“No leaders anywhere, in Brewster’s opinion, could have more physical presence than the nazirs and sheiks of the Sudan. Nearest to the High Table sat the king of the Meidob, and directly across from him was the nazir of the Kababish. Each was surrounded by several sheiks of his tribe. Across the aisle, they acknowledged one another with predaceous stares.”
-“Fifty-two People on a Continent”, an essay that begins with a portrait of an American working in Sudan, by John McPhee
McPhee describes a meeting between the heads of the Meidob and Kababish tribes near Umm Badr, where I went in 2010 to screen “Voice of the Whip”, a documentary film shot in places not far away. The film’s Arabic dialect is unique to the Kababish and nearly impossible for Arabs of other locales to understand- thus the fact that when screened before other Arabic speaking audiences, the film’s jokes and stories always fall flat and many can follow only with subtitles.
Thus Umm Badr provided “the perfect audience”, needing no extra-filmic explanations or translations, the kind of audience that documentary filmmakers are keen to have. In my case, it meant waiting twenty two years and travelling a hundred miles off the blacktop in North Kordofan province to reach them.
The village has no central electrical supply, only solar panels, batteries, and a community generator with long extension cords. We opted to run the DVD player and projector with solar, competing for power with a TV set up outside for an Africa Cup soccer match. We were indoors as night fell and started the film. Five minutes from the end we were shut down by an AK-47 toting soldier who insisted his commanding officer wanted to see me immediately.
We walked a few hundred yards in the dark to his post where the officer was also watching the match. I waited impatiently. The soldier offered me a broken plastic chair. I petulantly kicked it over and said, And you call this hospitality? You might have said that I gave him a predaceous stare.
The officer finally emerged from his TV room wearing a soccer jersey and flip flops. No, he said he had not sent for me, and he already knew that I was in Umm Badr with permission to show a movie. And no, he didn’t have time to come to the next screening.
I gave three more screenings that night, all powered by an extension cord from the generator because the solar panels had drained. It was a big success I thought, especially the last outdoor screening projected against a mud wall, on a hot night with no ambient light except for stars.
Many in the audience recognized the drovers and trail bosses on camera even though their faces were all twenty two years younger. They laughed at the lyrics of the camel driving songs- “O Rocket of the Sudan, your eye like a Seiko watch”- and one drover’s amorous address to a sand-roasted goat head- “You love me and my belly loves you”. No subtitles needed in Umm Badr. It was all in their language, spoken by familiar voices.
