Shatt is an ethnic group in Sudan located in the northern Shatt Hills southwest of Kadugli in South Kordofan State (Shatt Daman, Shatt Safia, Shatt Tebeldia) and in the Abu Hashim and Abu Sinam areas.
They refer to themselves as the Caning people.
They are one of seven distinct ethnicities comprising the Daju people.
They speak Shatt, a Nilo-Saharan language. Most members of this ethnic group are Muslims.
The Thuri, also known as Shatt, and Luo people of South Sudan. They speak DheThuri, a Luo language that is similar to the Jur and Dinka languages. Having been perceived as close to the Dinka people, the Thuri were targets of ethnic violence during the Second Sudanese Civil War, when the "Army of Peace", a mostly Fertit pro-government militia, attacked them as supporters of the mostly Dinka SPLA rebels. This caused many Thuri to take up arms and to join the SPLA in order to take revenge against other Fertit groups.
The Shatt of Sudan are numbering 36,500 (Peoplegroups.org, 2025)
The Shatt of South Sudan is made up of sub-tribes namely:
Most of the Shatt are farmers, and they primarily based their economy on grain production. Staple crops include millet, sorghum, and corn. They gather foods such as cereals, grasses, berries, honey, and wild fruits from the forests. They also hunt wild game.
The homes of the Shatt villages are usually round and have cone-shaped roofs. Town homes are rectangular in shape, with mud-brick walls and flat roofs. Young boys and girls of the villages become members of social groups and work groups. They perform community chores, such as keeping the villages clean and organizing village dances.
The Shatt are a patriarchal society in which the families are dominated by the older men. All parents desire to have a male heir, so sons are pampered while they are young children. When a boy reaches adolescence, his "representative" will approach the parents of a girl and propose marriage. Young men are given many responsibilities, such as preparing the fields for cultivation, planting the crops, buying the livestock, and trading in the market.
The Shatt society is divided into three main agnatic lineages making up more than thirty Shatt clans. The society is patrilineal and the role of the women is believed to be in the domestic domain although their role in economic life of the community is recognised. The Thuri think highly of themselves. They have elaborate traditions and customs for nearly everything in their realm. They engage communally in many social events and activities e.g. hunting, fishing and marriage and funeral ceremonies.
At one time, a sultan (Muslim ruler) had total authority over all the Daju tribes. Today, however, sultans only possess nominal authority, such as presiding over religious ceremonies. The sultanate is passed down from father to son, and they grant the family of a sultan special rights and privileges. Daju tribes like the Shatt are subdivided into clans (extended family groups), and each clan has a leader called letuge. The letuge assists the sultan, as well as helping to give direction during times of war.
Shatt women are subordinate to the men. A woman's responsibilities include sowing the millet and sorghum, grinding the grain, preparing the meals, buying dry meat in the marketplace, selling chickens and eggs, and bearing as many children as possible. They expect wives to please their husbands and to raise the children without the help of their husbands.
Shatt women have many unique beauty customs. They whiten their teeth with sticks; tattoo their eyelids, gums, and lips with acacia thorns; and often remain bare-breasted among relatives.
Marriage courting ends in declaration of intent to marry on the part of the groom and the marriage negotiations starts in earnest. The dowry payment or distribution is shared out among the relatives. The bride is then surrendered to the groom.
The first born must be delivered in the bride’s parental home. The naming ceremony is performed after three or four days depending on whether the child is a boy or girl respectively. The child is made to hold three or four tiny pieces of grass each carrying a particular name which the child will have once it remains in its hand when it is dipped in warm water.
Death is mourned by the whole village depending on the age of the diseased. Only elderly persons prepared the corpse for burial. After it has been lowered into the grave one of the close relative would come and sit next, but with the back, to the grave holding three or four stones, which are then thrown onto the corpse and the performer leaves immediately without looking back. This act signifies that presenting the case to God. The burial instruments are left on the grave for three or four days when the last funeral rite has been performed which signifies separating the dead from the living.
Hunting is a social as well as an economic activity. It is performed in large groups and according to certain rules particularly when it come to hunting big games e.g. elephants, rhinos, giraffe, etc., to prevent conflict over the distribution of the trophies like the tusks, skins, tail hairs . The person who stabs the elephant first receives the right tusk and the second tusk goes to the second person etc.
The Shatt occupy the crest of the Nile-Congo watershed. The terrain is their rugged plains with isolated hills cut by deep valley in which drain several perennial streams. The climate is tropical and the vegetation is thick forests with tall grasses. The rainfall regime is one long season that sustains their extensive agricultural activities. The Shatt are essentially agrarian but they rear few cattle, goats and sheep in addition to poultry. The main crops are sorghum, simsim, beans. They collect honey and lulu oil. They engage in hunting trading the games trophies with their neighbours e.g. they sell elephant trunks to the Arab merchants or barter it with the Dinka for cattle. The economy although is essentially subsistence it has elements of trade and barter. The natural resources are mainly forest products.
The Shatt are a part of the Luo group and linked more closely to the Shilluk and Jo Luo of Bahr el Ghazal . They believe that Dimo gave birth to Othuru who became the ancestor of the Thuri . They separated from the rest of the Luo and came to settle in their present place some four hundred years ago. They have never moved away except as a result of the first war and the last war.
