The Kababish are not a homogeneous tribe…but at the same time the several elements of which the tribe is compounded, if considered as a whole, will be found to be less contaminated with non-Arab blood than are those of any other Sudan-Arab tribe to which a single name is now applied.
-The Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan, Harold MacMichael
I never even thought to ask KhairAllah that question, whether he felt there was non-Arab blood in his veins. And if so, would he have even cared.
But I do know this, if any linguists tried to do among the Kababish what they once did among the deep desert tribes of the Arabian Penninsula, to go among them to record their choice and pronounciation of key words, such as which broken plurals they chose for which singular nouns in order to uncover some supposedly uncontaminated Arabic language, then I pity those linguists, and shudder to imagine what supposedly pure words they might bring back from their interviews in the well flats of Hamrat al-Shaikh.
When I came off the trail after forty days and spoke to an urban Egyptian, hoping to impress him with my easy fluency, he gave me a big laugh. “You sound like a hillbilly,” he said. “A smooth talking hillbilly. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Water, it’s mayya, not muyya.” For KhairAllah, everything that was good was saafi, pure, uncontaminated, as in muyya saafi, meaning no sand and no sulphur in his tea water.
It was a bit embarrassing to get the desert’s most essential word wrong, a bit like when I’d first arrived in Egypt after studying Modern Standard Arabic for three years in a US classroom, and couldn’t even get right how to pronounce the country I was in. Egyptians call it Masr, not Misr. I was corrected on my first day. But that muyya from Dar al-Kababish tasted just fine.