Dagu

The Dagu are an ancient people whose origins go back to the area around Tunis in North Africa. The ancient Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans considered the Dagu the indigenous people of the Tunis region of Africa. However, the Dagu have experienced a long history of warfare and invasions. From the time of the Phoenician invasion in the 9th century BC, they have absorbed other groups. The small band of Phoenicians who left Tyre with Princess Elyssa and settled in North Africa was soon assimilated into the indigenous populations such as the Dagu and other African ethnic groups.

After numerous wars with Arabs, during the Great African Upheaval of the 7th to the 19th centuries, the Dagu were forced into the interior of Central Sudan. They now occupy a considerable region of Darfur and Kordofan in West and Central Sudan. The Dagu have retained many of their customs, although they have increasingly become Arabicized by the policies of the Sudanese government.

They were known in the past for their ability to absorb other ethnic groups. For example, the Dagu assimilated many of the Fur and Arab people into their communities while maintaining their strong matrilineal structure. Thus, although the Dagu express a belief in Islam, they also rely on their more ancient traditions. In the past, when areas of Sudan were Christian, the Dagu also held fast to their traditional ancestral customs, thus weathering both the Christian and Islamic onslaught. However, during the 20th century, the increasing centralized power of the Sudanese government forced the people to accept more Arabic elements into their culture because Arabic is the preferred language among the elites.

The pattern of Dagu disintegration is like that of many ethnic groups in the Sudan. The Arab armies met with great resistance from the Dagu kings. This was also the case with the Nuba royals. However, the Arabs who fought against the indigenous people were often more victorious among the matrilineal people of the Sudan when they took the daughters of the kings they defeated as wives. The offspring of these Arab fathers and Dagu mothers would become the rulers of the country because these children, especially males, would inherit from their mother's side of the family.

In this way, most historians of the Dagu believe that the Dagu, Nuba, and Fur people often moved from being African to being Arab. Once patrilin-eality was introduced in an area by the Arab Muslims, it meant that the older African matrilineal form ended. As one writer claims, all vestiges of authority and tradition usually disappeared in the lands where this occurred, and the old patterns of authority were exchanged for the new Bedouin Arab authority.

Elements of resilience exist in all cultures, and from time to time, even among the Dagu, there are periods of réévaluation and reassessment that suggest a neo-renaissance of even the more traditional customs that have disappeared over time. Consequently, although the outward religion of [Page 191]many Dagu is Islam, they retain the cultural forms of their ancestors in their music, dance, festivals, styles of women dress, and specific Dagu elements of courtship and kinship patterns. The memory of the ancestors, a central aspect of African religion, is never far from the Dagu. They are profoundly impacted by the integrative nature of all forms of human life, and the cyclical nature of the African world is still a part of their deepest thinking.

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