Remembering the Beja Nomads: in a Time of Turmoil

By Peter J. Marchand

With a revealing memoir and striking photographs, Peter J. Marchand reflects on the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills and contemplates the fate of nomadic peoples the world over, as population growth and economic forces chip away at the edges of indigenous cultures everywhere. "Little by little," he writes, these encroachments exact the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ripple Effect Publishing LLC
• Release date: Oct 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780989553452

Peter J. Marchand

Peter J. Marchand is a field biologist and photographer whose interests in plant and animal adaptation extend to human cultures living in extreme environments. He has worked in forest, tundra, and desert ecosystems throughout North America and currently resides in Colorado.

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Remembering the Beja Nomads

In a Time of Turmoil

Peter J. Marchand

Remembering the Beja Nomads

In a Time of Turmoil

Peter J. Marchand

Ripple Effect Publishing

Colorado Springs, Co.

Remembering the Beja Nomads in a Time of Turmoil

Copyright © 2018 Peter J. Marchand

All rights reserved

No part of this book, either text, photographs or illustrations, may be reproduced without prior permission from the author/publisher.

First Edition

ISBN: 978-0-9895534-4-5

ISBN: 978-0-9895534-5-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number

2018953494

Published by Ripple Effect Publishing LLC

Colorado Springs, CO

Designed in the USA, Printed in region of distribution

Ripple Effect Publishing LLC

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Cover photo: Peter J. Marchand

Cover design: Michael Angelo DePalma

Photography: Peter J. Marchand

Art Director: Michael Angelo DePalma

Publisher: Bill Young

For the Beja

and all other nomadic peoples

whose way of life is threatened.

Near the ditch grew a thin grass, but elsewhere, as far as the eye could see in all directions, stretched sere distances burned off to gravel.

Peter Matthiessen, describing the extensive desert south of Khartoum while journeying overland in the back of a trader’s lorry.

Table of Contents

I. Notes from a Country in Chaos: A Short Travelogue

II. End of the Long Road: The Beja of Eastern Sudan

Photo Gallery: Remembering the Beja

III. Chipping Away at the Edges of Indigenous Culture

IV. Coda

Endnotes

Additional Resources

I

Notes From a Country in Chaos

Spring of 1989 was not a great time to be in the Sudan. The country was bankrupt, agricultural production had dropped to half of what it had been two decades earlier, and the south was once again a battlefield, rent by unending religious and ethnic bigotry. In the squeeze of famine and fighting, people were dying of starvation or being murdered in unfathomable numbers.

Preoccupied with their own internal struggles, the government in Khartoum seemed helpless to remedy the country’s ills. When military commander Swar ad-Dahab and his supporting officers wrested the country away from Gaafar el-Nimeiri’s hands in April, 1985, after 16 years of volatile rule, ad-Dahab promised the first free elections in nearly two decades – only to see his Transitional Military Council voted out of power a year later. The Umma Party’s Sadiq al-Mahdi was installed as Sudan’s new leader in June 1986, but al-Mahdi’s coalition government lasted no longer than ad-Dahab’s. Unable to keep the fledgling democracy functioning, al-Mahdi summarily dismissed his government in less than a year. His second attempt at a coalition failed only months later because of party squabbling (no fewer than 40 political parties had registered with the brief ad-Dahab administration) and for the next nine months the country was essentially without government as parties failed to agree on just about everything.

A new coalition finally emerged in May 1988, still under al-Mahdi, but by the end of the year, tension had risen to new heights. Al-Mahdi was under mounting pressure from his own armed forces commander and senior military officers to make the coalition more representative and announce terms for ending the civil war. So in March, 1989, just weeks before I arrived in the country, al-Mahdi dissolved his third government.

Such was the state of affairs then. Outside of Khartoum it was getting difficult to keep track of who was running the country, though to many it didn’t seem to matter. As Peter Matthiessen wrote years earlier, to most of the tribesmen, the Sudan government is a foreign power, having come into existence (in 1955) without the agreement or even the knowledge of many of its inhabitants. Little seems to have changed.

* * * * * * *

May 9, 1989. With a hundred-pound note and a name