The Shatt speak a dialect very close to the Shilluk and Jo-Luo dialects of the Luo language.
The Shatt concept of state and politics is not elaborate as would be found among the Shilluk. The traditional leader of the Shatt is Rwot but this system has been eroded by the state and replaced by government chiefs.
The Shatt of Sudan are mainly Sunni Muslims. Shatt children attend village classes where they are taught to chant the Koran in Classical Arabic. Unlike most Daju peoples, the Shatts have a small number of Christian believers.
Although the Daju are almost entirely Muslim and follow Islamic teachings, they do not do so in the strictest sense. For example, not everyone attends Friday prayer at the mosque, and most people ignore the Islamic ban on drinking alcohol. Most of them keep their traditional animistic beliefs and mix them with their form of Islam. Most of them believe in good and bad spirits, form cults, and even practice witchcraft.
The Shatt venerate intermediary spirits, magic and charms. Each Shatt family or clan have own totem e.g. crocodile, hippo, certain snakes although they believe that there is super being God who resides in the sky Some Shatt have converted to Islam and Christianity and have therefore adopted their respective ways.
The Shatt have evolved a culture that honours the self and this is expressed in body and facial marks, speech, song, music, dance, poetry during the social events e.g. during marriage and funeral ceremonies. The Shatt songs carry praises and insults that sometimes could invoke conflicts especially among the youth and young people.
The Shatt used to weave cotton cloth using local technology. They evolved different kinds of tools and implements they use for agricultural, hunting and fishing activities. The Shatt also make beautiful crafts and furniture from erotic wood which abound in their territory.
The Shatt neighbour the Kresh , Bai and the Dinka. The relation with the Kresh and Dinka is cordial as these communities engage in trade and barter. However, the Shatt have tensive relationship with the Bai.
The Kambala is a spiritual dance originating in Sabori village near Kadugli, which perhaps was founded in the early eighteenth century during the reign of Mek Andu of Kadugli. This traditional and ceremonial dance has been passed on from one generation to another up to today. Now Kambala is a popular dance and it is one of the main national dances which are performed on special occasions and it had been performed outside the Sudan as well.
The word Kambala has no definite meaning but it is associated with boys' maturity and adolescence, an important age for the Nuba boy. At this age the boy is considered to be mature enough to be second in command in the house after the father. Therefore Kambala is principally a ceremony to mark the induction of age-set boys into manhood. It's performance is usually initiated by the Kujur, a powerful man in the Nuba society: he is like a chief and sometimes known as a rain-maker. The Kambala dance itself has much to do with bringing up Nuba men to be brave, courageous and audacious like a bull. This is demonstrated by dancing and making beating rhythmic sounds like a bull.
A Kambala dancer traditionally wears Buffalo horns which are tied to his head with a long white turban and on the top of each horn is attached a colourful piece of cloth, and sometimes he wears a nickel or beads on his neck put by either his sister or his mother. The dancer also wears around his waist a thin rope or leather belt encircled by long thin strips up to his knees, which are usually made from branches of palm trees. Around his arms and legs, he ties bundles of small balls made also from the branches of palm trees and containing small beads (stones) to make rhythmic sounds. In his hand he holds a horsetail attached to small piece of wood which he swings across his face while dancing.
The performance of the dance follows a special ceremony which is carried by the Kujur who announce the start of Kambala dance and generally takes places during the mid raining season and usually in August and it continues for 28 days until the end of harvest.
At the early days a ceremonial whip was kept in Sabori with the Kujur, who decides when the time has come for it to be taken to the house of the Mek, or king, together with a sacrificial goat or lamb. However, this tradition was changed a little bit at the time of Mek Rahhal who he decided to keep the whip with him. The distribution of the whips and permission for the performance of the dance were then carried out by the mek of Kadugli and usually the whips are sent to three main places around Kadugli: the first one to Murta and Miri Juwa (inside Miri), the second from Sabori to Kadugli to Miri Barra (outer Miri) and the third one to all areas south of Kadugli whose people speak Kadugli language.
When the day for Kambala to start is announced all the young men who have reached 12-14 years of age are publicly summoned to attend. The women file into the arena and start to sing in a circle, while the referees or whip-holders take up their positions and they usually stand far from the dancing circle. Each boy is led dancing into the arena and then suddenly he comes out from the dancing circle, dancing towards the whip-holder and presents his naked back to the whip-holder and submits to lashing without flinching. He will never turn away from the whip-holder until a woman comes and stands between him and whip-holder and then he will continue dancing back to the arena where the women will sing for him and for his bravery. The women singers will mock the cowardly ones who show sign of pain, and they sing and praise those who stand silent and show no movement at all while they are lashed. These young men demonstrate their skills at dancing and their ability to withstand pain which is the main exercise of this ceremonial dance.
All the young men will continue to dance and queue up to receive their lashes which continue until sunset while the dance and the ceremony continues until around midnight that day. The boys are led to special rooms where they are kept for 28 days of singing and dancing. After that moment the whip is passed on around the villages after the mek has given his blessing. Traditionally, at the end of the 28 days there will be no Kambala dance. However, it is performed sometimes for special occasion.
Like other tribes in the area the long running civil war has affected the Shatt causing large scale migration to the towns and across the north-south borders.
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