Niger: Nomads of Niger

Niger’s up for exploration this week. It has a population of 17 million people, and it skews young: the median age is 15, no surprise given that the country has the highest birthrate in the world. The per capita GDP of $800 is among the lowest in the world.

This isn’t a country that is going to excite investors any time soon. It is a land-locked desert nation, so food security is a huge issue. Niger has resources of oil and uranium, but 90 percent of the population works in agriculture.

It’s also not a nation that has much written about it in English. (Niger’s official language is French.) I spent some time with the University of Illinois-Chicago library information system, looking for good texts. Even with the wide diversity of books on very narrow topics that you find in an academic library, there wasn’t much on Niger. I found books about the geology of the region, books about camels, and the book I finally checked out: Nomads of Niger, first published in 1983. It’s part coffee-table book, part anthropological study of the Wodaabe, a tribe of nomads who make up a small part of the Nigerien population. The photographs are gorgeous. It’s a great book for learning about a vanishing way of life and analyzing photographic technique, but there’s little about finance beyond a household scale.