Qualla: Nuba Mountains

Nuba Mountains: Introduction

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA, CC BY 2.0. They are not the Nubians. That confusion has cost the Nuba people centuries of being misidentified, miscounted, and underestimated. The Nubians live along the Nile in northern Sudan and Egypt. The Nuba live here, in the hills of South Kordofan, a hundred and fifty kilometers south of the Nile's middle reaches, and they are a family of roughly fifty distinct ethnic groups speaking dozens of languages across a cluster of rocky inselbergs rising from the Sudanese plain. Their name comes from the mountains themselves, which in turn carry something older. In antiquity this was Kushite land. In the Middle Ages, part of the Christian Nubian kingdom of Alodia. In the eighteenth century, the small kingdom of Taqali ruled the high country. And then, slowly, the attention of more powerful neighbors began to settle on them, and it has not lifted since.

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Image: Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA | CC BY 2.0

Nuba Mountains: A Green Island in a Dry Land

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA, CC BY 2.0. The Nuba Mountains cover some 48,000 square kilometers in South Kordofan. The hills rise 450 meters or more above the surrounding plain, and their igneous inselbergs stand sharp against the metamorphic lowlands like stone waves. The rainy season from mid-May to mid-October brings...

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Image: Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA | CC BY 2.0

Nuba Mountains: Who the Nuba Are

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA, CC BY 2.0. The Nuba are not one people but many. Their languages belong to several different language families, some Kordofanian, some Nilo-Saharan, some that linguists still argue about. Their religions vary: some follow Islam, some Christianity, many preserve ancestral Nuba practices that...

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Image: Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA | CC BY 2.0

Nuba Mountains: Genocide by Attrition

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit COSV, CC BY-SA 3.0. During the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), the Sudanese government under Omar al-Bashir targeted the Nuba systematically. The scholar Samuel Totten described the campaign as genocide by attrition, using starvation as a tool of extermination. Villages were bombed. Relief co...

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Image: COSV | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nuba Mountains: The New War and the Old

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Muhammad Daffa Rambe, CC BY-SA 3.0. South Sudan became independent on July 9, 2011. The Nuba Mountains, geographically north of the new border, had voted overwhelmingly for the SPLM but found themselves cut off from it by the border. Within weeks, new fighting broke out between the Sudanese government and the newly...

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Image: Muhammad Daffa Rambe | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nuba Mountains: Still Holding

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA, CC BY 2.0. As of 2025, during Sudan's ongoing civil war, most of South Kordofan including the largest town of Kologi is controlled by al-Hilu's SPLM-North forces. They describe themselves as secular, free-market, and democratic, and they have been fighting for autonomy and rights for more t...

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Image: Maureen Didde from Kansas City, MO, USA | CC BY 2.0