Bare necessities are, in a way, basic, and luxuries secondary. Bedouins thus are the basis of and prior to cities and sedentary living. The toughness of desert life precedes the softness of city living. Urbanization is the goal towards which the Bedouin aspires. When he has attained enough for the requirements of luxury, he enters upon a life of ease and submits himself to the yoke of the city.
-Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), called the Father of Sociology
What happens if the desert herdsman leaves behind the desert without leaving behind his desert ways? If he wants to buy young sheep for fattening before selling but neglects to figure in the high urban costs of buying them there and buying fodder and water, and if he can’t attain an economy of scale because his urban compound only can stable a few rather than many head? That was KhairAllah’s problem before this year’s Feast of the Sacrifice. Last time he bought a sheep along a desert roadside directly from a herdsman and had free transport into the city in the rear seat of my jeep, its bound feet kicking my movie projector. The fattest one cost $60.
This year he bought three in central Omdurman’s Suq Libya from a middleman, each one for $150 or more. This made no sense to me but it did to him, because a desert herdsman’s calculus includes a factor that an urban trader’s does not- the psychic value of going to sleep with the sounds and smells of your livestock settling for the night right beside you. Costs and prices and selling margins be damned. For KhairAllah, city living is neither joke nor yoke.