AndrewWanhMayik_songTheSongOfDibalo

The recording at the center of this item is a Shilluk song. The Mahdists entered Khartoum on 28 January 1885. And the Mahdi declared an Islamic State with its capital in Omdurman. Mahdi died in June the same year and Khalifa Abdalla took over. Khalifa Abdalla sent Al-Zaki Thamal to convert the Shilluk people to Islam in 1890. King Yor Akoc welcomed him. Al-Zaki was very happy and went back to tell the Khalifa that the Shilluk people accepted the Islam and will pay taxes. King Yor did not order the Shilluk to become muslims but to be ready to fight the Mahdists when they come back in the following year. Al-Zaki came back and the Shilluk fought with him. He killed many people because he had guns. The fighting started in Kodok. Some of the Shilluk villages did not fight well, so the Shilluk king was pushed to the south until he reached Tonga. This song is telling how some villages conspired with the enemy to kill the people of Dibalo, which is part of Nyibanyo, within the Tonga cluster of villages. The conspiring villages sent a message to the people of Dibalo that Al-Zaki, the Mahdist leader says that people should go to Chief Gokwec for safety. And people went to Gokwec Village. But when Al-Zaki entered that village (the village of Chief Gokwec) in March 1892, he killed all the people. King Yor Akoc surrendered after the Dibalo massacre. He was led to Kodok and was killed. Then Al-Zaki declared Kur Nyidhok, whom he brought from El-Obeid, as the Shilluk King. Then he went back to Omdurman. But he could not come back as he promised, because the British returned to the Sudan in 1896 with Horatio Kitchener as commander of the Anglo-Egyptian army. He defeated the Mahdists in the battle of Karari on September 2, 1898. After Al-Zaki’s departure, the elders took prince Kur to the river and ordered him to take bath. When he took off his clothes, they saw that he was not circumcised, so he was accepted as King. This item consists of a recorded Shilluk song (wav file), accompanied with annotation (in Praat TextGrid) and associated information: metadata, permissions and speaker questionnaire. The associated information is also summarized, in a spreadsheet. The TextGrid annotation includes Shilluk orthography, translation, and comments.