Village life in southern Sudan
Early photography
Village life in Southern Sudan: Alexine Tinne’s photos
Published Feb 21, 2024
In February 2024, Leiden University Libraries announced the acquisition of 18 previously unknown photographs by Dutch traveller Alexine Tinne. The photos date from 1862, and show life in Gondokoro, a village in Southern Sudan that no longer exists. And: they capture jewellery, hairstyle and dress!
Alexine Tinne: traveller and photographer
Alexine Tinne was a member of the Dutch elite in the 19th century. Her father had become rich through the exploitation of sugar plantations. When he died, she inherited a fortune, and decided to exchange her hometown of The Hague for a life of travel and photography.
Read more about her life and photographs in this article.
Photography in the 19th century was still a cumbersome activity. Instead of automatic presets, you actually had to know what you were doing in terms of exposure and lighting. That all had to be set manually, photo cameras were heavy and large, as were the tripods needed to keep them steady for the duration of the shot (no quick snaps in the 19th century!).
And instead of a film (anyone remember the day where you had to insert a filmroll in your camera instead of a memory card…?), early cameras worked with glass plates. Besides bringing your own equipment, you also needed the chemicals and tools to develop the images, and understand how that process worked.
So imagine going on a photo journey in the 19th century: loaded with glass plates, wooden tripods, heavy cameras, tins and buckets of chemicals and darkroom equipment. Alexine dragged all this and more to southern Sudan.
Southern Sudan: early photographs
Alexine set out to travel to the sources of the Nile. She left Cairo in 1861, with a series of river ships, a crew of enslaved staff, and her mother and aunt. The next year, she arrived in the village of Gondokoro: a destination that was known from her travel documentation, but of which no photographs survived. Until these photos were discovered!
These 18 photographs show scenes of village life. All of them are posed: taking a photograph was a time-consuming process, one of the reasons why early photography often shows buildings and landscapes rather than people.
The village itself consisted of both wooden buildings of poles and mudbrick covered walls, and structures of alternating rows of stone bricks and baked mudbrick. You see a glimpse of it in the photo above: click to enlarge it.
In a few photographs, details of adornment can be seen: let’s see what we can make of those!
Jewellery of southern Sudan: bracelets
The first photo above (click to enlarge it) shows two children engaged in hairdressing. The child on the left is picking something out of the child’s hair on the right. Both children wear beaded necklaces, and the child on the left also wears what looks like a single bracelet. But is it…?
The woman holding a basket on her head (in the gallery below, click to enlarge the photo) is wearing three of such bracelets on the arm planted in her side, and one on the arm holding the basket. I included a detail of that photo in the gallery above.
Looking at other photographs in which bracelets are worn, such as the other two children shown above, and more specifically at the shadows cast by the outer rim of the bracelets, I think we’re not looking at a single bracelet, but at a stack of bracelets of the type shown above. These are ivory bracelets from Congo (close to Gondokoro) and southern Sudan. Its name according to Griselda el Tayib is sin fil [1].
It is of course difficult to compare a 160-year old photo with bracelets existing today, but I believe this is the type of jewellery we’re looking at.
Dress and hairstyles of southern Sudan: the rahat skirt
The children in the photos are wearing the very familiar leather skirt known as rahat. An actual example is shown above. This skirt was worn by little girls [2] until they reached puberty: the collection also contains a photo of a young adult woman wearing such a skirt.
Such skirts also survive from archaeological excavations in Sudan and southern Egypt. I have seen fragments of leather skirts during my participation in the study season of the Ottoman leather of Qasr Ibrim, but they also date much further back to the medieval period. [3]
The difference in their hairstyles points to a difference in the stages of their life: the child with the braids sitting on the right is in a different social stage of life than the child with the little tufts on the left.
Adornment of southern Sudan: leather amulet container
The woman holding a basket on her head is also wearing a leather amulet container or higab, hanging from a long leather cord. These have a very long history, and are abundant in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
The photo shows beads and a cowrie shell strung onto the leather cord. The upper part of the leather container seems to be decorated with a pattern of horizontal lines, much like the image of a comparable container on this blog.
Alexine Tinne’s early photos of southern Sudan: a historic source
These 18 photographs are incredibly important. They show us what the village of Gondokoro looked like, and what its inhabitants wore in terms of dress and adornment. I honestly could not be more excited about this new acquisition!
See the press release about the discovery of the photos here.
The photos have been acquired by Leiden University Libraries with financial support of Vereniging Rembrandt, a Dutch cultural organisation supporting the acquisition, research and restauration of art in the public domain.
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References
[1] G. el Tayib 2017, Regional Folk Costumes of Sudan, p. 138.
[2] G. el Tayib 2017, Regional Folk Costumes of Sudan, p. 100.
[3] See this blog by Women’s Literacy Sudan and this blog by Textile Research Centre, Leiden for more on the rahat skirt.
S. van Roode, [write the title as you see it above this post], published on the Bedouin Silver website [paste the exact link to this article], accessed on [the date you are reading this article and decided it was useful for you].
Sigrid van Roode
Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. Her main field of expertise is jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, as well as archaeological and archaeological revival jewellery. She has authored several books on jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Turquoise Mountain Jordan, and many others. She provides consultancy and research on jewellery collections for both museums and private collections, teaches courses and curates exhibitions. She is not involved in the business of buying and selling jewellery, and focuses on research, knowledge production, and education only.
