E. E. Evans-Pritchard - The Political System of the Anuak of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

Managing Editor: Charles Stafford

The Monographs on Social Anthropology were established in 1940 and aim to publish results of modern anthropological research of primary interest to specialists.

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First published in 2006 by Berg Publishers

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ISBN 13: 978-1-8452-0018-3 (hbk)

This description of the political system of the Anuak is part of the results of two expeditions to East Africa as a Leverhulme Fellow. I express my gratitude to the Leverhulme Research Fellowships Committee and also to the Sudan Government for their support and for additional financial assistance. The Government has also contributed towards the expenses of publishing this monograph. I thank Mr. M.W.Parr, then Governor of the Upper Nile Province, for the interest he took in my work. To Mr G.L. Elliot Smith, then Assistant District Commissioner at Akobo, I am deeply indebted not only for his hospitality and for the great trouble he took to make the many arrangements that enabled my work to be accomplished without a hitch, but also for the generous manner in which he placed his information and photographs at my disposal. I thank my wife for her assistance in the preparation of this book for publication.

FEBRUARY, 1940.

E.E. E-P.

Although Anuak country had been visited in 1855 by the Maltese Andrea Debono and Philippe Terranuova DAntonio and by several other European travellers thirty to forty years ago, the Italian Bottego (1897), the French missions under De Bonchamps (1897) and Faivre (1898), Wellby (1899), Austin (1900), the German Oscar Neumann (1901), and the MacMillan Expedition (1904), practically nothing was known about the Anuak when the Government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan began to administer the whole of their country in 1921. Like most African travel-literature the accounts of these explorers are meagre on the ethnological side. Since Anuakland was taken over by the Government more detailed enquiries into their political system have been made. Credit is due to the Military Administrator, Lieut-Col C.R.K.Bacon, for recording observations on their political system and on other features of their social life in several short articles in Sudan Notes and Records. Of necessity he only touched the surface, his visits to the area in which the noble class is found being few and short, and his time being taken up with surveying and with establishing friendly relations with the people, a difficult task in view of their previous contacts with the Government and one which he accomplished with great success. A summary of Col. Bacons information, together with notes supplied by Mr. Heasty, of the American Mission at Doleib Hill, who questioned some Anuak passing through Shillukland, is to be found in Prof. and Mrs. Seligmans work. Some information on Anuak customs is contained in unpublished Government files, especially in reports by Mr.G.L.Elliot Smith who has taken great pains to enquire into their political organization. I particularly acknowledge my indebtedness to his account of the history of Anuak-Government relations, culled from early reports, his detailed description of the emblems of nobility, and his discovery of the two noble lineages of Nyigoc and Nyiudola.

On the linguistic side, apart from short lists of words by early travellers, there exist only Prof. Wester-manns notes on the Anuak language. However, there is in manuscript an Anuak dictionary by Capt.E.C. Tunnicliffe, lately District Commissioner at Akobo, and grammatical notes by Dr. A.N.Tucker, both of which I was privileged to see.