the southern funj: a frontier in transition

It is a commonplace understanding of Islamic constitutional law that the world is divided into dar al-harb, the land of conflict where Muslim law is absent, and dar al-Islam, where Muslim law prevails, and that the former becomes part of the latter by conquest. The history of the southward expansion of the sovereignty of the Funj sultanate and the consequent extension of dar al-Islam narrates a series of victorious military campaigns. The armies of the Sultan overcome the plucky resistance of the local pagans, whose leaders then see the wisdom of converting to Islam and joining forces with the Sultan (e.g. O'Fahey and Spaulding 1974:58–59). Delmet has gone further, and argued that the southern Funj was on the frontiers of Islam and was deliberately maintained by the Funj rulers as an active zone of violence. Even when Turco-Egyptian rule replaced the Funj sultanate, ’the centuries of violence' continued (Delmet 1991:125, 138). But this account seems to recycle traditions that reflect the views of later commentators, for whom worthwhile political change could only be brought about by force of arms. Unless the southern Funj is in fact radically different from regions that appear to be similar, such as, for example west Africa, then it seems likely that the emergence in the southern frontier of local Islamic rulers and their courts subordinate to the Funj sultanate was the consequence of the political activity of pagan leaders of local communities. These leaders successfully sought the prestige of Funj titles, and permission to submit tribute thereby, to gain access to the long-distance trade sponsored by the sultanate (cf. Lattimore 1962:476, 483). In this respect, the interests of the local rulers and the Sultan coincided. Muslim traders, such as the Funj Sultan—according to Spaulding “the greatest merchant” in Sennar (1985:114–15)—were engaged in exporting merchandise to North Africa, almost all of which came from the southern Funj, and they had to be sure that their goods were not sourced in dar al-harb, since handling merchandise from pagan territories was outside the protection of Islamic law. One solution to this problem was to establish a Muslim jurisdiction and to enter into a treaty (`ahd or sulh) with such non-Muslim communities as necessary. Trading in products under dar al-sulh was acceptable (cf. Last 1993:281).⁵

In any event, the outcome was that the local communities in the southern Funj associated themselves with the sultanate through those indigenous chiefs (muluk, sing, makk) who were granted Funj titles and regalia from the sultan in Sennar and installed as Muslim rulers, though subordinate to the Sultan, at the provincial capitals of Fazughli, Keili, and Gule. These modes of association were particularistic, varied, and changing. The sultan also conferred recognition on subordinate communities and their institutions by having his representative attend the installation ceremonies of indigenous dignitaries and office holders (Jedrej 2000; see also Ewald 1990:74–79). Though the southern frontier of the sultanate was annually plundered for slaves by the Sultan's own army, such raiding could not have been so severe as to disrupt peaceful commerce. We know this because during the latter half of the eighteenth century, after the defeat of an Ethiopian army in 1744, traders from north of Sennar moved into the southern provinces in pursuit of business.

Besides slaving expeditions from the north, another source of anxiety for local populations were the pastoral Nilotes in the west and south. Traditions of migration and of previous homelands among some of the populations in the southern Funj indicate movement from the south and west, possibly under pressure from these pastoralists (Johnson 1994:46; Robertson 1934:26; Evans-Pritchard 1932:21). No doubt the loss of animals through drought or flood also prompted them to raid in the southern Funj in order to restock depleted herds. As late as the 1970s, older inhabitants of the Ingessana Hills recalled raids into the margins of the hills by people they called “dingi,” presumably Dinka. These are remembered as having been as terrifying as anything they had experienced at the hands of others. Many could remember a relative in their parent's generation who had been killed or abducted by Dinka, never to be seen again. These particular raids would have been contemporary with the years of severe Nile flooding from 1916 to 1918 (Johnson 1986:140).⁶

The sultanate's tributary capitals of Fazughli, Keili, and Gule were also usefully placed as regards gold mining activities: Fazughli was the mouth of the Khor Tumat along the banks of which gold was mined and washed, Keili was beside the gold workings in the north western foothills of the Beni Shangul, while the gold workings of the Tabi (Ingessana) Hills lay within the triangle formed by Gule, Keili, and Fazughli (Bruce 1804, vol. 4:43–44; Cailliaud 1826, vol. 4:18–19). The households in communities falling under the sultanate's protection, in addition to delivering tribute in gold, were also compelled to participate in communal work parties for the benefit of the local Funj ruler and his court (Triulzi 1981:72).⁷

It seems, too, that they were able to offer sanctuary to outlaws from other jurisdictions, debtors on the run from creditors, and ‘wizards’ escaping execution in their own communities. The ruler's household was not only a sanctuary for diverse refugees, it was also a cosmopolitan court of Arabic culture and Islamic learning where Muslim holy men, envoys, and itinerant merchants were received.

