Nomads in No-Man’s Land - Egypt Today Article

http://www.egypttoday.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=7738

Kim Piper

November 2007 Nomads in No-Man’s Land Rulers have come and gone, but none have won the trust of the the Eastern Desert’s tribes. Now that the Beja tribes are grudgingly considering settlements, is this the end of the “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” way of life? By Cache Seel

MY FIRST TRIP to the Eastern Desert was to visit a gold mine. I wasn’t the only visitor there — a group of geologists, miners and industry experts were inspecting the site as well. During our time together, I learned that these men had spent most of their lives in Egypt’s furthest corners. The average age of the group was well over 60, and there were literally hundreds of years of experience assembled in the desert. Naturally, the conversation centered on the uniqueness of —and the oddities in — Egypt’s hinterlands.

“Have you ever seen the Fuzzy-wuzzies?” one of them asked.

People don’t really say things like that anymore, do they?

I must have looked as shocked as I felt, because the man started laughing. “No, no, that’s what they’re called.” Then he described the tribesmen of the Eastern Desert: the hairstyle which earned them their nickname, their unique language and the amalgam of religious beliefs they had accumulated over time.

“But it’s very hard to get down to see them now,” he warned.

He was right, particularly when you consider the area he was describing includes the disputed border with Sudan. Besides being as far from Cairo as you can get and still be in Egypt, government permits are required for travel.

Kim Piper The Hamedab prepare jabana, a ginger-flavored coffee, for their visitors in a ceremony that draws in everyone in the camp.

Shortly after, while working on a different story about the Bedouin of the Sinai, a project director for the World Food Program (WFP) mentioned that he had recently been working with nomads in the Eastern Desert.

“Have you ever heard of the Besharin, I think they’re called?” I asked, paused for a second then added. “The Fuzzy-wuzzies?”

He had: In fact, it was the tribe he was working with. He was also more than happy to help arrange a trip. Nearly a year and a half of red tape and scheduling problems later, I finally began my journey to find the group of nomads Egypt seems to have forgotten all about.

The Beja

The Ababda and the Besharin belong to the Beja tribes, which roam the deserts from Egypt to Eritrea. Accounts of their lives and customs date back to the ancient Greeks, and although many of the earliest accounts are littered with myths presented as fact, there is still enough truth in them that the people being described are recognizable as the same tribes documented by later, less imaginative travelers.

Kim Piper Some fear that as the Bedouin move into settlements, children will abandon their tribes’ traditions and culture.

More than a millennium after Pliny the Elder and Herodotus described the “Gebadei” and the “Blemmyes” — complete with drawings depicting them as having their faces in the middle of their chests — another wave of travelers journeyed to the lands of the Beja.

The “lost book” of Ibn Selim Al-Aswani, written in 971 AD, assigns the Gebadei and the Beja the same lands as the ancient Greeks. The “G” prefix is common in the Beja languages: A Besharin man in Shalatin called the Beja language Gebejawi, and the Gebadei are almost certainly the Ababda.

The European explorers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relied heavily on ancient texts to guide them through the Eastern Desert. The stories they brought back show a land where little had changed from the earliest accounts. The weapons, the houses, the language and even the spiritual beliefs would have been instantly recognized by Pliny.

Today, the tribes’ long continuity may be coming to an end, victims of the consequences of modernity. Lake Nasser, completed in 1964, took six years to fill to capacity. By 1970, an estimated 90,000 people were displaced and more than 5,000 square kilometers of land were submerged. The only permanent grazing areas for the Besharin and the Ababda were left underwater.

The remainder of their lands are suffering through a decades-long drought. The herds that any nomadic people need to sustain their lifestyles are disappearing.

Kim Piper A ‘fearsome’ Fuzzy-wuzzy: A Besharin girl in Shalatin shows off the hairstyle that gave the tribe its nickname.

On the Road

Standing overwatch on the long drive down the Red Sea coast is the Citadel of Quseir, now a museum dedicated to the history of the area. In the northern tower is a display of the daily lives of the Bedouin tribes, specifically the Ababda and the Besharin. It’s a small exhibit, limited by space, but it shows a traditional house and items used in the tribes’ everyday lives. A map is also on display showing the range of the nomads, which remains identical to the areas identified by classical geographers.

