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National Geographic : 1982 Mar
Contents
Sudan; "track" is more appropriate. On an early trip out of Juba, I wound north on one of these into the open grasslands near the Sudd. This is the home of the Dinkas, who live in scattered huts in the rainy season but congregate in the dry season in cattle camps along the edge of the swamp. I drove cross country until I ran into a river. Off across the water I could see the smoke of a cattle camp. Crossing Water Proves Perilous Some of the people on their way to the camp offered to take me with them, so I packed up my cameras and pulled on my gum boots. The still, swampy waters of the Sudd are infested with a microscopic para site, bilharzia, that can cause death. All this pest needs is contact with the skin; I hoped the boots would protect me. We set off into the water, but my boots were not nearly high enough to deal with the waist-deep river. Filled with water, they became just a bur den dragging through thick bottom mud. We waded about halfway to the camp and up onto a small spit of raised land. Beyond there the water was much too deep to wade through. To ferry people across the last 75 meters, the Dinkas employed a small hollowed-out palm trunk. Only a few centi meters wider than my hips and extremely round, the trunk was not very steady in the water. Rot had eaten a huge hole in its front, and the hole had been filled with mud, but the river seeped through at a good rate. A small boy with a paddle sat perched on the back of the log and we started across, water pouring in and the log rocking vio lently. I could see myself taking a swim with boots on and my cameras clutched in my arms. The Dinkas all thought it terribly amusing-they could not understand why I wanted to go out there in the first place, much less burdened down with my gear. The camp was a bit of raised ground along the river. On the far side, the toich, the grassland exposed after the floods of the rainy season subside, stretched off toward another river in the distance. The earth was bare from the pounding of feet and hooves, short stakes for tethering the cattle dotted the ground, and long poles were bent to gether and hung with skins to provide some shade during the day. Dung fires, around which people slept at night, gave off a constant thick smoke, which kept some of the flies and the Sudd's 63 known species of mosquitoes out of the camp and lent an eerie, hazy light to it (pages 372-3). The naked gray figures of the Dinkas moving in the haze, smeared with gray ash to discourage insects, reinforced the feeling of otherworldliness. When I arrived, most of the young men were out in the toich with the cattle. But there were many men and women sitting around talking and children playing. Some women were gathering dry dung to stoke the fires for the night. My presence caused a stir. Mothers brought out children to show them what a khawajah, their word for white man, looked like. Many pulled at the hair on my arms, and even lifted the legs of my jeans to see if I had hair there too. The Dinkas have virtually no body hair and could not believe that anyone with as much as I could call him self a human. Monkeys, lions, cattle have hair, sure-but a person? "This is the best life," one of the men told me. "Here there is lots of milk, and we are free to spend our time with the cows." That night I sat by a small fire out in the bush thinking how strange it was that the cattle camps of the Dinkas and the space shuttle could exist on this planet at the same time. In the distance I heard the lonely whoop of a hyena, and drums from a far away village. Overhead, a satellite arced its way across the sky. Losing Touch With a Glorious Past The contrast between the semi-nomadic cattle-keeping Dinkas and the next people I visited, the Zandes, was striking. The Zandes are subsistence farmers who live in compounds scattered in the forest along the southwestern border with Zaire. Paramount Chief Andrea Zungumbia, great-grandson of the Zande king Gbudwe, holds court in a large cleared space under towering trees near the compound where he lives with his nine wives and twelve chil dren. The whole area was swept clean, and Andrea's chair was at one end, by itself. In front of this chair, about ten meters away, was a raised pole. People wishing to address the chief did so from there. Another chair was brought and placed next to Andrea's. The man who brought it Sudan:Arab-African Giant 355
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