Nomads and Nation-Building in the Western Sahara

Gender, Politics and the Sahrawi

Konstantina Isidoros

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788311403
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786723642
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Social Sciences

Fabled for more than three thousand years as fierce warrior-nomads and cameleers dominating the western Trans-Saharan caravan trade, today the Sahrawi are admired as soldier-statesmen and refugee-diplomats. This is a proud nomadic people uniquely championing human rights and international law for self-determination of their ancient heartlands: the western Sahara Desert in North Africa. Konstantina Isidoros provides a rich ethnographic portrait of this unique desert society's life in one of Earth's most extreme ecosystems. Her extensive anthropological research, conducted over nine years, illuminates an Arab-Berber Muslim society in which men wear full face veils and are matrifocused toward women, who are the property-holders of tent households forming powerful matrilocal coalitions. Isidoros offers new analytical insights on gender relations, strategic tribe-to-state symbiosis and the tactical formation of 'tent-cities'.
The book sheds light on the indigenous principles of social organisation - the centrality of women, male veiling and milk-kinship - bringing positive feminist perspectives on how the Sahrawi have innovatively reconfigured their tribal nomadic pastoral society into globalising citizen-nomads constructing their nascent nation-state. This is essential reading for those interested in anthropology, politics, war and nationalism, gender relations, postcolonialism, international development, humanitarian regimes, refugee studies and the experience of nomadic communities.

CHAPTER 1

PERCEPTIONS OF NOMADISM

The treatment of nomads by the nascent Soviet state was influenced by processes and events located far beyond the Communist Party's control, sometimes originating long before the Russian Revolution, often resulting from the unintended or unforeseen consequences of earlier Soviet policies. Governance immediately following the Civil War was especially erratic, though the Party mithered about its lack of administrative reach and influence throughout the 1920s.¹ Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks began having a noteworthy impact on nomadic life from soon after the Revolution, and increasingly so as their power grew and their infrastructure solidified. Even in those early cases when policy aims were more hypothetical than realisable, we see the beginnings of a Soviet approach to nomadism which would be immensely important by the end of the decade.

As such, how those in power after the Revolution thought about and understood nomads and nomadism mattered enormously. This is a topic comprising everyday stereotypes and misconceptions, cultural suspicions, philosophy, ideology, state reports and scholarly investigations. Of relevance are not only how the state thought but also what it knew and felt it knew of the nomads' numbers, lives and desires. This chapter aims to encapsulate how nomads were perceived by state administrators and Party members in the Soviet 1920s, thereby providing the foundations for a wider account of the relationship between nomad and state in the book's remaining chapters.

Who was the Skotovod?

At the first sitting of the Congress of Workers for Sedentarisation in 1930, a Comrade Koshkunov was giving a report on the previous year's campaigning when he was interrupted from the floor:

[Koshkunov] … And as a result of that year we have it that the poor and moderately wealthy mass have themselves started to declare support for sedentarisation, in spite of agitation from bais and nationalistic elements. They were saying that this sedentarisation turns Kazakhs –

Rejoinder: Into Russians. (laughter)

[Koshkunov] These chauvinistic elements interfered with our work.²

This throwaway interruption to Koshkunov's report was a simple summary of a complex situation in nomadic life of the time. The rejoinder mocked a prevalent anxiety that sedentarisation equated to Russification. It thereby undermined the arguments of those in Soviet Central Asia, characterised by Koshkunov as class enemies and nationalist deviationists, who wanted to protect the nomadic way of life from Party and state. That these ‘bais and nationalistic elements’ said they did not want to see nomads become Russians, implying perhaps that sedentary Kazakhs were a contradiction in terms, emphasises how controversial and contested the treatment of nomads still was, but it also reveals something about the nature of political discourse at this stage in Soviet history.³

The language of nationality permeated Central Asian political discussion in the 1920s. This is why the notion of Kazakhs being transformed into Russians was meaningful whether treated with earnestness or, as at the Congress of Workers for Sedentarisation, with derisive amusement. Conceptions of nomadic and sedentary life, on the other hand, were not quite so ubiquitous, and when used by the Party they were far less intellectually developed than the conceptual toolkit pertaining to nationality. The decision to stress the nomads' national status rather than an identity based on their lifestyle emerged partly from a lack of common understanding of what it meant to be nomadic.⁴ How had political discourse around nomadism come to be so indeterminate? Three factors present themselves for appraisal.

First, Karl Marx had relatively little to say about nomads.⁵ Kevin B. Anderson indicates that Marx's theorisation about Asiatic nomadic tribes was not altogether unfavourable, in that he declared them to be devoid of private property and capable of communal forms of production.⁶ But as Anderson himself states, what little there was of nomadism in Marx's canon was largely located in his journalistic or unpublished works and would therefore have had less impact on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than his more famous economic tracts.⁷ There, Asiatic nomadic societies are presented simply as stagnant.⁸ Nomadic regions are not where history is made. Unlike on matters of statehood or class, therefore, the Bolsheviks came to power in Central Asia with little theoretical commentary on nomadism from which to draw inspiration. Nor did they have any aggressive critique of the nomads' circumstances to motivate change.

