CHAPTER 7

The Rikdbia

I The RiKABiA are a distinctively Arab colony settled in Dongola, and having ramifications elsewhere in the Sudan, but they do not

recognize the name Danagla as applicable to them and evince a somewhat exclusive pride in their nobility of descent. Their ancestor,

they say, was a descendant of Husayn the son of Ali ibn Abu Talib,

the Sherif Ghulamulla ibn 'Aid, who settled in Dongola about the second half of the fourteenth century and conferred the benefits of

his learning on the ignorant autochthonous population. He came to Dongola by way of the Red Sea from the Yemen^.

II We have seen that the Nurab section of Kababish express pre-

tensions to be an offshoot of the Rikabia. There is also in Kordofan

a large but scattered family known as the Doalib, i.e. descendants of

Dolib, with settlements at Gebel el Haraza and, farther south, at Khursi and Bara^. These also call themselves RiKAfiiA. They formed

a colony in northern Kordofan at the beginning of the eighteenth

century and rapidly attained a very definite ascendancy over the

northern hillmen. At the same time they took to wife the women of

the "Nuba" and Shabarka^ and so helped to produce the mixed

population of the present day*.

Other so-called Rikabia and related tribesmen from Dongola had

probably settled at el Haraza, Abu Tubr, Um Durrag and farther

south long before the main Doalib immigration^, but they can hardly be distinguished from the Danagla immigrants whom we have

already alluded to as continually trickling into Kordofan under the name of Bedayria, Gawabra, etc., and may be here ignored.

The Doalib in Kordofan were a very intelligent and capable

family, and during the Turkish regime were given positions of trust

1 See Introduction to Part IV, BA CLXXIX and D 5 (^.

^ There are some of them, too, incorporated in the Howarab section of Kaba- bfsh {q.v.).

* Q.v. on p. 243.

* It is they of whom Cuny speaks {Voy. pp. 46, 50, 142, 143, 158) as " Berbers," or " Dougalawi," from Debba inhabiting the hills of northern Kordofan and speak- ing a "rotdna" of Dongolawi corrupted by Zaghawa and Kungdra. So, too, Browne, late in the eighteenth century, spoke of the people of el Haraza as mostly "of a reddish hue" (see Browne, App. 6, p. 566).

^ See pp. 93 and 94 (with notes) of Tribes of Northern and Central Kordofan.