Hundreds of kilometers farther south we turn off the main road and head into the mountains. The asphalt gives way to gravel, which in turn gives way to a seemingly trackless expanse. Finally, we come across a small camp in a valley called Gambeet.

The only difference between Gambeet and the museum in Quseir is the fact that people live in the latter. Past a small enclosure housing a few goats sits a low shelter. Only a small child would be able to stand upright beneath the burlap and miscellaneous pieces of cloth that are supported by the wooden frame. Along the frame hang water skins and other items identical to the museum ‘relics.’

It’s a living museum. The older women have square, flat, gold rings hung off the front of their noses and decorative scarring on their cheeks. Some of the younger women have plaits and gold rings woven into their hair.

Kim Piper A small spring, marked by a Roman-era temple, is the only source of water for the Ababda in this part of the valley known as locally as “Abrak.”

Khaled Chatila is the program manager for the WFP. He introduces us to Taha, the only man present in Gambeet. The others, he says, are out collecting wood to turn into charcoal.

“One of the main income sources is now charcoaling,” Chatila explains. “They forage the desert for wood and turn it into charcoal to sell. Herding is [dying out] because of the drought.”

This drought, which has affected the Eastern Desert for more than 30 years, is what brought Chatila here. Some environmentalists have blamed micro-climatic changes resulting from the Aswan High Dam; others have tied it to the greater trend of global warming. While the cause is disputed, the effects are clear.

Camels are the traditional measure of wealth for the Bedouin, and throughout their history the Ababda and the Besharin were considered to be very wealthy tribes. Travelers’ accounts always include a description of the herds, and later travelers came specifically for the camels, sometimes described as the best in the world.

“Before, we had large herds,” Taha says. “But now we have only maybe five or six goats per family. There are still some camels, but only three in Gambeet.”

Kim Piper An Ababda woman weaves a blanket at Shalatin’s community center, as part of a project to help the Bedouin learn marketable skills.

The men out collecting wood for charcoal have the camels, he tells us. Once they have collected a full load, they will take it to Shalatin to the market, a four-day journey by camel from Gambeet.

Chatila asks Taha if he has seen the settlements set up by the WFP and the government. “We are all the same; there are good things in both,” he replies. “The houses are okay, but so are the tents.”

“Don’t you want a house?” Chatila asks.

“I have a house,” Taha says. “This is my house, he says, pointing around the tent. I prefer this life. I don’t want a house made of wood. I might join the project if I saw something concrete. I’m waiting to see the results.”

The women aren’t any more enthusiastic about the settlement programs than Taha is.

Kim Piper Traditional beauty techniques: The Ababda women at Gambeet use charcoal on their faces and plait their hair with a gold ring, beads.

Fatima is the oldest woman in Gambeet. “I like Gambeet. I’m not going to move from here,” she says. “But if one day Gambeet becomes like Abu Safa, no harm. We’re happy with what we have now.” A widow, Fatima explains that she is dependent on her relatives for support. Her son lives with her, but he is away at the school the government set up in Abu Safa, as are all of the children in Gambeet.

Asked about the need for educating future nomads, Taha finally admits, “People are aware of something changing, and they’re looking for something easier. Even if this means that we lose some of the old habits and customs, it doesn’t really matter. Surviving is becoming much harder. Especially the young,” he says, “They know that they have to change.”

Chatila has worked on numerous Bedouin settlement programs across Egypt, but he has never encountered the problems that the Ababda and the Besharin present. “One of the problems we were facing early on is that many of them did not speak Arabic,” Chatila explains. “Most of them speak Rotana, which is the local language of the place.”

They are also difficult to register because they simply will not tell you more than their first names. For the nomads, Chatila explains, their full names betray their family, as well as their tribal allegiances and histories. Two absolute strangers could find themselves obligated to settle a centuries-old blood feud simply by introducing themselves.

Abu Safa

Retired Army General Ahmed Al-Mullah has spent a good deal of time in the Eastern Desert, first with the army and now with the Ministry of Agriculture and Land Reclamation. Five years ago, the ministry began with a simple program growing fodder to save the herds.