After the collapse of the sultanate before the invading Turco-Egyptian forces and the establishment of Ottoman rule in the Sudan in 1821, in the southern Funj the Funj rulers—or, more usually, their Arab trader advisers who had usurped the office—were prepared to transform the structure of the local polities to meet the demands of a bureaucratic administration, rather than defend particularistic arrangements between the local Funj rulers of the sultanate and the people. In effect, they became the agents of the Turco-Egyptian government in the southern Funj and they ultimately relied upon the military forces of that government to enforce an oppressive extraction of taxes in gold and slaves. The Turco-Egyptian forces were based, significantly, in the newly constructed garrison town and provincial headquarters of Famaka on the opposite bank of the river from the old capital of Fazughli. Idris Adlan, a descendant of the last Funj sultan of Sennar, had moved south before the invading Turco-Egyptian army to Jebel Gule, and displaced the local ruler. He was later joined by other court officers from the Funj capital. He treated with the Turco-Egyptian authorities and was recognized by the new government as ‘sheikh of the Funj mountains,’ and charged with delivering the taxes of his domain to the new government at Sennar directly, and not through Famaka (Delmet 1974:127).

The populations deemed pagan were for the next ten years to suffer the harshness of the Turco-Egyptian demand for slaves. Gule, however, developed under the patronage of Sheikh Idris' court, and its population is recalled as having numbered as many as several thousand (Hasan 1977:100; Nalder 1931:80; Delmet 1974:127). On the other hand, the revolutionary Mahdist government that overthrew the Turco-Egyptian government in 1885 was disastrous for Gule. The resumption of slaving, followed by a combination of famine and raiding for supplies by the Mahdists in the last years of the regime, dispersed the population of Gule. The basis of Sheikh Idris' wealth and power in the outlying districts under his control was destroyed. The Arab merchant sheikhs in Beni Shangul emerged from the Mahdiyya as the most powerful warlords in the region and, until the appearance of Anglo-Egyptian military patrols in 1903, were able to pillage the populations previously tributary to Gule with impunity.

The processes set in train in the 1820s resolved a complex range of relationships between the local representatives of the sultan and the adjacent communities. What emerged, by contrast, was a polarization of the inhabitants into those who had taken refuge in the mountains from where they defied the government and its agents, and those who were variously subordinated or enslaved to them. Some of the latter, many of them captives from slave raids, especially women and children, were sold on to slave traders. Others were retained and put to work in agricultural settlements under the control of Arab merchant sheikhs. There, they constituted a reserve from which soldiers could be recruited for further raids, even on their own people. Of course, events on the ground at any given time were probably more ambiguous than contemporary reports claim. Leaders of particular communities had to weigh bold defiance and a refusal to pay taxes against a quieter life and the payment of ‘tax arrears.’ Similarly, some of those who had fled their homes and escaped capture when their villages were attacked eventually resorted to the agricultural slave settlements. Sometimes they were brought in by individuals sent out to find them, while others found protection under less-oppressive sheikhs (James 1979:52–53, 58).

At the same time, during the period of Turco-Egyptian rule, there is evidence of corresponding changes in the economic relationships and activities of the local communities in the southern Funj consistent with the political reconstruction of the region. By the mid-nineteenth century foreign travelers observed that a large proportion of the local population, who, according to these travelers, were previously industrious farmers, had left their fields and were now supporting themselves by mining gold. They were taking the gold to the merchant sheikhs as tax as well as to exchange for sorghum and other supplies. Meanwhile, people who had retreated into their hills were not only defying the forces of the government and refusing to pay taxes, they were securing commodities not by trading but by banditry (Triulzi 1981:97; Beltrame 1882, vol. 1:295).

