Today ʿAwad and I come again from Abu Na’ama to Wad an-Nail. The patient, a certain Maahi Bello, who had had sleeping sickness, is cured and has been sent home. He wants to show us his home, but feels too weak to walk. We rent a Landrover, but later the driver turns back without us, because he is afraid of getting stuck in the mud. After a walk of one and a half hours, we hear human voices and the lowing of cattle. We meet a migrating group of Mbororo with bent sticks, which are used as frames in building houses, loaded in bundles on the back of oxen. The Somali transport their houses on camel-back in a similar way. Small children are sitting on top of these loads or riding on donkeys. A little later we meet the group to which Maahi Bello, the cured patient, belongs. Women are just beginning to drive stakes, to which housing frames and storage scaffolding will be tied, into the ground. Men are twisting leather strips into rope; smaller strings for tethering calves will be attached to such ropes. After the greetings, we are offered angarebs (stretchers), which are of the same type as those of sedentary villagers, though quite a bit smaller. People unloading their beasts of burden in the neighbourhood greet each other rather formally. They appear not to have settled together at the previous location. Women bring us tea without sugar. Sugar is the largest single item of expenditure in many Sudanese households, and its absence seems to be an indicator of relatively weak market integration. They also bring half calabashes filled with milk.
After their playful attempts to communicate with me in Fulfulde and Oromo, which are largely unsuccessful (in the case of Fulfulde, because of my limitations, and in the case of Oromo, because of the limitations of my hosts), we continue the conversation in Arabic. The inhabitants of the hamlets that are clustered together here do not have fixed seasonal routes; rather, they decide, depending on the conditions of the pasture, whether to move into Upper Nile province or to cross into Ethiopian territory. In the south, there are frequent conflicts with Dinka, who capture cattle and women, then withdraw quickly and to a great distance, so that they cannot be held accountable for their actions. In one case, Dinka captured Mbororo women. The Mbororo then fled from the Dinka, going to Ethiopia. Later, some of the captured women managed to escape from the Dinka and rejoin their families in Ethiopia, but others stayed with their captors. The man who tells this story says that he came to the Sudan as a small boy in the 1950s from West Africa.
The night sky above us inspires me to ask some questions about the names of stars and their significance. The man, who came to the Sudan in the 1950s, knows no such names or stories. But he says that his father once told him that the French had written down that kind of information in Niger. There seems to be some awareness of Marguerite Dupire's work on the Woɗaaɓe (1962).
ʿAwad repeatedly stresses how respectfully the Mbororo treat each other and contrasts their conduct with that of Arabs. When an elderly man approaches, everyone gets up from his angareb, crouches down, and mumbles some benedictions. Tea is poured in the order of the seniority of the recipients. The Mbororo explain this behaviour with reference to the fear that younger men have of the curse of their seniors. Arabs regard the conduct of the Mbororo with some admiration, apparently because it conforms to ideals that they hold, but do not themselves achieve.
A young man with long tresses stands upright against the starlit sky, looking over the tethered herd. He plays the lyre (Ar.: rabaaba; ربابة) all night long and sings – apparently for the cows, which are thought to have the ability to warn and to protect human beings from dangers coming from the bush. Nevertheless, he might also have human females on his mind while singing. On the occasion of marriage, the tresses are shorn off. Longitudinal folds remain visible in the scalp for a long time in the places where the skin has been pulled together by tight plaiting.
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