III. 1. XXXI. THE GA'ALlfN AND DANAGLA GROUP 223

In appearance the Gamu'ia are darker and more negroid than the average Sudanese Arab. They themselves attribute the fact to the enormous number of slaves they owned prior to the Dervish days and the miscegenation that resulted. That the Gamu'ia owned many slaves is an established fact, and no doubt, as they allege, much of the thieving for which as a tribe they are so notorious is due to the slave famines whom they include, but all and sundry are uniformly dark and semi-negroid and it is probable that the fact is due as much to ancient inter-marriage between free aboriginals of Nuba stock and Arab immigrants as to the particular cause assigned.

XXXI The GawAma'A. The history of the Gawama'a, in so far as they are Arabs, is similar to that of the Bedayria, but they are even

less homogeneous than the latter, and the fact that taken as a whole they are darker in colour and more debased^ in manners suggests that the original Arab nucleus of the tribe was small, and that in con- sequence it became more merged in the negro. There is no tribe of Gawama'a in Dongola, but since the Mek of the Mahass in Burck- hardt's^ time was "of the family of Djama" (^^l*.), i.e. "Gama'i," and the plural of " Gama'i " is " Gawama'a," and the chief section of Gawama'a is specifically known as Awlad Gama'i, it is possible that the Gawama'a are related to the Mahass^.

The negro element in the Gawama'a would appear to be largely Darfurian. We have seen earlier in this chapter that there is evidence that one of the Gawama'a early in the seventeenth century was responsible for the foundation of the royal house of Wadai, and that a colony of Gawama'a has been settled at Turra in Gebel Marra from much the same date. As to the numbers of them in Darfur from the seventeenth century until the nineteenth there is no information, but at the time of the Turkish conquest (1874) they were one of the chief tribes between el Fasher and the Kordofan border, and at the present day, though few remain in those parts, the Gawama'a are repre- sented by the Darok, a soi-disant Arab tribe of Ga'ali extraction, who used to live round Kebkebia in the west and have lately moved to Showai at the eastern foot of Gebel Marra, and by the Awlad ManA.

Cuny goes so far as to say* that the " Djoama se disent descendants

^ Writing as I am of Arabs and not primarily of the older Sudanese stocks I use the phrase "more debased" as the equivalent of "less Arab."

' Nubia, p. 64.

^ Ibn Khaldun mentions a small branch of Beni Hilal, named Awlad Gama'i who were for a time "amirs'' of I<:abis ("Gabes") in North Africa, but there is nothing beyond the name to connect them with the Gawama'a of the Sudan. (See Ibn Khaldun, ed. ar. Vol. 6, p. i66, Bk. m.)

' P. 177.