There is also circumstantial evidence of the withdrawal of what then became the refugee hill-dwelling people from participation in wider regional economic exchanges, such as the long distance trade they had taken part in under the Funj sultanate. For instance, Cailliaud described an important market in Sennar in 1821 exporting to Egypt gold, slaves, tamarind, ivory, rhino horn, ostrich feathers, civet, gum and incense, senna, and fine leatherwork, commodities which are largely the product of hunting and gathering. According to Cailliaud, most of these were produced in the southern Funj by two groups of people: the nomadic Arab pastoralists, especially the Rufaءha al-Hoi, and the pagan highlanders, such as those inhabiting the western Ingessana Hills (Buk, Sedak, Kukur). The latter then also specialized, we are told, in trapping elephant and rhino (Cailliaud 1826 vol. 2:294–96).⁸

Sixty years later, in 1881, the town of Karkoj had replaced Sennar as the main market in the Blue Nile valley, probably because it was the head of year-round navigation on the Blue Nile and water transport was particularly important to the Turco-Egyptian political economy. The imported goods in the market were much the same as at the end of the sultanate, but the most valuable local commodities for export were now reported by the Dutch explorer Schuver to be gum, durra, cotton, tobacco, and sesame (James, Baumann, and Johnson 1996:304). Gum remained the only significant wild product and was then, as now, collected almost exclusively by the nomadic pastoralists.⁹

The other commodities are the agricultural produce of a sedentary peasantry.

Thus, during the middle period of the nineteenth century a sometimes defiant and often truculent segment of the population declined to engage with the Tuco-Egyptian state, withdrew from the old long-distance trade and its associated values, and turned to production organized around domestic subsistence needs and local social reproduction supplemented by occasional raiding. The sedentary population, then, was polarized as a consequence of the Turco-Egyptian conquest into those who defied the government and those who submitted to its exactions. This split was represented in contemporary nineteenth-century literature in geographical terms, as a distinction between mountain dwellers or highlanders, described as “independent,” and those who inhabited the river valleys and the plains (See, for example, Marno 1872:452–53). However, such was the local value of Funj symbolic capital that the highland communities persisted with what were pre-modern, and now truncated, Funj institutions. De Pruyssenaere observed what he called “ein heidenische fest” in February 1863 at Gule, presided over by Sheikh Idris as the Muslim Funj makk, in which people from several highland communities took part. Funj makks were still being ceremonially installed in office at the old provincial capitals by great gatherings of the surrounding communities long after the demise of the Funj sultanate and well into the mid-twentieth century (Zöppritz 1877:8–9; Disney 1945; Jedrej 2000:288–89).¹⁰

In addition to those populations who were once tributaries of the Funj or were part of the Funj ritual hegemony, there were groups that had relatively recently migrated into the southern Funj from the south, and who there encountered the Funj sultanate, if at all, only in its terminal phase. These intrusive groups nonetheless did experience the full brutality of Turco-Egyptian slave raids, and then the more or less successful attempts by the Arab merchant sheikhs and their successors who came to power during the Mahdiyya to subordinate them as slaves and clients. The latter persisted well into the 1930s, largely because the sheikhs took advantage of the settlement of the international boundary between the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Ethiopia in 1907. That boundary placed their centers, but not the southern Funj populations they exploited, in Ethiopia, beyond the jurisdiction of the Sudan government (Theis 1995; James 1979).

In general terms, there was a profound change in the southern Funj: from a diversity of pre-modern asymmetrical relationships of affiliation between elite centers and their adjacent populations and between these centers and the capital, Sennar, there was a shift to a bureaucratic system of garrison towns that enforcing the collection of taxes from an enumerated subject peasantry. At the same time they ‘collected arrears in taxes’—in effect pillaged—among populations beyond regular administrative control. From this transformation emerged three salient modes of sociality among southern Funj populations. This social organization developed under Anglo-Egyptian rule, and continued for some twenty years under post-colonial rule.

modes of sociality in the modern era

Among the communities that had been part of the Funj sultanate, some did not become, as a matter of administrative routine, subordinated to Turco-Egyptian rule and instead took refuge in the hills where they worked out a degree of political and economic independence after the collapse of the Funj sultanate. Others communities did become subjects of the new government, or sometimes the clients and slaves of the merchants and peasant lowlanders who were. The subsequent Anglo-Egyptian policy of “devolved government” by Native Authorities played on these historical outcomes and experiences in rather different ways.

