 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2017) |
Ingessana (Gaahmg, Tabi) are the members of an African ethnic group of Sudan who speak the Gaam language. They live around the Tabi Hills, southwest of Ad-Damazin and northwest of Kurmuk in the Blue Nile Province. The capital of the Ingessana area is Bao, and the government offices are in Soda.
There are 5 major subgroups of the Ingessana: the,jok Gabanit or Bawoak, Jok Bulek, the Jok Gor, and the Jok Tau. Each of these major subgroups of the Ingessana has an economic specialisation: the Jok Kulelek own great heards of livestock, the Jok Bulek are known for their farming capabilities, the Jok Gor are skilled weavers and the Jok Tau specialise as blacksmiths and iron ,the jok Gabanit or bawak which know by chilly planeting hard test called shada Gabanit which means chilly of Gabanit people. [1]
As Jedrej (1995) explains, the Gaahmg (Ingessana) have historically protected themselves and their hills from many invasions by outsiders. As a result, their culture is much more resistant to change than that of other ethnic groups of the southern Blue Nile region. Mainly self-sustaining in what they cultivate in the hill area, the Gaahmg are slow to grow cash crops or to migrate for wages. As a result of past conflict with Arabs and other invaders, they have a reputation of being hostile towards strangers and even refugees. [2]
Although the origins of the Gaahmg are unclear, the Ingessena hills were alternately raided for several hundred years by the Funj sultans of Sennar to the northwest or by the Abyssinian kings of Gondar to the northeast, the Ingessena hills being a borderland between these kingdoms that plundered for slaves and gold. The Dinka and Nuer to the southwest raided the Gaahmg for cattle during times of drought or flooding in their own areas. [3]
From 1820-1855, the ruling Turkish-Egyptian administration demanded heavy tributes of slaves and gold. When they did not receive their demands, they attacked and imprisoned the Gaahmg, taking several hundred prisoners at a time. The Gaahmg fought back with speed and surprise attacks, causing many attacks on them to be unsuccessful. [4]
In 1888-1889, the Mahdist government raided the Funj area and the Ingessena hills in particular, to provide for Khartoum during a severe and widespread famine, taking 1000 head of cattle from the Gaahmg on one occasion. The Gaahmg made counter attacks and held Arabs captive for ransom at ten head of cattle per person. [5]
From 1903-1934, the Anglo-Egyptian government continued a similar pattern of collecting tribute and squelching resistance. When the Gaahmg attacked tax patrols in protest to tribute collections, the Anglo-Egyptian government conducted ‘military operations’ which, although they did not involve taking slaves, seized livestock and killed those deemed responsible. [6]
Since the 1980s, the state has become a major battleground for the ideological competition between two opposed models: Khartoum’s attempts at unifying and centralising the country with a dominant Arab-Islamic identity, which South Sudan’s separation is paradoxically reviving, versus the rebel SPLM/A’s and now SRF’s agenda for a more inclusive and devolved Sudan. Attempts to resolve Blue Nile’s past and current conflicts thus very much reflect Sudan’s existential dilemma as to how best it should define itself.
By the 1980s, land grabbing and exploitation by the centre led some in Blue Nile State to identify more with the South. In 1985, the newly formed SPLM/A was quick to send Southern troops and recruit from among local communities, including many Ingessana. Some of the most prominent leaders of SPLA-North are Ingessana, including Malik Agar.
As a result of on-going conflict, most of the Ingessana have since 2011 been displaced as refugees to South Sudan.
The main occupations of the Gaahmg relate to livestock, cultivation, or craftmaking. In particular, the Gaahmg grow sorghum, sesame, maize, peppers, gourds, and tobacco. They keep cattle, goats, pigs, sheep, hens, donkeys, mules, and camels. During the dry season, young men and boys take herds of up to 50 head of cattle a hundred miles south to the Yabus River for water and pasture.
The Gaahmg are also famous for their throwing knives, called koleth. There are two types of these, called "Sai" and "Muder".The designs on the blade are fixed and different for both the varieties. The "Muder" features a scorpion (deit) on the left side and an insect called fil on the other. Fil is a water insect and often stings people who are bathing but the pain is slight relative to that inflicted by a scorpion. The "Sai" also carries two creatures from nature, the snake (der) and the spider (maras) Both are represented on each side of the blade and spider four times in all, twice on each side. The shank and hilt of each variety are engraved with either pairs of small incisions (representing the footprints of a small deer, mofor) or parallel zig-zag lines called 'the millipede' (dongole) and sometimes combinations of both. The design here reflects the preference of the client or smith.
