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.