The camels are the cause of the Bedouin’s savage life in the desert, since they feed on desert shrubs and give birth in desert sands. The desert is a place of hardship and starvation, but to them it has become familiar and accustomed. Generations of Bedouins grew up in the desert. Eventually they became confirmed in their character and natural qualities. No member of any other nation was disposed to share their conditions. No member of any other race felt attracted to them. But if one of them were to find ways and means of fleeing from these conditions, he would not give them up.
-Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
In 1984 most drovers carried only mimeographed letters identifying their employment in the camel trade. They were no more official than the To-Whom-It-May-Concern letter that Hajj Bashir had written for me. But I also carried my US passport. If I had to flee the desert, I could. They could not even if they’d wanted.
In 1988 I rode with another group, mostly younger men. When an airplane passed over at 35,000 feet, we would tease each other and say, Why didn’t you fly? A few answered, I once did. It was true, some of them had previously worked in Iraq as day laborers and carried real passports. They had cleared customs in foreign airports and browsed Duty Free. They knew all about international air travel.
They had fled Ibn Khaldun’s savage conditions and returned to them, not because camels fed and bred only in Dar al-Kababish but because international trade had made a market for them elsewhere. Iraq’s oil-fueled demand for Sudanese workers had fallen while Egypt’s foreign aid-fueled demand for Sudanese meat had risen. In his time, Ibn Khaldun was not wrong about the bright line dividing the sand and the sown, between being Bedouin and metropolitan. Half a millennium later, however, could he have ever guessed that some of his bedu would have flown from desert to city and back again.