From the Mountains to the Plains: The Integration of the Lafofa Nuba into Sudanese Society (review)

130 Booh Reviews From the Mountains to the Plains: The Integration of the Lafofa Nuba into Sudanese Society Leif O. Manger Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1994. Pp 173. Leif O. Manger's account of the Lafofa, a matrilineal people from the southern Nuba Mountains, provides a welcome addition to our knowledge of Nuba groups, complementing earlier works of Nadel (1947), Baumann (1987), Faris (1989), Salih (1983) and Rottenburg (1988) in particular. His careful detailing of the changes that occurred in Lafofa society up to the early 1980s makes this a significant historic document, as the area he describes has since become a battleground for the civil war in the Sudan. Reading the text, it is hard not to wonder sadly if the villages of Liri, where Manger carried out his research, still stand or how many of his informants, introduced by way of case studies, are still alive. This text was originally his Ph.D. thesis presented to the University of Bergen in 1991, and Manger's analysis is clearly influenced by his mentors F. Barth (widely cited in the text), Gunnar Haaland and Gunnar Sorbo. No stranger to either the Sudan or to development studies (he had earlier worked in Northern Kordofan), Manger set out to investigate "socio-economic and socio-cultural changes among the Lafofa in the wake of increased contact with the wider Sudanese society" and commercialization of their economy (15). This then led him to consider more general issues of cultural and national identity in a contemporary "peripheral" society, and how this is expressed in everyday situations. Specifically, he seeks to understand what it means to be Nuban and Lafofa in the Sudan, and the problems of integration in a country where "the processes of Arabization and Islamization have been taken for granted" (H). In describing the Liri region, Manger's emphasis is on its cultural pluralism. He shows how three distinct Nuban groups (the indigenous Liri, the Talasa and the Lafofa, who both settled here in the last century because of ecological and political constraints) live alongside various "Arab" groups (settled pastoralists such as the Kawahla and Howazma, as well as riverainjellaba traders who came in the 1920s and 30s), West African [Fellata] migrants (who began arriving in Book Reviews 131 the 1920s) and Southerners (who came as laborers and servants in the 1970s). In this diverse context, Manger argues that Nuban identity has become stigmatized , being seen (by, he infers, Nubans and non-Nubans alike) to represent the opposite of the ideals of mainstream Arab-Sudanese culture (55) which have persistently invaded this region: through political administration and the court system, through religion and the Islamization of social and ritual life, through the transformation of the region's economic life, and particularly through returning migrant workers with their revised cultural values. "As a result of their wider life situation" (151), therefore, individual Lafofa lives are changing in varying degree as people try to convey to their wider world, "we are human beings" (152), emulating the Arab Sudanese and eschewing those practices and beliefs which the latter regard as "backward" or "superstitious." In this process, symbolic changes (such as in women's roles, or the shifts from matrilineal to patrilineal practices, from traditional to Islamic rites of passage, from beerdrinking to abstinence) assume added social significance. Some of the strongest analysis in this text is that of the economic transformations experienced around the Liri region (hence the subtitle): the Lafofa were originally intensive hill farmers, who with pacification under the British and later independence began to cultivate extensively on the plains, a reversal of the more commonly understood process of development. Clearing lowland "far fields" to grow cotton, sorghum and peanuts, the Lafofa became part of a cash economy, which by the 1970s led to younger men participating in urban migrant labor to support the concomitant changes brought about in their broader socio-cultural life. Such outside experiences in turn reinforced the marginalization of the Lafofa/Nuba conception of self. While this account makes important historical and ethnographic contributions , on the more conceptual level of deconstructing Lafofa identity I find it disappointing. Although Manger argues that "we should not look at a total Lafofa social and...