Nilotic

The Nilotic group includes the Luo, Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk and Anuak of South Sudan and its borderlands, and the Turkana, Maasai and Kalenjin of Kenya and Tanzania. In the early centuries of the second millennium the southern Luo moved south from the Bahr el Ghazal region, and the Maasai also came down from South Sudan.

The Maasai and Kalenjin adopted age-set organisation from their Cushitic neighbours and absorbed or displaced earlier peoples. On the White Nile, Nyikang founded the Shilluk Kingdom at Fashoda in the late 1400s; its sacred king, the Reth, was bound up with the nation's well-being.