The Nuba Mountains have been subject to a cease-fire since 2002, and this has been incorporated into the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. International personnel have participated in a peace-monitoring mission since 2002. The book and films were made before that therefore they don't represent the current situation.
All one could hear was peaceful breathing.
The round walls of a clay hut were still radiating the heat of the day. The air smelt of desiccated plants and excrement. Through the gaps in the thatch roof the full moon was gently taking shape. The night purred seductively, like a loving wife who had just turned off the light.
»Digini! Digini!«
The breathing stopped.
The breathing was mine, and Digini was me! That’s what my new Nuba friends called me.
Through the narrow entrance a naked shadow invaded my solitude.
»What’s up?«
»Digini, fiki fiki kuwais. Ketir kuwais,« a tall, slender, athletic man grabbed my hand and pulled me out.
The grinning face hid nothing.
I was lifted from the wooden bed, and followed him round the hut down the path to the savannah.
Among giant blocks of black granite there was a black crowd. Voluptuous girls with firm breasts, sturdy boys with long penises, grandmas and grandpas with skin like well-baked bread crust, herds, whole clusters of happy children, babies crawling among them... The entire village was gathered under the benevolent baobab, on its branches and further up on the rocks among the glittering stars. In the middle of the crowd my sleeping bag was laid out. Two female shadows were sitting on it, and with gestures, understandable to the whole world, lured me towards them.
»Digini - fiki fiki.«
It was in January 1980, nineteen years ago, in the village of Rekha in the Nuba Mountains, in the central Sudanese province of Kordofan.
I had come from the north.
Wandered in, actually. My head felt heavy with all sorts of confusion. Every now and then I vomited bile and excreted blood. In my stomach, in the wall of my duodenum bled a hole. The doctors said it was due to stress. A colleague of mine, who was into alternative ways of healing at the time, told me I had problems because I had neglected the soul and the heart. A body with a duodenal ulcer was warning something was wrong: I had not been living naturally, not the way I should have.
I had just passed the final exams at the Faculty of Economics, but was still waiting to defend my thesis; in the May holiday I was supposed to go to the army. I had four months left. Four months of ultimate freedom, and after that I would have to wear a tie and...
»The blacks remind me of warm primeval sources of life, of animals and plants and the sun,« I read one night in the middle of a leaden Slovenian winter, supposedly a quote from Nefretete, mother of Pharaoh Akhnaton.
I spent the following night on an empty train to Belgrade, caught a plane, and before the dawn of a new day crawled into my sleeping bag on top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. In the afternoon I wandered around museums and mosques, but it was not what I was looking for. Finally the train carried me further up along the Nile. I crossed Lake Nasser by boat, followed the path of the temples and pyramids of the ancient pagan Nubia by lorry, and marvelled at the hospitality and dignity of black Muslims. The country was biblically beautiful, the capital of Khartoum reminded me of Kabul, there were hardly any cars, shop windows and ties were rare, the women wore no make-up, the locals dipped bread in beans seasoned with sesame oil and kept asking me for tea...
But that wasn’t the right thing either.
Then I saw him.
Stark naked he was perched on the neck of his just as naked comrade below him, and shamelessly stared straight at me.
The thighs taut as a bull’s, the torso like that of Greek statues, arms, neck, head, everything on him was firm... Yet his palm seemed gentle, softly relaxed...
I was in the library of the University of Khartoum, and stared at a picture of a black Nuba covered in ashes, taken by an English officer, George Rodger, in 1949.
When it came out in the mid-fifties, the book Le Village des Nubas with impressive photos of Nuba wrestlers shocked both the scientifically and traditionally religiously inclined humanists. Among the first to be attracted by it was a German film director Leni Riefensthal, famous for her propaganda films in honour of the great Führer. Politically and morally controversial, as many deemed her, or just infatuated with the human will-power and art, as she defended herself, at seventy, when most women think only of rest and death, she managed to get through to the most inaccessible hills, and published two books containing pictures of sturdy natives, and shot a documentary she entitled »The wonderful people«.
In a picture, holding hands with a black olympic stud, desiccated like an apple in spring, she seemed to me incredibly lively and happy.
Look, there in the heart of darkness lives a people, I thought, untouched by the crusades of Arab and European civilisation.
