the king and the court as conscripts into the king’s regiments and as cultivators enabling the king to amass surpluses of food for redistribution. Internal justice was maintained through the kings’ monopoly of a type of poison obtained in long-distance trade and used as an oracle to determine guilt or innocence in life-or-death issues. The Azande began moving out from between the Mbomu and Shinko rivers in the first half of the eighteenth century, entering the Nile-Congo watershed region around the beginning of the nineteenth. A king’s son would be given his own frontier province, and the princes expanded their holdings or created new kingdoms by destabilizing and conquering their neighbors. The terror the disciplined Zande regiments inspired was enhanced by their reputation—whether deserved or not—of being cannibals, a reputation physically reinforced by the practice of filing their teeth to sharp points. Conquest brought assimilation, and the Zande language spread as the kingdoms incorporated communities originally speaking Sudanic, Bantu, and Nilotic languages throughout territories now contained within the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1971a, 23–25, 269–78).
The most powerful kingdoms and states had a severe impact on their neighbors. Both the sultanates of Sinnar and Darfur were slave-raiding states, making regular forays into the hills of the Blue Nile hinterland, the White Nile plain, and the forests of western Bahr el-Ghazal. Along the White Nile the Shilluk countered and even at times checked the advances of Sinnar through fleets of canoe-borne raiders (Mercer 1971). An alternative to all these states was provided by the Padang Dinka.
The Padang Dinka tribes (including the Abialang, Paloich, and Dungjol on the White Nile and the Rueng and Ngok along the Bahr el-Ghazal and Kiir/Bahr el-Arab systems), being segmentary societies, had an ability to form social alliances across communities and developed as antistates, providing alternatives for peoples fleeing state authority. The Abialang, Paloich, and Dungjol established themselves on the east bank of the White Nile throughout the seventeenth century and by around 1775 had decisively defeated the forces of Sinnar as far north as present-day Renk and Jebelein (Westermann 1970, lv; Hofmayr 1925, 66–68; Bedri 1948, 40–42; O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 61–63, 98). Farther west, Rueng sections dominated the grazing areas between the Bahr el-Ghazal and lakes Keilak and Jau/Abiad, while the Ngok Dinka settled along the Ngol and Kiir/Bahr el-Arab rivers toward the end of the first half of the eighteenth century, assisting the Humr Baggara Arabs in clearing the area of its original inhabitants and offering refuge to both the Rizeigat and Humr Baggara when they fled the demands of the sultan of Darfur (El-Tounsy 1845, 129–30; Henderson 1939, 58–59, 61–64, 76; O’Fahey 1980, 99). By the beginning of the nineteenth century the main powers along the northern waterways were not the Muslim sultanates of Sinnar and Darfur but the states and antistates of the Shilluk, Anuak, and Dinka.
4
Trade and Empires, Tribal Zones and Deep Rurals
The former slave Salem Wilson recalled witnessing raids conducted by well-armed miniature armies against villagers armed only with bows and spears. “We need not dwell on the attack,” he wrote, “I have too vivid a recollection of the reality,” but he was explicit about the fate of the survivors. “We leave the slain and the dying, and watch the treatment dealt out to the poor prisoners. . . . The men are yoked with leather thongs to long poles, and their hands tied behind them. They then load the poor women with what have heretofore been their household goods, and make them carry these like beasts of burden” (1901, 25). Describing the aftermath of such raids, Evans-Pritchard later observed, “The tribes of the Bahr-el-Ghazal present the appearance of a routed army” (1931, 15). The military image was apt. The Turco-Egyptian state’s reliance on armed commerce in its southward expansion brought about a massive change in power relations and population distribution within southern Sudan. The military forces of state agents, trading companies, and their armed allies created new power centers that had a direct impact on indigenous social and political systems.
From the 1820s up to 1840 southern Sudanese contact with the expanding state was confined mainly to the Shilluk and Dinka between the two Niles. During the next two decades more areas in the interior were opened up to river-borne trade as government flotillas and trading companies expanded into the southern waterways. In the 1860s power shifted to the commercial companies as their private armies spread through the zariba system, a network of fortified trading stations. Commerce was founded on the trade in ivory and slaves, the latter seized in warfare, and relations between traders and southern Sudanese, in Richard Gray’s telling phrase, descended into a “vicious spiral of violence” (1961, 54).
Egypt attempted to assert its control over indigenous peoples and merchant companies alike, recruiting a succession of European administrators in the 1870s and 1880s ostensibly to expand government authority, suppress the slave trade, and support legitimate commerce. The power of the traders was broken by 1879, but the methods and even the personnel of the Egyptian administration scarcely differed from that of the traders as government troops occupied the same sites and continued to plunder local peoples for food, supplies, and captives. The outbreak of the Mahdiyya in the 1880s precipitated a rapid collapse of the Egyptian administration in its southern provinces, but the Mahdists were unable to retain control of more than a few river ports, from which they sent out raiding parties until expelled from the region by Belgian, French, and Anglo-Egyptian forces in the late 1890s. Patterns established in the nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth.1
Tribal Zones and Deep Rurals
The early colonial history of southern Sudan is an example of expanding states creating “tribal zones” along their peripheries through trade and war. Progressive militarization transformed indigenous social relations, political structures, and patterns of warfare, leading to wars of resistance, panethnic alliances, ethnic soldiering with indigenous peoples fighting on the side of or under the control of the expanding state, and internecine wars to control trade or seize plunder (Ferguson and Whitehead 2000).
But there is a parallel process in response to encroaching commercial networks of the sort that southern Sudanese experienced in the nineteenth century. The accepted picture of southern Sudan at this time is one of relentless destruction, a “rape of the Sudd” with whole communities defenseless against the onslaught of foreign exploiters. As Cherry Leonardi has pointed out, this is only part of the story, and the nineteenth century was also a time of engagement and adaptation by many southern Sudanese societies (2013a, chap. 1). We can understand this period better through the anthropological concept of “deep rurals,” a term first applied to West Africa to describe the ambivalent relationship between market centers and peripheral agricultural communities. To maintain their autonomy within regional systems created and dominated by plantations and markets, deep rural communities adopt a number of strategies, including selective trading with markets, absorbing runaways and debtors, and living symbiotically with more mobile pastoralists (Jedrej 1995; James 2015).
The late nineteenth-century history of southern Sudan illustrates these related processes. Foreign state presence constantly redefined itself, first facilitating the activities of commercial companies, then subduing them and grafting government administration onto the network of trade centers and caravan routes the companies had created, before giving way to the militant Mahdist theocracy operating through a much reduced network. Indigenous communities, too, alternated between accommodation with and resistance to the new powers in the land. Communities living in close proximity to the new military-commercial centers became captured labor, while other communities adopted deep rural strategies to maintain their autonomy.
The Rape of the Sudd and Patterns of Authority
At the beginning of the nineteenth century each of the Sudanic states had their own tribal zones. The Tunisian traveler and scholar Muhammad al-Tunisi identified them as the lands of enslaveable peoples: the Nuba south of Sinnar and the Fartit south of Darfur. Neither Nuba nor Fartit were specific ethnic labels, but expressed
