The Sudan Handbook

PeoPles & cultuRes of tWo sudans 77

the original Dongolawi communities maintain a traditional rural life

as date-farmers, cultivating the strip of fertile land along the banks of

the river downstream of the great Nile bend. Here a Nubian language

continues to be spoken, adding a significant undertone to an otherwise

Arab-inflected cultural identity.

Beyond the northern Sudanese heartland, away from the two Niles,

in Kordofan and parts of Darfur, is the territory of nomadic Arab camel

and cattle pastoralists. Many Arabs in Kordofan and Darfur trace their

ancestry, nominally at least, to a second wave of migration sometime

after the seventeenth century, which entered Sudan from the east. Their

traditions and ways of life – and their historical origins – are distinct from

those of the farming people living along the river and the latter’s urban-

ized relatives in the cities of the heartland. This difference is reflected in

a paradoxical use of the term ‘Arab’ in riverain communities: it may be

used as a self-description, but it may also be used in a pejorative sense

to refer to these desert-dwelling nomads.

The Kababish, an historically recent confederation of camel keepers

who live in the arid lands of northern Kordofan, have been seen as

typifying the way of life of the desert-dwelling Arab peoples – though

since the 1980s many of them have lived in poverty on the fringes of

Omdurman, having lost their livestock to droughts and misgovernment.

In northern Kordofan and in northern Darfur there are numerous other

such groups of Abbala – camel-keeping tribes – wresting a living from the

harsh environment, as herders and as harvesters of gum Arabic. Further

south, in southern Darfur and southern Kordofan – in the northern part

of the north–south borderlands – where greater rainfall expands the

possibilities of livestock husbandry, is a broad belt of cattle-keeping Arab

peoples, known collectively as Baggara (their name derived from the

Arabic term for cow). Baggara groups include the Hawazma, Misseriya,

Rizeigat, Taisha and Habbaniya. To a still greater extent than other Arab

incomers, these cattle nomads of the west have politically and economi-

cally assimilated indigenous populations, while themselves being

physically assimilated, an ancestry visible in skin tones that are darker

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors than^ those^ of^ most^ other^ Arab^ Sudanese,^ as^ dark^ as^ many^ southerners.

(www.riftvalley.net).