The Nuba do not cherish consumer gods, but are - much like the rare remnants of other oldest surviving natural peoples on the planet - more absorbed in the spiritual world, which we, descendants of the Greek-Jewish culture, have long forgotten and lost. The existence of the natives in the Nuba Mountains is not only physical, but first of all spiritual, then mental, and last of all material. In the world as perceived by the Nuba nothing is senseless, empty and dull. The Nuba universe is alive.
The belief that the world is made of substance, first introduced by the Greek Democritus in the 5th century BC, has not yet reached the Nuba Mountains.
I spent many of the following days in the library, reading, reading.
The home of the Nuba people is the granite islands in the sea of savannahs west of the Nile in the central Sudanese province of Kordofan. Up to four thousand metres high mountains of widely scattered masses of black, red and violet granite attract the rain, and in their stone bosom retain the water even at the times of the most severe droughts. The black soil in the valleys is incredibly fertile.
The Nuba Mountains are a kind of natural fortress, and have since ancient times provided shelter for refugees belonging to various African peoples.
The Nuba are not a tribe like their neighbours, the nomadic Baggara Arabs in the deserts of the north, or the Dinkas, the Nuers and the Shilluks in the swamps of the south; the Nuba is a collective name imprinted on the European conscience by the Arab slave hunters, and refers to all the natives living in the almost inaccessible mountains bearing the same name.
In 1910, C.G. Seligman, the first anthropologist to scientifically treat the problem of the Nuba, pointed out that more than fifty languages were spoken in the area, and counted just as many different cultures.
In the late thirties, the Austrian anthropologist Franc Nadel was hired by the Board of the British-Egyptian condominium to discover the weaknesses of the »savages«, and consequently a way to get them out of the mountains and include them in the colonial economy. On the eve of the Ayrian racist march, Nadel wrote that the Nuba were not an isolated island only in Sudan, but on the entire planet.
The characteristic features of the Nuba - patience, tolerance, original people’s democracy, peculiar tenderness and sweetness - surprised not only the romantic searchers for a »good noble savage«, but also the bureaucrats. Officers of the British Board demanded special permits for entry into the Nuba Mountains. In this way they protected the Nuba from foreigners, particularly from Arab traders, but also isolated them and thus blocked the progress which other Sudanese tribes enjoyed.
The Nuba never formed a state and complicated bureaucratic institutions, just as they never developed any spiritual hierarchy. Instead of being led by tyrants, they have gathered around the village sages who take care of peace, heal the sick and make rain.
The Nuba are always making music, singing, dancing, colouring, carving. They spend most of their time maintaining the ritual harmony with plants, trees, animals, stones, soil, waters, winds, the entire universe, with just about everything, and with each other.
Anthropologist James C Faris believes that their dancing, decorating and scarring the bodies are ample proof of their artistic talent.
The rare reports of missionaries to the very last lament the fact that the Nuba are totally unwilling to accept the notion of original sin, let alone guilt of any kind. Their faith is expressed through cults of fertility emphasising physical strength and health. They blindly believe in the existence of a fertile life power, which is responsible for the life of the universe, and therefore nourishes everything that exists: plants, animals and humans. They seek to establish harmony with this power, with this spirit, through numerous rituals. This is also the reason why they are unwilling to undertake any pragmatic or practical work.
Some Australian Protestant brothers expressed their suspicion that a few Nubas were converted only to please them.
In the maps the Nuba Mountains are marked just above the red line dividing the present Arab northern and black southern parts of Sudan; the division was drawn during British administration. In order to enter the »twilight zone« one needs a special permit. I couldn’t get one, despite my connections in the Ministry of the Interior.
»But why do you want to go down there?« my friend Ibrahim, a Sudanese Slovenian, tried to talk me out of the idea. Ibrahim and I, in the good old days when we were freshmen, cultivated links among the non-aligned nations of the world, and visited many a Ljubljana pub together. »They live like animals! Naked! Can you imagine it? They walk about naked! The Nuba are the shame of the Sudanese nation. They’re going to die out, progress dictates it! The Nuba are remnants of the past.«
»So I want to see them before it’s too late,« I said and stood up.
He didn’t call me back.
