Nuba - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

For the musical form, see Andalusi nubah
Andalusi nubah
Andalusi nubah is a musical genre found in the North African Maghrib states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya but, as the name indicates, it has its origins in the Arabo-Andalusian music...

or Nuubaat
Nuubaat
Nuubaat is a form of Algerian classical music. The term itself is the plural form of nūba , a suite of old Andalusian musical pieces. It is these multi-movement works that give nuubaat its name. The music originally spread from Islamic Spain to North Africa following the Christian Reconquest of...

.

Nuba is a collective term used here for the peoples who inhabit the Nuba Mountains

Nuba Mountains

Nuba Mountains is an area located in South Kordofan, Sudan. The area is home to a group of indigenous ethnic groups known collectively as the Nuba peoples. In the 18th century, Nuba Mountains became home to the kingdom of Taqali that controlled the hills of the mountains until their defeat by...

, in Sudan

Sudan

Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...

, Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

. Although the term is used to describe them as if they composed a single group, the Nuba are multiple distinct peoples and speak different languages. Estimates of the Nuba population vary widely; the Sudanese government estimated that they numbered 1.07 million in 2003.

Leni Riefenstahl

Leni Riefenstahl

Helene Bertha Amalie "Leni" Riefenstahl was a German film director, actress and dancer widely noted for her aesthetics and innovations as a filmmaker. Her most famous film was Triumph des Willens , a propaganda film made at the 1934 Nuremberg congress of the Nazi Party...

, better known for directing Triumph of the Will
Triumph of the Will
Triumph of the Will is a propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl. It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts from speeches given by various Nazi leaders at the Congress, including portions of...

and Olympia
Olympia (1938 film)
Olympia is a 1938 Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl documenting the 1936 Summer Olympics, held in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, Germany. The film was released in two parts: Olympia 1. Teil — Fest der Völker and Olympia 2. Teil — Fest der Schönheit . It was the first documentary feature...

, published a collection of her photographs of the peoples titled The Last of the Nuba
The Last of the Nuba
The Last of the Nuba is the English-language title of German film director Leni Riefenstahl's 1973 Die Nuba, an illustrations book published a year later in the United States...

in 1976.

Awarded Australian born photographer Jack Picone also photographically documented the lives of the Nuba people between 1994 - 1998. The series of images called "The Nuba" can be seen online here: http://www.jackpiconeportfolio.com/#a=0&at=0&mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=0&p=2

Culture

The Nuba people reside in the foothills of the Nuba mountains. Villages consist of family compounds, and the men's house (Holua) in which unmarried men sleep. A family compound consisting of a rectangular compound enclosing two round mud huts thatched with sorghum stalks facing each other called a shal. The shal was fenced with wooden posts interwoven with straw. Two benches ran down the each side of the shal with a fire in the middle were families will tell stories and oral traditions. Around the shal was the much larger yard, the tog placed in front. The fence of the tog was made of strong tree branches as high as the roof of the huts. Small livestock like goats and chickens and donkeys were kept in the tog. Each compound had tall conical granaries called durs which stood on one side of the tog. At the back of the compound was a small yard were maize and vegetables like pumpkin, beans and peanuts were grown. For families that were small a compound was not needed and a mud hut with a fence would be enough. The entrance was as large as a man so people had to climb the ladder and dive in to get grain. Inside the houses there was very little furniture, only a bamboo bed frame with a baobab rope mat on top and the hearth in the middle with firewood. Possessions and tools were hung or leaned against the wall. A small garden behind the house was used to grow vegetables like beans and pumpkin while sorghum and peanuts were grown away in the hills. A mans wealth is measured by cattle so they are kept in a enclosure called a coh for cows and a cohnih for calves. The Nuba people eat sorghum as their staple. It is boiled with water or milk to make kal eaten with meat stew called waj. Corn is also roasted and eaten with home made butter. The main religion of the Nuba is islam although the old shamanistic beliefs still prevail. Men wear a sarong and occasionally a skull cap. Young men remained naked while children even girls wore only a string of beads. Older women and young women wore beads and wrap a sarong over their legs and sometimes a cloak tie on the shoulder. Both sexes practise scarification and circumcision. Men shave their heads, older men wear beards, women and girls braid their hair in strands and string it with beads. The Nuba speak a language related to Dinka

Dinka language

This article is about the language, for the ethnic group see Dinka.Dinka, or , is a Nilotic dialect cluster spoken by the Dinka people, the major ethnic group of South Sudan. There are five main varieties, Ngok, Rek, Agaar, Twic / Tuic East, and Bor, which are distinct enough to require separate...

and other Nilo-Saharan languages

Nilo-Saharan languages

The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers , including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of Nile meet...

Effect of private agriculture schemes

The Nuba people are primarily farmers, as well as herders who keep cattle, goats, chickens, and other domestic animals. They often maintain three different farms: a garden near their house where vegetables needing constant attention, such as onions, peppers and beans, are grown; fields further up the hills where quick growing crops such as red millet can be cultivated without irrigation; and farms farther away, where white millet and other crops are planted. A distinctive characteristic of the Nubas is their passion for athletic competition, particularly traditional wrestling. The strongest young men of a community compete with athletes from other villages for the chance to promote their personal and their village’s pride and strength. In some villages, older men participate in club- or spear-fighting contests. The Nubas’ passion for physical excellence is also displayed through the young men’s vanity—they often spend hours painting their bodies with complex patterns and decorations. This vanity reflects the basic Nuba belief in the power and importance of strength and beauty.

