Nilotic Peoples

The Nilotic peoples take their name from the Nile and their definition from a branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. They include the Dinka and Nuer of South Sudan, the Shilluk of the White Nile, the Luo of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and the Maasai, Samburu, Turkana and Karamojong of the East African rift. Between them they range from the cattle camps of the Sudd wetlands to the open savannah, and they have never formed a common polity or used a common name for themselves. What they share is descent of speech, and the atlas says so on the row rather than letting a reader infer more.

The grouping is also the source of a substantial body of anthropology: E. E. Evans-Pritchard's work on the Nuer in the 1930s and 1940s became a foundational text for the discipline, and the Dinka and Nuer accounts of divinity that came out of that tradition of fieldwork, above all Godfrey Lienhardt's, are among the most cited descriptions of any African religion. That prominence is a fact about who did fieldwork where, and not a measure of how important these traditions are relative to others. The peoples covered are also divided by the borders drawn over them. The Luo are split between three countries, the Maasai between two, and South Sudan's Dinka and Nuer have been on opposite sides of a civil war whose reporting frequently mistook a political conflict for an ethnic one.

Sources The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic PeopleE. E. Evans-Pritchard with Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the DinkaGodfrey Lienhardt, Sudan's Prolonged Second Civil War and the Militarization of Nuer and Dinka Ethnic IdentitiesJok Madut Jok and Sharon E. Hutchinson

Before Nilotic settled into its present form, colonial ethnography divided these peoples using a scheme built on the Hamitic hypothesis. The hypothesis began as a reading of Genesis, in which the descendants of Noah's sons populated the continents, and it was reworked in the nineteenth century into a racial theory: that the achievements found in Africa, states, cattle keeping, monotheism, must have arrived with lighter-skinned migrants from the north, who were classed as Hamites and treated as Caucasian rather than African. Peoples who did not fit either the Hamitic or the Negro category were called Nilo-Hamitic, a term applied to the Maasai and their neighbours.

Edith Sanders traced the history of the idea in a 1969 article that remains the standard account, and the theory it describes is wholly discarded. Its consequences were not confined to books. Colonial administrations in the Great Lakes region used Hamitic reasoning to rank the populations they governed, with results that ran into the twentieth century and beyond. The atlas keeps this on the record because the vocabulary of a discarded theory outlives the theory, and a reader meeting Nilo-Hamitic in an older source should know what it was doing there.