![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The virtual tour of Africa II
This was perhaps the saddest destination for a lightning one-day tour so far. South Sudan is a very young country, founded 2011, but it has very, very old problems. South Sudan split from the rest of Sudan over religion and culture: northern Sudan is Islamic and Arabic and looks north and across the seas. The British occupation of Sudan focussed on the trading and citified North and seems to have ignored-and-overtaxed the south, which I'm guessing seemed much stranger and less profitable to the British, since the Dinka and Neue of the south did not use coin or build roads.
South Sudan is insular and pastoral and the people that live there have their own religion worshipping a God by the name of Nhialic. Their culture is very, very interested in cattle - beautiful, long-horned cattle. In fact, it seems that cattle and competition for pasture were the primary interests of south Sudan, except that the cattle seem to be closely linked to the God.
If I've understood it correctly, South Sudan is a traditional cattle-raiding culture. It reminded me of the Scottish borders, with no fixed borders for clan lands, but quite a bit of give and take as floods rise and fall, rivers shift and people exchange livestock, wives and pasturelands with a certain amount of violence. Only, most recently, with modern guns and mines, which is a terrible addition to the tensions between cattle-raiding clans.
So a lot of what I learned about Sudan was heart-breaking stuff about starving refugees, the terrible impact of the war for independence from Sudan, and the later ongoing wars between the Neue and the Dinka.
We did manage to get a more positive spin on South Sudan in a video about how tall the Dinka clan are, which gave us some brief interviews with Dinka people not talking about cows or war, but basketball, which they play with extra-high 12 foot hoops because otherwise nobody has to jump. Their average height is nearly six foot, and seven is not unusual! We also watched a rather wince-worthy anthropological National Geographic video, from which we learned that Dinka have a specific art of making beaded corsets for men. I wondered if very tall people would find it particularly useful to make clothes with back support.
Egypt.I feel like I knew more about Egypt going in than the other countries, though of course there is such a vast depth of known history in Egypt that even a brief rummage will always turn up something new.
This time it was that Muhammad Ali Pasha, the leader of the Ottoman force that took over control of Egypt after Napoleon and the French withdrew in the face of Ottoman opposition, and later led Egypt against the Ottoman Empire from 1805-1848, was Albanian. At one point he ruled Egypt, Sudan, Hejaz, Najd, the Levant, Cyprus and parts of Greece: an impressive level of conquest. Apparently he admired Napoleon.
I'd like to know more about the 600-year period of Mamluk domination in Egypt before the Napoleonic invasion, specifically who the Mamluks were and if there are any individual accounts of them, rather than . I know they were a group of Ottoman slave-warriors, taken from originally Christian areas in Armenia and Georgia etc, but were they constantly replaced by the Ottoman system, or did they dig in and form dynasties?
We headed West from South Sudan into the centre of the continent, and the...Central African Republic
Not a place with a major tourist industry. It's an ex-French colony, mostly nominally Christian, home to a lot of different peoples. Not much older history available, at least in English, though there were a couple of tantalising mentions of very old megalithic monuments. The layout of the capital, Bangui, is still the original French one. Recent history is rent with coups and civil war.
It's a place that *should* be rich, in that it has gold, diamonds and oil. But the historic export industry was slaves (sold to the Muslim north by the local Bobangi people), and since then all the riches seem to have flown out of the country without touching the locals except as forced labour.
And now it has Wagner group mercenaries 'policing' the place and (probably) getting paid in blood gold and diamonds.
However! We did find a Youtuber on a day visit to a village of Aka pygmy people who are subsistence hunters, and though very poor did at least seem to have escaped the impact of the wars. Though the Youtuber was full of how simple and peaceful their lives were, a brief interview with a village leader expressed concern about food insecurity, and a wish for a hospital, school, and clean water. The old blokes hanging out gossiping and smoking could have been from anywhere. Also the Judgemental Old Lady who kept giving the oblivious Youtuber very old fashioned looks.
Tomorrow: Chad!
no subject
Just coming back to catch up on these — thanks so much for sharing.
Although so much of it is heartbreaking on a grand scale, at the same time as having all the simple enjoyments of everyday moments and people just being people...