Thuri Erotic

The Thuri are one of the Luo peoples who never left. Luo oral histories, from the Shilluk on the White Nile to the Luo of the Kenyan lakeshore, point back toward the Bahr el Ghazal as the starting point of the great dispersal, and the Thuri, with their close cousins the Luwo, are among those still living there. Their land lies between Wau and Aweil in northwestern South Sudan, between the Jur and Lol rivers, where the wooded ironstone plateau gives way to the Dinka flood plains. They call themselves Jo Thuri, the people of Thuri, and their language Dhe Thuri. Outsiders have mostly known them by other people's words. Shatt is an Arabic label usually explained as "the scattered", and it is also pinned on unrelated groups elsewhere in Sudan, which has muddled the written record. Jur, which turns up in the names of Thuri sections such as the Jur Manangeer, is a Dinka word for strangers, applied to the non-Dinka farming peoples on the western margins of Dinka country.

That tangle of names says something true about their position. The Thuri are a small people, numbering in the thousands by the counts that exist, living beside the Dinka, the largest people in the country. Most are multilingual: Luwo or Dinka with the neighbors, Arabic in the markets around Wau. Thuri itself belongs to the northern branch of Luo within Western Nilotic, close enough to Luwo, Shilluk and Anuak that the family resemblance is plain, and a long way from the Ubangian and Central Sudanic languages of the Fertit peoples to the west. Three sections are usually listed: Bodho, Colo and Manangeer. Like the Luwo, they are cultivators first, with sorghum as the staple and fishing, hunting and a few animals around it, which sets them apart from the cattle economy next door.

History has been hard on the small peoples of this region. In the nineteenth century the armed trading camps called zaribas spread across the Bahr el Ghazal, and Deim Zubeir, headquarters of the slave trader Zubeir Pasha, sits at the far end of a road that runs through Thuri country. The long Sudanese civil wars later turned the corridor from Aweil to Wau into raiding ground and, in 1998, famine ground, and pushed many families from this countryside into the towns. Christianity, which arrived largely through the Catholic missions based at Wau, now sits alongside older belief, which among the northern Luo centers on a creator spirit, Jwok, and on the ancestors. What keeps the Thuri distinct is less any single custom than the language itself, still spoken at home by people who may use two or three others before noon.