Shilluk

The Shilluk, who call themselves the Cøllø or Chollo, are a Luo Nilotic people settled along the western bank of the White Nile and lower Sobat in South Sudan, living by farming, fishing and cattle herding. Their kingdom, with its capital at Fashoda, was founded by the legendary king Nyikang, who probably lived in the second half of the fifteenth century and remains the center of the national cult.

Its rulers, the reth, were sacred kings whose health was held to be bound up with that of the nation. The kingdom reached its apogee in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the Funj sultanate weakened.

In 1820 Muhammad Ali's army destroyed the Funj, and from 1821 the Shilluk frontier receded. The first confirmed northern slave raid followed in 1826, while a Dinka and Nuer force crossed the Sobat and cost them control of the White Nile.