Kunama

The Kunama are an ethnic group of the plains between the Gash and Setit rivers, in the Gash-Barka region of western Eritrea, whose Kunama language belongs to the Nilo-Saharan family and whose closest kin are the Nara.

The earliest written notice is that of the Arab writer Ya'qubi around 872, who places the Cunama on the eastern borders of the Christian kingdom of Alodia. The tenth-century geographer Ibn Hawqal located them in the Barka valley, worshipping a god called Anna and governed by a council of elders.

Their society is matrilineal, with kinship traced through the mother, and they lived by hoe farming and cattle herding. During these centuries they were repeatedly the target of slave raiding from their Abyssinian neighbours; in 1692 the Ethiopian emperor Iyasu I led an expedition against them, sacking their towns and carrying off captives.