EMIGRATION

A characteristic feature of Sudanese society today is the widespread settlements of northerners throughout the towns and villages of the central and southern savannas. This diaspora has pushed the frontiers of Islam further into Africa and continues to do so also today. ‘One comes across Danagla in every town in the Sudan’, wrote a diarist in 1839. From before the Turkiyya the Danagla were among the most numerous and prosperous immigrants to Kordofan, closely followed by the Ja'aliyyīn and outnumbered by them in many areas during the Turkiyya. In Kordofan, the migrants were in a somewhat freer situation, but they might still be subjected to arbitrary treatment by the Turks and be forced to move further west or south. Miiller observed an episode there in 1848 in which a peasant set fire to his house in protest after being subject to maltreatment and extortion by six soldiers; he claimed that the Turks had slaughtered his hens, stolen his sheep, driven his camels away, made a soldier out of his son, and raped his womenfolk. ‘Now you will take nothing more from me. I will go to Dar Fur!’

The sources do not indicate when this process of migration started, probably because there has always been mobility between the Nile and the savannas, and not always from the Nile. The Arabs who intermarried with the Nubians to form the Ja'aliyyīn Group may have moved into the Nile Valley from Kordofan where the founding father, Ibahim Ja'al, is said to have been buried.