Shua Arabs

The Shua Arabs , also Shoah or Shuwa , live in the area of Lake Chad in central Africa .

history

The Lake Chad Arabs are the only Arabs referred to as "Arab". These Arabs do not form a single group either. They consist of the Djuhaina who immigrated from Egypt from the east and the Hassanua who advanced from the north of Tripoli , which are found particularly in the west of Lake Chad. The crowd is made up of the Djuhaina. The large individual groups of the Djuhaina, the Djusm, Hemat, Ssalamat, Eregat, Missirijje, Risegat etc. have the common tradition of descending from Abdullah al-Djuhaini and having immigrated from the east. The Hassanua probably immigrated later than the Djuhaina, but nothing precise is known about their history.

In the 11th to 13th centuries, the later Shua Arabs emigrated from Egypt to Sudan . When they emigrated from Egypt, they were not pure Arabs, but mostly Arabized Berbers . They immigrated to Sudan as camel breeders with light skin color, but then mixed strongly with black peoples there, mostly those who advanced to Sudan and had to switch to the economy of the shepherds of Sudan, cattle breeding. The same tribe names can be found among the Abbala (camel breeders) and the Baggara (cattle breeders); the latter are blacker, even completely black, more loosely related to Arab customs and not as strict in Islam as the “red” Abbala. Their language is still Arabic everywhere , but it has lost its purity, especially among the Baggara, who are often multilingual, and is called Chadian Arabic . Even so, the relationship to the Egyptian dialect is beyond doubt. In terms of language, the Djuhaina differs little from the Hassanua. The Hassanua have kept themselves relatively pure. Both groups got mixed up.

The cultural significance of the Shua Arabs in central Sudan is most clearly shown by the fact that the Arabic language has become the language of written communication there. Arabic is also used or understood as a spoken language by many indigenous tribes.

The German African explorer Gustav Nachtigal researched the history and language of the Schua Arabs in the 1870s and, after 1900, the French Henri Carbou and the English Harold Alfred MacMichael .

literature

Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (1920), Volume I, page 67 f. and Volume III, page 306