Nuer

The Nuer, who call themselves the Naath, are a Nilotic cattle-herding people of the Upper Nile marshes, speaking a language closely related to Dinka. Their traditions say they began as a Dinka section that moved south out of the Gezira and, after centuries of isolation and contact with the Luo, became a separate people.

Semi-nomadic pastoralists, they built their society around cattle, which served as bride wealth, the measure of kinship and the center of ritual life. From the late 1700s the arrival of the Baggara Arabs and their slave raids drove the Nuer east out of Kordofan toward Bentiu, opening the expansion into Dinka and Anyuak country that continued into the nineteenth century.