Wrestling among Sudan’s Nuba
Every week at the Haj Youssef stadium in the outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan, hundreds of people gather to watch Nuba wrestling, a tribal practice going back thousands of years. In the 1990s, the Sudanese government declared a war against the Nuba. Around 100,000 people were killed and hundreds of thousands more were internally displaced, mostly on Khartoum. Haj Youssef stadium has become a space for Nuba people to connect with their culture and revive their community spirit.
Pictures by Walid Farouk
Dhikr at Hamed al-Nil Tomb in Omdurman
Sheikh Hamed al-Nil was a 19th-century Sufi leader of the Qadiriyah order (tariqa). Each Friday afternoon adherents of the tariqa gather to dance and pray. The ceremony starts with a march across the cemetery to the tomb of the sheikh. As they march, they chant, accompanied by drums and cymbals. Outside the tomb, a large open space is cleared for the dervishes and the banner is raised for the ritual to begin. The pace of the chanting picks up, and the dervishes start to circle the clearing, bobbing and clapping. Occasionally a dervish will break off and start twirling, spinning on one foot and lost in his own personal path to God.
Pictures by Walid Farouk
