With globalization comes emerging nations within the African continent. Rural communities exist among the nations where people often continue living much as their ancestors. They work the land, fish, raise herds of goats, sheep as well as cows, in some instances continuing nomadic desert lives. These people have little if any formal education, often live by their own laws, and increasingly come under the scrutiny of well-intentioned governments with little knowledge of the decency, the heritage, and the pride of socially marginalized groups of humans. In the 21st century, stereotypes of the Maasai pastoralists, the nomadic Bedouin, and the Egyptian peasant images influence state policies in the treatment of these people.
Distinctly, much of the stereotypic view of the Maasai pastoralists as representative of Africa comes from Western journalists. To a certain extent, Africans educated in Western schools or attending schools based on Western educational precepts attending African educational institutes has the same influence. The greatest effect of stereotypes about the Maasai and government policies directly concerns their water rights and lands for feeding their cattle with massive government modernization efforts. Other considerations of their culture connected to negative, treatment of women with the tradition of circumcision and marriage with the greatest negative application by the government on their grazing rights. Hauff explains how, "The Maasai are well known pastoralists from East Africa who have lived a long and proud past; however, their unique way of life is diminishing" (2). According to Marx, pastoral societies, whoever they are, have stereotypic ramifications connected to government treatment based on stereotypes remains locked on the government classification of such groups as lacking social significance. Marx explains this results in, "state authorities view the pastoralists as candidates for displacement, that they consider them useless" (88). It is this fundamental stereotype driving state treatment of such people.
Stereotypic views of the nomadic Bedouin typically sustain less negative impressions in the Arab world in particular/ The Bedouin people remain respected for their traditional way of life and for what many consider a reflection of the truest form of purity of the Arab tradition according to bedawi.com (2013). The government treatment of the Bedouin remains much the same attitude as exists toward the Egyptian peasant with stereotypes considering them uneducated and untrustworthy. The government of Egypt, in particular, projects on both the Bedouin and the Egyptian peasant a label of having collective identities and not as communities (Saad 113). It is Mitchell's view of the treatment of the Egyptian peasant and of the marginalized sectors of societies harboring nomadic, pastoral, and peasantry that clarifies how stereotypic views of such people as "less" by their governments (1990).
Mitchell offers from his studies of literature on the topic of Egyptian peasants how they exist "as a living museum" (134) and how they remain "preserved and repeated, but (do) not originate, create, or change" (134) thus, requiring government handling to educate them. Here the input from Abu-Lughod caps the situation by explaining the importance of Egyptian television with every village having the necessary television set as an educational tool fully supported by the state (1998). Pastoral and/or nomadic lives of the Maasai, the Bedouin, and the Egyptian peasant stereotypes of ignorant, incapable of contributing to society's needs and their marginalized existence continue driving state government unfair treatment of these groups of human beings in the 21st century.
Works Cited
Abu-Lughod, Lila. Television and the Virtues of Education: Upper Egyptian Encounters with State Culture. Hopkins, Nicholas and Kirsten Westergaard (Eds.) Directions of Change in Rural Egypt. American University in Cairo Press. 1998. Book
Bedawi.com. Bedouin Culture. 2013. Web
Hauff, Laura. The Effects of Development on the Maasai. 2003. Web.
Marx, Emanuel. The Political Economy of Middle Eastern and North African Pastoral Nomads. Chatty, Dawn. (Ed) Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa. Brill Publications. 1998. Book.
Mitchell, Timothy. The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 22:2 1990 Print
Saad, Reem. Hegemony in the Periphery. Hopkins, Nicholas and Kirsten Westergaard (Eds) Directions of Change in Rural Egypt. American University in Cairo Press. 1998. Book
