Dinka

The Dinka, who call themselves Muonyjang, are the largest Nilotic people of southern Sudan, spread in independent clans along the White Nile from Bor to Renk and through Sudd's Bahr el-Ghazal and Sobat floodplains.

Their ancestors lived on the southern edge of Christian Nubian Alodia in the Gezira; Alodia's language left traces in Dinka. Medieval Arab writers of the 1200s knew raiders, the Damadim, possible western Nilotic ancestors, who sacked Alodia's capital Soba around 1220.

As Alodia crumbled in the thirteenth century, slave raids and drought sent Dinka clans south into the marshes, and the Funj Sultanate's founding in 1504 pushed the migration deeper over three centuries. Cattle-keeping agro-pastoralists, the Dinka move herds between dry and rainy pastures, count wealth and marriage payments in long-horned cattle, and venerate the high god Nhialic through spear-masters and earthen shrine-mounds; grazing rivalry made the Nuer habitual foes.