peoples were as often raiders as raided. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the whole of southern Sudan had become a tribal zone of the old Turco-Egyptian empire followed by the advancing Anglo-Egyptian state.
For some two centuries the Shilluk dominated the White Nile, using canoes to raid Baggara cattle keepers and downstream Muslim villages, and alternately taxing or disrupting trade where the east-west trade routes crossed their territory. By the end of the eighteenth century Aba Island was a Shilluk island and the river from Alays to Kaka was known to neighboring Arabs as “Bahr Shilluk,” the river of the Shilluk (Mercer 1971, 407–18).
Armored cavalry were at the core of the armies of Sinnar and Darfur, but they were of little use against canoe-borne raiders. Nor did they have a marked edge over Dinka spearmen, who developed their own tactics to neutralize cavalry’s advantage, as the Turco-Egyptian army learned to its cost in its first foray into the White Nile plains in 1827 (Bartoli 1970, 7–8, 34–35). In the west the formal cavalry-mounted slave raids launched from Darfur into the forested valleys of western Bahr el-Ghazal had become a stylized form of warfare during the first half of the nineteenth century, aimed at increasingly scattered communities of Fartit rather than the stronger Malual Dinka who, together with the Ngok Dinka to the east, controlled most of the river Kiir, the geographically misnamed Bahr el-Arab (O’Fahey 1980, 93–94). Despite often being in conflict with these demographically strong Shilluk and Dinka societies, the Sinnar sultanate and the Baggara also often sought them as allies (Hofmayr 1925, 66–68; Henderson 1939, 63–64; O’Fahey 1980, 99).
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