Lahawin Erotic

The Lahawin are Arabic-speaking herders of eastern Sudan. What makes them a people is shared descent and a shared yearly route. They count themselves among the Juhayna Arab lineages whose ancestors came south out of Egypt in the late Middle Ages, and they are usually linked to the Rufa'a. Their country is the Butana, the flat clay plain east of the Blue Nile, along with the Atbara River at its edge. For generations the rain has set the year. When the summer storms bring up grass, herds of camels, cattle, sheep and goats spread across the plain. When the pools dry and the ground cracks, the herds pull back toward the river and its wells. The Butana cattle, a red dairy zebu named for the plain, come from herds like theirs.

The Lahawin have never had the Butana to themselves. The Shukriya have long been the leading tribe on the plain. Beja herders work the country east of the Atbara, and the Rashaida, who crossed the Red Sea from Arabia in the nineteenth century, graze camels on some of the same land. The Lahawin speak Sudanese Arabic, part of the Semitic branch of Afro-Asiatic, in a region where the Cushitic Beja language is common in the markets of Kassala. Their Islam is Sunni and practical. Prayer times set the pace of the camp, Ramadan and the two Eids mark the calendar, and the Khatmiyya and other Sufi orders carry real weight across eastern Sudan.

The biggest break came in the 1960s. The reservoir behind Egypt's Aswan High Dam flooded Wadi Halfa, and Sudan moved the Nubians who lost their homes to the Atbara. The government dammed the river at Khashm el Girba and laid out the irrigated New Halfa scheme on dry-season grazing land the Lahawin depended on. Many families took plots as tenants and grew cotton and other crops while keeping their animals. Often some family members worked the land while others went on with the herds. Over the same decades, large mechanized farms around Gedaref took more of the grazing land and narrowed the routes livestock need. Since war broke out in 2023, Gedaref and Kassala have taken in huge numbers of people fleeing Khartoum and Gezira. That puts new strain on the towns, markets and grazing the Lahawin share with everyone else.