Realizing much more needed to be done, the ministry enlisted the help of the WFP, inked an agreement in 2003 and began work the next year. They chose the area around Abu Safa for two reasons: The situation of the local population was dire, and the presence of groundwater made it possible to do something about it.

“The biggest problem we faced early on was gaining the people’s trust,” Al-Mullah says. “When we started the program and explained what we wanted to do, the reaction was, ‘Why, what do you want from us?’ It’s been a long process.”

And the process isn’t over yet. Driving farther into the desert from Gambeet, you eventually come across the Abu Safa valley. Ten feddans of small green rows hedged in by a wall of young cactus appear out of the endless sea of brown.

The Ababda are divided into three lineages: the Hamedab, the Ashebab, and the Melaikab, each headed by a hereditary sheikh. This area belongs to the Hamedab.

Kim Piper The home of Taha, his wives and children at the Abrak settlement in a valley near Shalatin.

“If anyone is going to do anything here, he is told about it and people need his permission,” Al-Mullah says as he introduces Sheikh Hamedab. Sheikh Hamedab is an old man with cataracts, who gets around slowly using a walking stick. His authority has not diminished with his health.

“He has absolute authority,” Al-Mullah explains. “When he told people to settle in Abu Safa, they moved.” This authority has been both a blessing and a curse for the project. After a successful harvest, the government and the WFP would like to expand the settlements, but Sheikh Hamedab isn’t sure yet. “He still isn’t sure about drip irrigation,” Al-Mullah tells us. “He only knows flood irrigation, so he needs to see more before he okays more houses.”

The crops are only one part of the program. To reach the people with basic government services such as medical care and education, they need to be settled. But if houses are built without the Sheikh’s approval, no one will come, and if he tells them to leave, they will.

The man who is perhaps doing the most to convince Sheikh Hamedab of the value of drip irrigation is Mohandis Hussein. For the last two years he’s been implementing the technical side of the agriculture program while working on his PhD in agricultural techniques and desert reclamation. He’s training local men, but says it could take a full seven years before they’re self reliant.

“It will take a long time before the program can walk away,” he says simply. Still, he doesn’t regret leaving his home in Cairo’s Mataria neighborhood for the spartan desert life. “We’re doing it for the children and for the future; we’re teaching them another world.”

Kim Piper

Not far from the fields is the ancient route that connects the Nile Valley and the Red Sea. A Ptolemaic temple is carved into a cliff face, marking the location of a spring. Across the narrow valley is a fledgling olive grove. Al-Mullah points to this as an example of the evolution of the project.

“When we started here five years ago it was just fodder to save the livestock. Then we started to plant for people and the settlements began. Now we are working on marketable produce,” explains Al-Mullah, who believes that the change in attitude is largely due to the success of the settlements.

The nearby settlement is a ring of wooden houses on tall concrete foundations, surrounding a school, a mosque and a community center. The community center was part of a joint program with the United Nations Development Program and the WFP, Chatila says. “The joint program identified the 10 ten poorest villages in all of Egypt,” he explains. “Abu Safa was selected, and so this center was built.”

The facility is a multipurpose training center, with sewing courses for the women, adult literacy programs, and basic awareness advice on topics such as hygiene. The center also serves as a meeting area for the villagers and is a clinic for the government doctor who visits once a month.

“It was a coordinated effort,” Chatila says. “We provided the building, and the government donated the sewing machines and monitors for the classes.”

There is also a television. Al-Mullah sees this as an important tool for teaching the nomads that there is another world out there; Chatila is not as convinced.

“There’s always the danger in this type of aid work that you are destroying a culture,” he says. “But what are we supposed to do? They were starving out there in the desert, and we can’t pretend for them that there isn’t another world out there. They’re not children.”

The school is a simple, one-room building. The teacher has come from Qena since none of the locals are qualified. An imam from Shalatin visits periodically for the same reason.

Leaving the settlement is not an easy task. The people insist that we sit with them and drink a thick, sweet coffee flavored with ginger called jabana. Drinking jabana is a ritual in which the guest watches the entire process of making the coffee. While we’re waiting, men emerge from behind the community center with round bull hide shields and “Crusader style swords” that perfectly fit the descriptions offered by Ibn Selim Al-Aswani more than 1,000 years ago.

