BOOK REVIEW: Proud to be Nuba, stories of a long struggle

A review of “Proud to be Nuba: Stories of a Long Struggle”, a book written by By Nanne op ‘t Ende

By Anne Fuller

January 12, 2008 — In the mid-1990s, human rights activists feared for the future of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. African Rights published a report called Facing Genocide: the Nuba of Sudan. The Nuba region (some 30,000 fertile square miles in the center of Sudan) was subject to assaults by the Sudanese Armed Forces, famine and officially sanctioned jihad. Many of its inhabitants had turned to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, based in the South and fighting a war against marginalization and discrimination from Khartoum.

The region has survived, and is slowly recovering. There are plenty of scars—visible in abandoned fields and house sites, the lack of roads, electricity and schools, and unseen in the hearts of people who welcomed a ceasefire in 2002 and peace accords in 2005 that provided for disarmament, reconciliation and the promise of economic recovery — if not a full accounting for the past or clarity on the future.

Dutch artist Nanne op ‘t Ende has published a stunning new book about the Nuba Mountains. Proud to be Nuba is large– nearly coffee-table sized– with hundreds of glossy photos and 36 interviews with articulate figures from the region, including the late much-honored SPLA commander Yousif Kuwa Mekki, the current Deputy Governor of Southern Kordofan State, of which the region is a part (in traditional Nuba dress), soldiers, a businessman, a bus driver, a woman lawmaker, a widow farmer, an American aid worker, and others.

In recent years the world has paid little attention to the Nuba Mountains and other parts of Sudan that are not Darfur. Southern Kordofan borders Darfur on the west. It embraces a multitude of tribes; the Nuba are actually some 50 groups, speaking as many languages. Other tribes in the state include the Misseriya and Hawazma Arabs, the Fellata, the Dinka and others. The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement provided the state with a special Protocol of steps designed to resolve the conflicts there. The country’s governing National Congress Party has 55% representation in Southern Kordofan’s state legislature, with the former rebel Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement having 45%, a situation that will stand until elections, planned for in 2009, allow the people themselves to speak. The governorship rotates between the two parties. The UN’s peacekeeping mission, called UNMIS, has over 1,000 military, police and civilian peacekeepers in the state capital of Kadugli, and in several vital areas around the region.

The book’s publisher and designer, Hans Lodewijkx, has created a volume that is dazzling, down to its bound-in gold ribbon page marker. The photos, mostly color but some black and white, show traditional wrestling and dancing, as well as scenes of daily life. They were taken by op ‘t Ende and four other photographers: Jack Piccone, David Stewart-Smith, Yashuiro Kunimori and Antonio Cores, who visited the region between the 1970s and 2006, a period of enormous change.

There’s also a sampling of small earlier, mostly British colonial, photos that support a brief, well-written history of the region that makes use of scholars’ research on the origins of the many peoples who migrated to the Nuba Mountains over the millennia. A preface by Jan Pronk, the Dutch former chief representative of the UN in Sudan (who was declared persona non grata in 2006) discusses the Nubas’ place in the struggle for peace.

Nanne op ‘t Ende first came to the Nuba Mountains in 1997, invited to document the war; he returned in 1998 and 2000 with help from the Bruno Schulz Foundation (which supports “artists investigating and creating knowledge”) and again in 2006. He writes about the war, with affection for SPLA commanders, child soldiers, and a setter of land mines (who is now removing them). Yet he acknowledges and gives a voice to other residents who chose not to join the SPLA during the war.

Visitors to Southern Kordofan who are familiar with Leni Riefenstahl’s two books on the Nuba from the 1970s (The Last of the Nuba and People of Kau), may be struck that in the Nuba Mountains today, everyone is fully clothed; and clothed mostly in typical northern Sudanese Islamic styles. When op’t Ende first visited the region, this was not entirely the case.

“I couldn’t help notice,” he asked Commander Yousif Kuwa, “that many measures taken by the SPLM administration seem to go against distinct tribal traditions. Nudity has been forbidden, stick fighting too. Bride prices are fixed. I guess all with good reason, but how does it fit with fighting for the right to be Nuba?”

“What else can we do?,” Kuwa answered. “We have to unite the Nuba people somehow. As long as they are divided, as long as they are ignorant and primitive, other people will decide their fate…..But I’m not without doubt…”

There are many, many things to love about this book, but none more than its inclusion of the voices of Arab residents of the region, mostly Misseriya whose people have traversed the area for hundreds of years as nomads and begun to settle down in the last century. Nuba and Arabs have frequently been at odds in the region, in modern history as farmers versus cattle herders. The war of the 1980s and 90s –especially Khartoum’s use of Arab raiders against Nuba villages, has left deep suspicions and currents of intolerance, including Nuba groups that say Arabs have no place in the Nuba Mountains. For their part, many Arabs will sidestep hard questions about the past. But the Misseriya of Southern Kordofan are mostly poor, uneducated and also victims. Op ‘t Ende interviewed Safa’a Fadl Rahamtalla, an NCP member in her early thirties who chairs the state legislature’s Committee on Women and Children’s Affairs: “Some people from out of the region have created disunity between the people here and we have nothing to say, but the devil just entered between us,” she told him.

Nanne op’t Ende would like to claim all the state’s resident as Nuba; it’s a fine gesture. He is an engaged observer, a recorder, a chronicler and an artist who has figured out a way to express his affection and respect for the people of the Nuba region in a way that honors without sanctifying them.

Proud to be Nuba: Stories of a Long Struggle by Nanne op t’Ende can be ordered for 25 Euros plus postage on op t’ Ende’s Nuba Mountains Homepage. http://home.planet.nl/~ende0098/

(ST)