ABSTRACT
Pastoral peoples have long held a powerful fascination for western writers who have sought in nomadic society both romance and mystery, as well as the repository of laudable characteristics believed lost in the West, such as independence, stoicism in the face of physical adversity, and a strong sense of loyalty to family and to tribe. The settled populations in Africa and the Middle East have a less rosy but nonetheless equally idealized stereotype of nomadic pastoralists more in line with say, European perceptions of gypsies; that is, the settled groups think of the nomads or gypsies as aimless wanderers, immoral, promiscuous and disease-ridden as a result. Both perceptions of the way of life of pastoralists misrepresent the reality of living by rearing animals; small wonder that frequently the development planner’s ‘solution’ to the perceived poverty or low productivity of livestock herders has been to settle them and to try and integrate them into a mixed farming economy (see Teitelbaum, 1977 for a Senegalese illustration).
