272 THE GUHAYNA GROUP iii. 3. i.

its high protruding forehead, wide mouth and weak chin at once

suggests the Fellata, and it is an estabhshed fact that large numbers

of that race have become incorporated with the Bakkara tribes since

they first settled in Central Africa. This is of course more especially

true of the Salamat and Haymad, the most westernly Bakkara, v/ho

live among a population that is largely Fellata^ and who appear to

include sections of that people^; but it also applies to the more

easternly Bakkara as we shall see in dealing with the Hawazma.

II As a whole the Bakkara are, with the possible exception of the

Shaikia, the most warlike Arabs in the Sudan: they are also the most

inveterate slave traders and raiders, and living as they do on the

northern confines of the negro country they have indulged their pre-

datory propensities ad libitum for so long as they have not been

repressed by the firm hand of the Government.

The same qualities that have made them bold fighters and hunters

have at all times since their settlement in Africa brought them into

collision with the rulers of the more sedentary people who inhabit

the zone immediately north of them, with the Sultans and Meks, that

is, of Bornu, Wadai, Darfur and Kordofan.

In the dry season of the year the Bakkara move with all their

cattle to the rivers of the south and there hunt the elephant and raid

the negroes, but when the rains render the southern Bakkara country

a swamp of cotton-soil infested by the fly they move northwards to

the clean pastures of the higher ground and cultivate or graze their

herds. It is then that they have been apt to become involved in

quarrels with the sedentary people of the Sultanates.

They have not, however, been invariably successful, except in so

far as a perennial evasion of the full tribute demanded may be

counted success, and in consequence they have at diff'erent periods

migrated eastwards or westwards along the line of least resistance and various sections have been transplanted from place to place and from tribe to tribe until it is impossible to say how they were originally

grouped. In the account which follows I have taken as the units the

tribes as they appear at present and specified the various sections

subject to each, but it will be at once obvious from a comparison of

the lists of these sections and from a study of the past history of the Bakkara that no real racial dividing line can be drawn between any

one tribe of them and any other.

In Kordofan, where, if one omit the brief orgy of the " Mahdta,'*

there has been a settled Government for nearly a century, the

^ Carbou, ii, 51.

^ See Chevalier, Afrique centrale frangaise, p. 321, quoted by Carbou, 11, 60.