Nilo-Saharan

The Nilo-Saharan group includes the Daju, Fur and Berta of Sudan, the Toubou of Tibesti, the Kunama of the Eritrean lowlands and the Nuba of the hills of Kordofan. The Toubou, divided into Teda and Daza, were clan-based herders and oasis farmers whose clans each held certain wells and pastures.

The Nuba lived in some fifty groups in the Nuba Mountains, and spoke languages that were not closely related to each other. In Darfur the Tunjur kingdom gave way in the 1500s to the Fur sultanate of the Keira dynasty, founded, tradition says, by Daali. By the late 1700s Darfur reached east to Kordofan and the White Nile.