The Village Sends Its Men

Nobody fights for himself. The young man who walks into the ring at harvest with a stick and a small shield carries his village's name, and the village has prepared him for it: trained under former champions, kept on milk, held to abstinence, taught dances and songs alongside the footwork. What he wins, the village wins. What is broken, the village carries. Nuba stick fighting descends from combat with spear and shield and has kept the risk. Almost no armour is worn. Faces are split, arms and legs broken, and the willingness to stand under that is precisely what the contest measures — the conviction in South Kordofan being that a man who can take a blow in public can be relied on later. Wrestling runs beside it at the same gatherings, the lighter of the two disciplines. That collective logic is why the practice endures, and why it has been attacked. A culture that assembles in the open, names itself and settles its own hierarchies is hard to dissolve. For decades the Nuba have been killed, raped, abducted and pressed to give up their customs; Khartoum has repeatedly tried to legislate Nuba life out of existence. Since 2023 Sudan's war has come to the mountains, and South Kordofan — long a refuge in the rocks — is a front line, with civilians displaced in their hundreds of thousands. Between harvests and offensives, the sticks still come out. These photographs are among the first made among the Nuba since Riefenstahl's contested work of the 1970s. They record not a custom about to vanish, but a decision taken again each season by people with every reason to stop.