For those highland communities that persisted into the twentieth century in minimizing the government's involvement in their affairs, and attempted to control the indiscriminate penetration into their economic activities of Arab traders and their modern commercial transactions, indirect rule and its promotion of ethnic boundaries coincident with Native Authority territorial boundaries could work to advance their conservative interests.¹¹

On the other hand, for those who now identified with an Islamic Sudanese Nile Valley peasantry, local ethnic identities such as “Berta,” “Hamaj,” or “Funj,” were becoming less relevant to any practical system of Native Authorities. These labels were only meaningful to the extent that they entered the vocabulary of the regional system of social ranking of Sudanese society. From the perspective of the urban Sudanese, the highlanders came to be seen as pockets of remote, backward and, as yet, nationally unassimilated African tribal people. The latter, for their part, are a rather rustic, but nevertheless historically Sudanese peasantry who are part of a modern economic division of labor between the town and the country. One ethnographic effect of this has been the representation of the highland communities as self-sustaining societies with a rich, distinctive, and complete ‘traditional’ culture. A second ethnographic effect has been a convergence between the ‘traditional’ societies that emerged from the ruins of the sultanate and the intrusive groups in the south. Both sought to accommodate to modern circumstances by adopting, though in different ways, defensive and conservative postures.

Highland social structure during the middle period of the twentieth century was based in territoriality combined with gerontocracy. In the Ingessana Hills, there is a hierarchical nesting of bounded territories that is expressed in a corresponding hierarchy of shrines. At the lowest level, rights of access to land and other resources of the territory are controlled by a small group of six or seven senior men. Disputes are adjudicated by a wider group made up of all the elders of the locality. In general, men are stratified into elders, bachelors, and boys; women into elders, women/wives, and girls. These distinctions take precedence after gender but before kinship and descent at almost every kind of gathering. This order, where the junior owes respect and obedience to the senior, is strictly and, among men, aggressively enforced. The territorial and hierarchical organization represented by and embodied in the shrines, together with the gerontocratic ordering of people, enables the elders to mobilize individuals for communal hunts and for rituals of affliction intended to “drive evil things out of the hills/territories.” These rituals, though they take the form of actions directed at non-human agents infesting the territories, are carried out in every detail—including procedures, weaponry and vocabulary—like well coordinated military operations. As such, they could equally be directed at mundane but hostile human intruders. These are not open societies and they do not welcome strangers. It may be precisely because in the past the Funj makk reserved for his own court the granting of sanctuary, that affiliated peoples rejected refugees and sent them to the makk, or simply killed them (Jedrej 1995; Ecsedy 1973; Evans-Pritchard 1932). Nowadays it suits their purposes to sustain their inhospitable reputation in order to deter unwelcome interference.

In the nineteenth century, marriage in almost all highland communities was marked by the groom and his kin having to perform several years of onerous brideservice for the parents and kin of the bride. They would also build a house for the bride where she could receive the groom in the homestead of her parents. This work, for which no restitution was expected or made in the event that the marriage process broke down, was provided in addition to bridewealth payments in the form of livestock, and sometimes also tobacco, tools, and weapons. These, however, could be repaid if the marriage ended in divorce. Comparisons between ethnographic reports of observations at different times during the twentieth century confirm what many highlanders themselves were saying in the latter part of the century: that much less work was being done as compared with the previous generation; that fathers were now working on behalf of sons, who were themselves working as wage laborers on mechanized cultivation schemes financed by urban merchants; or that in some communities brideservice was now only a memory. The claims and obligations of brideservice created extensive and highly valued relationships of affinity that continued to be mobilized long after the formalities of brideservice were deemed completed. At the same time, the need for bridewealth subordinated young men to their parents and to their generation of collaterals from whom they had to beg livestock. Highland people conceive of brideservice and one's obligations to contribute to an affine's work party as similar to the communal work of repairing and maintaining the territorial shrine. It is likely that where communal work had been done for the Funj ruler it was regarded in a similar way (Jedrej 1995: 27). This cultural continuity and integration, on a dimension that reached from the narrowest domestic context to embrace the widest engagement in the regional political system of the sultanate, was abruptly severed and reduced when the Turco-Egyptian colonial government replaced the sultanate.

