Nuba Condolences For Leni Riefenstahl
We are all
saddened to hear of the death of Photographer and Filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl on
8th September 2003. Leni will always be remembered by the Nuba people
and also by many people around the world as one of the most important film
director of all time. She was the first women photographer from the Western
World after George Roger (1949) to visit Nuba Mountains in 1962 where she was
well received by the Nuba of Masakin and Kau Nyaro Hills.
She lived among them for almost seven years and she loved them. They too
loved her. Leni was fascinated by
the Nuba life style, physiqueness, and Nuba traditions. She took many unique and
magnificent pictures of these Nuba, which were later published in her two famous
book: “People of Kau and The
Last of the Nuba”. These two books of Leni have made Nuba famous as exotic
subjects of coffee-table books, which generated great interest for the Nuba
among anthropologists, photographers and documentary film-makers from all over
the world.
It is no doubt
that the work of Leni and George Rodger, the famous British Photographer had
helped to make Nuba known to the outside world and also put the name of the Nuba
Mountains on the map. However, these good works had provoked the Sudanese
Central Governments, which responded through the years with a campaign of
destroying Nuba cultural identity and traditions. During all these years Nuba
have been suppressed, marginalized and discriminated. Today, the Nuba political
future is at stake, as their issue has been sidelined at the current Sudan’s
Peace Talks under the auspices of Inter-Governmental Authority for Development
(IGAD) in Kenya
Many Nuba will
remember Lein through her good work on Nuba of Masakin and Kau Nyaro, which they
considered it to be as the last historical records of what was once Nuba way of
life.
We in Nuba
Survival on behalf of the Nuba people would like to pay our condolences and
respect to the family and friends of the late Leni Riefenstahl.
May her soul rest
in Eternal Peace.
Nuba Survival
London
10th
September 2004