Introductory Essay

Abstract The world as the Uduk-speaking people knew it was almost destroyed in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Those who had not been enslaved, or enserfed by chiefdoms of the Sudan Ethiopian border, had.fled as refugees away to the north and west. The three valleys of the Ahmar, Tombak, and Yabus which they had made their homeland over the previous century or so were deserted. In my previous book, ‘Kwanim Pa: The Making of the Uduk People: An Ethnographic Study of Survival in the Sudan Ethiopian Borderlands (henceforth abbreviated as ‘KP),1 I have described these events and their continuing relevance for our under standing of the society the Uduk have recreated since the early twentieth-century pacification of this region by the Anglo-Egyptian government of the Sudan.