On top of the lorry, which took five days to get to Kadugli, the administrative centre of the Nuba Mountains in the province of South Kordofan, I grew scared of police checks. But the boys dressed in washed-out uniforms, with ancient British guns and the traditional African carefree attitude, didn’t even bother to ask me if I had a passport.
»Allah, those are animals. They aren’t people!« a fat salesman pointed at a group of the Nilotic natives, who - in the corner of the local suk - sold milk, hide and a bit of ivory under the counter.
»Why?«
»They don’t go to school. They don’t know of Allah. They sleep on the floor. Why do you want to go there? You have nothing to do with them. You’re a Christian, just as I’m a Muslim. We’re both fine white people. We know God.«
The man I was talking to was no whiter than the slender black Dinkas. What distinguished him from the southern Sudanese was above all a white gown, a golden tooth and messy business with mbango - pressed marihuana, a Sudanese speciality - which he tried to sell to me.
No matter whom I asked, nobody knew or was willing to tell me how I was supposed to continue my journey.
»No road! No transport! Nobody goes there! There’s nothing there anyway.«
But the market place was full of Nuba tobacco. I’ll wait, I thought stubbornly, looking at the chain of blue mountains on the horizon. I’ll wait for them and go there with them.
Since, during the following three days, I found no-one willing to act as a guide, one evening, when it got cooler, I set off on my own towards the mountains with my backpack full of dates, bread and two canisters of water, hoping I would meet plenty of hospitable natives on the way.
But I didn’t meet anybody.
At the time I was totally unaware that the real Africa was not manageable with European logic.
In total darkness I was frightened by a muffled roaring. I got badly scratched when I climbed the nearest acacia. I was bleeding, trying to make out the sounds similar to those heard in the ZOO at the time lions are fed, and waited for the sun.
At dawn I was back in Kadugli. The Arab traders laughingly explained it was not the season of wild beasts. It was the dry season, leopards and similar pussycats came with the rain, when the savannah grew green and the antelopes returned from the south. At that time of year the savannahs were empty, the only creatures wandering through them were evil spirits and crazy Thomas.
»Brother, what you’re looking for we’ve already got. Stay with us, pray to Allah, and you’ll feel better,« the Arab settlers encouraged me.
They showed me how to bow and say the most beautiful poetry dictated by Mohammed. I tried, but it didn’t help. I lingered about until I got so much on everybody’s nerve that the locals themselves advised me to give it one more try. That time with a donkey which would carry my food and water. So I wouldn’t get tired and could fight back evil spirits.
In the following days they tried to sell me every creature that could crawl. They even doped one animal up by feeding it stems of Indian cannabis. The local school-teacher finally showed me how to recognise a true homar. You had to pierce the donkey in the cleavage between the hooves with hairs from its own tail; by the way it jumped you could tell whether it had any life in it or not. His donkey charged with such force that I immediately christened him Janez - a common Slovenian name.
I also bought a couple of goats which were to ensure my survival with their blood and meat in case I got lost. With a rope long enough to let them run I tied them to Janez’s saddle. On each side of the saddle I hung baskets containing three hens and a rooster intended for presents. For the same reason I strapped onto the donkey a five-kilo bag of millet, some dates, salt and tea, notebooks, pencils, erasers, pegs, a couple of lengths of rope and a few pieces of raw iron suitable for shaping into spear ends or a hoe. I filled two skins with twenty litres of water. Early the following day we were ready to set off.
Dry, thorny, cracked plain. Scarce, bare acacias casting no shade whatsoever. A stone path, a blue chain of mountains far out on the horizon and endless yellow-blue country. Fifty degrees, no humidity and no smell. Fiery light - and the eight of us, made of fragile dough of dust and water. And what I used to draw in every kind picture as a child: the Sun! Mata Hari! The Killer Fist!
We trekked on for a good long time.
Some time in the afternoon the terrain changed. The path lost its hardness, gaspingly we ground the red sand and shyly looked at each other. The goats cried in despair, the feathery fools kept their eyes closed, the rooster’s red comb hung low, every now and then he looked at me as if he were to charge at my face and scratch my eyes out any moment. And Janez, Janez kept turning his teary head and pulling at the halter. Only when we left behind the last shattered hut and the last neglected field did he become reconciled to his fate.
