If he comes back from the north and his dog recognizes him, don’t converse with him.
-Nyabuoth Nguany Thoan, quoted in Nuer Dilemmas, Sharon Hutchinson
Sharon was my Arabic classmate in Cairo and spent the 1978 Christmas break in Nuerland dancing with them at their cattle camp fires. Naturally she told our class’s best What I Did On Vacation story. This dictum she quotes from a Nuer girl of marriageable age refers to her expectation that a Nuer man returning from a job in Khartoum should be decked out in so much finery that even his dog doesn’t know him, and if not, then he is not suitable as a husband. I don’t know if the same was expected of drovers returning to Dar al-Kababish from Cairo, but I do know their wages were paid in Sudanese pounds and if they had bought finery in overvalued Egyptian pounds, they would have come home even poorer than as they had left.