It didn’t matter if one was in Dar al-Kababish that one knew about Aristophanes or Plato. The things that mattered were the knowledge of the way in which camels would be taken south at the beginning of the rains and west during the dry season…
-British Colonial Officer quoted in Bonds of Silk: The Human Factor in the British Administration of the Sudan, Francis Deng and M.W. Daly
We too came to Sudan with the wrong books, having read Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande and Talal Asad’s The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe, but not David Werner’s Where There is No Doctor or Murray Dickson’s Where There is No Dentist. Luckily we had trouble with neither indigestion nor our incisors, although knowledge of Aristophanean comedy might have helped KhairAllah when we first mounted our camels and he mistook it as tragedy.