Shaigiya Erotic

Ask where the Shaigiya come from and the answer is a stretch of river: the great bend of the Nile in northern Sudan, running roughly from Korti upstream past Merowe and Karima toward the Fourth Cataract. Dar al-Shaigiya is a narrow green band of date palms and small fields squeezed between the water and open desert, and it sits on very old history. Jebel Barkal, the sacred mountain of ancient Kush, and the royal pyramids at Nuri and El-Kurru stand in Shaigiya country. The people living around them today speak Arabic, are Sunni Muslims, and take their name from an ancestor called Shayig. Like the other Ja'ali tribes of the river, they claim descent from al-Abbas, the Prophet's uncle. Most historians see them as Nubians of the old river kingdoms who took up Arabic and Islam over several centuries.

They made their name on horseback. From the late 1600s the Shaigiya threw off the Abdallab chiefs who ruled this part of the river for the Funj Sultanate. They became an independent confederation of fighting sections under their own kings, called meks, and their cavalry raids were feared up and down the Nile. That ended in 1820, when Muhammad Ali's Turco-Egyptian army marched south and broke the Shaigiya horsemen with guns near Korti. Sudanese memory puts a woman at the center of that battle: Mahira bint Abboud, remembered for driving the warriors forward. Then the Shaigiya changed course. They went to work for the new government as irregular cavalry, garrison troops and tax collectors, and they stood with it against the Mahdist revolt of the 1880s. That closeness to the state lasted into the modern era. Along with the Ja'alin and the Danagla, the Shaigiya are counted among the northern river peoples who have supplied much of Sudan's political, military and administrative class since independence.

Their Islam is shaped by Sufi orders, and the Khatmiyya has long been strong in the region. Domed saints' tombs and dhikr gatherings are part of ordinary village life. Many Shaigiya now live in Khartoum, Omdurman or the Gulf instead of beside the family palms, but the river villages are still home base, and so is the music. Shaigi song, built around the five-string tambour lyre, is one of the most recognizable regional sounds in Sudan, and weddings are where it gets played loudest. Some older men and women still carry shulukh, cheek scars that once showed a person's lineage at a glance. The custom has mostly faded.