Where have all the nomads gone?

Alexander Tasker writes about Professor Sara Randall’s inaugural lecture, held on 7 February

Professor Randall (UCL Anthropology) colourfully illustrated extensive problems that colonising powers, tax-hungry governments and struggling researchers have had in trying to ‘count’ nomads across the African Sahel, and some of the myths that surround these often elusive groups.

Before this evening, Professor Randall was more familiar to us from the dynamic exchanges of her small-group seminars as part of the Anthropology, Environment and Development Masters. We were looking forward to seeing how her extensive experience and forthright style translated into the more formal Gustav Tuck lecture theatre: there was no disappointment!

The lecture started with a quote from Professor Randall’s own fieldwork – a Malian Tuareg reflected on the increasing need to build houses not solely for practical purposes, but to become visible. It was this concept of visibility that continued as a theme throughout the lecture.

The first threat to this visibility was the very way in which the counting of nomadic people has been undertaken. The audience were introduced to the “DHS” (Demographic and Health Survey) as a means of collecting population data.

The DHS, as Professor Randall detailed, claims to be “nationally representative”. Through careful examination of this and census data – often right down to a sub-clause in an appendix – she took the audience from Mali to Kenya (via numerous other Sahelian countries) in order to show how nomads have been systematically excluded from these surveys.

Drawing further from raw data, published articles and personal experience, Professor Randall gave an insight into how nomads were rendered invisible through a mix of apathy, logistics, categorisation and active removal.

Often, the very officials responsible for organising the surveys viewed the nomads as an inconsequential portion of the population, not worthy of counting as “what difference would it make anyway as there are so few of them?”. A shocking illustration was provided by Tanzania, where it seemed that minorities had been deliberately ‘edited out’ through selective application of either ‘extended’ or ‘standard’ surveys.

Professor Randall then went on to examine some more commonly held myths surrounding nomads. These erroneous beliefs are still perpetuated from African farmers to UK professors – such as pastoralist populations having low fertility and mortality and that these communities were comprised of highly mobile groups of predominantly young males.

She showed how these assumptions stemmed from the colonial era, where West African French colonialists and the East African British started attempting to document and tax the relative nomadic populations.

Accounts from this time painted a picture of “dying races” with decreasing populations, rampant with disease. She carefully illustrated the findings of current work in the light of these statements, particularly around the assumption that fertility would increase once pastoralists “settled down”.

This assumption was refuted in her own work conducted over 20 years in Mali where neither war, famine nor sedenterisation had led to any perceivable changes in fertility at all!

Further claims were then brought under the spotlight – such as “only young men were pastoralists” – again drawing on the inadequacy of data as a possible origin of these fallacies. Her own PhD students had demonstrated again and again that these assumptions were false in multiple pastoralist populations.

Finally, the question was posed – “well, where have the nomads gone?”. In a response to this Professor Randall cited a number of methods by which the populations may be decreasing, if decreasing at all.

Using a series of population analyses through language types, the growth or decline of Malian nomads was tracked. It became clear that when examined in isolation, numbers were indeed dropping from the initial surveys in 1970s right through to the 1990s.

Once again it was Professor Randall’s personal experience that illustrated the practical problems taking data at face value; as she put it, “I had to remove all the ‘fake’ nomads – the bank managers, film directors and people who lived in concrete houses”. There was, however, a ray of light; the 2009 Mali census showed a definite upturn in numbers.

As the evening came to a close, it became obvious that Professor Randall had managed to achieve that rare feat in academia – combining intellectual debate and great breath of knowledge with a common sense approach to methods and findings.

We on the Masters’ programme have benefited greatly from her approach of integrating a firm qualitative anthropological understanding of issues with finely honed techniques of critical data analysis. To paraphrase Martin Holbraad in his vote of thanks: “the mixing of social anthropology with the dark demographic arts”.

The audience was left with not only a better understanding of the issues faced by nomadic populations and their requirement for visibility in a changing world, but also the vital need to examine all sources of information with a critical eye – be they anthropological, demographic or personal.

Professor Randall’s lecture was one in a series of inaugural lectures organised by the UCL Faculties of Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences running until May 2012.

Image: Nomad, French West Africa (Source: Wikimedia Commons, National Archives and Records Administration)