When walking not in haste/Her laughter not misplaced/Guest of the Desert/You’d say, “A flower in the waste”.
-Poem collected by C.G. and Brenda Seligman, “The Kababish”, Harvard African Studies 1918
A short lyrical outburst in praise of camels, girls, or what not, often sung to while away a journey.
-R.Davies, describing a typical Kababish poem, in his review of the above, Sudan Notes and Records, 1920
The Seligmans, husband and wife, he a medical doctor and ethnologist at the London School of Economics and she his field work companion, were in Dar al-Kababish for only a few months before writing an ethnography of the tribe. Reginald Davies was a British colonial officer with a 25 year career in Sudan, much of that time serving as Inspector of the Kababish roving throughout Kordofan Province, and a Seligman antagonist in the scholarly literature.
Their back-and-forth letters to the editor published in Sudan Notes and Records read as a comedy of mistimed score settling, with the editor often appending the note- “Currently Mr. Davies is somewhere along the Darfur border and cannot be reached for comment.”
The Seligmans must have greatly bothered Davies for their parachutist approach to studying the tribe he lived and rode with and sang songs and recited poetry beside while passing long days on camel back for his appointed rounds between Bara and Nahud, or Mellit and Kutum, or UmBadr and UmSunta, incredulous no doubt of the Seligman obsession with Kababish physiognomy, making much as they did of the pure Arabid Armenoid nose and dark skin due, they assumed, to the admixture of slave bloodlines into what its shaikhs claimed as Sudan’s noblest tribe. You can read this in C.G. Seligman’s “Some Aspects of the Hamitic Problem in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” and his “Races of Africa”, which divided the continent’s peoples into the four categories of Bushmen, Pygmies, Hamites, and Negroids, plus half steps in between where the Kababish found themselves put.
Davies’ memoir of his time with the Kababish is titled The Camel’s Back, and I stand with him against the Seligmans, remembering as did he many things about a camel’s back and nothing at all about KhairAllah’s nose.