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kuku and Hebrew culture

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A COMPARATIVE STUDY of THE KUKU CULTURE <strong>and</strong> THE HEBREW CULTURE:<br />

M.M.NINAN<br />

_________________________________________________________________________________<br />

M.M.NINAN<br />

1. Introduction<br />

The Southern Sudanese African Culture is decaying fast. Most of the tribal <strong>culture</strong>s are<br />

not known to the new generation <strong>and</strong> has never been collected or written down. If this is<br />

not done in the immediate future, it is most likely that we will loose these for ever. In 1983<br />

when I came into the University of Juba my interest was to know what are the traditional<br />

religious beliefs <strong>and</strong> practices of the tribes around this region. A survey of existing<br />

literature showed a lack of underst<strong>and</strong>ing of the African mind. Most of them were written<br />

from the point of view of western materialism or from. the point of view of early<br />

missionaries who considered the African religions as totally pagan. A perusal of the<br />

literature in this field includes such great anthropologists as Lienhardt G (Divinity <strong>and</strong><br />

Experience: The Religion of the Dinka, Oxford, 1961),Seligman C.G (Pagan Tribes of the<br />

Nilotic Sudan, London, 1932), Frances Madtrig Dang (The Africans of the Two Worlds<br />

Yale, 1978) <strong>and</strong> Evens Pritchard E.E (The Nuer Religion, Oxford 1956) All of them<br />

indicated similarities between <strong>Hebrew</strong> <strong>culture</strong> <strong>and</strong> Southern Sudanese <strong>culture</strong>. But their<br />

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