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Sudan / South Sudan: 'A Niam-Niam (Azande) Minstrel' (Georg August Schweinfurth, 1874)

Sudan / South Sudan: 'A Niam-Niam (Azande) Minstrel' (Georg August Schweinfurth, 1874)

'As the darkness came on, our camp was enlivened by the appearance of the grotesque figure of a singer, who came with a bunch of feathers in his hat, and these, as he wagged his head to the tune of the music, became entangled with the braids of his hair...Their instrument is the local guitar, the thin jingling of which accords perfectly well with the nasal humming of the minstrel'.

The Azande are a tribe of north central Africa. Their number is estimated by various sources at between 1 and 4 million. They live primarily in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in southwestern Sudan, and in the southeastern Central African Republic.

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