The vicinity of the Bir al Malha is occasionally infested by the Cubba-Beesh, a wandering tribe, who, mounted on the swiftest dromedaries, rapidly traverses the desert, and live by plundering the defenseless. As they are, however, unfurnished with fire arms, so numerous a body as ours was not in much danger from their attack.
-Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria, from the year 1792 to 1798, William George Browne
I met Talal first because he lived in New York and I had read his book. I told him I was going to Dar al Kababish and asked him for pointers. He reminisced about the old days of his field research, living in UmBadr village in the late 1960s and feeling like the weekly supply lorry from El Obeid would never arrive. Later I heard from Mahdi that he had worked in the family shop in UmBadr and remembered “Talal the Khawaja” coming in often to buy jam and cheese and macaroni.
Talal wrote an ethnography on the Kababish with its focus on the political control exercised by their paramount shaikh, or nazir, who, in a rare case among pastoral tribes in western Sudan, had unusually close ties to the central government. The book included flow charts and organigrams of how the tribe’s lineages were structured and where high level decisions originated and through whom they were executed down below. I did not find much helpful advice on such topics of how to dress, when to go, and what I should expect to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
I met KhairAllah later, at the wells from where we were set to depart in a day or two. He was to be our khabir, and he was of the Kababish, the Arabic broken plural noun whose root gives the singular adjective, Kabbashi, meaning “of the Kababish”. I liked the tribe’s doubled consonant “b”. KhairAllah al-Kabbashi.
Contrary to Browne, KhairAllah did not plunder and did not ride the swiftest dromedary. He was a hired man in the employ of Mahdi’s father Hajj Bashir, who agreed against all common sense to let me and David ride with his camel herd to Egypt. KhairAllah was to be the herd’s leader and perhaps our babysitter.
As khabir, on the trail he had much power and authority, but consent he did not have in the matter of being stuck with two khawajas never before having ridden a camel. He worked for Hajj Bashir, and Hajj Bashir said that we were going with him. It was going to be a rough forty days for all three of us.
You must ask KhairAllah to be sure, but I would say that he had to baby sit David and me only once or twice, and that was in the first few days. After that, we both got the swing of things on the trail pretty fast. If an anthropologist had been along, he would have written an ethnography about inter-cultural joking and comic misperceptions, of why not to wear blue jeans in a camel saddle and how to fit five men around a four sided bowl of millet stew.
