SUMMARY
The Kababish (or gabīlat al-kabābīsh in Arabic) is a tribal group in Sudan. Although it is difficult to trace a single origin of the tribe due to its complexity and heterogeneity, the Kababish themselves claim that they originate from the Howára, a tribe of the Upper Egypt who was driven to Tunisia, and thereafter settled in Sudan.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the name Kababish denoted a loose confederation of tribes with diverse origins, occupying what is now the north-western region of Sudan. It appears that smaller groups joined and left the confederation at different periods, and migrated from one locality to another.
The Kababish today inhabits the semi-desert region in North and West Kordofan state of Sudan, together with other small ethnic groups. The tribe has a complex system of migration which follows the three main seasonal periods of the year, where different parts of the family moves to different places during these three periods. Most families later return to the same area where they started their annual move, where they have access to grazing areas and watering-center. Though the Kababish people are defined as pastoral nomads, they have over the years become more semi-nomadic and some sections spend a majority of the year in villages west of Khartoum. Traditionally, the tribe herds camels along with other animals such as sheep and goats. It is difficult to determine the size of the group due to its nomadic nature loosely organized structure. Yet, it is estimated that the Kababish numbered some 424.000 per 2020.
The Kababish is made up of around 20 sections, which subsequently are dived into smaller sub-sections. Each section, with a few exceptions, is headed by one, or several, local leaders called shaikh. These local leaders function as a communicator between the tribesmen and the chief of the Kababish tribe, the Nazir. Other than collecting taxes from the tribesmen, the shaikhs have no formal administrative authority over their respective sections of the tribe. There is no fixed rule of succession to shaikhship, other than that the successor must belong to the same tribe section as the former shaikh and prove to be acceptable to the majority of the member in the section. The Kababish rarely acts as a unified group since they are spread over too large of an area for their unity to have any great political and/or military significance. Even though the confederation of sections and sub-sections that form the Kababish tribe is vague and loosely connected, all the sections and their associated sub-sections speak Arabic and Islam is the overall religion. The chief of the whole Kababish tribe - Nazir Umum - always belongs to the Awlad Fadlallah sub-section. Virtually all effective authority within the tribe, including the judicial authority, is vested in persons who belong to the Awlad Fadlallah sub-section of the over-arching Nurab section. This sub-section has a clearly defined political identity within the Kababish tribe. Moreover, the whole Awlad Fadlallah sub-section, with a few temporary exceptions, all live and migrate as members of a coordinated camp called the dikka. This could be seen as the moving capital of the Kababish tribe, in which all the important people of the Awlad Fadlallah sub-section live.
There are different views on where the name Kababish is derived from. According to parts of the group, it stems from their great ancestor named Kabsh. Others argue that the name is derived from the word Kabsh, i.e. a male sheep. It could be that the group owned great herds of sheep before they mainly started to herd camels for their livestock.
During the Anglo-Egyptian rule of Sudan (1899-1956), the Kababish tribe was considered more of a formal institution, rather than as an ethnic group, over which the rulers could excise their control. For instance, the British administration appointed a Nazir (chief) of the Kababish tribe which they considered well-suited and that would ultimately work as an extension of the British administration. This practice of utilizing native institutions at the local level for administrative purposes was well established in many other British colonies. Subsequently, the appointed Nazir started to centralize his decision-making process within a small group of close relatives which developed into the privileged sub-section Awlad Fadlallah. Following Sudan’s independence in 1956, this system was left virtually untouched and remains, to some extent, in the present day. A large part of the Nazir’s dominant power over the Kababish tribe was derived from the central government, first the colonial and later independent Sudan’s. In modern times, the Kababish tribe has been accused of controlling the ”Desert Shields”, a militia group that receives arms from the government.
