ابيي تقترب من ان تكون جنوبية

Quote: The main part of the disputed area consists of a network of waterways flowing into the Bahr el-Arab on its way through Kordofan into the Bahr el-Ghazal. The heart of the area is where the Ngok Dinka have had their permanent settlements for more than two centuries. Its pastures are used in a seasonal rotation by both the Ngok Dinka and the Humr section of the Misseriya Baggara Arabs, who move south from their main settlement areas at Muglad and Babanusa.3 The Ngok and the Misseriya both entered Kordofan from different directions in the eighteenth century, occupying two distinct ecological zones. The Ngok were part of a broad migration of Padang Dinka who moved westward along the Bahr el-Ghazal, while the Baggara trace a migratory movement along the savanna belt from Wadai through Darfur and Kordofan.4 According to K. D. D. Henderson’s standard history of the Humr, published over a quarter of a century before the area became disputed, the Ngok were well established in their area along the Ngol (Ragaba ez-Zarga), Kiir (Bahr el-Arab), Nyamora (Ragaba Umm Bieiro) and Lau by the time the Humr reached Muglad, and sections of Ngok even assisted them in seizing control of the area from the indigenous Shatt.5 Conditions along the Bahr el-Arab were disturbed during the late Turco-Egyptian period (1821–83) and throughout the administration of the Mahdist state (1883–98). The establishment of large ivory- and slave-trading companies operating in Bahr al-Ghazal, Kordofan and Darfur in mid-century brought about a commercial alliance between northern merchants from the Nile Valley (jallaba), such as al-Zubayr Pasha, and various Baggara groups, including the Humr, in raiding the Dinka and other peoples of Bahr al-Ghazal for slaves and cattle. For a while the Humr were administered as part of al-Zubayr’s trading empire from Bahr el-Ghazal, and he appointed his own sanjak (military administrator) over them. The Ngok resisted these attacks, but they also sought strategic alliances with the Humr. The leading Ngok chief, Arop Biong, established personal relations with Humr shaikh, and through them, the Mahdi. In this way he secured protection from raids.6 The Humr split during the Mahdiyya. Most joined the Khalifa Abdullahi in Omdurman after 1885, but some refused and were targeted by the Mahdist state. The non-Mahdist Humr sought and received refuge with Arop Biong and the Ngok. After the overthrow of the Khalifa Abdullahi in 1898–9, the Mahdist Humr returned to Muglad. Shaikh Ali Jula, a former marasala (messenger) of the Khalifa, was recognized as nazir (head shaikh) of the Humr by the Condominium government in 1905.7 At the beginning of the twentieth century the in-coming Condominium administration found that Arop Biong’s group of Ngok were generally on good terms with their Arab neighbours, but at the same time the Ngok’s closest relationship was with the anti-Mahdist Humr, who were being supplanted by the returning Mahdist Humr. Ali Jula was largely responsible for carrying out raids against the Ngok and Twic Dinka, and of extortion in claiming to collect cattle tax on behalf of the government. The Bahr al-Ghazal Province administration found that the Dinka living around the Bahr al-Arab were largely inaccessible to them because of the sudd (barriers of floating vegetation) in the river. There was also a confusion about just who had jurisdiction over whom. The annual reports claimed that the Bahr el-Arab was the provincial boundary between Kordofan and Bahr el-Ghazal, but no official was quite sure where the Bahr el-Arab was, since neither the Dinka nor the Baggara used that name and called the river the Kiir or the Jurf respectively.8 The location and nomenclature of these waterways were not sorted out until some years after the transfer of the Dinka to Kordofan.9 As a result of Dinka complaints it was decided to transfer the Ngok and part of the Twic Dinka from the administration of Bahr al-Ghazal Province to Kordofan, so that they would be placed ‘under the same Governor as the Arabs of whose conduct they complain’.10 Various readjustments to the province boundary were made in 1912–31, leaving only the Ngok in Kordofan.