Ma ya’rif el-haa min el-waw. He doesn’t know H [as in himaarhu, his Donkey] from W [as in waladhu, his Son], or…right from wrong, or…bad from good, or…day from night, or…up from down, or…cold from hot, or…whipping his camel forward from reining it back.
-Sudanese proverb, collected by Shaikh Abdullahi El-Amin, Tuti Island, with variant translations to reflect regional humor. The last is of Dar al-Kababish.
After he saw how badly we rode on that first day, kicking our camels like they were horses and pulling the reins (in fact there was only one lead off a single rope-tied halter) as if they had steel bits in their mouths, I know which of those translations KhairAllah would have intended for us.