Karachi Camel Here to Stay, but Drivers Want to Go Trucking

Given a choice between a camel and a truck, Arslar Khan says he would take a truck.

Khan, 35, a Karachi camel cart driver, appeared to be astonished that anyone would even ask such a stupid question.

“A truck,” he said patiently, “is a machine. A camel is an animal. A truck is 10 million times better.”

The only good thing about a camel, he said, glaring at his own camel, a 16-year-old gray dromedary, is that Mohammed the Prophet had one. But Khan is certain that if Mohammed--”Peace be upon him”--were alive today he would opt for a truck or one of the streamlined Japanese Suzuki vans that are made here in Karachi.

Khan represents a consensus among the oont wallahs (camel drivers) who were interviewed one hot July morning in the port area of Karachi. Here, as in much of the rest of the Third World, respect for machines is usually greater than it is in the developed world--which has machines.

Economy Needs Camels

Khan and the others would probably be surprised to learn that an American professor and three Pakistani colleagues published a study of the matter last year, concluding that for years to come camels and camel carts will continue to play an important part in the Pakistan economy, even here in populous Karachi, the country’s largest and most modern city.

Alan Heston, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote that there are some instances in which the camel cart is even superior to its motorized competition, including the Suzuki van that is so coveted by the oont wallahs.

“We conclude,” Heston went on, “by suggesting that the camel will continue to find several ecological niches for itself in Pakistan, including head-to-bumper confrontations with the Suzuki in the crowded streets of cities like Karachi.”

Karachi has more than 6 million of Pakistan’s 90 million population. It is the nation’s main port, its banking center and its industrial capital. Its wide streets are a blur of Japanese-built cars and gaily decorated buses and trucks.

Reverence for Speed

Karachi is also the fastest city in a country that reveres speed. Many of the buses and trucks are adorned with paintings of jet aircraft and fondly labeled with their names--F-16 and Boeing 747 are the most popular. The rule of the road here is the fatalistic Arabic “Inshallah”-- “God willing.”

Yet much of the merchandise and industrial production of this city is moved by camel cart, one of the slowest of all means of transport. The two-axle, four-wheel cart, seen only in Pakistan and neighboring India, has been in use here since Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, emerged as a major port in the British Empire at the turn of the century.

But its presence has not diminished with the advent of modern machines. In fact, the number of camels in Karachi and the surrounding province has increased over the last 30 years, according to a count by the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council. In all of Pakistan, the number of camels has increased to over 700,000 today from about 460,000 in 1956. Almost all of them are one-humped dromedaries, not the two-humped Bactrian variety found in the Asian highlands.

Good Camel Costs $500

As their numbers here have grown, the price for a good camel at the many livestock markets, including one in Karachi, has increased steadily. It is now about $500.

That is proof of the continuing need for the camel, Heston said, citing the laws of supply and demand.

“If the Suzuki van and other machines had doomed the camel, we would have expected the relative price of camels to have fallen,” he said.

On any working day, several hundred camel carts can be found in the industrial and port areas of the city. Their cargo varies: textiles, grains, machine parts, motorcycles. The other day, Arslar Khan had several hundred toy balls in big white cotton sacks.

Mansour Thariani, president of Celluko Industries, said that his firm has been using camel carts for years. Celluko makes plastic toys and hires Khan and other camel cart drivers to deliver them to rail and truck depots for 60 rupees (about $4) a load.

“The cart is open on all sides, and our toys, especially the play balls, are very bulky,” Thariani said. “But they can be tied on the camel cart with ropes. Besides, it was costing us at least 250 rupees (about $15) to do the same job with a truck.”

Personal Trust

Thariani said a personal trust develops between an industrialist and his camel drivers.

“The first thing I do when I come to work every morning is greet them and ask them about their camels,” he said.

According to Khan, what develops is not so much personal as it is practical.

“He knows I do better and cheaper work,” Khan said, “and he knows I don’t steal.”

Khan says he will spend half of the 60 rupees he gets for this load on food for his camel, mostly a dry desert grass called guwara. Some of the rest will be saved for upkeep of his cart. The cart rides on four standard automobile tires and the tread on one of the tires is wearing thin. A new cart with good tires would cost more than the camel, about $600.

The Heston study, entitled “The Economics of Camel Transport in Pakistan,” determined that a camel cart operating in Karachi, working 250 days, brings in about $1,250 a year. After the feeding costs and other items, including “camel depreciation per annum”, are subtracted, the camel cart driver gets about $500 a year, somewhat more than the national average per capita income here of $350 a year.

