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522 MIMA-MIMI
Historians have not investigated the reasons for their present dispersal. Linguistic
research has yielded interesting material which might throw light on the
early history of the group. The Mima of Sudan and the pastoralist part of the
Chadian Mimi have been Arabophone for a long time. The sedentary, cultivating
Mimi of Chad (self-name: Amdang, or "people," and called Mututu by the
Maba) speak a language related to the extensive Fur language spoken hundreds
of miles to the east by more than one-half million people. Various other pieces
of circumstantial evidence strongly point to a migration westwards of part of the
original group in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the latest. The Mima
who stayed behind lived between the Nile Valley, the source of Islamization
and Arabization from the seventeenth century onwards, and the Fur. They along
with the Birgid and Berti, similarly located, adopted Arabic, and their languages
became extinct. The majority of the migrated Mimi engaged in animal husbandry
and frequent migrations, and contacts with Arab pastoral nomads led to their
adopting Arabic as their mother tongue. Thus, of all Mima and Mimi, only the
Amdang, who have stayed put in the Biltine region, still speak the original
language of the group. They number 8,000 at the most.
The main written sources on the Mima and Mimi in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries stress a number of similarities. Both have been subject polities
of the pre-colonial states of the region, the sultanates of Wadai and Darfur. Both
groups were divided into 20 or 30 subsections headed by native chiefs. At the
apex of this tribal organization stood Mima and Mimi "free" kings, who were
in turn overseen by agents from the central government. Both Mima and Mimi
are commended for their bravery in battle but are compared unfavorably with
neighboring ethnic groups as regards religious dedication, civility in dealing with
strangers and even physical appearance. Another similarity which emerges from
the travel literature of the nineteenth century is the impact on both groups of
external influences and the concomitant loss of ethnic identity. Finally, in the
case of the Mimi of Wadai, there are indications that they were not highly
regarded. As immigrants who converted to Islam around 1665 upon the overthrow
of the then ruling pagan Tunjur dynasty, the Mimi have since been associated
with the Zaghawa, a neighboring group with whom they exchanged women and
who were held in contempt by the new Maba dynasty for their religious ignorance
(see Beri; Maba; Tunjur).
The majority of the Chadian Mimi spend the larger part of the year in the
southern part of Wadai, and many have chosen this region as their permanent
habitat. These pastoralist Mimi have lost their cultural identity and are virtually
indistinguishable from Arab pastoral nomads with whom they compete for grazing
and water. The sedentary Mimi of the Biltine area inhabit the hilly eastern
part of Dar ("home of") Mimi, where they cultivate cereals, beans, sesame and
a number of other crops; they also keep livestock, but much less than their
pastoralist brothers.
The entire Mimi area—the eastern hills and western plains—is sandy and