Cultural Anthropology for Missions

COMPARITIVE STUDY OF KUKU AND HEBREW CULTURES
M. M. NINAN
was to know what are the traditional religious beliefs and
practices of the tribes around this region. A survey of existing
literature showed a lack of understanding of the African mind.
Most of them were written from the point of view of western
materialism or from. the point of view of early missionaries who
considered the African religions as totally pagan. A perusal of the
literature in this field includes such great anthropologists as
Lienhardt G (Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka,
Oxford, 1961),Seligman C.G (Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan,
London, 1932), Frances Madtrig Dang (The Africans of the Two
Worlds Yale, 1978) and Evens Pritchard E.E (The Nuer Religion,
Oxford 1956) All of them indicated similarities between Hebrew
culture and Southern Sudanese culture. But their subject matter
were along different lines and no one the comparative study.
Recently Lazarus Leek Mawut (Proc. of Conf. on the Role of
Southern Sudanese, Khartoum, 1985) attempted a study of
comparison from data available from the various literature. But
the data was very meager and the conclusions so arrived were
not conclusive or compelling. Since I felt the need of more direct
information, I have made an attempt to collect data directly from
the field, from the elders of the various tribes with the help of a
group of dedicated young people from the Sudan Theological
College. Fifteen of these people went out and gathered a lot of
information from the various tribes. In this paper I am dealing
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