From 1962 till 1977 Leni Riefenstahl
had been living as the first white woman with a special permission
issued by the Sudanese government in the remote valleys of the
central Sudan among the mysterious Nabu tribes, had studied their way
of life and recorded it on film in pictures of unusual fascination
for eternity. Particularly the circumstance that through the advance
of civilization the Nuba's way of life is approaching its
irreversible end is giving these picture documents a unique
anthropological, ethnological and cultural-historical importance.
Who are the Nuba?
Since the outbreak of the civil war in
1983 there have been living in the central Sudan in the Kordofanian
province in the Nuba mountains still between 8,000 and 10,000 Masakin
Quisar Nuba of different language groups and far from any
civilization out of all Nuba tribes counting about half a million
people all together. The Austrian anthropologist S.F. Nadel reported
that there should have existed 105 different Nuba languages, not
dialects but different languages as there are in Europe.
With these sensational pictures, Leni
Riefenstahl raised an everlasting monument to this no warlike people
in Africa.(leni-riefenstahl.de)