Two armed men face each other as another picks up a flat drum and begins beating out a rhythm and chanting. The men dance in circles around each other, stabbing the sky with their swords. As the music ends, the dancers lay down their swords and back away from each other with their hands held high as if to show that it was all in fun. Two more men rush in to pick up the weapons, and the dance begins again almost immediately. The women of the settlement sit off to the side ululating as dance continues. Everyone joins in, the youngest dancer couldn’t have been all of 10 years old and the oldest don’t look as if they will be able to finish the dance.

Leaving Abu Safa, Chatila says the rituals make him feel vindicated in a way. “I know that their lives are changing and that we are a part of that,” he says. “But when they wanted to celebrate and greet guests, this is what they chose to do. To me that says that at least a part of their culture is going to remain intact.”

Shalatin

Shalatin is a sprawl more than a city. The concrete buildings which line the main street give way to a random collection of shacks built from scavenged material. It doesn’t look it at first, but Shalatin is an important trading hub. It is the last Egyptian city before the disputed border area with Sudan, with a market that has more goods than you can find anywhere outside of Cairo. Raw materials make their way from Africa through Sudan, and manufactured goods both imported and made in Egypt stop here on their way south. The camel market in Shalatin is the largest in Egypt, by some estimates the largest in Africa.

Rahman is Besharin and has lived in Shalatin for years now. His children were born here and their lives bear no resemblance to their father’s childhood.

“When I was young, we used to take our camels to Aswan and Komombo to pick up wheat flour. We used to take caravans down into Sudan. There was much more water than now, but water was always a problem. Now there is no water. It used to rain and there was good grazing,” he says resignedly. “We worked as herders, camels, cows everything. But now with the drought, no one has camels anymore. Now we are mostly working in the camel market and some are working as fishermen.”

Chatila explains that in the camel market the men hire themselves out as laborers and are lucky to make LE 30 a week. The settlement program in the Eastern Desert is based on an earlier collaboration between the government and the WFP in Sinai. There, participants in the program contribute 15 percent of the local market value of their food aid into an account. The government then matches their deposits at a nearly 10:1 ratio. The impoverishment of the Ababda and the Besharin has been so severe that this common fund is provided entirely by the government.

“Everything is different now,” says Rahman. Rotana is his first language and his Arabic is accented. “The young generation is speaking it less and it’s becoming mixed with Arabic.” After a while he admits that his children, born and raised in Shalatin, barely speak basic Rotana.

“Most of our culture is still preserved, but a lot of it is a little different,” he responds when asked if he was worried that the Beshari culture is dying. Leaving Shalatin for the desert is no longer an option. Besides, he says, “Now it is better. The Egyptians are giving us schools and electricity for free and a monthly stipend.”

Rahman still refers to the Egyptians as a people other than himself. He is Beshari, not Egyptian. It’s very likely that he will be the last generation of his family to think so.

The Shalatin community center is a microcosm of the surrounding area. In the “slums” of Shalatin, as Chatila calls them, tribes and family lines are strictly segregated. Inside the center the Ababda, the Besharin and locals gather for training and socialization. Today, they’re learning weaving techniques.

Hawa is Hamedab Ababda and visibly so. She has the hole in the front of her nose where her wedding ring went, and her bright colors and bare arms seem immodest compared to the townspeople. She is teaching around 30 assembled women weaving techniques. The idea is to create a marketable product which will be sold in a consignment store in Marsa Alam. She greets the visitors with a long stream of Rotana.

“What is she saying?” Chatila asks the woman next to him.

“She is praising God and praising the project,” the woman replies.

Then, switching to Arabic, Hawa says, “Before this project we just stayed in our homes and now we are learning things.”

Al-Mullah says this instruction is part of one of the project’s main goals to empower the women of the area. “This is changing the whole attitude here,” he maintains. “Now they know if you work, you can get money, not just food.”

An effort is underway with the Ministry of Social Affairs to create a micro-loan program for the women in the project, but one of the biggest stumbling blocks so far has been that the women simply didn’t have marketable skills.

Desert Dwellers

Few, if any, outsiders know even half as much about the Ababda and the Besharin as Shahira Fawzy. And few if any people are as critical of the agricultural programs as she is.

