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NUBA CONVERSATIONS

Großbritannien 1999 / 53 Min. / Video, BetaSP / OmeU
Regie, Kamera, Schnitt & Ton: Arthur Howes; Produktion: Arthur Howes

Verleih: Arthur Howes, 26 Gateley Road, GB-London SW9 9SZ, Tel: +44 171 274 43 81, Fax: +44 171 274 43 81, e-mail: arthurhowes@hotmail.com

Zehn Jahre nach Kafi's Story kehrt der Regisseur Arthur Howes in den Sudan zu den Angehörigen des Nuba-Stammes zurück, die er in seinem ersten Dokumentarfilm dargestellt hatte. Kurz danach wurde ihre Bergregion Schauplatz des Bürgerkrieges, der den Sudan seither zu großen Teilen zerstörte. Die Bestrebungen der Regierung, absolute Kontrolle über das Gebiet zu erlangen, führten dazu, dass die Angehörigen des Nuba-Stammes verfolgt, deportiert und ihres Landes größtenteils beraubt wurden. Die Kinder kamen in Lager, viele wurden beim Militär Gehirnwäschen unterzogen. Viele ihrer Väter schlossen sich freiwillig dem Militär an, um ihren Lebensunterhalt zu verdienen, und kämpfen heute gegen die eigenen Leute. Einige flohen in andere Länder wie Äthiopien oder Kenia. Die Frauen zogen sich in Gruppen in die Berge zurück. Howes, der große Schwierigkeiten hatte, ein Visum für den Sudan zu erhalten, gelang es, mehrere Männer und Frauen des Stammes ausfindig zu machen, deren Geschichte er Ende der achtziger Jahre erzählt hatte. Er organisierte geheime Vorführungen des Films Kafi's Story, den sie noch nicht gesehen hatten. Ihre Berichte sind ausnahmslos aufschlussreich, und der Kontrast zwischen ihrem Leben damals und heute ist schockierend. Nur selten gelang es einem ausländischen Journalisten bisher, so persönliche Berichte von einer Stammesgemeinschaft zu erhalten. Howes genießt ganz offensichtlich das völlige Vertrauen der Menschen, die er darstellt. Zwar fügt er dem Dokumentarfilm eigene Kommentare hinzu, doch die Erzählungen der Menschen benötigen keine Einführung. Sie sind eindeutig und als Dokumente an sich schon von unschätzbarem Wert.

Ten years after he made Kafi's Story, director Arthur Howes returns to the Sudan to find the members of the Nuba tribe who featured in his earlier documentary film . Soon after he had left the Sudan, the mountain area they had been living in became the battlefield of the civil war that has been destroying much of the Sudan ever since. With a government that is attempting to gain absolute control, the people of Nuba have been persecuted, deported, and deprived of much of their land. Children have been put into camps, many of them brainwashed in the military. Many of their fathers have voluntarily joined the army and are now being forced to fight their own people, as they have not been able to find any other way of making a living. Some of the Nuba people have fled to other countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya. Groups of women have withdrawn further into the mountains. Howes, who had a great deal of difficulty obtaining a visa for the Sudan, manages to find several of the Nuba men and women he filmed back in the late eighties, and their testimonies are, without exception, revealing. He succeeds in organizing secret screenings of Kafi's Story, which they have never seen before, and the contrast between their lives then and now is shocking. It is rare to hear stories collected from so deeply within a community, and which have been given to a foreign journalist who has obviously gained peoples's complete trust. Howes gives his personal perspective during much of his comentary. However the fact is the stories of the Nuba people hardly need any introduction; they are clear and invaluable documents on their own.

THE NUBA OF SUDAN

MOUNTAINS UNDER SIEGE

The Nuba mountains are a scatter of granite outcrops jutting abruptly out of the plain in the central Sudanese region of South Kordofan. With the wide lowlands between them, they cover an area of about 30,000 square miles. Here a group of tribes, totalling about a million people, have lived side by side for centuries, defending themselves from slave raiders and other enemies. The Nuba are a cluster of diverse peoples, speaking more than a fifty languages. `Nuba´ is a collective name given to them by outsiders. (`Nubian´, the name of the people living on the Egypt-Sudan border, is another form of the same word.) Linking the different tribes are commonalities which grow out of the shared conditions of their lives. They are skilful farmers who work either terraces on the hillside or when conditions are peaceful enough, till larger and more fertile fields down in the plain. They grow millet, groundnuts, sesame, and vegetables, and keep cattle. For a long time Nuba have also been leaving their mountains to look for work elsewhere in Sudan. Now they make up a large proportion of the army. However, they are generally treated as second class citizens and are discriminated against in education, employment and civil rights. Ever since the 1960s, the fertile plains have been taken over by large, hugely profitable, mechanised farming schemes owned by businessmen who dominate the Sudanese state. These schemes are ruinous to the environment, to the nomads who graze their herds on the plains, and to the Nuba. Those who refuse to give up their land have been harassed, imprisoned and murdered. It is against this background that the Nuba have become caught up in Sudan's long drawn out civil war. On the one side is the central government in Khartoum determined to impose its own vision of an Islamic State and to wipe out the cultural diversity of this vast country with its many different peoples. On the other is the Sudan Peoples's Liberation Army (SPLA), a movement of the southern peoples, who adhere black Africans to either Christianity or indigenous religions. The Nuba, though geographically in northern Sudan, have much in common with the peoples of the south. Since the 1980s, the Sudanese government has been harassing the Nuba as suspected SPLA supporters, but it was not until 1989 that the `New Kush Division´ of the SPLA arrived in the mountains. They won the support of the Nuba people as liberators and many of the young men joined them. They control much of the countryside, though the government holds the main towns. In retaliation, government forces destroy villages and farms, plant land mines, and arrest people. The object is to induce the people to leave the SPLA-controlled areas and settle in so-called `peace camps´. The official position is that these camps are inhabited by `returnees´ and are centres for relief and development. In fact, the inmates are either kept against their will or sent to work for little or no money on the mechanised farms. Women are raped, children are taken from their parents and put into `Islamic´schools, and men are forced to join the government militia. As one Nuba farmer put it, "Because they have not defeated us, they are burning our villages so that we will go to their towns and become their slaves." One strategy of the government is to use the local Arab tribes against the Nuba. Called `Baggara´, a name meaning `cattle´ these Arab tribes and the Nuba have competed over water and land for generations but they always found ways to limit and resolve conflict, traded together, and even intermarried. But since 1989 the Baggara, who have lost their own pasture lands to commercial farms, have been armed and trained as a paramilitary `People's Defence Force´ (PDF), and encouraged to take over Nuba land. They are now being joined by Nuba recruited to the PDF, often forcibly, from the peace camps or in the cities. Since 1991, the Nuba mountains have been in a state of siege. (Arthur Howes)