Mà'dí

The Madi, or Mà'dí, are a Moru-Madi speaking people of the Central Sudanic group, living along the White Nile and in the borderlands of South Sudan and Uganda, around Gondokoro and the Moyo district south of the river.

Their oral traditions tell of a migration from the west through Amadi in southwest Uganda to the Nile, where they parted from the related Moru; outside scholars place their arrival in the region between roughly 1400 and 1700, alongside the southward movement of Nilotic peoples.

Madi society is built on exogamous clans grouped into tribes. From the 1820s Egyptian expansion up the White Nile carried ivory and slave traders into Equatoria; Gondokoro became the main trading station, and armed raids on Madi lands south of it scattered communities into the forests and drove refugees south into Uganda.