HADENDOWA CAMELRY

The Hadendowa were one of the major clans of the Beja tribe, which lived in eastern Sudan. As something of a backwater little changed in the Sudan so the figures in this set would doubtless be appropriate for a very long period of time, but the obvious focus for such a set would be the last two decades of the 19th century, when the Mahdi raised the people in revolt against their Egyptian overlords and established an independent state which fought Egyptian, Abyssinian, British and Italian armies before being crushed in 1899, following the famous battle of Omdurman.

Camels are the obvious form of transport in land such as that on which the Hadendowa lived, but they are not the ideal beast from which to conduct warfare. Various accounts of the battles in the Sudan between 1880 and 1899 make no particular mention of camels used in battle by the Ansar army, so it seems likely that, apart from beasts of burden naturally, they were mainly used for patrols and reconnaissance. As such they would have been a most useful part of the native forces.

The Beja were known for the way they teased their hair into strands and used fat to make it stand out, forming a kind of 19th century perm which earned them the nickname ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzies’ from the British. Once the Ansar state was well established it seems they dropped this habit in favour of shaven heads and turbans or skull caps, as the Mahdiyah imposed some sort of uniformity on the Ansar

Aantal soldaatjes;