Word: shilluks
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some of them, says Toynbee, migrated to the moist Sudan, where their descendants probably survive as the primitive tribes of Shilluk and Dinka. But others, responding to the challenge of desiccation, resolved to change their lives completely. The valley of the Nile was then an all but inaccessible jungle of rank reeds, the lair of hippopotamuses and crocodiles. To live at all under such conditions required an effort beyond any that such men had ever made. Through the centuries, they drained the swamps, felled the reeds, diked the Nile, laid out fields. This response, Toynbee believes, was the genesis...
...child whom she called Kola; his grandson was Ukwa. Ukwa took two wives, beautiful holy maidens who rose out of the sacred river. One of Ukwa's sons, Nyakang, a Negro, went south to the swampy country of the Upper Nile; there he founded the Shilluk nation and became its first ret (ruler) and a demigod. That was about four centuries...
Last month the passing of Ret Fafiti (rets, like Christian Scientists, do not die) brought the stately Shilluk peers into conclave. The peers elected the 30th in a long line of rets: middleaged, blue-black Anei Kur, prepared to install him at Fashoda...
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