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
Otuho (Lotuko)
Farmers and herders of the Imatong mountains and the Torit plain, builders of dense stone-walled hill villages, whose rainmakers held the only authority anyone recognised, and in whose town the Sudanese civil wars began in 1955.
Identity
Population: Estimated 200,000 to 300,000
Location: Torit and the Imatong mountains in Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan
Language: Otuho (Lotuko)
Language family: Nilo-Saharan → Eastern Nilotic → Lotuko-Maa
Traditional governance: Village-level monye (chiefs) and rainmakers with hereditary ritual authority; age-set organisation; South Sudanese county administration today.
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.
Otuho of Torit
The plain communities around the town.
Otuho of Lopit
Hill communities of the Lopit range, with their own dialect.
Otuho of Logir and Lokoya
Related Lotuko-speaking communities of the surrounding hills.
Culture
Clothing: Contemporary dress; beadwork, ivory and brass ornament in ceremony; the age-set dance regalia with ostrich feathers and hide.
Food: Sorghum and maize porridge, groundnuts, sim sim, wild greens, goat and cattle at ceremony, and the sorghum beer that accompanies every collective undertaking.
Ceremonies: Rainmaking; age-set promotions and the dances associated with them; harvest and hunting observances; funerals with extended mourning and dance.
Marriage customs: Patrilineal and clan-exogamous with bridewealth in cattle; age-mates participate in the negotiation and in the labour that accompanies it.
Initiation rites: Boys enter named age-sets which move together through grades; the age-set is the working unit of labour, defence and social obligation.
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
The Villages Made of StoneArchitecture
Otuho and Lopit villages are built on hillsides in tight terraced clusters of stone-walled compounds, houses stacked one above another with narrow stepped lanes between and dry-stone retaining walls holding the slope. The form is defensive and it is also social: houses share walls, everything is overlooked, and the village functions as one structure. They are among the most striking settlements in the Nile basin and are almost entirely undocumented outside a handful of anthropological accounts.
The Rainmaker's StandingPolitical and ritual tradition
Otuho rainmakers held hereditary power over the season and, with it, the only authority that extended beyond a lineage. The office was dangerous: a rainmaker who failed repeatedly could be killed, and the ethnographic record contains several such cases. Colonial administrators appointed chiefs who had no ritual standing and found their orders ignored, then appointed rainmakers as chiefs and found the office corrupted. The tension between ritual and administrative authority has continued into the South Sudanese present.
Torit, August 1955Political history
On 18 August 1955, four months before Sudan's independence, southern soldiers of the Equatorial Corps mutinied at Torit rather than accept transfer north under a northern command. The mutiny was suppressed and its leaders executed, but it is conventionally taken as the beginning of the first Sudanese civil war, which ran to 1972 and was followed by a second from 1983 to 2005. The Otuho town where it started has been fought over in every subsequent conflict, including the fighting after 2013.
Proverbs
“The rain is asked for by one man and waited for by everyone.”
On the rainmaker's exposure.
“A village on a hill has no secrets and no strangers.”
On the stone settlements.
“The age-set carries what one man drops.”
On collective obligation.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: A high god associated with rain and the sky; rainmakers as the intermediaries; ancestral spirits at homestead and lineage sites; the Imatong peaks carrying prohibitions.
Beliefs: Rainmaking as the central religious institution; ancestral offerings; divination; Catholic missions established from the early twentieth century, now widespread.
Ancestors: The dead are buried within the compound; rainmaking lines trace descent carefully, since the office is inherited and its legitimacy rests on genealogy.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The high god of rain
Addressed through the rainmaker rather than directly
Ancestral spirits
Addressed at homestead sites for health and harvest
Imatong peaks
The mountains, treated with prohibition and associated with rain
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Terraced stone villages stepped up hillsides, compounds sharing walls, with stepped lanes and dry-stone retaining walls; plain villages of round thatched houses within fences.
Building techniques: Dry-stone walling and terracing on the hill sites; round houses of pole, mud and conical thatch; raised granaries within compounds; stone-lined paths and steps.
Village layout: Compounds stacked up a slope with a single approach, the granaries within each compound, and the dance and assembly ground at the village's foot.
Artifacts
Stone hill villages
Architecture
Terraced dry-stone settlements of the Imatong and Lopit ranges.
Rainmaker's stones and vessels
Regalia
Inherited apparatus of the rainmaking office.
Age-set dance regalia
Regalia
Feather headdresses, hide and bead ornament marking set and grade.
Torit mutiny site
Memorial
The town where the 1955 mutiny began, conventionally the start of Sudan's civil wars.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Lotuko-speaking communities settle the Imatong foothills and build the terraced stone villages.
1860s–1890s
Khartoum-based raiding and Egyptian administration reach Equatoria; the region is devastated.
1899–1955
Anglo-Egyptian administration; Catholic missions establish; chiefs are appointed over rainmakers.
1955
The Torit mutiny of the Equatorial Corps, conventionally the beginning of the first civil war.
1983–present
The second civil war, independence in 2011, and the conflicts after 2013 all pass through Otuho country.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Rift Valley Institute — Equatoria researchRift Valley Institute
- Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic SudanWorldCat
Premium & scholarly sources
- Ethnologue: OtuhoSIL International