The Nuba of Kau, known as the ‘South East Nuba’, live only a hundred miles away from the gentle and peace-loving Mesakin Nuba observed by Leni Riefenstahl in her first book. Yet they speak another language, follow different customs, and are very different in character and temperament. The knife-fights, dances of love and elaborately painted Picassoesque faces and bodies captured in the images of People of Kau show a wild and passionate people, unlike any other on earth today. Leni Riefenstahl, legendary film-maker and photographer, spent sixteen sweltering weeks with the Nuba of Kau in 1975, weeks she herself describes as ‘a time of almost intolerable hardship and exertion.’ Yet from those weeks emerged the extraordinary photographs that make up this ground-breaking monograph. People of Kau bears magnificent witness to a remarkable tribe menaced by the advance of industrial civilisation and sinking slowly into the mists of time.