There are reported to be 78 hills in the area, some rising 300 meters above the surrounding flat plains. While the plains are grassland with occasional acacia trees, the vegetation in the hills has a much greater variety of plants and trees, with water sources even in the dry season. Their traditional religion is thought to be based on worship of the Sun, but there is a distinction from the physical phenomenon of the Sun ("tel") and the creator-deity "Tel". [7] This confusion may be based on the fact that the Gaahmg language is tonal (that is, relative pitch is used to contrast between different words and/or different grammatical forms [8] ). Extensive research on the Gaahmg has been done by anthropologists Charles Jȩdrej and Akira Okazaki, the latter referring to them as "Gâmk".
Writing in 1941, the journalist George Steer, then an officer in the colonial British military force attempting to oust the Italians from Ethiopia, described the Ingessana in his account of the campaign:
Their hills are a freak outcrop of giant boulders piled one on top of the other to make an unfinished doll's house for the Ingessana. They themselves have pasted their particular cells out of a grey camouflage plaster on to this substructure, like a law-abiding colony of weaverbirds or wasps. But the Ingessana are superior to these social animals in that they have a sense of both humour and affection. When they see one they smile charmingly, one is not quite sure from which motive. Their skin is black and they are happy, but besides that they have few characteristics of the negro, for their features are regular and small like the mixture of Amhara and Galla that one meets in the Shoan countryside. They have their own tribal uniform which they do not abandon for the ways of Britain, Greece or Syria. Their long skirt or sarong is rolled tight over their buttocks and their hair is plaited back to fit the turn of their heads. Round their necks and plump, well-formed armes they wear thick plain bracelets and rings of bronze and a braided leather necklace with a sharp bronze bar pointing behind them and another long trailing necklace hanging in ingenious reverse down their backs. Their hair sometimes concludes in a Nelsonian queue, cased in leather and bronze. They carry two spears and balance on their easy shoulders, blade towards the sky, a magnificent curved and formal sword concave to the front of them. Their women are as free and sleek as they. They live round waterholes like dewponds in the rocks, ringed by the same grey clay as they sentryboxes they sleep in. [9]
— George L. Steer, "Chapter VIII: The Route of Rolle", Sealed and Delivered (1942)
The history of Sudan refers to the territory that today makes up Republic of the Sudan and the state of South Sudan, which became independent in 2011. The territory of Sudan is geographically part of a larger African region, also known by the term "Sudan". The term is derived from Arabic: بلاد السودان bilād as-sūdān, or "land of the black people", and has sometimes been used more widely referring to the Sahel belt of West and Central Africa.
The Nilotic peoples are people indigenous to the Nile Valley who speak Nilotic languages. They inhabit South Sudan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, the eastern border area of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. Among these are the Burun-speaking peoples, Teso people also known as Iteso or people of Teso, Karo peoples, Luo peoples, Ateker peoples, Kalenjin peoples, Datooga, Dinka, Nuer, Atwot, Lotuko, and the Maa-speaking peoples.
The Dinka people are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan. The Dinka mostly live along the Nile, from Bor to Renk, in the region of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile, and the Abyei Area of the Ngok Dinka in South Sudan.
The Funj Sultanate, also known as Funjistan, Sultanate of Sennar or Blue Sultanate, was a monarchy in what is now Sudan, northwestern Eritrea and western Ethiopia. Founded in 1504 by the Funj people, it quickly converted to Islam, although this conversion was only nominal. Until a more orthodox form of Islam took hold in the 18th century, the state remained an "African empire with a Muslim façade". It reached its peak in the late 17th century, but declined and eventually fell apart in the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1821, the last sultan, greatly reduced in power, surrendered to the Ottoman Egyptian invasion without a fight.
Alodia, also known as Alwa, was a medieval kingdom in what is now central and southern Sudan. Its capital was the city of Soba, located near modern-day Khartoum at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile rivers.
Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and had a resurgence during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). During the Trans-Saharan slave trade, many Nilotic peoples from the lower Nile Valley were purchased as slaves and brought to work elsewhere in North Africa and the Orient by Nubians, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs.
The Islamization of the Sudan region (Sahel) encompasses a prolonged period of religious conversion, through military conquest and trade relations, spanning the 8th to 16th centuries.
The Mahdist State, also known as Mahdist Sudan or the Sudanese Mahdiyya, was a state based on a religious and political movement launched in 1881 by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah against the Khedivate of Egypt, which had ruled the Sudan since 1821. After four years of struggle, the Mahdist rebels overthrew the Ottoman-Egyptian administration and established their own "Islamic and national" government with its capital in Omdurman. Thus, from 1885 the Mahdist government maintained sovereignty and control over the Sudanese territories until its existence was terminated by the Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898.
