Yulu Erotic

What makes the Yulu a people, and not just a handful of villages along a remote border, is their language and a shared history of holding on in country that raiders spent the better part of a century emptying. They live where the Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan meet: in the wooded savanna of the CAR's Vakaga prefecture, on the southern fringe of Darfur, and around Raga in South Sudan's Western Bahr el Ghazal. This is some of the most thinly settled and poorly connected country in Central Africa, where roads turn to mud or vanish in the rainy season.

Yulu is a Central Sudanic language of the Bongo-Bagirmi branch. Like its relatives it is tonal, and its closest kin are Binga and Kara, both spoken in the same borderland. Its wider family reaches west to Bagirmi and the Sara languages of Chad and east to Bongo in South Sudan. The Banda languages heard nearby belong to another family entirely. Arabic carries trade on both sides of the frontier, and in the Central African Republic, Sango is the language of markets and officialdom. Islam, which came into this country along the trade and raiding routes out of Darfur, is the dominant faith.

The name outsiders gave the region tells much of the story. To the sultans of Darfur, the non-Muslim peoples to their south were Fertit, a label that marked them as fair targets for slave raids, and the area became known as Dar Fertit. Armed ivory and slave traders from the Nile built fortified camps across the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Around 1900, al-Sanusi, sultan of Dar al-Kuti, sent raiding columns from Ndélé deep into what is now northeastern CAR. Much of the region was depopulated, and today's small, scattered settlements owe a good deal to that era. French and Anglo-Egyptian rule then ran a border through Yulu country, and South Sudan's independence in 2011 added a second, leaving the Yulu divided among three states. In South Sudan the slavers' word has been turned around: Fertit is now a shared political identity for the smaller peoples of Western Bahr el Ghazal, the Yulu among them.

The borderland has rarely been quiet since. Northeastern CAR was the cradle of the Séléka rebellion in 2012. Western Bahr el Ghazal was fought over in Sudan's civil wars and again in South Sudan's, and the war that broke out in Sudan in 2023 pushed refugees across the frontier. Through it all the Yulu remain a farming people far from any capital, with relatives on more than one side of a line on the map.