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against them in the homophobic arsenal. The Nazis murdered up to half a million Gypsies, but treated with relative lenience any Gypsy who could demonstrate that they had lived a settled life for more than two years. Gypsies in France were also known as ‘truands’ – the wild, free and hated opposite of the schooled uniform majority. Their life was ‘O lungo drom’ – the long road – in the Romany language. In the 18th century in Germany, signs were erected showing Gypsies being flogged and hanged. They were hunted and killed like wild animals, and one estate owner in the Rhineland in 1835 lists creatures he ‘bagged’ while out hunting, including ‘Gypsy woman and suckling babe’. Just being a Gypsy was a hanging offence in several European countries. Today, throughout Europe, Gypsies still face being beaten to death by racists and often live in poverty. In Britain, around two thirds of traditional travellers’ sites were closed between 1986 and 1993. In 1994, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act effectively destroyed Gypsy nomadism, removing the duty for local councils to provide sites for travellers. In 1554, a British law said that people calling themselves Aegyptians were in fact ‘false vagabonds’ and were condemned to death. These ‘false vagabonds’ are today’s ‘bogus asylumseekers’, imprisoned in detention centres. Interestingly, the modern media’s metaphors for refugees almost always use terms from wild and moving

nature, ‘tidal waves’ and ‘floods’, ‘flows’, ‘streams’ and ‘surges’, as the tabloids give a pernicious new voice to an ancient hatred.

Settlers and savages When European settlers invaded other lands, it was the nomads they despised the most. In 1910, in Canada, the French missionary Father Le Clercq commented that the ‘wandering and vagabond life’ must be brought to an end, and a place ‘suitable for the cultivation of the soil’ found so that he could ‘render the savages sedentary, settle them down, and civilise them among us’. By 1927, in southern Africa, it was illegal to carry a Bushman bow and ‘vagrancy’ was a crime. (The etymology of vagrant is from ‘vagor’ in Latin, to wander, to roam free.) In the mid19th century, in Australia, Kooris were criminalised under the Vagrant Act: not having material possessions, they were automatically defined as rogues and vagabonds. Travelling across their own lands, they were also caught under new ‘trespassing’ laws. In 1888, as C M Doughty was writing of the ‘land-loping Beduw’, the Illustrated London Newsreported that Aborigines were ‘wandering, restless, half-starved, lazy, dirty, naked savages, homeless and miserably depraved’. The Aboriginal ‘on Walkabout’

was and still is mocked by white Australians, though the wisdom of that practice is profound. (So nomadic are Aboriginal people that even their languages can be nomadic – many Aboriginal people are named after an animal or plant, but when someone dies, it is forbidden to use their name, so the name for that object would be changed and thus language would walk on, to a new lexical camp, returning, perhaps only years later.) 1888 was a bad year for nomads; it was also the year when the ‘Aborigines’ Protection Association’ stated that any parent who ‘roamed the country’ should have their children stolen from them by the mission. Everywhere that Christian missionaries established their mission stations, they have first forced local people to settle, and then they have turned their attention to the object of their greatest fear: the shapeshifters of the Amazon or the Arctic, the shamans, nomads even in the spirit world. This nomadism takes the form of transformation – trance-formation – through dance, fasting or drugs, and the spiritual experience was in direct conflict with the fenced mission stations: shamans vaunted the adventuring human spirit. Potential shamans were characterised sometimes by illness, physical or mental, and by their emotionality – mood-nomads, mercurial, sometimes refusing food, sometimes greedy for it, sometimes sleepless, sometimes full of sleep and dreams, and typified by a need to ‘wander,’ restless in their minds.

Go whereyou will, burn your bridges ifyou must and scorch yourway across theland. I dareyou oct/nov2007 red pepper

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‘Nomad’ comes from the Greek ‘nomein’ meaning to pasture, to move from place to place looking for grazing. Thus, although nomads are movers, they move within their own known lands, individually wandering but collectively stable. Although it appears that it is the roamers who move and the estated who stay in one place, in the long run the opposite is true. Nomads and huntergatherers dwell in one area of land though they move freely within it, while the most ferocious horde of marauders are those European ‘settlers’ who individually sought to establish their sedentary lives but who have collectively swept over the world, stealing whole continents.

The nomad in us all Perhaps the deepest truth of nomadism is this: it is in us all. The lure of wild and nomadic freedom has never left us, any of us. It is in our lungs, breathing in freedom, in our eyes, hungry for horizons and in our feet, itching for the open road. Even people who think they have forgotten their nomadic shadow still feel that keen urge to take a flitting-tent and fling it under the stars, then swing on, on at dawn, on an elemental journey. James Joyce wrote in Portrait of the Artist: ‘There was a lust for wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry ... He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air.’ To ‘wander’ is the Taoist code word for becoming ecstatic, and roamers, farfarers and wayfarers know the intoxication. The Sufi have a tradition of ‘aimless wandering’ – the aim of aimlessness is psychological purification, practising ‘sacred drift’. ‘Before the white people came, we were roaming, roaming, roaming,’ I was told, by an Aboriginal Australian, Ernie Williams, and as he had spoken those words – sung them, almost – their rhythm evoked their meaning, and the words were regular and endlessly repeated, the strides of a nomad, roaming, roaming, roaming, and I couldn’t forget them, the words left footprints in my mind. The whites exiled Aboriginal people from the land, but they were themselves exiled, as modernity is exiled from the nomadism we are still heir to. For its call has never

lost its power; wanderlust is with us still, the desire for the open road, to be gypsy, tramp and bird of passage, we are wayfarers all. We were made this way: our feet are winged as Mercury. Highly alert, our eyes are alive to paths and cannot resist following lines on the land.

Walk, I dare you Walk. The drum begins. Follow it. Follow the drums of thunder. Follow the sun. Follow the stars at night as they lean their long slant down the far side of the sky. Follow the lightning and the open road. Follow your compulsion. Follow your calling. Follow anything except orders and habit. Follow the fire-fare-forwards of life itself. Go where you will, burn your bridges if you must, leave the paving stones smouldering and singe the gate as you leave, leave an incendiary device by The Wall, and scorch your way across the land. I dare you. Modernity experiences all the ills of caged animals; rage, depression, isolation. While the causes are sought in hyper-complicated analysis, one of the simplest reasons is our ignoring of this deep, precious and essential need. Get out of the house and start walking. New horizons for the eyes liberate the mind and to be a nomad in one’s mind is in our gift: to move and learn, to be a student always, to discover new lands, leaving behind some rock of certainty, to wonder without doxy, letting the mind wander till it surprises itself. Our minds are as winged as our feet, responsive, volatile as the weather on the way. The mind, let loose, is a walking, asking, searching thing, an extra-vagrant of mental journeys, questioning, questioning, whose root, of course, is to seek, to go on a quest. All children, but only a few adults, are wise enough to know they must run away and join the circus, the Travelling Circus, the really Big Top, where the sun itself is the ringmaster and the circus tent the whole round of the world. The troubadour and minstrel knew it; the gleeman and the band on tour; the gleeful, romping nomadism of the travelling singers. Every day the fervid performance, free, gratis and for everyone. And all you have to do to get an entrance ticket is come with your boots on.

JayGriffiths is theauthorof Wild: An Elemental Journey (Hamish Hamilton, 2007)