The people principle

by Ron Willingham

Although the Nuba of Kau - anthropologists call them the "South East Nuba" - live little more than 100 miles from the gentle and peace-loving Mesakin, they speak a different language and observe different customs and conventions. A wild and passionate people, they are diametrically opposed to the Mesakin in character and temperament. Their knife-fights, dances of love and elaborately painted faces and bodies, which resemble "living Picassos", are unequalled by any surviving primitive race on earth. Leni Riefenstahl does not claim to have captured their entire way of life in this book. Rather, she has concentrated on photographing what distinguishes the South East Nuba from other tribes of her acquaintance. Leni Riefenstahl's unforgettable photographic impressions of the life of the People of Kau bear final witness to a primitive tribe which is menaced by the advance of industrial civilization and slowly subsiding into the mists of time.