Mahas Erotic

The Mahas are Nile Nubians, the people of the Third Cataract in northern Sudan, where the river breaks over granite and the farmland narrows to a strip of date palms and bean fields between rock and desert. Their villages line both banks and the river islands, roughly from the cataract at Tombos north past Kajbar and Delgo, with the Sukkot, their closest kin, downstream and the Danagla of Dongola upstream. What marks a Mahas out, to other Sudanese and to each other, is the language: Nobiin, the direct descendant of the Old Nubian written in the medieval Christian kingdoms of this same valley. It belongs to the Nubian branch of the Nilo-Saharan family and has nothing to do with Arabic, which nearly everyone also speaks. The Danagla next door speak a different Nubian language, Andaandi, and the two are not mutually intelligible.

The Mahas have been Muslim for roughly five centuries, Sunni with a strong Sufi coloring, and they took to religious scholarship early. There is a second Mahas population far to the south, around the meeting of the Blue and White Niles, settled there since about the sixteenth century: on Tuti Island, at Burri, at Aylafun. These Mahas gave up Nobiin generations ago and speak only Arabic, but they kept the name, and they produced a striking number of the holy men of the Funj period. A Mahas teacher from Tuti, Arbab al-Aqaid, opened a Quran school on the south bank in 1691, generally counted as the first settlement at what became Khartoum. Many Mahas lineages claim descent from the Khazraj of Medina, a pedigree that sits without apparent strain beside a language older than Islam in the valley.

In the north this was long frontier country: Ottoman garrisons sat on Sai Island downstream, the Funj sultans claimed the river above, and the Mahas kept petty kings of their own at Kokka. Life since has been shaped by leaving and returning. The land cannot feed everyone, so for generations men have gone to Khartoum, Egypt and the Gulf for work and sent money home to households run by the women. In 1964 the Mahas watched their Halfawi neighbors lose their villages to the Aswan High Dam reservoir. When Khartoum proposed another dam at Kajbar, in the middle of Mahas territory, they organized, and in June 2007 security forces shot four protesters dead. The dam has not been built. That fight, along with Nobiin classes and renewed interest in the Old Nubian alphabet, has made the Mahas more deliberate about being Nubian than they were a generation ago.