Articles exploring Sudan’s living cultures, creative work, traditions, and the people who sustain them.
Sudan's Indigenous Sport: From Ancient Nubia to Nuba Wrestling
Cover: Nuba wrestling in Bahri, Sudan, 29 August 2014. Photograph by Joseph Bautista (Ginger Brew), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. No changes were made to the image. Sudan has no need to manufacture a national sport. It already has one. On wrestling grounds in Khartoum, athletes from different communities have competed before crowds drawn largely from the city’s working population. The sport they practice developed from wrestling traditions of the Nuba Mountains, but it no longer belongs only to one neighborhood or one ethnic group. Anthropologist Paul Hayes describes contemporary Sudanese wrestling as a practice adapted over the past three or four decades from diverse Nuba Mountains rituals. In the capital, he found, it brought together thousands of ethnically diverse athletes and spectators and allowed status to be earned through skill and conduct rather than ethnicity, religion, occupation, or political connections. ...