On animism, the 99 percent, and the pattern that appears everywhere I spent years in Sudan before I understood what I had been taught not to see. The work took me into camps and villages across the country, and the Dinka were among the people I sat with. What struck me then, and what I did not have language for until much later, was how completely their account of the world held together. Nhialic sat at the center of it. Not a spirit of the sky, though that is how it gets tra
