The Kulũ in Northern Nigeria

Extract

Five years ago I happened to be passing through the Wurkun district of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria and used the opportunity to make some ethnographical inquiries. The people of the district, who are located on the north bank of the Benue River opposite Lau, had been described by Mrs. Temple (in her Notes on the Tribes of the Northern Provinces of Nigeria, compiled from official records) under the generic term of ‘Wurkum’, as though they constituted a homogeneous tribal unit. But from my inquiries it appeared that the term Wurkun (not Wurkum) merely meant ‘the people of the hills’, and included seven distinct groups of diverse origin, some speaking Bantu languages and some Sudanic. Notes and vocabularies were obtained for each group, but in this paper a short description of one of the groups only, viz. the (Ba-) Kulũ, can be given.