StapleSouth Sudan
Kisra
Thin fermented sorghum flatbread spread on a hot plate and peeled off in sheets, the base of every meal in the north of the country.
Serves Makes 12 · 30 minutes, plus 2 days fermenting
Mundari
Cattle keepers of the Nile's east bank above Juba whose enormous white Ankole-Watusi herds, ash-covered and horned, have made them one of the most photographed communities in Africa, and whose camps are a working system of dung, smoke and constant defence.
Identity
Population: Estimated 70,000 to 100,000
Location: Terekeka County in Central Equatoria, on the east bank of the White Nile north of Juba, South Sudan
Language: Mundari, a Bari-group language
Language family: Nilo-Saharan → Eastern Nilotic → Bari group
Traditional governance: Clan elders and camp leaders; rainmakers with ritual authority; South Sudanese county administration, with cattle-camp organisation the effective structure.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Mundari of Terekeka
The county's central communities.
Mundari of Tindilo and Tali
Eastern communities toward the Bari and Aliab borders.
Riverine Mundari
Households fishing and farming the Nile bank.
Culture
Clothing: Men often unclothed or lightly wrapped in the cattle camps, covered in white wood ash; beadwork and hide for women; ash and ochre as body covering rather than ornament.
Food: Milk in very large quantity, blood taken from live animals, sorghum, Nile fish, and meat only when an animal dies or at ceremony — a herd is capital, not food.
Ceremonies: Cattle naming and blessing; wrestling matches, which are the region's principal competitive occasion; rainmaking; funerals with cattle slaughter.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous with bridewealth in cattle running to dozens of head; the marriage economy is the reason herds are as large as they are.
Initiation rites: Forehead scarification in a distinctive pattern historically marked passage to adulthood; a young man is given a named ox with which he is identified for life.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for South Sudan, at national rather than community level — 9 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
StapleSouth Sudan
Mulukhiyah
also Jute leaf stew, Khudra
Jute mallow leaves cooked to a thick green sauce with garlic and dried fish, poured over asida. Simple, cheap and eaten across the whole of South Sudan.
Serves 6 · 45 minutes
National dishSouth Sudan
Asida with Kudra
Sorghum porridge with a green sauce of okra or greens, the everyday meal across South Sudan. Turned out as a dome and eaten from the shared dish.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishSouth Sudan
Combo
also Okra and greens stew
Fresh okra and wild greens cooked down with sesame paste into a thick, deliberately slippery stew, eaten with asida. The South Sudanese household dish.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Street foodSouth Sudan
Kajaik
Dried Nile fish stewed with onion and groundnut into a thick sauce, eaten with asida. The Nile's fish is dried in quantity and traded far inland.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Festival & feastSouth Sudan
Roast Goat for a Feast
A goat or bull killed and roasted whole for a wedding, a homecoming or the settlement of a dispute. In cattle-keeping societies the animal is the message.
Serves 12 or more · 4 hours
Festival & feastSouth Sudan
Fatta
also Bread and meat platter
Torn flatbread layered with meat broth, yoghurt and fried onion, assembled in a great tray at Eid and at weddings and eaten communally.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Regional specialitySouth Sudan
Wala Wala
Sorghum or maize porridge with a simple bean or greens relish, eaten in the Equatorias. Plain food, and what most of the country eats most days.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Drink & sweetSouth Sudan
Merissa
Sorghum beer brewed and sold by women, drunk from calabashes at markets and gatherings. It is thick, sour and cloudy, and doubles as food.
Serves Makes about 5 litres · 4 days
Stories & Oral Literature
Ash, Smoke and DungPastoral technique
Mundari camps burn cattle dung continuously; the smoke drives off mosquitoes and tsetse and the resulting white ash is rubbed over both cattle and people as a sunscreen, insect repellent and antiseptic. Cattle urine is used to wash and to bleach hair orange. Every part of the animal's output has a use. The photographs that circulate internationally show something that looks ceremonial and is in fact a complete, hard-worked veterinary and public-health system.
The Named OxSocial institution
A Mundari man is given a personal ox, which he names, decorates, sings to and is addressed by reference to; the animal's horns may be shaped as it grows. It is not slaughtered for food. The relationship — documented among the Nilotic cattle peoples generally and among the Mundari intensely — means that an insult to a man's ox is an insult to the man, and that the loss of the animal to a raid is a personal injury as well as an economic one.
Guarding the HerdContemporary history
Mundari cattle are wealth in a country awash with weapons, and the camps are guarded around the clock by armed young men. Raiding with Dinka Aliab and Bor neighbours across the Nile has produced repeated cycles of killing, and the militarisation of the cattle camps is both a consequence of the wars and a driver of them. Attempts at peace conferences between the communities have produced agreements that hold for a season or two.
Proverbs
“A man is known by the ox he sings to.”
On identity and the named animal.
“The smoke that troubles you saves the calf.”
On the dung fires.
“Cattle are counted by those who intend to take them.”
On discretion, and on the raiding economy.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Ngun as the high god of the Bari-speaking peoples, of rain and sky; rainmakers as intermediaries; cattle understood as the medium through which relations with the divine and between people are conducted.
Beliefs: Rainmaking; cattle sacrifice at every significant occasion; ancestral spirits addressed at homestead level; Christian missions present at Terekeka with limited penetration into the camps.
Ancestors: Ancestors are addressed at the homestead and through the slaughter of cattle; descent of a herd traces descent of a family.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Ngun
The high god, of rain and sky
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at homestead shrines and through cattle sacrifice
Rainstones
The rainmaker's inherited instruments for opening the season
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Cattle camps of hundreds or thousands of animals with tethering pegs, dung fires and minimal shelter; permanent villages of round thatched houses on the higher ground.
Building techniques: Dung fires maintained continuously; ash collection and application; tethering-peg layouts that keep the herd ordered; round pole-and-thatch houses in the villages.
Village layout: The camp is the herd: animals tethered in ranks with fires between them, people sleeping among them, and the village a separate and lesser place.
Artifacts
Named oxen with shaped horns
Livestock heritage
Personal animals identified with their owners, decorated and sung to.
Dung fires and ash
Pastoral technique
Continuous smoke and ash used against insects and as a body covering.
Wrestling grounds
Heritage site
Sites of the competitive wrestling that is Central Equatoria's principal sporting tradition.
Forehead scarification
Bodyart
Distinctive patterns marking adulthood in the older tradition.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Bari-group communities occupy the Nile's east bank above Juba, specialising in cattle.
1840s–1890s
Khartoum traders and Egyptian administration reach the region; cattle are raided and requisitioned.
1955–2005
Sudan's civil wars; automatic weapons enter the cattle-raiding economy.
2011–2013
Independence; conflict from 2013 intensifies raiding between Mundari and Dinka neighbours.
2015–present
International photographic attention brings the camps a global profile; peace conferences between neighbouring communities continue with limited effect.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Rift Valley Institute — Central Equatoria researchRift Valley Institute
- Buxton, Religion and Healing in MandariWorldCat
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: MundariSIL International