Bongo people (South Sudan)

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Not to be confused with Bongo people (Gabon).

The Bongo are a Central Sudanic speaking ethnic group, living in South Sudan in small, scattered settlements south and east of Wau.[1] They speak the Bongo language, one of the Bongo-Baka languages. Unlike the Dinka and other Nilotic groups, the Bongo are not a cattle herding people and do not use cows for bride price. Subsistence farming is the primary source of food, though money is obtained by working in forestry, building, selling honey, and other various means.

Since the 1970s, large size wooden funerary sculptures of male figures have been collected and described as important examples of African tribal art.

History[]

Georg August Schweinfurth, a German explorer, who lived two years among them around 1865, reported that before the advent of the slave-raiders, c. 1850, they numbered at least 300,000. Slave-raiders, and later the Mahdist followers from northern Sudan, greatly reduced their numbers, and it was not until the establishment of effective control by the colonial Sudan government during 1904 and up to 1906 that recuperation of the population was possible.[2]

Bongo grave post at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, France

Before the twentieth century, Bongo men formerly wore only a loin-cloth, and many dozen iron rings on the arms (arranged to form a sort of armour), while the women had simply a girdle, to which was attached a tuft of grass. Both sexes now largely use cotton cloths as dresses. The tribal ornaments consist of nails or plugs, which are passed through the lower lip. The women often wear a disk several inches in diameter in this fashion, together with a ring or a bit of straw in the upper lip, straws in the alae of the nostrils, and a ring in the septum. The Bongo, unlike other inhabitants of the upper Nile, are not great cattle-breeders, but employ their time in agriculture. The crops mostly cultivated were sorghum, tobacco, sesame and durra.[2]

In the late 1920s, British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard visited and later described the lifestyle and history of the Bongo people.[3]

Bongo tribal art[]

The African Art collection of the Pacific Lutheran University in Washington State in the US holds a rare wooden Bongo grave post in the shape of a male figure. Such sculptures and their cultural use were described by Catholic missionary Stefano Santandrea of the Comboni Mission after his extended stay with the Bongo community in the mid-1960s.[4][5]

Further, the catalogue "Bongo - Monumental statuary from Southern Sudan" presents pictures and art historical descriptions of a number of life-size statues. These were erected at the graves of important members of the Bongo communities and constitute a specific artistic tradition of this ethnic group. Starting in the 1970s, these sculptures have been collected by European travellers and were later sold to museums or private collections in Europe and other Western countries.[6]

References[]

  1. ^ "Bongo | people". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2021-06-16.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bongo". Encyclopædia Britannica. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 204–205.
  3. ^ Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1929). "The Bongo". Sudan Notes and Records. 12 (1): 1–61. ISSN 0375-2984. JSTOR 41719404 – via JSTOR.
  4. ^ "Learn More: Bongo Grave Post | African Art Collection". Pacific Lutheran University. Retrieved 2021-06-16.
  5. ^ A Catholic priest in the Comboni Mission, Santandrea is the author of approximately twenty books and shorter texts on linguistics, anthropology, geography, and history. Their common link was the Bahr el-Ghazal region, where he dedicated himself for the most part to the mission of being a priest. In A Popular History of Wau, he recalled that the old city of Wau, which he described as a modest village, had been noted since the 1860s in a number of accounts (von Heuglin 1869; Schweinfurth 1984) but that it had disappeared following a Mahdist attack in the spring of 1884 (Santandrea 1964, 17).[1]
  6. ^ de Grunne, Bernard (2011). "Bongo - Monumental statuary from Southern Sudan". Issuu. Retrieved 2021-06-16.

Further reading[]

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