Volume 1 — APPENDIX E.

ETHNOLOGY OF THE SUDAN.

The wealth of the Nile Valley has at all times tempted invasion; the land presents no serious physical obstacles, and the people who live in the countries bordering it have always been unsettled and migratory. We expect, therefore, to find here a perfect babel of tongues and races. To mention invasions from the East alone and within the historic period, Africa has been overrun by the dynastic Egyptian, the Hyksos, the Abyssinians and the Arabs, and from the early cemeteries of Abydos archæologists have collected skulls which appear to show that from the time of the Stone Age four races at least have contributed to the population of Egypt. These races Kollmann[237] identifies as Punts, who were, perhaps, of Semitic origin, Nubians, Libyans, and Negroes, the last including several Pygmies and, to judge from their grave-offerings, some men of wealth and consideration. In the Sudan no detailed researches have been made in ancient burial-places, but we may confidently expect some day to read in the northern half the same story as in Egypt.

Invasion, moreover, is not the only disturbing element. The natives of the Sudan, even when they have adopted a more or less settled life, are great travellers: traffic in human flesh and conquest for the sake of human flesh have nowhere been pursued so long and so thoroughly. The native changes his abode without hesitation, and his love of strange women is passing Solomon’s. A hundred years ago Brown found Darfur full of Dongolawi traders. Fifty years ago the same race had turned their eyes to Kordofan and the Bahr El Ghazal, and wherever they go they intermarry with the women of the land. The Takruris have similarly in a peaceable way shifted their abode from Darfur to the province of Kassala within quite recent days.

Yet again, in the southern half we have seen within the last few centuries a succession of loosely-knit empires (Fungs, Shilluks, etc.) which carry the name and often the language of a single tribe over a wide area and then melt away, leaving behind only confusion to the ethnologist. What we know to have existed for the last thousand years, we can premise for the last fifty (?) thousand. So intricately mixed indeed is this southern half that the Nileland has been aptly described as the Negro Potpourri.

But there are mitigating circumstances which we must also take into account, otherwise the ethnologist would indeed be, of all men, the most hopeless.

In the first place, invaders do not exterminate and, by what seems to be almost a law, the old Somatic types tend continually to reassert themselves; a new invasion, that is, changes for a time the numerical proportion of different types, but as the newcomers are absorbed the old order returns, and the preponderating elements in the population become increasingly evident. It is a commonplace in Egypt that a Turk of the third generation is indistinguishable from a native.

In the second place, invasions and migrations have gone on from time immemorial, but they have always come from the same regions. Kollmann, as we saw, makes a four-fold division of the prehistoric inhabitants of Abydos; this corresponds to our four-fold division into Semites, Nubians, Libyans, and Negroes. The successive inroads into our area have meant, therefore, not the introduction of new constituents but the stiffening of an element already present by a fresh influx of kindred blood.

These two facts simplify the problem: they do not enable us to say that so-and-so is an Arab, indeed they make it impossible to say so with scientific certainty, but they will enable us ultimately to say which original stock has contributed most to the population of any given district. “Ultimately” because at present the data which alone will permit us to delimit the frontiers of the various peoples are wanting.[238] Along the river, especially, one stock shades into another with such delicate gradations that no two observers seem to agree as to the point of division, and the theories of the people themselves as to their own origin and that of their neighbours—theories which seldom agree—have little foundation in fact, albeit to some they may prove of greater interest and political importance than the future classifications of the learned.

We must at present renounce all pretensions to scientific exactitude and confine ourselves to more or less popular distinctions; accordingly, eliminating from our survey all recent new-comers of European or Asiatic extraction, we shall divide the present inhabitants of the Sudan broadly into four groups—the Negro, the Nuba, the Bega, the Arab.

