Nuer people

The Nuer (also known as the Nei Ti Naath (roughly meaning original people) are a confederation of tribes located in South Sudan and western Ethiopia. Collectively, the Nuer form one of the largest ethnic groups in East Africa. They are a pastoral people who rely on cattle products for almost every aspect of their daily lives. The Nuer border such tribes as the Dinka, Anyuak, Shilluk and other minor tribes in both Ethiopia and Sudan.

History

The Nuer are among the very few African tribes that successfully fended off colonial powers in the early 20th century.^{[citation needed]} The Nuer warriors are among the most skilled fighters in Africa; they wielded weapons made of finely crafted iron.

The nature of relations among these various southern tribes were greatly affected in the 19th century by the intrusion of Ottomans, Arabs, and eventually the British. Some ethnic groups made their accommodation with the imperial attackers and others did not, in effect pitting one southern ethnic group against another in the context of foreign rule. For example, some sections of the Dinka were more accommodating to British rule than were the Nuer. The Dinka treated the resisting Nuer as hostile, and hostility developed between the two groups as a result of their differing relationships to the British.^{[citation needed]}

In 2006, the Nuer were the tribe that resisted disarmament most strongly. Members of the Nuer White Army, a group of armed youths often autonomous of tribal elders' authority, refused to lay down their weapons, which led SPLA soldiers to confiscate Nuer cattle, destroying their economy. The White Army was finally put down in mid-2006, though a successor organisation self-styling itself as a White Army formed in 2011 to fight the Murle tribe (see 2011–2012 South Sudan tribal clashes), as well as the SPLA and UNMISS.

Culture

Cattle have historically been of the highest symbolic, religious and economic value among the Nuer. Cattle are particularly important in their role as bride wealth, where they are given by a husband's lineage to his wife's lineage. It is this exchange of cattle which ensures that the children will be considered to belong to the husband's lineage and to his line of descent. The classical Nuer institution of ghost marriage, in which a man can "father" children after his death, is based on this ability of cattle exchanges to define relations of kinship and descent. In their turn, cattle given over to the wife's patrilineage enable the male children of that patrilineage to marry, and thereby ensure the continuity of her patrilineage. A barren woman can even take a wife of her own, whose children (obviously biologically fathered by men from outside unions) then become members of her patrilieage, and she is legally and culturally their father, allowing her to participate in reproduction in a metaphorical sense.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard studied the Nuer and made very detailed accounts of his interactions. He also describes Nuer cosmology and religion in his books.

In the 1990s, Sharon Hutchinson returned to Nuerland to update Evans-Pritchard's account. She found that the Nuer had placed strict limits on the convertibility of money and cattle in order to preserve the special status of cattle as objects of bride wealth exchange and as mediators to the divine. She also found that as a result of endemic warfare with the Sudanese state, guns had acquired much of the symbolic and ritual importance previously held by cattle.

The people speak the Nuer language which belongs to the Nilo-Saharan language phylum.

The Nuer receive facial markings (called gaar) as part of their initiation into adulthood. The pattern of Nuer scarification varies within specific subgroups. The most common initiation pattern among males consists of six parallel horizontal lines which are cut across the forehead with a razor, often with a dip in the lines above the nose. Dotted patterns are also common (especially among the Bul Nuer and among females).

Typical foods eaten by the Nuer tribe include beef, goat, cow's milk, mangos, and sorghum in one of three forms: "kop" finely ground, handled until balled and boiled, "wal wal" ground, lightly balled and boiled to a solid porridge, and injera, a large, pancake-like yeast-risen flatbread.

Because of the civil wars in Southern Sudan over the past 50 years, many Nuer have emigrated to Kenya, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Approximately 25,000 Nuer were resettled in the United States as refugees since the early 1990s, with many Nuer now residing in Nebraska, Minnesota, Sag Harbor, NY, Iowa, South Dakota, Tennessee, Georgia and many other states, and some of them living in Canada, mostly in Toronto, Kitchener, Edmonton, and Calgary. There are currently (2008) over 20,000 Southern Sudanese in Australia, perhaps a third of these Nuer.

Nuer military and political leaders

Some important Nuer politicians are Bul Nyawan who fought against the Khartoum government in Bentiu; he was killed in 1985 by the current president of Sudan. Commander Ruai and Leah Diu Deng were responsible for the attack that forced Chevron to suspend activities in the oil field around 1982.

Naming conventions

• "Nya" (née ya) meaning "daughter of", is the standard prefix used for female names. "Gat" meaning "son of", is a common prefix for male names.^{[citation needed]}
• Children are commonly given names to mark historical events ("Domaac" meaning "bullet", or "Mac" meaning "fire or gun" given to a child born during times of war or from another man in the name of the deceased father who legally married the mother ).^{[citation needed]}
• "Nhial" means "rain", and is a common name for males.^{[citation needed]}
• Many Nuer have been exposed to missionaries and carry a Christian first name. Their second name is a given name and always in Nuer. The father's given name follows the child's given name, which is then followed by the grandfather's name, and so on. Many Nuer can easily recount ten generations of paternal lineage because they carry those names themselves.^{[citation needed]}
• When a Nuer comes to the Western world, which wants a first and last name, it is their custom to give their name as their first name followed by their father's name as a their middle name and their grandfather's name as their last name.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Lost Boys of Sudan
• Dinka tribe
• Anuak people
• Nuer White Army

References

• E. E. Evans-Pritchard, "Nuer Marriage Ceremonies", Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 18 (1948), pp. 29–40

External links

• Images of Nuer in the village of Leal, Southern Sudan
• [1]
• ]http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/422112/Nuer]

Further reading

• The works of E. E. Evans-Pritchard
• Jon D. Holtzman, 2000 (2nd ed. 2007), "Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives"[2], Pearson Education, Inc., Boston, MA.
• Sharon Hutchinson, 1996, Nuer Dilemmas, University of California Press, Berkley, CA.
• Maggie McCune 1999, Till The Sun Grows Cold, Headline Book Publishing Ltd, ISBN 0-7472-7539-4
• Deborah Scroggins, 2004, Emma's War, Pantheon Books, New York
• Dianna J. Shandy, 2007, "Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration," Gainesville: University Press of Florida.