Cannot Afford Shoes

That is not much money, particularly for Khan, who has a family of three girls and two boys. Khan, who is thin and toothless, cannot afford shoes. None of his children are in school. The family lives in one of the very poorest slum areas of the city.

“We are very poor people,” Khan said. “I am only able to earn for food and shelter.”

Still, acquiring a camel was a step up for Khan, who used to work as a laborer and was paid much less.

Historically, the camel is a creature of the desert, and much of Baluchistan province to the west of Karachi is desert, some of the most forlorn and rugged terrain on earth. The camel was the pack animal of the caravans that used to ply the desert between the Middle East and Asia. The camel was the very symbol of remote spaces.

A popular saying in Baluchistan has it that “If you see a cow, you are near a village; if you see a donkey, you are near a camp; if you see a camel, you are lost.”

After the great caravan routes were replaced by roads, the “ship of the desert” began a career in agriculture. Vast areas of South Asia were turned into farmland by means of irrigation projects, and the camel was used to drive water pumps, plow the sandy soil and power the sugar-cane crushers.

Role Changes Again

As these tasks were gradually taken over by the gasoline engine, the role of the camel changed again, to that of a specialist in hauling cargo over short distances, for the most part in urban areas.

For all its usefulness, the camel is much maligned. There is an expression in Urdu, one of the languages used in Pakistan, that is applied to large men not blessed with great intelligence: “He is very tall but he is foolish. He is a camel.” In the West, the camel has been ridiculed as “what happens when a horse is designed by a committee.”

But in this steamy port city, they add a playful, insouciant quality to life, taking an edge off the severe, functional architecture. And they serve a practical function beyond that of the best-designed horse.

The writer V.S. Naipaul, visiting here in 1982 after a 20-year absence, was pleased to find the camel carts still on the streets.

‘A Triumphant Air’

“The camels trotted with their long heads held high,” he wrote. “Their flapping mouths and big round cleft feet, picked up clean, gave each camel a triumphant air, as of a smiling athlete perpetually breasting a tape.”

Heston in his study, carried out with the help of Pakistan agricultural researchers H. Hasnain, S.Z. Hussain and R.N. Khan, determined that the main challenge to the camel cart is mounted by small Japanese trucks and vans, notably the Suzuki.

Suzuki started producing pick-up trucks and vans in Pakistan in 1983, and has made about 46,000 of the vehicles since then. Wholesale prices are $4,500 for a truck and $5,500 for a van, compared to about $1,100 for camel and cart.

After comparing the camel to its motorized Japanese competition in several categories, including “the cost of feeding Suzuki vans versus camels,” Heston and his colleagues concluded that the camel is superior in several ways, particularly for short-haul trips in the city.

Best in Congested Cities

“Ironically,” they said, “it is the larger, more-congested cities such as Karachi that have general traffic conditions that make the camel carts competitive for a larger range of goods.”

The camels are much slower, but on short runs, time is not so important. A camel cart can carry more than twice what a small truck or van can. It can accommodate loads such as Thariani’s sacks of toy balls. And, finally, the cost of feeding a camel dry grass or fodder from the desert is less than feeding gasoline to even a fuel-efficient truck. For this reason, camel cart drivers are able to charge much less than truck drivers and still make a subsistence income.

But even the more successful camel drivers, given the money and opportunity, would gladly trade in their phlegmatic dromedaries for a motorized vehicle.

“I am trying my best to leave the camel cart business and buy a Datsun,” said Ghulam Nabi, 35, the relatively successful owner of three camel carts.

Nabi has seven children, and he says he wants them “to be able to do something else.”

Exception to the Rule

But there is one former camel driver here who is convinced that the life of a camel owner is superior to that of a truck owner.

In 1961, when Lyndon B. Johnson was vice president of the United States, he visited Karachi and met Bashir Ahmed, a camel driver, whom he invited to visit the United States. Ahmed went and returned a national hero. An American organization gave him a new Ford pickup truck and the Pakistan government built him a home here.

Twenty-five years later, Ahmed had dropped out of sight. William D. Miller, press spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, was asked about Ahmed, and replied:

“The camel driver is long dead. We have nothing to add beyond the well-documented historical record.”

But on July 15 a Pakistan journalist named Iqbal Jaffery, a part-time correspondent for American magazines and the British Broadcasting Corp., found Ahmed, now 80, in a Karachi slum.

The money and fame, Ahmed complained, were long since gone. Jealous relatives had robbed him of most of his possessions. The truck no longer worked. He was not unhappy with Lyndon Johnson or with Americans in general.

For a time after the visit he had been happy, he said. “I socially upgraded myself and my family,” he told Jaffery.

But, he added, “if I had not gone to America I would have continued as a camel cart driver, living happily with my colleagues.”