(i) Negroes.The ancient Egyptians referred to the South—it is difficult to say where it began—as the land of the black man, just like their successors, who named it Nigritia or Belad el Sudan; and they knew, as we know, that there were pygmy blacks as well as big fighting blacks. Whether the pygmies, relics of whom have been found all over the world, were evolved first in Africa or came in as immigrants, and whether the big blacks were developed by selection from them here or elsewhere we cannot here discuss. Suffice it to say that from before the dawn of history the two have always been in Africa, and that the Negroes of the Nile land are to-day more hopelessly subdivided than the Negroes of any other part. The pygmies have been now driven into the forests of Central Africa, and the big Negroes are now found in the Sudan only on the Upper reaches of the White and Blue Niles and in the hill countries to the west; north of this they occur merely as immigrants, soldiers, slaves, etc., amounting, though, in some parts to almost 50 per cent. of the population. They vary enormously in size, colour, language, institutions, and religion, so that in spite of the great work of such explorers as Schweinfurth, Emin, and Junker, we are still far from unravelling the intricate web of their interrelations. A recent writer, who has given a popular account of the researches of travellers before the Mahdia, disclaims as impossible any attempt at scientific classification, and we can only follow him in grouping the blacks of the White Nile and its tributaries according to the picturesque impression which they made upon their visitors. In this book (“Die Heiden Neger des Aegyptischen Sudan,” Berlin, 1893), Frobenius divides the blacks within our present frontiers into four groups:—

I. The Swamp Negroes—Shilluk, Shuli, Bari, Jur, Nuer, Dinka or Jange, Anuak, etc.

II. The Iron-working Negroes—Bongo, Mittu, Golo, Sheri, Madi, Kreich, etc.

III. The A-Zande or Nyam Nyam.

IV. The Latuka.

For further information about these people we must refer the reader to other chapters in this compendium, and to the authors mentioned above.

It only remains to point out that the blacks of Kordofan and the Blue Nile, offer practically virgin fields to the ethnologist.

(ii) Nubas.Under this head we include (a) the Barabra, who are found between the 1st and 4th cataracts, and are subdivided into natives of Dongola, Mahas, Sukkot, Halfa, each with a different dialect; (b) the Nubas of Kordofan, with their sub-tribes. To these some philologists add, on linguistic grounds, a number of tribes usually described as negro or negroid.[239]

Geographically, and perhaps physically also, these Nubians appear as a link between Egypt and Negro land. They are darker and smaller than the Egyptian, but still brown and not black,[240] although they often have, like so many Egyptians, the woolly hair of the Negro. It is probable that they represent the ancient Kushites, and the latest student of the old Ethiopian inscriptions has sought to prove that the Nubians and not the Begas were the rulers of ancient Napata.[241] They are enterprising people, apt linguists and great travellers, very ready to take on a veneer of European culture, the last trait being an old one caricatured by the wall-painters of ancient Thebes. It is the more strange that they should have preserved their own dialects, especially as they have been Muslims for some centuries.

It was on the ground of their language that Lepsius[242] related the Nilotic Nubians with the Nubawis of Kordofan. The connection corresponds with traditions current in Dongola, where the traveller will hear again and again that, although the particular man he is interrogating is, of course, pure Arab from the Hejaz, yet most of the people round are Nubians like the Nubawis of Kordofan. Supposing this relationship to be proved, it would be still uncertain whether the Kordofan people are a colony from the Nilotes or vice versâ. But it is also possible that the Nubawis of Kordofan adopted a Nuba language in some by-gone age when there was a powerful Christian or pre-Christian Nubian kingdom on the Nile. If we are to believe Hartmann[243]—a very good observer—the majority of the Shaigia “Arabi” and many of the Jaalin really belong to the same stock.

(iii) Begas.This name is derived from medieval Arab historians and has been identified with the Bugatæ and Buka of earlier days. It is applied to the tribes living in the eastern desert who speak various languages belonging to the so-called Hamitic group of languages. The principal tribes are Ababda, Bisharin, Amarar, Hadendoa, Halenga, Beni Amer, Habab.

In type they are far more “Caucasian” than those we have previously mentioned, and they occupy the same position and present the same characteristics as many turbulent pastoral tribes mentioned by Egyptian scribes and classical writers.[242] As Hamites, one school of anthropologists represented by the Italian Sergi, regards them as an off-shoot of the great Euro-African stock which populated North Africa and Europe: others bring them from Asia. “Non nostri est tantas componere lites.” Nor do we like to hazard an opinion as to whether they or the Nubians were the creators of ancient Meroe. The termination ab which is so common throughout the Berber Province proves that people of the Bega stock once held this district, and their immediate descendants are probably to be looked for among the riverain “Arabs” rather than the desert Begas, for no civilized people would exchange a settled life for a nomad life, least of all so warlike a race as the Begas.