Of all former life the only things left were shocks of burnt grass, smouldered branches, abandoned high termite hills and every now and then black granite blocks.
The deadly monotony was broken by a huge, almost ironically frowning baobab. On order we all lay in the shade under its belly-like trunk, watching how it desperately twisted its bare branches into the raging inferno above; we sympathetically asked the tree what had happened to all its chlorophyll.
»Got eaten by the last swarm of locusts,« Janez nodded knowingly.
The hens kept their eyes closed. The goats said nothing.
Evening was approaching, but reality remained surreal. The blue contours in the east looked like the scenery of an imaginary world we were never meant to reach. Once more I was tortured by the thought that my whole life I had been doing nothing but driving myself on - myself and everybody unfortunate enough to be near me. I’m possessed! Crazy! Here, now I know it. How right are those who find me suspect!
It wasn’t until the blue velvet curtains, scattered with silver stars, mercifully concealed the stage that I felt some relief. I tied Janez, lay on the still hot crust of the planet and immediately went to sleep. In the middle of the night I got up to take a leak. As I was collapsing back on the globe, my legs fell over one edge, and my head over another. At that moment I felt incredible power, the presence of something widely spread and whole and perfect and extraordinarily marvellous.
»I don’t know what it is, but I clearly feel it isn’t faking, it’s not hypocritical, it doesn’t lie, it’s equally fair to plants and animals and waters and breezes and fires and the last pinch of soil. Here, I can feel it’s supporting me and wishes me well, just as it supports and wishes well to everything that exists. This is the only authority I can really respect,« I wrote in my diary.
Even before dawn, singing, I got Janez on his feet, loaded the hens, tied the goats and, pleased with the world and myself, set off straight into the sunshine.
A couple of times during the morning, fierce-taloned vultures circled above our heads. In the acacias I spotted their nests padded with guinea fowl feathers. We crossed a well-trodden path of strong black ants. Under the bark of a smothered stump I found fat, cold larvae. On the distant horizon something was flying to and fro; it could have been an ostrich, but the air was so glimmering with the heat that I couldn’t quite trust my perception.
The sun had reached the zenith when the path started to branch out. I tried to keep on the main course by following camel droppings, but Janez didn’t like it. He kept pulling me to the left. The more I tried to persuade him, the more he stubbornly drew right over the woollen loaves. I finally gave in. Perhaps he was sensing something I wasn’t.
A mere kilometre away, at the foot of a gentle slope we saw the thatch fences and typical nomadic huts of the Arab tribe of Baggara, and next to them the hole of a freshly dug well.
»Janez, bravo!«
As I cried out, a cluster of kids came running towards us. Behind them appeared brown men dressed in white, carrying spears. I raised my arms and smiled kindly.
We drank three cups of tea before I managed to explain to them I hadn’t come to preach, force them to attend school or sell them anything. In the evening, after we had shared a bowl of beans and a fragrant cigarette, their faces finally brightened up. I learnt they had bought themselves cheaper and more enduring Nuba wives, that they had stopped here in order to trade, and were waiting for the cattle to be herded from the south by their fellow men.
More they did not wish to tell me.
Early next morning I was surprised by the girls. Wrapped in characteristic Muslim tobbas they appeared at my door, black as lust itself. They were singing, swaying their hips, rolling their eyes and obviously flirting with me. I gave each of them a mango, we sucked at the fruit together; I kept thinking why the meat was sweetest right at the stone. I would have loved to see circumcised female private parts, but I politely moved over to the men. We shared millet porridge, and during breakfast I found out everything I needed to know to continue my journey.
On the fourth day, a slender silhouette carrying a spear appeared on top of the granite mass in the blue background above the tongue of the savannah up which we climbed among the chaotically scattered rocks. The animals were disturbed and started pulling back; I quickly took my clothes off and waved my white Arab robe in sign of surrender.
The silhouette disappeared.
But a moment later it reappeared higher up. And once more. I couldn’t tell whether it was the same man, or perhaps more of them. Neither did I know why they were hiding. Suddenly I felt sorry I had come so unprepared; I could at least have brought a gun.
They were right round the corner. Eight or nine of them. Strong and sturdy, they leaned against their spears and observed me carelessly, somewhat arrogantly.