The lowland peasantry is also stratified, but in a quite different way. Their stratification is ambiguous because it is coexists with powerful values of egalitarianism represented by the idea of the community of Muslims. First of all, there are a number of status groups other than the land owning Sudanese peasantry themselves. They comprise the nomadic pastoralists, the landless ex-slaves, and potentially servile peoples on the margins of the Islamic community and peripatetic artisans such as blacksmiths and tinsmiths. The crucial distinction is between two groups: muwatiniin, those who belong to a place, and to whom the place also belongs, who are essentially owners; and עabid, who are regarded by muwatiniin as people without belongings, ignorant and lacking civilization. The עabid are essentially the owned, that is, the slaves. The עabid do not deny these attributes and relationships, but they portray the muwatiniin as gullible and treacherous insofar as they are supposed to swindle each other habitually. The implication is, of course, that the עabid alone can trust each other, and that while they may be unlettered, they are actually very smart. Such a structure of categories is entirely open-ended regarding the lowest strata insofar as the category עabid extends to include potential עabid, in effect, the rustic pagan at the opposite extreme from the civilized Muslim townspeople (al Shahi 1972; el Hassan 1993:39–51).

This stratification is mitigated, amplified, and mobilized by elaborate networks of patronage and clientship. These asymmetric networks tend to make permeable the boundary of the ‘community’ of Muslim believers, and facilitate the processes of assimilation. The names of ethnic groups are less likely to indicate different ways of life and more likely to mark positions in a ranking of status and prestige (James 1971). So Jaءalyin, Watawit, Jabalwiin, Funj, Hamaj, Berta, and Burun, come to represent points on scales between urban and rural, Muslim and pagan, superior and inferior, and master and slave, and they appeal to a discourse of ancestry that defines essential attributes: ‘They say they are Funj, but they are really Hamaj.’ In fact, a Jaءali or Watawit sheikh or merchant will not usually condescend to recognize fine ethnic differences among the lower strata, nor will he recognize their pretensions to distinctions among themselves. He will simply refer to them indiscriminately as עabid. From the opposite perspective, the ‘tribal pagans’ on the margins share an understanding of the impoverishing consequences the system for most of those involved. This awareness is expressed in remarks that such people became so desperate that in the past some of them sold their children, and indeed may secretly still do so (See also James, Baumann, and Johnson 1996:318).

One effect of this ranking can be seen in the way different marriage strategies are deployed by families in the middle of the ranking scale. They confront in an acute way the Islamic code that a woman ought not to marry a man of lower rank than herself. This introduces an inherent instability. Where the father and brother of the bride claim equality with the groom, they will demand a considerable dower (mahr) for their daughter, which then becomes a benchmark for subsequent marriages in the community. Anything less will be taken to signify an acknowledgement of inferiority to the groom and his father and brothers, and hence there will be a gradual inflation of endowments. The highest ranking families can deal with this by arranging a marriage of the son and daughter of two brothers. They may be either full brothers or patrilateral half-brothers since they embody the relationship of equality, and therefore only the minimal dower need be paid to satisfy legal requirements (Bonte 1994:371–97; Fluehr-Lobban 1987:110). At the opposite end of the ranking continuum, the poorest families from time to time arrange to marry their daughters on the same day for the minimal dower, and their weddings are organized as joint affairs conducted on an auspicious day in the Islamic calendar (Lobban 1982). From the perspective of the potential עabid, although they are embraced by this system of values and practices, which has its center of gravity in the towns, there are also significant discontinuities and exclusions.

Among the people who migrated north into the southern Funj during the last years of the sultanate, but who did encounter the brutality of the early phase of the Turco-Egyptian government, their social organization is marked by a number of features which distinguishes it from both that of the highlanders and that of the lowland peasantry. Two are particularly significant. First of all, their social organization is constructed around clans and kinship relationships rather than stratification by age and territories, or by ranking in terms of class and status groups. Human reproduction and the kinship relationships elaborated out of this process inform the discourse of the continuity of life and productive cooperation, and pervade peoples' understandings of the relationships among humans and between humans and nature (James 1979:112–24; Theis 1995:63–72). Second, there is widespread acknowledgement of their own weakness and poverty relative to the powerful and threatening peoples around them. There is a readiness to recognize others as either, like themselves, part of the ‘community of the weak’ in which case they are absorbed, or as agents and representatives of the powerful, in which case tactics of avoidance or camouflaging are employed (Theis 1995:175). Yet this distinction between the weak and the powerful is not easily mapped onto a distinction between the rural and the urban, or the traditional and the modern. Included among the threatening and powerful are not only the merchants and agents of the government operating from the administrative and commercial centers, but also the people of the Ingessana Hills, and Arab nomadic pastoralists—the Rufaءha al-Hoi, who move south into the region annually in search of grazing and water.