According to W. Max Müller (“Aethiopien,” Berlin, 1904, p. 19), we have in the legend quoted on p. 224, a distorted version of one Hamitic settlement in this very area. The word Sembridae or Semberritae is a hybrid name formed by a North Hamitic people out of a Semitic root, and means, not “Deserters,” but “Nomads,” “Wanderers.” The legend above-mentioned will therefore be the echo of an early Hamitic invasion of a district then peopled by Nubas or Negroes, and of the adoption of a sedentary life by these invading “Wanderers,” whose success may explain the shifting of the capital from Napata to Meroe (p. 225).

(iv) Arabs.The first three stocks have been in the country for as long as our records go. The Arabs are comparative newcomers; it is improbable that they came in any numbers until after the fall of the Christian kingdoms of Dongola and Alwa (Soba). The traditions of some tribes are against this, but historians only mention raids, and the traditions are not to be set against the historians’ testimony. The extension of these raids, which led to the downfall of Christianity and a consequent increase of Arab immigration, was probably due to pressure caused on tribes elsewhere by the conquests of Spain and Portugal on the one side and Turkey on the other. This would give the Arabs an occupation of from four to six centuries, though a slow infiltration from Arabia into the Sudan must have gone on from the beginning.

Now, at any rate, the Arab dominates the northern half of the Sudan, that is, from Egypt to Kordofan. He has nowhere exterminated the original inhabitants; he has in many cases not yet succeeded in forcing even his language upon them; he has, unlike the Arabs in Arabia, intermarried freely with them; but his conquest has been so far complete that his religious ideals and tribal organisation have replaced the older faith and institutions wherever he has cared to carry them. This fact upsets our perspective. The people call themselves Arabs and we accept the name, but it would certainly be a mistake to regard them as Arabians or to recognise as genuine their long pedigrees “of unsullied (?) Arab descent” “going back to early Mohammedan times” (Keane). The present writer believes that the materials newly published by Naum Bey Shoucair (“History of the Sudan,” Cairo, 1904—in Arabic), enable him to trace two distinct steps in the Arabization of the Central Sudan.

Up to 1500 A.D., the Christians reigned on the Blue Nile; there are no Gubbas, no mention of Fikis, earlier than this, as would certainly have been the case if many Arabs had been here. About this time the Fungs, a powerful black tribe under Amara Dunkas, became Muslims and, assisted by some Arab immigrants, overthrew the kingdom of Soba. Hardly had they done so when they were themselves menaced by Sultan Selim, the Turkish conquerer of Egypt and Suakin; it was their policy then to represent themselves as orthodox Muslims connected with the most venerated Arab tribes, and a certain Sheikh El Samarakandi, who had wandered to the court of Dunkas, provided the necessary pedigrees, which were duly sent to Selim and by him much admired (Naum II, pp. 73, 74). But the Sheikh did his work clumsily, if it may be judged from a Jaali pedigree which purports to be extracted from his work, for he left at the crucial point several non-Arabic names, and few, if any, Sudanese pedigrees are accepted by Muslim genealogists elsewhere.

At this point the Arabization of Central Sudan seems to have stood almost still for three centuries. Gubbas were built and Fikis became powerful, but the tribal organization, although indigenous among the Begas, did not supplant the very different political division of the land into small kingdoms tributary to Sennar. The emblems of kingly power, a throne called the K-K-R and a two-horned cap (Naum II, pp. 100, 101), are also clearly African, not Arab. Burkhardt, again, who knew the Arabs in Syria and Arabia, is never tired of contrasting their manners and morals with those of the Sudanese Arabs.

This period was closed by the Egyptian conquest of Mohammed Ali, which continued the process begun in the time of Selim, and finally obliterated several of the most characteristic survivals from pre-Islamic days. Indeed, all the events of the last century, including the great upheaval in which it culminated, had the same tendency. Having lost their native kingdoms, the people have been forced to adopt the Arab tribal system, and, unlike the Berbers in Algiers, have identified themselves enthusiastically with all things Arab. The more striking is it that they should have still kept such African customs as the Akh-el-banat, the scarring of the cheeks, female excision,[244] all alien from the true Arab of Arabia.

