The Sudan Handbook

94 the sudan handbook

called down, through the music and song they specially respond to, and

possess the women involved.

Sennar is a bustling town with a mixed population and its religious

life (today including four churches) reflects this scene. In Sennar, some

women are practitioners of zar; some are involved in the parallel cult of

tembura (which emerged historically from ex-slave and displaced military

communities). There is also a holy woman of the family of the Khalifa

Abdallahi, the successor to the Mahdi, who acts as a consultant to patients

in the manner of the ubiquitous feki or holy man of the Islamic tradition.

Within the ‘Three Towns’ (Khartoum, Khartoum North and Omdurman)

the tembura cult is also active among former military families (many of

slave descent) in Omdurman. The spirit world is acted out there in the

hierarchies of Sudanese military history, with all its accompaniment of

bugles, uniforms, and marching.

Christianity, Ancient and Modern: Anglo-Egyptian

Policies and their Aftermath

Christianity is the other key world religion of the modern Sudan. Its

history goes back further than Islam. But apart from archaeological

remains, there are few signs left in the modern Sudan of the string of

Christian kingdoms which extended along the Nile valley in medieval

times, and were linked with Ethiopia. In the early medieval period, as

far as we know, Christian teaching and practice was largely confined to

a monastic elite, but its impression on ordinary Nubian communities

is suggested by the persistence of the cross in some aspects of popular

culture. The small number of Coptic Christians in Sudan today are more

recent arrivals from Egypt, who came, along with Greek and other trading

and professional families, in the wake of the Ottoman conquest in the

nineteenth century. It was in the middle of that century too that Christian

missionaries from the West, specifically Catholic priests of the order of

the Verona Fathers, under the inspiring leadership of Daniel Comboni,

began to establish outposts in the southern regions of the Sudan.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors From^ its^ inception,^ the^ Anglo-Egyptian^ Condominium^ government^

(www.riftvalley.net).