Gula iro

The Gula Iro, whose language they call Kulaal, are a Gula people of southeastern Chad, living north and east of the seasonally flooding Lake Iro in Moyen-Chari, between the Bola and the Bahr Salamat.

Their speech is a Bua language of the Niger-Congo family, closest to Zan Gula and Bon Gula; it splits into four dialects, of which Pongal, on the north shore of the lake, is the largest.

Gula oral history traces the people to the Blue Nile region, from which they moved into Darfur around 1750 and on toward the lake country of the Chad-CAR border by 1795. The nineteenth century brought repeated slave raids from Darfur, Dar al Kuti and Kara, with heavy tributes in captives and ivory, and Gula communities fled or scattered before the raiders.