SUDAN. Tabanya, Nuba Mountains, Sudan. January, 2024.

Traditional Nuba wrestling near the village of Tabanya in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains.

For thousands of years, ritualized wrestling has been a fixture of life for the dozens of distinct tribes that constitute the Nuba. The individual customs vary among communities—some hold elaborate tournaments to mark the planting or harvest seasons; others wrestle as part of wedding celebrations—but the common practice is part of the cultural glue that holds the Nuba together. With the passage of time, Nuba wrestling practices have evolved, and today wrestlers non longer fight naked, as immortalized by the iconic photographs of George Rodger in the 1950’s and Leni Riefenstahl's in the 70’s.

The Nuba people are indigenous inhabitants of central Sudan, and they are made up of 50 various indigenous ethnic groups who inhabit the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan state in Sudan. Since 2011, when the southern part of Sudan became an independent state as South Sudan, the Nuba now live in the southern part of Sudan.