Nuba

The Nuba are some fifty ethnic groups sharing the Nuba Mountains of southern Kordofan in central Sudan, speaking Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages. In antiquity their country belonged to the Kingdom of Kush, and in the Middle Ages to the Nubian kingdoms of Alodia and Makuria.

From the fourteenth century Arab tribes moving south from Egypt merged with the plains population or drove its remnants into the hills, where the Nuba settled in family compounds, living by hoe farming and cattle herding and becoming known for wrestling contests between villages.

The Taqali kingdom kept oral memories of a sixteenth-century founding but took solid shape under Muhammad Wad Jayli and his son Ismail in the later eighteenth century, uniting the region’s “99 hills.” It stayed independent after the Egyptian conquest of Sennar in 1821, beating off three Egyptian invasions.