THE SUDAN: Euthanasia in the Otoros

Since science can now distinguish the incurably sick from the curable, mercy killing is justified—so goes the chatter in cocktail bars. The naked, woolly-haired Nuba tribesmen who live in the Otoro Hills, deep in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, did not wait for the cocktail-bar moralists; the Nuba have been euthanasians since way back. Once they are sure that a tribesman is possessed of a djinn (evil spirit), they bump him off. Everybody (in the Otoros), of course, is quite certain that djinns inhabit the bodies of the lame, the deaf and the dumb.

A djinn-infested Nuba is marched out of his village in a procession headed by a goat wearing a big brass bell. Victim and goat are buried alive. When the bell stops ringing, the tribesmen know that the goat and the man are dead, and the djinn is banished. Recently explorers in the Otoros came across the graves of two crippled children and a deaf-&-dumb woman. Last week police arrested 22 tribesmen for murder.

This euthanasia, like the Western variety practiced by the Nazis, was not entirely consistent. Arrested as a ringleader of the mercy killers was a blind man. Apparently, his djinn knew a ward leader or a geneticist.