Karima

The land around Karima is the old heart of Kush. Egypt's New Kingdom pushed this far up the Nile around 1500 BC and identified the flat-topped hill beside the river, Jebel Barkal, as a home of the god Amun, building a great temple at its foot. When Egyptian power faded, a local dynasty rose at Napata, the settlement around the mountain, and in the eighth century BC its king Piye marched north and made himself pharaoh; his successors, among them Taharqa, ruled Egypt as its 25th dynasty and were buried under pyramids at El-Kurru and Nuri, within a few kilometres of the modern town.

Napata was sacked by an Egyptian army in 593 BC, and by about the third century BC the royal burials had moved south to Meroë, though Jebel Barkal kept its religious standing for centuries. Christian Nubian kingdoms followed, and the monastery at Ghazali in the desert valley behind the town dates from that period; Islam and Arabic spread through the region from about the 14th century, and the Shaigiya became the dominant people of this stretch of the river.

Karima itself is a modern town. It grew in the early 20th century at the terminus of a railway branch built from near Abu Hamad, becoming the transfer point between the trains and the Nile steamers that ran downstream towards Dongola, and a market for the farming villages along the bank. Archaeological excavation at Barkal, Nuri and El-Kurru from the early 20th century made its name abroad, and the UNESCO listing of 2003 brought a small stream of visitors that lasted until the war began in 2023.

Karima lies in Shaigiya country, on the edge of the Nubian-speaking north, and the two traditions meet here. Arabic is the everyday language, the Dongolawi Nubian language is spoken downstream, and families on both sides take pride in a long lineage tied to particular villages and stretches of riverbank. The Shaigiya figured prominently in the Egyptian Army and later in the Sudan Defence Force.

Houses follow the northern pattern: thick mud-brick walls around a courtyard, flat roofs, and large doors and gateways painted in bright colours and geometric patterns. Every house keeps a room for guests, and hospitality runs in a fixed order of water, tea, coffee and then food, offered to strangers as a matter of course. Weddings last several days, with a henna night and the jirtig ceremony in which the couple are adorned with red silk, gold and perfume.

Music is played on the tambour, the five-stringed lyre of the Nubian and Shaigiya north, with hand-clapping and drums, and the songs of Mohammed Wardi, the Nubian singer and cultural icon of modern Sudan, are known in every house. Islam is observed with Sufi devotion, and the domed tombs of local holy men stand at the edge of villages, drawing families to their annual commemorations. Life is lived early and late because of the heat, and a long absence in Khartoum or the Gulf followed by a return for Eid is a normal shape for a working life here.

Karima is a small town of a few tens of thousands of people, the market and administrative centre for the villages along this bend of the Nile and the crossing point to Merowe on the far bank. Its population has risen since 2023 with families displaced from Khartoum, and current figures are not reliable.

Farming is the base of life. A strip of fields and palm groves only a few hundred metres wide runs along both banks, growing dates above all, with wheat, broad beans, onions, spices and fodder crops watered by diesel pumps where waterwheels once turned. Livestock is kept in the villages, and the Merowe Dam downstream supplies power to the national grid. Trade, transport, government offices, schools and the hospital provide most salaried work, and remittances from relatives in Khartoum and the Gulf pay for much of the building on the edge of town. Informal gold mining in the surrounding desert has drawn workers since the 2010s.

Days start before sunrise and stop through the worst of the afternoon heat, and the evening is spent outdoors in courtyards and at tea stalls. Since 2023 fuel, electricity and medicines have been short, prices have risen steeply, and the small tourist business around the pyramids — guesthouses, drivers, guides — has disappeared entirely. Displaced families are housed with relatives, in schools and in rented rooms, straining water and food supplies in a town with little to spare.

Northern cooking is plain and built on what the river grows. The characteristic bread here is a thick wheat pancake torn into pieces with a meat or vegetable stew poured over it, alongside kisra, the thin fermented sorghum flatbread eaten elsewhere in Sudan. Stews are mullah, made with okra fresh or dried and powdered as waika, with dried meat called sharmout, or with greens thickened by dakwa, the local peanut paste.

Breakfast is ful, broad beans simmered overnight and mashed with oil, cumin, white cheese and onion, eaten from a shared bowl with bread. Meat is grilled over charcoal for guests and feasts, goat and mutton above all, and fish from the Nile is fried whole. Nubian households make their own thin wheat breads and stews of molokhia greens, and wheat is more common in the north than in the rest of the country.

Dates are the pride of the region, the Barakawi variety above all, grown along the bank, eaten fresh and dried, pressed into paste, stuffed with nuts and set before every guest. Sweet tea with mint or cinnamon is drunk all day, jebena coffee is roasted, pounded with ginger and cardamom and strained through grass from a clay pot, and cold karkade, an infusion of dried hibiscus, is the usual drink against the heat. In Ramadan the fast is broken with dates and sweet drinks. Alcohol was banned under the sharia laws of 1983 and the ban was lifted for non-Muslims in 2020, although araqi, a date spirit, has long been distilled quietly in the villages.