The majority of the Nuba—those living in the east, west and northern parts of the mountains—are Muslims, while those living to the south are either Christians or practice traditional animistic religions. In those areas of the Nuba mountains where Islam has not deeply penetrated, ritual specialists and priests hold as much control as the clan elders, for it is they who are responsible for rain control, keeping the peace, and rituals to insure successful crops. Many are guardians of the shrines where items are kept to insure positive outcomes of the rituals (such as rain stones for the rain magic), and some also undergo spiritual possession.

In the 1986 elections, the Umma Party lost several seats to the Nuba Mountains General Union and to the Sudan National Party, due to the reduced level of support from the Nuba Mountains region. There is reason to believe that attacks by the government-supported militia, the Popular Defense Force (P.D.F.), on several Nuba villages were meant to be in retaliation for this drop in support, which was seen as signaling increased support of the S.P.L.A. The P.D.F. attacks were particularly violent, and have been cited as examples of crimes against humanity that took place during the Second Sudanese Civil War

Second Sudanese Civil War

The Second Sudanese Civil War started in 1983, although it was largely a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War of 1955 to 1972. Although it originated in southern Sudan, the civil war spread to the Nuba mountains and Blue Nile by the end of the 1980s....

(Salih 1999).

The Nuba Mountain People of Sudan

The Nuba people reside in one of the most remote and inaccessible places in all of Sudan, the foothills of the Nuba Mountains in central Sudan. At one time the area was considered a place of refuge, bringing together people of many different tongues and backgrounds who were fleeing oppressive governments and slave traders. As a result, over one hundred languages are spoken in the area and are considered Nuba languages, although many of the Nuba also speak Sudanese Arabic, the official language of Sudan.

The Nuba Mountains mark the southern border of the sands of the desert and the northern limit of good soils washed down by the Nile River. Many Nubas, however, have migrated to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum to escape persecution and the effects of Sudan’s civil war. Most of the rest of the 1,000,000 Nuba people live in villages of between 1,000 and 50,000 inhabitants in areas in and surrounding the Nuba mountains. Nuba villages are often built where valleys run from the hills out on to the surrounding plains, because water is easier to find at such points and wells can be used all year long. There is no political unity among the various Nuba groups who live on the hills. Often the villages do not have chiefs but are instead organized into clans or extended family groups with village authority left in the hands of clan elders.

The War in the Mountains

After some earlier incursions by the SPLA, the Sudanese civil war started full scale in the Nuba Mountains when the Volcano Battalion of the SPLA under the command of the Nuba Yousif Kuwa Mekki

Yousif Kuwa Mekki

Yousif Kuwa Mekki was a Sudanese revolutionary, rebel commander and politician.- Early life :Yousif Kuwa was born in 1945 at Jebel Miri, a locality in the Nuba Mountains of Central Sudan. A member of the Miri sub-tribe, he was named Kuwa after his father and Mekki after his grandfather. As with...

and Abdel Aziz Adam al-Hillu entered the Nuba Mountains and began to recruit Nuba volunteers and send them to SPLA training facilities in Ethiopia.The volunteers walked to Ethiopia and back and many of them perished on the way.

During the war, the SPLA generally held the Mountains, while the Sudanese Army held the towns and fertile lands at the feet of the Mountains, but was generally unable to dislodge the SPLA, even though the latter was usually very badly supplied. The Governments of Sudan under Sadiq al-Mahdi and Omar al-Bashir also armed militias of Baggara Arabs to fight the Nuba and transferred many Nuba forcibly to camps.

In early 2002 the Government and the SPLA agreed on an internationally supervised ceasefire. International observers and advisors were quickly dispatched to Kadugli base camp and several deployed into the mountains to co-located with SPLA command elements. The base camp at Kauda for several observers included Swiss African advisor, French diplomat, an Italian and an American former US Army officer.

At that time, Abdel Aziz Adam al-Hillu was the governor of Nuba Mountains. During the course of the following months, relief supplies from the UN were air dropped to stem the starvation of many in Nuba Mountains.

The ceasefire in Nuba Mountains was the foundation for the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) signed in January 2005. This fragile peace remains in force, but infighting in the south, plus the Government of Sudan involvement in Darfur have resulted in issues which may break the peace agreement.

The south will vote on whether to secede from Sudan and form its own country in 2011. This provision was agreed to in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA).

External links

Tomo križnar in Sudan - A Slovenian peace activist in Sudan, helping the Nuba peoples
Nuba Survival - Nuba indigenous rights organization
The Nuba and their Homeland
Nuba Languages
Nuba Culture
The Nuba Mountains Homepage
The Linguistic Settlement of the Nuba Mountains
Nuba People by Fr. Yousif William

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Culture

Effect of private agriculture schemes

The Nuba Mountain People of Sudan

The War in the Mountains

See also

External links