Humr

The Humur are intrepid hunters of elephants and the giraffe. Humrawi hunters' main reason for hunting the giraffe is the preparation of the drink umm nyolokh.

The Humur are most commonly known outside the Sudan as the preparers of a drink made from the liver and bone marrow of a giraffe, which they call umm nyolokh, and which they claim is intoxicating, causing dreams and hallucinations. If substantiated by a chemical analysis, this claim would make the giraffe the first mammal to be discovered to contain a hallucinogen in its bodily tissues, and the Humrawi the first people to have discovered the existence of such a mammal. Ian Cunnison, who accompanied the Humr on some of their giraffe-hunting expeditions in the late 1950s, noted that:

It is said that a person, once he has drunk umm nyolokh, will return to giraffe again and again. Humr, being Mahdists, are strict abstainers [from alcohol] and a Humrawi is never drunk (sakran) on liquor or beer. But he uses this word to describe the effects which umm nyolokh has upon him.

Cunnison's account of a psychoactive mammal found its way into a mainstream literature through a conversation between Dr. Wendy James of the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford and specialist on the use of hallucinogens and intoxicants in society Richard Rudgley, who considered its implications in his popular work The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Substances. Rudgley hypothesises that the presence of the hallucinogenic compound DMT might account for the putative intoxicating properties of umm nyolokh.