92 THE NON-ARAB RACES OF DARFUR 1. 4. xx.
Si, etc.) and the hills south-west and west of it in a state of savagery
until some Beni Hilal Arabs under Ahmad el Ma'akur, a descendant
of Abu Zayd el Hilali who was himself descended from the Beni
'Abbas^, came to these parts. It was a descendant of this Ahmad named Sulayman and surnamed Solong—the word Solonga means Arab in the FuR tongue—who finally established an overlordship
over the Fur and welded them into a single political unit and became
ancestor of the royal line^. He and his son Musa ruled from Turra,
^ This is, of course, impossible. The Beni 'Abbas have no connection with the Beni Hilal (see Part II, Chap. i).
- As being "Beni 'Abbas" they claim a kind of kinship with the Ga'alifn, and " Idrls Ga'al" or "Edrisdjal" appears as paternal grandfather of Sulayman Solong
(see Nachtigal, ap. Helmolt, World's History, p. 585). The same Ga'ali connection
is implied in the tradition that Sulayman was "son of a Temurki [Fur] and an Arab woman of the tribe of Bedayri'a of Kordofan" (Escayrac de Lauture, Bull. Soc. Geogr. Aug.-Sept. 1855, p. 79), the Bedayria being generally reckoned Ga'alifn of a sort. A similar claim is also preferred in the case of most of the African kingdoms west of Darfur. For instance, in Wadai, a Ga'ali from Shendi—
a
soi-disant 'Abbasi that is—by name 'Abd el Kerim ibn "Yame" (the "Gama'i" of the Ga'alifn pedigrees, ancestor of the Gawama'a) is the traditional ancestor
(see Nachtigal, Voy. au Oiiaddi, pp. 70 and 93 ; and Part III, Chap, i on the Ga'aliin- Danagla group).
The details of Sulayman Solong's ancestry are extremely vague and various.
I have generally heard him spoken of as an Arab of the Beni Hilal who married a Fur princess. He sometimes appears as a son of Ahmad el Ma'akur, and some- times as descended from him in the second or third or more distant generation. His mother is variously reported as an Arab or a woman of the Masalft, but there
is no sort of agreement about him beyond the fact that he was " an Arab " and con- nected with the Fur by marriage. Both the Fur (Kungara) and the Tungur, while admitting they are entirely different from one another in race, claim to be descended from Ahmad el Ma'akur of the Beni Hilal; but the fact is likely to be that a combination of Fur and Arab (the Kayra section), reminding one of that of the Bega and Arab in the eastern Sudan, intermarried with the Tungur as a preliminary to succeeding them in northern and eastern Darfur at the end of the sixteenth century. Dr Helmolt's tree, q.v. The World's History, p. 585, based on Nachtigal's and Slatin's accounts, shews " Fora," a daughter of the Kayra
chieftain, married {a) to the father of Shau Dorshfd, the last of the Tungur Sultans of Sf (for whom see p. 67), and {b) to Ahmad el Ma'akur the "ancestor of the Tungur in Darfur." To her first husband she bore Shau and to her second Dali, the ancestor of Sulayman Solong. To pursue the matter in detail is a waste of time, and ail that one need note is the existence of an ancient Fur stock, connected on the one hand with the Islamic Arabs and, on the other, with the Tungur.
That the succession was matrilinear is also obvious. As each dynasty succeeds the last, tradition seldom fails to marry the founder of the new dynasty to the daughter of the last representative of the old. This system maintained in Egypt under the early New Kingdom, and almost certainly before, and in the Ptolemaic era
(see Murray, "Royal Marriages and Matrilinear Descent" mjourn. Roy. Anthrop.
Inst. XLV, 1915), among the Bega and in the Christian kingdom of Dongola. We
shall see, too, how the Arabs, to whom the practice had been familiar in Arabia, readily adopted it for their own purposes when they conquered Dongola, and how it was in vogue among the Berber princes round Asben in the fourteenth century.
F'uller details and references will be found in a note to Part II, Chap. 2, xxxiii.
So, too, Barth (11, 273) says: "The Kaniiri even at the present day call people
in general, but principally their kings, always after the name of their mother, and the name of the mother's tribe is almost continually added in the chronicle as a