The Last Nomads

The Numbers

Geography

The nomadic belt

The Peoples

Twelve answers to the same question

Morocco

The tent that emptied

In 1935, the French Protectorate counted its subjects and found that 16% of all Moroccan households lived under tents. Nomadic pastoralism was not marginal — it was how a significant minority of the country functioned. Herds were private property. Rangelands were collective property of the tribe. The Berber verb gdel — "to graze cattle in a meadow" — gave its name to the agdal system: high mountain pastures in the Atlas opened and closed by collective agreement. Rock engravings at Oukaïmeden date this practice to 2000 BCE.

Then the numbers began to fall. By 2004, Morocco's census found 68,540 nomads — still meaningful, but a fraction of what had existed. By 2014: 25,274 people in 4,044 households. A 63% drop in a single decade. The causes stack: drought, rangeland privatisation, government modernisation programmes, and the quiet violence of borders that were never designed for people who move. In the Souss region, nomads moving north in search of water now collide with settled Amazigh farming communities. The clashes have turned deadly.

Morocco's nomads are not Tuareg (too far south) and not Bedouin (that's an Arab designation). They are Amazigh — the same people who built the agdal, who carved the rock at Yagour, who speak Tamazight and Tashelhit. The pastoralists of the Oriental steppe, the pre-Saharan camel breeders, the sheep herders of the Middle Atlas — these are the last inheritors of a practice older than any city in Morocco. The nomads persist in the East, on the steppes of the Oriental region, and in the pre-Saharan and Saharan regions of the South. But every census finds fewer of them.

The Disappearance

Every country tells the same story

Convergent Evolution

Five patterns. No shared origin.

The Amazigh of Morocco never met the Maasai of Kenya. The Sámi of Norway never traded with the Qashqai of Iran. Yet every nomadic people on earth independently invented the same social architecture. The terrain is the teacher.

The Thesis

Nomads are not a curiosity. They are an alternative answer to the question of how humans should relate to land. The settled world chose ownership. The nomad chose movement. For 10,000 years, both answers coexisted. Now the settled answer is eliminating the other — not through argument, but through borders, census forms, and the quiet assumption that staying put is normal.

The question is not whether nomads will survive. Some will — the Fulani are 40 million strong, Mongolia still herds. The question is whether the knowledge survives: how to read land that doesn't belong to you, how to leave a place better than you found it, how to carry your wealth on four legs and your home on your back. That knowledge took 10,000 years to build. It is leaving the earth in a single century.

Sources & Attribution