Have you ever met someone in a crowd of strangers, all new to you, yet whom you felt as a fact you had met before?

This is what happened to me this week when I went to visit a Unicef supported Education project in Karyet village of the Handadawa tribe. The Handadawa are a sub group of the Beja ethnic group, a nomadic people, which occupies Eastern Sudan, Eriteria and Egypt. A group of villagers, all male, gathered to welcome us and discuss the project with us.

The man in the middle reminded me of someone I had seen before

My eye was drawn to one villager, the man in this picture, above. He had a piercing look, striking facial features and an Afro hair straight style out of the 70’s. I knew we had never met but he still looked very familiar. I wracked my brain to remember where. The closest I could recall was a friend from the Solomon Islands in the South pacific who had a similar style.

But, no. That was not it.

The answer came to me an hour later just when we were about to leave. I noticed the unique curved stick that that the Handadawa people use to heard their animals. It is quite short and not really very useful for herding animals or even as a walking aid.

Considering how practical their life is, how could they have invented such an inefficient implement?

Suddenly it struck me, the stick looked like a stylized ‘boomerang’ the one used by the Aborigines of Australia. I was in fact told the men and boys sometimes use it to hunt birds and small animals in a similar way to the Australian first people.

That is when I remembered where I had seen the Afro sporting man before. He reminded of an Australian Aborigine musician I met in Perth Australia two years ago.

I have always been struck by the unique facial features common with many Aboriginal men and women. They are really distinctive. Many have piercing eyes, and sharp angled facial features, almost Caucasian, but with the black skin of Africans. Even the back skin color is different somehow, sometimes lighter on the surface, ‘off black’ but almost blue in other cases. The hair is long and not as curly as for most African people. I have never seen Africans who look exactly like Aborigines, until now.

My life has taught me that the history of the Earth’s people is in some ways stranger than any fiction we could write. Is it possible, then, that there could be a genetic link between the Beja and Aborigines of Australia?

Lacking the resources to properly answer this question, I would like to consider a cheaper alternative. A comparison of the language and the genesis stories of the Beja and the Aboriginal peoples. For instance, does the Benja cosmogony also speak of ‘the dream time?’

If you know, please let me know

Australian Aboriginal man