Sam Kinison
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.