Kazakhstan Prizes Its Cowboys, but Few Want to Saddle Up for Harsh Life
- 6 years ago
Kazakhstan Prizes Its Cowboys, but Few Want to Saddle Up for Harsh Life
"All the leaders of the state farm were too busy dividing up the property among themselves to tell us anything." Her husband then found a job with a new private ranching company, which often delays salary payments and insists
that its supplies of cattle fodder be used to feed only its own animals and not those owned by Mr. Kozhakov.
Mr. Mazhit’s wife, Rangul, said her five children, who live in a town near Almaty so they can go to school, cried
whenever they came back to the steppe to visit their parents because life is so hard and they don’t like animals.
Mr. Kozhakov’s wife, Kenzhi, 57, who was raised on the other side of Kazakhstan near its western border with Russia, recalled a brutal side
of nomadic traditions: She said she was "stolen" when, at 18, she made a trip east to visit her sister and was forced into marriage.
But so harsh is life on the steppe that today’s Kazakh cowboys, while proud of providing their rapidly modernizing nation with a link to its nomadic past, rarely want their own children to follow them into the saddle
and instead urge them into more sedentary and better-paying work.
Erlan Kozhakov, 63, a herder on the sandy scrubland between Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, and the Chinese border, has three sons and three daughters, and all but one followed his advice not to be taken in by the romantic notions about herding cattle spread by schoolbooks
that extol the glories of their country’s nomadic traditions.
"All the leaders of the state farm were too busy dividing up the property among themselves to tell us anything." Her husband then found a job with a new private ranching company, which often delays salary payments and insists
that its supplies of cattle fodder be used to feed only its own animals and not those owned by Mr. Kozhakov.
Mr. Mazhit’s wife, Rangul, said her five children, who live in a town near Almaty so they can go to school, cried
whenever they came back to the steppe to visit their parents because life is so hard and they don’t like animals.
Mr. Kozhakov’s wife, Kenzhi, 57, who was raised on the other side of Kazakhstan near its western border with Russia, recalled a brutal side
of nomadic traditions: She said she was "stolen" when, at 18, she made a trip east to visit her sister and was forced into marriage.
But so harsh is life on the steppe that today’s Kazakh cowboys, while proud of providing their rapidly modernizing nation with a link to its nomadic past, rarely want their own children to follow them into the saddle
and instead urge them into more sedentary and better-paying work.
Erlan Kozhakov, 63, a herder on the sandy scrubland between Kazakhstan’s biggest city, Almaty, and the Chinese border, has three sons and three daughters, and all but one followed his advice not to be taken in by the romantic notions about herding cattle spread by schoolbooks
that extol the glories of their country’s nomadic traditions.