Second, nomadism was not generally perceived to be a problem that would linger. At the first all-Kazakh Party conference, a small number of members asserted their view that Kazakhs were nomadic by instinct and would remain so forever.⁹ But this was already a minority attitude in June 1921 and rapidly lost what few advocates it had. By the time of the first Party conference of the Kyrgyz branch, in March 1925, no such claims were made.¹⁰ For various reasons, including the instability of the nomadic economy, the supposed desirability of life in a socialist urban environment, and the new hoped-for possibilities of technological innovation and financial investment, it was apparently assumed that the remaining nomads of the former Tsarist Empire would settle shortly after the Civil War. Marx may also have played a role in this, as by describing nomadic cultures as stagnant, he placed them at a fixed and early stage in human progress.¹¹ They would therefore have to change very quickly to keep up with the swiftly developing socialist society liberated by the October Revolution. If they were soon to voluntarily go extinct, then, there would have seemed little reason to agonise about nomads and how best to manage them.

Third, in terms of cultural heritage, leading members of the Communist Party were often European and overwhelmingly sedentary. The early leaders of Central Asian Party branches such as Aron Vainshtein and Mikhail Kamenskii originated from Russia or Eastern Europe. Other prominent figures with a Central Asian background had often received an education in urban centres or were ‘mostly partially acculturated to Russian culture’.¹² Thus even if they hailed from the ‘nomadic heartlands’ of central Kazakhstan, for example, usually they had long ago ceased to practice nomadism, if indeed they ever had.¹³ Lower down the echelons of the Party, basic requirements of literacy excluded many still-migrating communities.¹⁴

As the 1920s progressed, this situation did begin to change. Pastoral herders were brought into the administration, often attaining apparently significant positions despite poor literacy. Typically, though, their appointments were made on the basis of their nationality or lineage, not their nomadic heritage.¹⁵ It is instructive to compare this state of affairs with the importance of having grown up in a proletarian household when applying to join the Communist Party elsewhere.¹⁶ By systematically promoting members of the proletariat and demoting the bourgeoisie, the Party effected a radical redefinition of class in the former Tsarist Empire and created cadres of individuals fully willing to embrace the new definition, with the proletariat in a foremost position. No such alteration took place regarding nomads, who made their way into leadership positions by dint of their national or tribal identity.

In any case, in the early years of the (New Economic Policy) NEP when the trajectory of the period was being set, the Party was run largely by Europeans with no personal experience of nomadism, or by settled Central Asians. It also had a disproportionately greater presence in urban centres and this perpetuated its ignorance of conditions in rural areas. This was so despite the great efforts taken by the Party to embed itself in the countryside.¹⁷ Thus the firsthand nomadic perspective was as excluded from Communist Party congresses as it had been from the meetings of tsarist officials. Thinking on the matter was cursory.

Thinking was also poorly informed. As one Party member complained: ‘On the steppe now, as earlier, any information is completely lacking.’¹⁸ A scarcity of knowledge, or a rich abundance of ignorance, further defined the Soviet view of nomads. It was partly a product of Party members' backgrounds and their reliance on information gathered in the imperial era, which was significant but not expansive.¹⁹ Tsarist Orientalist scholarship was still a relatively new endeavour at the beginning of the twentieth century. Tsarist organs had tried to make a systematic distinction between settled and nomadic Central Asians and had failed. By what criteria could such a difference be recognised? Migration and mobility were not unique to nomads and the habit or frequency of movement was hard to measure. Reforms under Mikhail Speransky, Governor-General of Siberia, conflated nomads with vagrants on the largely pejorative grounds of what both groups lacked: a particular place of residence, currency, a sophisticated culture and so on.²⁰ At different times, there was inconsistency also over the legal recognition of nomadic land.²¹

In the NEP era ‘cattle-herder’ (skotovod) was frequently used in place of the word nomad despite the fact that cattle-herding was also something sedentary peoples did.²² Thus, even when it appeared in discussions of nomadic affairs, skotovod lacked some important specificity. The Party only occasionally used the word ‘nomad’ (kochevnik) in a precise, discriminating manner.²³ The Party also had trouble defining and describing the smallest nomadic social unit.²⁴ Aul was most commonly used, but khoziaistvo, ‘family’ and ‘homestead’ were also employed.²⁵ There was no clear, common agreement on how many individuals any one of these units contained.

There is evidence, therefore, of numerous efforts to learn more about nomads throughout the 1920s. Regional studies proliferated, investigating the predominant agricultural activity of a particular area, its natural conditions, potential productivity, the land norms of the nomads nearby and local political structures.²⁶ One inquiry into Party cells launched in February 1927, for example, described the majority of the population in the far south of Kazakhstan as semi-nomadic, located in one area during the winter and migrating in the summer months.²⁷ Under a heading helpfully entitled ‘Questions that need answering’, the authorities there revealed the extent of their ignorance.²⁸ Questions were a mixture of economic, political and social or cultural issues: the whereabouts of aul soviets; the number of communities in an ‘administrative aul’ (adm-aul); the size of the population in an adm-aul; the number of clans in an adm-aul; the main leaders of these clans; the time of the summer migration; migratory routes; the distances between summer and winter campsites; the size of aul Party cells; the age, education, social origins and occupation of cell members; how cells operated during migrations; and how frequently they convened.²⁹ Assuming that the inquiry asked questions for which there was no ready answer, the Party appears no better informed about its network of cells than it was about the population they supervised. Three years later the Party was still launching such regional investigations, including a commission for the identification of nomadic and semi-nomadic regions, though this time in the context of collectivisation.³⁰

Data produced in these reports could be unhelpfully specific or hopelessly broad. The following division of agriculture in Turkestan dates from 1925:

a) settled-agricultural, without any signs of the nomadic way of life; b) nomadic, with cattle herding, without any signs of settlement or agriculture; c) agricultural semi-settled...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Perceptions of Nomadism
• 2. Nomadic Land
• 3. Bordering Nomads
• 4. Taxing Nomads
• 5. (De)Mobilising Nomads
• 6. Collectivisation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography