Nuba

Member of a minority ethnic group forming many small autonomous groups in southern Sudan, and numbering about 1 million (1991). They are primarily agriculturalists, and go in for elaborate body painting. They speak related dialects of Nubian, which belongs to the Chari-Nile family. Forced Islamization threatens their cultural identity, and thousands were killed in the Sudan civil war.

The Nuba farm terraced fields in the Nuba Mountains, to the west of the White Nile. Army massacres, forced ‘disappearances’, and extrajudicial executions took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the Muslim Sudanese of the north attempted to dominate the south, and many Nuba were driven from their homes.