There are several indigenous languages, of which Uduk, Koma, and Ganza are the better known, and most people are polyglots. Intermarriage between speech communities is normal and frequent, and the inhabitants of any given settlement may represent several speech communities. Although anthropologists and the Anglo-Egyptian colonial government have identified distinct ethnic groups in terms of linguistic criteria, these people share a common culture in a number of other respects. So, for example, different speech communities participate in the same hunts and hunting rituals, and they recognize the same inspired spiritual figures of the so-called ‘rain maker’ cults spreading north from among the Nilotic pastoralists (Theis 1983; James 1988:159–61, 182). Ethnographic reports suggest that clan membership remains more significant for the people themselves as regards substantial identities than language or speech community membership. The vernacular terms for clan connote ‘kinds’ of people, and the same words are used to refer to kinds or species of animals. It is between clans that the relationship of ‘blood friends’ is institutionalized, sometimes between clans of different speech communities, and so this relationship can form networks of clans covering several speech communities (James 1979:13–15, 114; 1994:140–43).

Settlements are described by James as “hamlets,” which consist of a core of matrilineally related men with a “high degree of mobility”: they often split up, reform, and move site. Hamlets are identified by the name of a prominent inhabitant or by the clan name of the core local group. Even geographical place names for settlements are said to be “ephemeral” (1979:112, 124). Such institutions are compatible with the mobile populations, perhaps hunting and gathering as well as cultivating, which moved north and reached the southern Funj at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Indigenous leadership among Uduk seems to have been very informal, and such figures of authority as have appeared from time to time among them have been representatives of imported cults (James 1979:34, 112, 124; 1994:143).

James has convincingly shown that as a result of the collective experience over three or four generations of being plundered by slavers seeking human beings, the people developed an elaborate system of so-called “exchange marriage.” This evolved partly for pragmatic reasons—to deal with an actual shortage of women—and partly as the practical realization of a moral economy which abhorred the acquisition of wives by transactions in goods. Some explicitly compare bridewealth transactions to buying and selling people (James 1970). The basic principle of exchange marriage is that a husband secures rights to his wife, and especially to her children, as a consequence of providing a marriageable woman for his wife's father or her brother, not by paying them bridewealth. For this purpose, a woman may be borrowed from somebody who has the right to dispose of her in marriage. But this debt, in turn, can only be discharged by, at some later date, handing back to the creditor rights to dispose of a woman in marriage when the debtor is able to do so, usually after the birth of a daughter. The people themselves often describe the process as ‘sister exchange,’ since the simplest realization of the principle is for two pairs of brother and sister to agree to marry each other.¹²

However, the system is much more complicated in practice, and networks of indebtedness are established involving transactions in rights over as yet unborn women. Such procedures are workable in a strongly bounded moral community that has not been severely disrupted, and where there is no possibility of resorting to litigation in the courts of a powerful state. Outside of such circumstances, the complexity of debts will generate irresolvable disputes, hostility, and even outright fighting, and this, indeed, is how people recall the consequences of marriages under such conditions. Clanship, rather than marriage and affinity, is the fundamental idiom of sociality.

Although people could be found in the latter half of the twentieth century who had entered into ‘exchange marriages,’ the situation now appears to be changing in two directions: either toward the adoption of bridewealth as a necessary component of legally recognized marriage, or toward the rejection of bridewealth and therefore the abandonment by fathers of their claims upon their children. In these latter communities, a distinctly matrilineal dimension to their values and institutions has emerged. It may be significant that it is the most northerly peoples who are refusing to entertain bridewealth transactions, and they are precisely those communities who suffered most severely when intense slave raiding and pillaging re-emerged at the end of the nineteenth century (James 1979; Theis 1995).

social imaginaries

So far my account has been largely sociological and presented in terms drawn from the concepts of social anthropology, informed by ethnographies sensitive to the experiences of the people. This final section turns to a more immediate consideration of the shared subjectivities of the peoples as these are expressed in the images and metaphors with which they articulate and come to terms with everyday anxieties and misfortunes. The pretext lies in the assumption that there is a significant sociological relationship between these social imaginaries and the social structures in which they are generated, modified, and deployed.

