Ndogo Erotic

The Ndogo are one of the small farming peoples of Western Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan, settled around the town of Wau and westward along the road that runs toward Deim Zubeir and Raga. What marks them out is less their size, a few tens of thousands, than their position: they are a Ubangian-speaking people at the far northeastern edge of that language family, living beside the much larger Nilotic world of the Dinka and Luo. Their language, also called Ndogo, belongs to the Sere cluster along with Sere, Bai, Bviri and Tagbu, and most of the rest of the family lies south and west, in the Central African Republic and the Congo basin. Inside the region it carries more weight than the head count suggests. Neighbors such as the Golo and Bai commonly use it as a second language, and Catholic missionaries adopted it early for schooling and church use, which gave it a written form and a body of printed material.

The country is ironstone plateau and wooded savanna, tsetse territory, so the Ndogo are cultivators rather than cattle keepers: sorghum, cassava, groundnuts and sesame, with hunting, fishing and wild honey filling out the year. That difference from the herding Dinka is economic, but it has also been political. Outsiders have long lumped the Ndogo together with the Balanda, Kresh, Golo, Banda and others under the label Fertit, a term that began as a slight and has since been partly reclaimed as a regional identity. In the nineteenth century Zande expansion pressed from the south while slave and ivory traders ran fortified camps across the plateau. Deim Zubeir still carries the name of the most notorious of them. Whole communities were scattered or absorbed, and the Ndogo of today are in part a regrouping of survivors. Colonial administrators later pulled villages onto the roads, partly to control sleeping sickness, which is why settlement still strings along them.

Most Ndogo are Roman Catholic, the legacy of the Verona Fathers who set up around Wau in the early 1900s, and the church remains a real institution in daily life: school, clinic, meeting place and, more than once, refuge. Older beliefs about ancestors and the causes of misfortune have not vanished; they sit underneath, consulted when illness or bad luck needs explaining. In the 1980s Wau was split by killings between government-armed Fertit militias and the town's Dinka, and fighting in 2016 drove tens of thousands of townspeople, many Ndogo among them, into church compounds and a UN protection site. Arabic is the language of the Wau market, but Ndogo remains the language of home and village.