Berta

The Berta, also called the Benishangul, are a Nilo-Saharan people of the Blue Nile borderlands, in the hills between Sudanese Sennar and western Ethiopia, around Asosa. They trace their origins to the Funj sultanate of Sennar, remembered there as the largest Funj tribe, and in the 1500s or 1600s they crossed into the Ethiopian lowlands.

Their old name Bela Shangul, later Arabicized into Benishangul, means rock of Shangul, after a sacred stone in the mountains where they first settled. Feuding and slave raids from Sudan drove them onto rocky heights, houses and granaries raised on stone pillars, and by the 1800s the country had broken into sheikhdoms such as Fadasi and Asosa.

Centuries of Sudanese influence made most Berta Muslims speaking Sudanese Arabic, while ritual specialists called neri still healed, divined and made rain, farmers growing sorghum, keeping bees and cultivating coffee.