Cairo to Kisumu

by Frank G. Carpenter

Being followers of the Prophet, the Bisharin consider a difference of fifty years in ages no bar to matrimony. This girl wife probably spent a whole day in straightening out her kinky hair with a mixture of grease and clay, and adorning it with beads.

Omdurman, which once had a population of a million, is a strange city of mud. The houses and stores are one-story flat-roofed buildings with drain pipes extending out over the street that drip on the passers-by when it rains.

Within sight of the British and their civilization, the Sudanese blacks live miserably, crowded into their burrow-like mud huts, possessing only a few pots and bowls and the sheets of calico in which many of the women wrap themselves.

I came down the Blue Nile from Khartum in a skiff. The distance is about five miles, but we had to tack back and forth all the way, so that the trip took over two hours. The mamour met me on landing. He had a good donkey for me, and we spent the whole day in going through the city, making notes, and taking the photographs which now lie before me.

The people are stranger than any I have ever seen so far in my African travels. They come from all parts of the Sudan and represent forty or fifty-odd tribes. Some of the faces are black, some are dark brown, and others are a rich cream colour. One of the queerest men I met during my journey was an African with a complexion as rosy as that of a tow-headed American baby and hair quite as white. He was a water carrier, dressed in a red cap and long gown. He had two great cans on the ends of a pole which rested on his shoulder, and was trotting through the streets carrying water from one of the wells to his Sudanese customers. His feet and hands, which were bare, were as white as my own. Stopping him, I made him lift his red fez to see whether his hair was white from age. It was flaxen, however, rather than silver, and he told me that his years numbered only twenty-five. The mamour, talking with him in Arabic, learned that he was a pure Sudanese, coming from one of the provinces near the watershed of the Congo. He said that his parents were jet-black but that many men of his colour lived in the region from whence he came. I stood him up against the mud wall in the street with two Sudanese women, each blacker than the ink with which this paper is printed, and made their photographs. The man did not like this at first, but when at the close I gave him a coin worth about twenty-five cents he salaamed to the ground and went away happy.

I am surprised to see how many of these Sudanese have scars on their faces and bodies. Nearly every other man I meet has the marks of great gashes on his cheeks, forehead, or breast, and some of the women are scarred so as to give the idea that terrible brutalities have been perpetrated upon them. As a rule, however, these scars have been self-inflicted. They are to show the tribe and family to which their owners belong. The mamour tells me that every tribe has its own special cut, and that he can tell just where a man comes from by such marks. The scars are of all shapes. Sometimes a cheek will have three parallel gashes, at another time you will notice that the cuts are crossed, while at others they look like a Chinese puzzle.

The dress of the people is strange. Those of the better classes wear long gowns, being clad not unlike the Egyptians. Many of the poor are almost naked, and the boys and girls often go about with only a belt of strings around the waist. The strings, which are like tassels, fall to the middle of the thigh. Very small children wear nothing whatever.