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Hadendoa

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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(from Beja Hada, chief, and endowa, people), a nomad tribe of Africans of "Hamitic" origin. They inhabit that part of the eastern Sudan extending from the Abyssinian frontier northward nearly to Suakin. They ,belong to the Beja people, of which, with the Bisharin and the Ababda, they are the modern representatives. They are a pastoral people, ruled by a hereditary chief who is directly responsible to the (AngloEgyptian) Sudan government. Although the official capital of the Hadendoa country is Miktinab, the town of Fillik on an affluent of the Atbara is really their headquarters. A third of the total population is settled in the Suakin country. Osman Digna, one of the best-known chiefs during the Madhia, was a Hadendoa, and the tribe contributed some of the fiercest of the dervish warriors in the wars of 1883-98. So determined were they in their opposition to the Anglo-Egyptian forces that the name Hadendoa grew to be nearly synonymous with "rebel." But this was the result of Egyptian misgovernment rather than religious enthusiasm; for the Hadendoa are true Beja, and Mahommedans only in name. Their elaborate hairdressing gained them the name of "Fuzzy-wuzzies" among the British troops. They earned an unenviable reputation during the wars by their hideous mutilations of the dead on the battlefields. After the reconquest of the Egyptian Sudan (1896-98) the Hadendoa accepted the new order without demur.

See Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, edited by Count Gleichen (London, 1905); Sir F. R. Wingate, Mandism and the Egyptian Sudan (London, 1891); G. Sergi, Africa: Anthropology of the Hamitic Race (1897); A. H. Keane, Ethnology of the Egyptian Sudan (1884).