Masalit

The Masalit are farming people of the Darfur-Wadai borderlands, centred on Geneina in West Darfur with communities stretching into eastern Chad, where they grow millet, peanuts and sorghum and live in conical wood-and-thatch homesteads. Their own traditions trace a migration from Tunisia through the central Sudan before they settled this border country. They speak Masalit, a Nilo-Saharan tongue related to the neighbouring Maba and Marfa languages.

Islam reached them in the 1600s with wandering Muslim mystics, and Masalit Islam long kept older customary beliefs. Through the fourteenth to eighteenth centuries they had no state of their own, their villages and clans being split between the rival Sultanates of Darfur and Wadai, whose raiding and tribute-collect shaped their history.