In 1970, Fawzy was a recent AUC graduate, planning her wedding which would take place after a short study of water pollution around the very recently filled Lake Nasser. A chance encounter with a small group of Beshari women turned what had been up to that point a very conventional life upside down. The women eventually led her back into the desert to a small camp. Hard times had fallen on this group of Besharin.

“They kept telling me that they were waiting for the deluge to dry,” she says. The tribesmen believed that a massive rain had come down and flooded their grazing land; they were simply waiting out the flood waters. All of her efforts to convince them that the land was gone forever failed.

“I was young,” Fawzy recalls. “They told me that a huge torrential rain like this happens about every 20 years.” After a pause she adds, “How could a people like this even imagine something like the Aswan Dam?”

Back in Aswan, authorities were as incredulous as the Besharin had been. They refused to believe that a group of people they had never heard of were living out in the desert and insisted that she had run across a passing caravan.

Fawzy returned to Cairo, ended her engagement, walked away from her very comfortable life and spent the next 15 years living with the tribes. While being critical of the aid programs, Fawzy admits that early on she was doing some of the same things. She began by helping dig wells and introducing small vegetable gardens. Not everything she tried worked out well.

“Yes, I know I made some mistakes,” she says. “One time I gave some of the men some sandals. When the sandals finally wore out they went back to being barefoot, their feet had grown tender, and they could hardly even walk.

“I taught some of the men, the ones who were traders, some Arabic,” she tells us. For doing this, she received the same criticism that she is now giving, namely that she was changing the tribesmen’s lives irrevocably. “What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “They were trading a goat for a sack of flour. They needed to be able to communicate.”

They also wanted to know more about their religion. Sometime around the thirteenth century, the Ababda and the Besharin converted to Islam. “When I first met them, their idea of praying was to draw a crescent in the sand, say ‘B’ism Allah, Allahu Akbar,’ and then go on with their day. That was their prayers.”

Fawzy describes herself as “not very religious,” and enlisted the help of a driver to teach the tribes people the basics of Islam. The lessons have had a limited effect, she says.

“They do believe in Islam,” Fawzy begins. “But they also believe in Hobakoka, their grandparent who turned into stone. Ptolemy gave them a statue of Isis in ancient times. And they believed that it was their grandmother who turned into stone. In the days when I was there, it was their grandfather. I assume this is the intervention of Islam where lineages are more paternal. They talk of their dead parent as a man.”

Nearby Gabal Elba is where they believe Hobakoka is now, she says. “According to ancient accounts the Pharaoh would give them the statue every year for two months and they would slaughter and [hold] their festivities. Now no one knows where this statue is. The nomads claim that it is inside Elba Mountain. It is very possible they’re right, that it was taken there and hidden during one war or another.”

Fawzy herself has climbed the mountain several times but has found nothing there.

She doesn’t feel that anything she did in her time with the tribes altered their lives much at all. The gardening programs she implemented were small plots fed by shallow wells which could be abandoned and returned to as the nomads followed their annual migrations. The WFP and government programs are aimed at creating a sedentary lifestyle. Worse yet, in her opinion, they are temporary programs. The WFP limits these types of projects to five years.

“You are just creating a dependence in this region,” Fawzy says. “If you are trying to help someone, you either come to stay or stay away.” They don’t understand the culture they are dealing with either. A photograph of a program manager handing out cans of fish proves this, she insists.

“Fish is not part of the desert diet at all, not this desert, not other deserts. One of the worst insults they have is to call someone ‘samaka’.”

Moreover, she questions the need for the agricultural programs. “These people have lived for thousands of years with droughts,” Fawzy says. The drought is bad now, and the herds are dwindling, but this is by design, according to Fawzy. The Ababda and the Besharin practice a form of birth control on their herds. A stone and string are used to make the female camels infertile, when the drought passes, the device is removed and the herds are allowed to grow again.

“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 argues.

As for the question of whether or not their culture will survive, Fawzy is confident that it will. “More important than the tribes or the families, there are three different types of Bedouin in this area,” she says. “The first is the mountain people who haven’t changed at all.” She estimates that there are as many as 20,000 mountain people who continue their lives with little to no contact with the outside world.