In the savannah, the crickets were still singing passionately. Up there, each in its rainbow-like aura, the stars twinkled peacefully. And the crowd around me waited impatiently.
If I lie down with the two women, they may say: aha, that’s what he came for.
If I don’t, they may think: aha, he’s a racist.
So what to do?
I took a step forward. The crowd stirred, clapped their hands and stomped their feet, showing every sign of approval.
»Digini! Fiki fiki kuwais. Tamam! Tamam!« Kuku, my best friend, encouraged me with a beaming face. »Hinak! Hinak!«
I was still standing like a Slavic lime-tree, feverishly trying to think of a solution.
I’ve been threshing millet for more than a month with the young men, fixing fences for the cows with the old, learning to play with the kids, taking part in wrestling and dances every night. I feel more assimilated in the village than I do in Europe. The villagers as well seem to enjoy my company. They must have accepted me that night when I first stood on my head while practising yoga. Or perhaps later, when in the outburst of euphoria I hugged the baobabs and cows and grandmas and grandpas.
I sometimes get the feeling they intend to keep me here.
On my arrival two months ago they had a fight about whose house I was to sleep in. I reckoned they were interested in the profit they probably counted on. But they solved the problem by organising a nafir, a kind of garden party. High on marisa, millet bear and group euphoria we in no time fixed the roof of an abandoned dwelling and moved me in. The village witch doctor, priest and medicine man publicly »christened« me Digini during the ritual of name giving. Mak, the village chief and representative of the governor in Kadugli, promised me seeds and a field in which I would be able to sow sorghum at the beginning of the rainy season.
And now they want to marry me.
But I’m still not familiar enough with their customs. I have no idea what may change in our relationship if I seize the opportunity, and what I’ll be obliged to do afterwards.
Unlike their neighbours, the nomadic Baggara Arabs, the Nuba belonging to the Mesakin Quisar tribe make love freely, but only if both partners are free, and no third person suffers. Like most African tribes they are polygamous, but for every wife the husband has to pay a dowry and build a home. Two wives never live under the same roof. The more wives a man has, the more respected and richer he is, as wives are considered valuable working power. And a greater number of wives in the same family is good for the women as well; they can share chores and, despite having many children, have more time for themselves than European mothers. Given diseases, famine, attacks by foreigners and other perils, a large number of family members definitely ensures survival. Unity makes strength. Jealousy is not common and natural as it is in European marriages, but it sometimes does break out, especially if the husband neglects his wives and spends most of his nights with mistresses. The social organisation of the Mesakins is patriarchal as well as matriarchal. A family and its numerous branches form a clan, whose head can be a woman. Usually it’s the mother’s brother who takes care of the children after the age of five, and has more rights to them than their natural father; the children sometimes inherit his property, but not necessarily.
I wanted most to retire to my hut. There I was at peace; I got used to seeking refuge there whenever I experienced things I didn’t understand. Whatever dogmas, no matter how far-fetched, were better than life without any beliefs.
In the last two months I started to have doubts about most of what I had learnt in European schools!
The Nuba perceive life so very differently. For instance: when they put me up in my hut, they said it was for ever. What does »for ever« mean to the Nuba?
»Leni, Leni,« kept saying Kuku, my host. I spent my first night in his hut, and he was showing me a woman’s bra. Aha, I thought, the bra was given to him by Leni Riefensthal, and now he expected me to give him a present as well. So I took off my underpants; he merrily put them on, but the following day I saw his neighbour wearing them, and later other men, children and even women. A similar thing happened to my pullover, rucksack, shoes, books, biros, photos, condoms. The hens we ate, the rooster was saved. Of Janez they said he had hung himself on the rope with which he was tied to the tree, and we ate him together. I grieved over him, but not too much. In a different environment you quickly start thinking and feeling differently.
These people indeed fairly share everything they have. But they don’t really have anything: the huts are made of soil mixed with thatch, urine and animal blood. They’re fortresses, designed for defence in the times the Nuba were threatened by slave hunters. The huts are cool and airy, and therefore much more pleasant than any iron or concrete contraption that the Arabs from El Obeid are trying to sell them. Also the earthenware and water skins, mattresses made of baobab bark, drums, bene bene - kind of cymbals, spears and shields of rhinoceros hide, a few objects used in rituals, hoes, spades, flails ... everything is of local origin, made of natural materials. Only iron comes from elsewhere. And they have no salt. Both they trade for their tombak - tobacco. They chew, snuff and smoke it, men and women, the women apparently because they need strength to carry water. And some tobacco it is! I tried it only once, and it almost made my heart burst, so strong it is.
