BAGGARA (" Cowherds ")  , African " Arabs of Semitic origin, so called because they are great cattle owners and breeders . They occupy the country west of the White Nile between the Shilluk territory and Dar Nuba, being found principally in Kordofan . They are true nomad Arabs, having intermarried little with the Nuba, and have preserved most of their national characteristics . The date of their arrival in the Sudan is uncertain: they appear to have drifted up the Nile valley and to have dispossessed the original Nuba population . A purely pastoral people, they move from pasture to pasture, as food becomes deficient . The true Baggara tribesmen employ oxen as saddle and pack animals, carry no shield, and though many possess firearms the customary weapons are lance and sword . They have always had the reputation of being resolute fighters . Engaged from the earliest times in the slave trade, they were among the first, as they were certainly the most fervent, sup-porters of the mandi when he rose in revolt against the Egyptians (1882) . They constituted his real fighting force, and to their fanatical courage his victories were due . Their decision to follow him out of their own country to Khartum brought about the fall of that city . The mandi's successor, the khalifa Abdullah, was a Baggara, and throughout his rule the tribe held the first place in his favour . They have been described as " men who look the fiends they really are—of most sinister expression, with murder and every crime speaking from their savage eyes .

Courage is their only

good quality." They are famous, too, as hunters of big game, attacking even elephants with sword and spear, G . A . Schweinfurth declares them the best-looking of the Nile nomads, and the men are types of physical beauty, with fine heads, erect athletic bodies and sinewy limbs . There is little that is Semitic in their appearance . Their skins vary in colour from a dark red-brown to a deep black; but their features are regular and free of negro characteristics . In mental power they are much superior to the indigenous races around them . They have a passion for fine clothes and ornaments, tricking themselves out with glass trinkets, rings and articles of ivory and horn . Their mode of hair-dressing (mop-fashion) earned them, in common with the Hadendoa, the name of " Fuzzy-wuzzies " among the British soldiers in the campaigns of 1884–98 . See G . A . Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa (1374) ; Sir F . R .

Wingate, Mandism and the Egyptian Sudan (1891), Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, edited by Count Gleichen (19o5); A . H . Keane, Ethnology of the Egyptian Sudan (1884) .