For example, among the intrusive groups, the community of the weak, people say that in the past the fear of witchcraft was such that twins were killed at birth, since twins were considered indicative of witchcraft, a capacity reproduced through women. They say that now some women seek to give birth by themselves without attendants so that if twins are born one can be killed and she can return to the house with only one baby. But this new practice only serves to raise the general level of concern since such concealment allows the contamination to flourish unidentified. Other people do not go so far, and instead ritually purify the twins and the mother, thereby cleansing them of witchcraft (Theis 1995:69–70). What makes witchcraft so appalling is not the intentions of the witch, who is considered to be an involuntary agent, but the fact that its fatal effects were concentrated on the witch's own matrilineal kin. Hence the matrilineage—the life producing group, both in terms of reproduction and production, which thrives through cooperation among its members and is the foundation of the ‘community of the weak’—contains at its heart the almost ineradicable potential for its own destruction. Yet James detected among Uduk-speaking people a certain ambiguity, and a wistful notion that in the past this capacity was not essentially evil and indeed could be deployed for the benefit of people, for success in hunting for example. Perhaps this was during the time before their encounters with the Turco-Egyptian army and slave raiding, after which they found themselves no longer the hunters but the hunted, in their words, “running about the bush like antelopes” (1979:47, 116–17).

Highland Ingessana anxieties are not structured in terms of the tragic transmission of the debilitating seeds of evil by the very process of reproduction and kinship, nurturing and the promotion of life. Rather they are structured in the spatial terms of the persistent invasion of their territory, localities, and homesteads, and even their bodies, by malignant external agencies which must be repeatedly identified, extracted, and driven off. Yet there is also an ambiguity here which echoes, in an inverted way, that expressed by the Uduk, as just described. Twins, for Ingessana, are likened to strangers but rather than being expelled they are carefully nurtured and then recruited to a prominent and valued life-promoting cult (Jedrej 1995:65–77).

These malignant agents are said to affect the welfare of the homestead through the sorghum seed which they broadcast around the compound. Some people report actually seeing in their dreams these figures sowing the seed. People afflicted in this way turn to the doctor-diviner, who can see the harmful seed and will move about the homestead digging it up with his special staff. When someone is sick because of seed implanted in their body, he will pluck the seed from them. Some doctor-diviners grunt and groan with the effort of extracting these intrusive agents, which are then flung away over the stockade, or, usually at night, thrown with theatrical splashing noises into a large gourd of water. The water has a powerful association with the world beyond the Ingessana Hills. Ingessana geography imagines their uplands as being surrounded by grassland plains which in turn are circumscribed by masses of water, including the Nile rivers (delek). It is from these watery peripheries that the state, and other agents such as Dinka raiding parties, issue forth.¹³

Such images are quite consistent with a social organization grounded in spatially bounded territorial groups, the integrity and vitality of which are vulnerable to powerful external threats (cf. Okazaki 1992). Though the sense of external threat is prominent in these performances, we again find a definite ambiguity, since, in Ingessana ideas and institutions, there is an echo of sites beyond the hills as a source of life, a collective memory of the Funj sultanate and a benevolent relationship to it (Jedrej 1995:111).

The Nile valley peasant faces a rather general and unpredictable threat from sahhariin, individuals who can metamorphose into wild animals, especially crocodiles but in the southern Funj also hyenas, in which forms they indulge their predilection for the flesh of fellow human beings. People commonly attribute illness and misfortune to the work of unidentified sahhariin among them who bring about these dreadful consequences by the way they, unintentionally, look at people with an ‘evil eye.’ The most appropriate action is precautionary, and those who believe themselves particularly susceptible to the malignant and envious gaze of others will have phylacteries made by an Islamic holy man (feki), and wear them on their upper arms or tie them to their children. Such ideas about individual security are quite consistent with the relatively open and anonymous sociality of the towns and the markets of the lowlands, in contrast with the emphasis on collectivities in highland communities. Yet the fundamental asymmetry in the relationship between the two forms is indicated by the many young men from the highlands and from the ‘communities of the weak’ who also have phylacteries made for themselves by fekis in the belief that they might encounter sahhariin if they frequently travel outside of their own communities, for instance, when they move with herds of cattle in the regime of transhumance and then have dealings with strangers, merchants, and markets. Elders who confine themselves to their farms and homesteads are less likely to take such precautions.