If this reading of history be accepted, the people of the Central Sudan will be described as a mixed race recently forced into an Arab mould and in varying degrees modified by Arab blood. And we may prophesy that future researches will prove the other elements in this race to be akin to the other races on its borders, to the Nubians and Begas on the north, to the Negroes, Gallas, Abyssinians, etc., on the south and south-east.

In the above sketch there are so many necessary gaps, and so many controverted points of necessity passed over in silence, that it seems fair to the reader to give a brief statement of a different theory recently put forward by Sir H. H. Johnston on this subject. We therefore append a résumé of his views compiled by Captain Morant from “The Nile Quest”:—

In pre-historic times the land on each side of the Red Sea is said to have joined in the south as well as in the north. By these necks of land man came to Africa from Asia in the form of dwarfs of a very low negroid type, resembling the now much-advanced pigmy of the Congo or the bushman of South Africa. Thus perhaps, say, 10,000 years ago, the Nile basin south of N. latitude 15° was peopled by a negroid species from the east. It seems also not improbable that Egypt proper and Arabia were within the domains of this negroid race.

These indigenous pigmies appear to have been at an early date ousted (say 9,000 years ago) by races of Caucasian stock resembling the Dravidians of India, of aquiline type, possibly of nearly pure Caucasian “Khafra” origin, and probably emanating from Syria, Cyprus, or Libya.

In Gallaland, Somaliland, and Abyssinia a handsome race of Caucasian ancestry, mingled no doubt with proto-negroes and Dravidians, formed originally in Southern Arabia, sprang up. The lips of this people, destined to become the basis of a world-renowned and historic type, were full and their noses straight and finely shaped, whilst their skin was dark and their hair had a tendency to curl, and like the modern Somali, Galla, or Danakil, the men grew thin and wedge-shaped beards.

It was by emigrants of this new Hamitic race to the Lower Nile Basin that the stock of the ruling type of ancient Egyptians was formed. In the latter, nevertheless, an appreciable amount of Negro blood from the early Negro population must doubtless have been absorbed.

So degraded and transformed, however, has been the ancient Egyptian type by the infusion of the blood of their many successive rulers, that though facial resemblances may remain, their famous characteristics have vanished, and the Egyptian of to-day is the descendant of Slavs and Turks, Arabs, Armenians, and Circassians.

But it was not only to Egypt that this Hamitic race extended, but also, though more faint-heartedly, towards the negroid districts to the south-west to Uganda, Zululand, and even it is thought to the Atlantic. In Uganda their descendants are now distinctly traceable.

To recapitulate:—The country of Ethiopia, which included not only the highlands of Abyssinia but also the country north, to Berber or even Dongola, was probably originally populated by a very low type of pigmy or bushman, then perhaps partially by a race of big black negroes, such as Shilluk, Dinka, Nuer, and Bari, which in turn gave way to the Hamitic race already described. The ruling class of Ethiopia, however (the present “Abyssinian” in contradistinction to the “Galla or Somali”), became of Semitic origin through the Sabæan Arab conquest of Abyssinia some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

The break up of the Israelitish Empire by the Abyssinians and subsequent scattering of the Jews, many of whom settled in Abyssinia, introduced a further admixture of Semitic blood.

In comparing this ancient history, much of which is little more than guesswork, with the state of affairs at the present day, we find the descendants of the original pigmies, but in a more advanced state, having been ousted from place to place at length survive in hiding, as it were, in the forests of the most central of Central Africa. The big black negro tribes have withdrawn to and are content to remain in the swampy fever-stricken districts of which no higher human race has ever yet desired to deprive them. The Ethiopians have retired before the Arab invaders to their hills, whilst the Arabs continue to dominate all the country they cared to conquer.

The Hadendoa, Ababda, Bisharin, Beni Amer, etc., Arabs who speak a “rotana” somewhat resembling the Somali language, are, undoubtedly, not true Arabs, but are probably descended from the Hamitic race above described which also was the origin of the Somali and Galla races.