KZBlog

Mankurt is apparently an awful term to call a Kazakh. It literally means someone who has lost their home, their history, traditions, has no memory of where they are from, cannot recite their Seven Fathers. It is a grave insult. Recently, my wife was reading Chingis Aitmatov, the Kyrgyz author of The White Ship and Executioner’s Block, among others. In The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years, he explains, or interprets, this term and this concept. Factual or not, it is a beautiful and disturbing account.

The Huns used to take nomadic people as slaves. In order to make them into the perfect slave, they would shave their heads and tie a camel hide on their heads. Binding their hands to prevent them from removing the camel hide, they would then leave the prisoners in the desert. In the heat of the day and the cold of the night, the hide would shrink and bind itself to the prisoner’s scalp. This would also prevent removal of the hide, or at least a painless removal, disfiguring the slaves for life. As the hide tightened, and as the slaves sat in the desert, they would go quite mad and forget why they were in the desert, where they had come from, who they were, their mothers’ own faces. When the Huns returned and ‘rescued’ the slaves, feeding them and giving them water, the slaves would be one hundred percent loyal to these kind men who saved them and having no memory of another family, other friends, would agree to work for their masters.

True or not, that is the significance of the word in Kazakh (and apparently Kyrgyz).