Fazogli, also known as Fazughli, Fazoghl or Fazokl, was a historical province in what is now the border region between Sudan and Ethiopia. It was established by the Funj after their conquest of the kingdom of Fazughli in 1685 and was continued in Turco-Egyptian Sudan and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. It lay between the Blue Nile and the Sobat River, and included the mountains in the modern Asosa Zone of the Ethiopian Benishangul-Gumuz Region. The west slope of the hills drains the White Nile.
The Gumuz are an ethnic group speaking a Nilo-Saharan language inhabiting the Benishangul-Gumuz Region in western Ethiopia, as well as the Fazogli region in Sudan. They speak the Gumuz language, which belongs to the Nilo-Saharan family. The Gumuz number around 250,000 individuals.
The Butana, historically called the Island of Meroë, is the region between the Atbara and the Nile in the Sudan. South of Khartoum it is bordered by the Blue Nile and in the east by Lake Tana in Ethiopia. It should not be confused with the Gezira, the region west of the Blue Nile and east of the White Nile.
The Berta (Bertha) or Funj or Benishangul are an ethnic group living along the border of Sudan and Ethiopia. They speak a Nilo-Saharan language that is not related to those of their Nilo-Saharan neighbors. The total population of Ethiopian-Bertas in Ethiopia is 208,759 people. Sudanese-Bertas number around 180,000.
Gaam (Gaahmg), also known as Ingessana, (Me/Mun) Tabi, Kamanidi, or Mamedja/Mamidza, is an Eastern Sudanic language spoken by the Ingessana people in the Tabi Hills in Blue Nile State in eastern Sudan, near Ethiopia. It was considered an isolate within Eastern Sudanic until the other Eastern Jebel languages were discovered in the late 20th century. Dialects are Soda (Tao), Kukur (Gor), Kulang, Buwahg (Buek).
The Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North, or SPLM–N, is a political party and militant organisation in the Republic of Sudan, based in the states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan. The group's armed forces are formally known as the Sudan People's Liberation Army–North or SPLA–N. As of 2017, its two factions, SPLM-N (Agar) and SPLM-N (al-Hilu) were engaged in fighting each other and against the government of Sudan, and as of 2023, the al-Hilu faction is fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), while the leader of the Agar faction was appointed into the military-run government.
Malik Agar is a Sudanese politician and former insurgent leader who was active in the insurgency in Blue Nile state. Since 2023, he has been the deputy chairman of the Transitional Sovereignty Council, Sudan's ruling military junta.
The Sudanese conflict in South Kordofan and Blue Nile was an armed conflict in the Sudanese states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement–North (SPLM-N), a northern affiliate of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) in South Sudan. After some years of relative calm following the 2005 agreement which ended the second Sudanese civil war between the Sudanese government and SPLM rebels, fighting broke out again in the lead-up to South Sudan independence on 9 July 2011, starting in South Kordofan on 5 June and spreading to the neighboring Blue Nile state in September. SPLM-N, splitting from newly independent SPLM, took up arms against the inclusion of the two southern states in Sudan with no popular consultation and against the lack of democratic elections. The conflict is intertwined with the War in Darfur, since in November 2011 SPLM-N established a loose alliance with Darfuri rebels, called Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF).
The South Sudan Democratic Movement (SSDM), sometimes called the South Sudan Democratic Movement/Army (SSDM/A), was a South Sudanese militant group. Along with its armed wing, the South Sudan Defence Army (SSDA), rebelled against the government of South Sudan led by President Salva Kiir Mayardit and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.
The Hamaj Regency was a political order in modern-day central Sudan from 1762 to 1821. During this period the ruling family of the Funj Sultanate of Sennar continued to reign, while actual power was exercised by the regents.
The Kingdom of Fazughli was a precolonial state in what is now southeastern Sudan and western Ethiopia. Oral traditions assert its establishment to refugees from the Nubian Kingdom of Alodia, after its capital Soba had fallen to Arabs or the Funj in c. 1500. Centered around the mountainous region of Fazughli on the Blue Nile and serving as a buffer between the Funj sultanate and the Ethiopian empire, the kingdom lasted until its incorporation into the Funj sultanate in 1685.
In July, September, and October 2022, clashes broke out between the Hausa people and Funj and Berta peoples over land disputes in the Blue Nile state in southeastern Sudan, particularly the contentious establishment of a Hausa emirate in Blue Nile State. Over the course of several attacks and massacres, hundreds of civilians were killed up until the violence ended in January 2023. These clashes led to numerous casualties, mass displacement, and the imposition of a state of emergency in parts of Blue Nile State.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
