The Nuba Mountains

In ancient Egyptian, Nuba means slave. The Nuba Mountains are the mountains of slaves, where for centuries caravans of slave raiders would travel to hunt the strongest and healthiest Africans.

The Nuba Mountains are stony islands in the midst of a sea of savannahs, located between the southern rim of the world’s biggest desert, the Sahara, and the Sudd, an immense swamp by the Nile further to the south. The wildly scattered red granite hills attract rain and retain water even in the most thirst-stricken times. The black soil between the rocks is extremely fertile and enables sorghum production for more than fifty African tribes that took refuge in these natural fortresses when they fled the slave raiders from the wider area of central Africa. Far from the eyes of the world and in almost complete isolation, the locals managed to preserve their way of life and values, which have practically disappeared everywhere else on the planet today.

But today machines are taking over the work of slaves, so human slaves are no longer needed. Present-day empires mainly raid natural resources – water, fertile soil and minerals like gold, uranium and of course oil, which was discovered in 1978 about 100 kilometres south of these mountains by the American oil corporation Chevron.

The war for control over natural resources that broke out between the Arab and African peoples in Sudan five years later, in 1983, is led by corporations with headquarters in the west and east of the planet. But the “kill a slave with a slave” strategy is causing most harm to the indigenous Africans on both sides of the border, between what is left of the old Sudan and the new Republic of South Sudan, which gained its independence in 2011.