Dawud Lothdha, who claims his grandfather was a tax-collector for the nineteenth-century Turco-Egyptian government in the Sudan, offers a novel account of where ‘the Uduk’, or rather his family in particular, ‘came from’. It makes sense if his forebears were indeed government servants, or soldiers, at that time, and had picked up older traditions current among these humble people of the central Nile valley connecting them with Meroe and Kush. At the same time, the forebears of other Uduk families had fled well away from ‘the government’ to the hills, which most regarded as their real home anyway (see photo of Jebel Bisho in Further information - photos; and the Historical Introduction to War and
Survival esp. pp 11-13).