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Roxane Connick Carlisle
Anthropos 68. 1973
before moving on to Darfur. These traditions are still celebrated in the women’s
songs of the present day. The Zaghawi inhabit a harsh land, with soft sand
desert broken up by spurs of rock, with sparse thorny bushes and a rainfall
of an inch or so every few years.
South of the Zaghawi camel-herders lies the central mountain range of
Darfur, dominated by Jebel Marra, a volcano which rises to 10,000 feet above
sea level. This is the homeland of the Fur peasantry. In the seventh century
A. D. this region was nominally Christian and the monks of Ain Farah intro
duced terrace cultivation, which is still practised, and the date palm. In the
thirteenth century a muslim invasion from the northwest, probably by Berbers,
put an end to Christianity in the area and substituted Islam (Arkell 1961:
194). It may be that this was also the time of the arrival of the Zaghawi
from Bornu, bringing Islam with them. In any case the mountain Fur are
an ancient negroid population of settled cultivators and hunters who have
retained a number of pre-Islamic cultural traditions. The women own their
personal terrace gardens and the fruit trees, of which there is a wonderful
variety, while today the men engage in peaceful agricultural pursuits and
house building chores, in contrast to their once renowned war-like activities
in the service of their Berber overlords.
South of the central mountain ranges lies the westward extension of
the great flood plain through which run tributaries of the White Nile. This
plain is the home of the Baggara Arabs, pastoral nomads, whose name
means simply "cattlemen”. Baggara genealogies connect them with the Guh-
eyna of southern Arabia, long before the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammed,
but they probably did not reach their present area until after they had adopted
Islam. MacMichael (1922) has suggested that they advanced up the White
Nile in the fourteenth century, exchanging camels for cattle on the way, and
then spread west throughout the savannah belt as far as Lake Chad. This
belt of Acacia - tall grass savannah, to give it its technical name - is a region
of high rainfall, subject to flooding in the brief rainy season but without
rain for nine or ten months of the year. It is the rainy season and the mud
which make it unsuitable for camels, while flies and the availability of water
keep the Baggara on the move through a seasonal migration pattern.
All the tribes of the Baggara claim a relationship through genealogies
(often sung), but the chief tribe of southern Darfur is the Beni Helba, a sec
tion of the larger Humr conglomerate, some of whose other branches, the
Ta’aisha for instance, also spread into Darfur. These tribal sections maintain
a rich oral tradition of genealogies memorized by boys and girls and sung
throughout their lifetimes. Cattle are owned both by men and by women,
and the latter in particular ride bulls when they move around while the men
are more likely to be found riding horses or donkeys.
Though these three groups dominate Darfur, the ethnic picture of
the region is more complex than this. Darfur is on the west-east pilgrim
route to Mecca, and many villages today consist of West African Fellata