“Where have they come from? Why have they come here? When are they going? How do they survive? Who are they?” Where have they come from? Why have they come here? When are they going? How do they survive? Who are they?”
These are the questions that many of us ask in relation to nomadic communities. As Anthony Sattin points out in his work Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, “The sight of a family on the move with the animals and all their belongings excites some of us, but it fills others with terror or disgust or disdain.”
In school, we are taught that human civilisation started when wandering people began to settle down in specific areas. Sattin, however, holds a contrary view: that it is those we see as outsiders who had a profound impact on our civilisational history; one that we choose to ignore and forget.