In towns and large settlements one may still find a collective personal security cult known as tumbura, which shares features with the better known zar possession cult and with which it is now merging. But tumbura is associated, as might be expected, with the impoverished descendants, both men and women, of slaves and rural migrants to the towns of the Blue Nile (Makris 2000). It has its origins among the deracinated slave soldiers of the Turco-Egyptian army. Tumbura mediums are possessed by a spirit identified as the spirit of a particular culture, not in the sense of one of the spirits in that culture's spirit inventory, but in the very different sense of a spirit which is the essence of that culture: not, for example, a Gumuz spirit but the spirit of Gumuz culture, “the pagan tribes to which many devotees belonged before their enslavement” (Makris 1996:171). Nowadays, those involved regard tumbura as an Islamic institution given to them by God for their protection. They consider themselves to be poor Sudanese, and individuals find security among the spirits of different kinds of people. Some are named after ethnic groups—Nuba, Banda, and Gumuz, including Khawajat (Europeans)—others after localities, for example, Sawakiniyya, or kinds of government officials, who are invited to possess them and become their tutelary spirits. In these urban settings of emerging class stratification, tumbura may also be an expression by the poorest of a memory of, and nostalgia for, a pre-modern differentiation of peoples, of ways of life and cultures of the kind that might have been seen and experienced at the courts of the old Funj makks.

conclusion

In terms of the dominant mode of sociality particular to each of these three populations, the lowland peasantry can be distinguished from the highlanders and the ’community of the weak.' For the lowland peasantry, the market and consequently class relationships structure their actions. The state, like the urban centers from which it projects itself, is encountered as a natural feature in the social landscape that, however inadequate it is considered to be, is also indispensable. Clientilistic relationships provide a dimension of continuity among the otherwise discontinuous fields of the local community, the market, and the state.

The primary social groups among highlanders and ‘communities of the weak’ are significantly different, those of the former being realized in a spatial idiom and those of the latter in the substantial idiom of clanship. Yet in both cases the modern state is embedded in collective memories of images of an external, organized coercive force. There is a definite discontinuity of modes of sociality between, on the one hand, those at an interpersonal and local level and, on the other, those idioms of engagement with state agencies at the wider regional or even national levels. But this shared discontinuity represents a convergence from different historical origins. The intrusive groups who became the self-styled ‘communities of the weak’ were never part of the pre-modern Funj state, but the highlanders and the lowlanders at one time were, a time when the Funj used the idiom of marriage and affinity to build alliances between themselves and their subordinate populations (Chataway 1930:257; Delmet 1981: 26; Jedrej 1995:20–21, 57). While the lowlanders are now, to varying degrees, involved in social relationships that extend throughout the Nile valley and potentially link the lowest strata of society with the highest, the highlanders persist with truncated processes of marriage and affinity that now have only local and domestic significance, as has always been the case with the intrusive groups.

In the Ingessana Hills it is possible to elicit narratives that refer to events in terms which explicitly acknowledge distinctions between themselves, their society, and the state, but this usage, in my experience, refers back in time no further than the beginning of Turco-Egyptian rule. The words Ingessana use to mean ‘state’ or ‘government’—though not in an abstract sense but as represented concretely by the agents of the government of the Sudan—are Arabic: tuurk, or, especially when referring to the contemporary post-colonial government of the Sudan, hukuma. In fact, the advent of the Turco-Egyptian state marks a definite external point of reference in time, so that when someone wishes to describe something which extends further back in time they will use an expression such as “before the tuurk.” For instance, “my people have been the custodians of this shrine since before the tuurk.” And the expression tuurk extends forward in time to include the Anglo-Egyptian government. When listening to stories involving tuurk or hukuma, I often had the impression that the people were referring to encounters with representatives of one the several ethnic groups in the region, though an ethnic group with powers unmatched by any other.¹⁴

There appear to be no comparable expressions deriving from the era of the Funj sultanate. Yet there are numerous indirect references to the sultanate inscribed in the practice and symbolism of their own defining institutions and in allusions to the local Funj centers in the interpretations and explanations offered for these institutions (Jedrej 1995:15–16, 106). The ambiguous actions of the modern state and other powerful external agencies are now reflected in a ritual symbolism which highlights the coming to terms with outside threats while muting the life-giving qualities of the old ‘centers out there.’ And, as the statement from the people of South Blue Nile indicates, the Funj are not the other but themselves.