Water - they carry it from places two, even three hours away. The water gathers under the mountains as ground water. They need only to dig a hole. Granite hills are as if made for gathering water, permanent settling, life in an organised society with a rich concentration of ideas similar to the peoples of ancient Mesopotamia; only that the Nuba never strove for any norms, standardisation, systematisation and methodical development of what we call civilisation.
More than half of them walk about completely naked. However, they obviously find naked skin boring, so they invented fantastic body decoration and scarring. What relaxed creative imagination! And every one of them is his or her own artist. No cultural elite, no monopolies. All without exception are engaged in art. The purpose of decoration is to emphasise the beauty of the body, artistically express oneself and thus thank creation for strength and health.
All of them wear round their necks tiny strings of colourful plastic beads. Round their ankles and wrists they often wear brass ornaments made of old cartridges. Otherwise they’d be completely naked. And what huge dicks they have! They aren’t penises, they are really huge tools. I must say. Perhaps white men are so extremely racist because of their inferiority complex, because we feel we are rigid and stiff instead of elastic, supple and natural, because we have lost the natural feeling for movement that black people have. There is no bigger collective Western paranoia than the fear that our women, in the competitive fight, will betray us and copulate with black men, that our children will be coloured, and that our white race will die out.
The colourful pants the other half of the Nuba wear are truly ridiculous. They apparently got them for free. Just like that - they fell from the sky! They were thrown from aeroplanes. Supposedly the load was sent by the British Queen after she had learnt that people in her former colony still walked around naked. I heard that the pants, on the Queen’s initiative, were donated by the Woolworth’s chain of supermarkets from their unsold stock.
A fistful of red millet boiled in milk or in water, and a fistful of peanuts or roasted sesame seeds - that’s the usual meal in the dry season. Sometimes with a gourd of sour milk, clotted with the help of goat or cow urine and salted. And every now and then a piece of suet. We ate »real« meat only once, when the children caught a mouse down in the savannah. How happy they were one morning when the village was swarmed by a cloud of locusts, so weakened by hunger that they were falling from the sky. The old and the young feasted on them - raw! They bit off the legs and the wings and spat them out, and then all one could hear was pookhh, pookhh ... as the meat gave in at every bite. Poookhh!
And then they laughed. Not at me, because I couldn’t make myself to try the locusts, they probably laughed just like that, for better digestion. At every witty remark they spattered saliva, rolled their eyes, snapped their fingers, shook hands, hugged each other and patted each other’s knees, as if it was a kind of tribal sport.
No, to the Nuba laughter is more than a tribal sport.
Their laughter reveals the joy of life, the harmony between the mind, heart, soul and body, and the safe concert between the material and the spiritual. The Nuba are carefree and confident. They believe that life couldn’t be better than theirs already is. The men are real bulls, but gentle and sweet, and the women, oh, the women...
»The herds have multiplied, the cows are giving plenty of milk, there’s enough water, the harvest was rich, the elders say that there is every sign that the rainy season will come at the right moment and bring game ... Our country is the most beautiful in the world ... Our country is the most beautiful in the world...,« I kept hearing all over again.
»Come on, take your pants off, let’s see how you foreigners do it!«
I took one more clumsy step forward, and another - and then spotted tits hanging down to the waist, loose skin, toothless mouths.
Shit! They set me up with old matrons, depreciated a long time ago! The Nuba foisted rubbish upon me! Bastards, oh you black bastards!
I started to move backwards.
A while later I was hidden by the nearest hill.
»O oooo! O ooo!« I heard the disappointed cries behind me. »O ooo! O ooo ...!«
Translated from Slovene by Lili Potpara and Alan McConnell Duff
The Nuba Mountains have been subject to a cease-fire since 2002, and this has been incorporated into the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. International personnel have participated in a peace-monitoring mission since 2002. The book and films were made before that therefore they don't represent the current situation.
View the second chapter of the book NUBA, Pure People: NINETEEN YEARS LATER