Trekkers
PEOPLES ON THE MOVE
Introducing the Nomads of the World
By David J. Phillips
Piquant. 488 pages. £15
ISBN 1 903689 05 8
Available from IVP, Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HR or from info@piquant.net - as a Piquant PalPack special, when ordering two copies, the second copy is half-price.
This is a formidable resource covering some 50 million people scattered across the world. Their life style separates them from the settled lives of most people, and in consequence they can be marginalised, resented and excluded by the rest of the world because they are different. Many have never been reached by the gospel.
The author identifies three main groups. The first is the hunter-gatherers who do not cultivate crops or keep cattle, but are skilled in surviving in the most inhospitable areas of the world. The second is the pastoralists who herd cattle and may combine this with some cultivation. In fragile or extreme climates, this may include periods of settlement with travelling in search of pasture and other resources. The third group is the peripatetics, who include craftsmen, entertainers and traders who move round from city to city, in search of markets for their skills or goods. The book focuses on the last two groups.
The first section of the book devotes 50 pages to the social and economic bases for the pastoralists. This provides valuable insights for anyone concerned to understand a way of life so different from our own. It covers their efficient use of the least fertile areas, their complex social structures, their relationship to their animals and land. They may be self-sufficient with a close-knit social structure, and an uneasy relationship with the very different settled communities, or remote from them.
The second section develops the missionary challenge of the nomadic peoples, and a theology for nomads recalls the place of the wandering Aramaean, the stranger, the exile in the biblical story as it develops from Abraham the herdsman, through the Exodus to the settlement in the land and even the concept of the Pilgrim church. These nomadic peoples may be marginalised in today's world. They must not be forgotten when we face our calling to take the Good News to the whole world.
One group easily forgotten, with particular needs, is the women who may form a sub-society within the larger group. They can wield great influence, and be burdened with more than their share of the work, but be restricted to the women's world without education or contact with outsiders through trade languages. Their illiteracy rate is higher than the men's. There is a special plea for women missionaries to go and identify with them in their world. Churches cannot be established in these groups without the mothers.
The third section describes over 250 existing nomadic groups across Africa, Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and numerous maps and photographs are included to help the reader. It would be a profitable exercise for a house group to go through this section together in order to understand and pray for these unusual communities who may never have heard the Good News or, if they have, struggle as Christians with the encroaching forces of our modern world.
