Nilotic Peoples - Origins and History

Origins and History

Further information: History of South Sudan, History of Uganda, History of Kenya, and History of Tanzania

A Proto-Nilotic unity, separate from an earlier undifferentiated Eastern Sudanic unity, is assumed to have emerged by the 3rd millennium BC. The emergence of the Proto-Nilotes may have been connected with the domestication of livestock. The Eastern Sudanic unity must have been considerably earlier still, perhaps around the 5th millennium BC (while the proposed Nilo-Saharan unity would even date to the Upper Paleolithic about 15kya). The original locus of the early Nilotic speakers was presumanbly east of the Nile in what is now South Sudan. The Proto-Nilotes of the 3rd millennium BC were pastoralists, while their neighbors, the Proto-Central Sudanic peoples were mostly agriculturalists.

By about the 12th century, Luo peoples occupied the area that now lies in eastern Bahr el Ghazal. A "Nilotic expansion" southward, accompanied by ethnic and linguistic diversification, took place from about the 14th century. The reason was presumably the Islamization of Sudan and the eventual collapse of the Nubian Christian kingdom of Alodia The Luo moved to nearly all the countries neighbouring Sudan, resulting in many separate groups with variation in language and tradition as each group moved further away from their kin. A branch of the Luo, the Shilluk (or Chollo) nation, comprising more than one hundred clans and sub-tribes, was founded by a chief named Nyikango sometime in the middle of the 15th century. They evolved a nation with a feudal-style system. Nyikango and his nation moved northward along the Nile (towards Kush. The rest of the Luo groups rejected Nyikango's idea and kept a south and westwards migration.

The further spread of the Nilotes to their modern territories was a process spanning about the 15th to 18th centuries. Thus, the Maasai, according to their own oral history, migrated south from the lower Nile valley north of Lake Turkana in about the 15th century, arriving in a long trunk of land stretching from what is now northern Kenya to what is now central Tanzania during the 17th and 18th centuries.