“Then there are also ‘Al-Nass Al-Asfalt.’ These are the groups who can see the tar roads,” she continues. “Those are the people of Shalatin and the other towns. These are the people who are joining the settlement programs.”

“The last group is the ‘Fahab Al-Menakh,’ the owners of the Menakh. Menakh is the place where the camel sits,” Shahira explains. “These are the traders who interact with the tribesmen as well as the outside world. The Menakh is where they trade for goods they can’t get elsewhere.”

Her description sounds remarkably like Herodotus’ distinctions of the Blemmyes, the Ichthyophagi, and the Troglodytes in 450 BC. But as the drought continues and more of the nomads settle, it’s hard not to wonder whether the Beja tribes’ long, uninterrupted march through history may be coming to an end.

A History of the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”

In 1883, Mohamed Ahmed, a Sudanese religious fanatic known as the Mahdi, raised an army to expel the British and Egyptian forces that ruled his country. The Beja tribes that span both countries were split, with many of the southern tribes including the Ababda and the Hadendoa supporting the Mahdist cause, while members of northern tribes like the Besharin served with Egyptian forces.

At the Battle of Tamai in March of 1884, a group of Beja tribesmen succeeded in doing what no other non-European army had ever done: They broke open the British infantry square. The outnumbered tribesmen eventually lost the battle, but they won immortality through Rudyard Kipling’s poem recording the feat.

The name Fuzzy-wuzzy was used by British colonial soldiers as an obvious reference to the tribesmen’s unique hairstyles, and it is supposed to make a terrifying enemy seem a little less so.

The Mahdist uprising was the last major military action of the Ababda and the Besharin, but it was by no means the first. Nor was their martial success anything new. Pharaohs, Roman Emperors and nineteenth-century khedives have all tried to subdue the tribes: All finally decided it was easier to buy their loyalty than force it.

The earliest known reference to the Ababda and the Besharin is by Herodotus in 450 BC. The account describes the nomads as a wild race, only part human, who were constantly at war with ancient Egypt. Most of the gold mines which produced the Pharaoh’s incredible wealth were located deep in the tribes’ territories, as was the route to the Red Sea from ancient Thebes and Aswan. The Pharaohs, who documented their achievements prolifically, never claimed to have conquered the tribes. That, along with mountains of evidence of ancient activities in the region, leads to the assumption of some type of negotiated settlement.

By the time of the medieval Arab travelers, the rulers of the Nile Valley had once again lost their influence in the Eastern Desert. Caravans either paid tribute or traveled with armies.

Throughout their history, the tribes seem to be continually forgotten and rediscovered by the rest of the world. Linant de Bellefonds was a Frenchman who explored the region in the 1830s at the request of Mohamed Ali Pasha. Bellefonds was sent to map the area and search for the ancient gold and emerald mines. His trip produced little as far as the mineral wealth he had been sent to search for, possibly because he became fascinated with and spent much of his time documenting the Besharin.

The Besharin at that time were raiding villages around Shendi, and the map that Bellefonds produced was used by the Pasha’s army to establish control in the area. The campaign produced few results, and the army turned its attention to securing the Nile Valley and the Red Sea coast, effectively abandoning the ‘useless’ desert to the nomads.

Ababda and Besharin sheikhs remained nominal vassals of the khedives, but unlike other vassals they paid no tribute. They were in fact given a portion of the road tax to safeguard Hajj pilgrims from Bedouin robbers. The only Bedouin in the area, robbers or otherwise, were the Ababda and the Besharin themselves.

After the revolution which overthrew the monarchy, the Ababda and the Besharin once again faded from the public consciousness. As they reemerge, Egypt is once again discovering that they have little control over them. It is not without a degree of frustration that government project managers explain that all of their efforts need the approval of tribal sheikhs.

An interesting side note to the relationship between the Bedouin and the government is the experience of anthropologist Shahira Fawzy. While she was working with the tribes, her offices in Aswan were raided and effectively destroyed. Hundreds of soldiers in full riot gear were filmed storming the office. The reason, according to Shahira, was rumors claiming that she was raising an army of Besharin and Ababda tribesmen.

She wasn’t, of course, but the entire scene proves that even today, Fuzzy-wuzzy still has the power to strike fear into the hearts of others. et