Nairobi — THE UGANDA GOVERNMENT plans to turn Dufile Fort into a tourist attraction following an archaeological survey of Uganda's largest and most important 19th century forts.

The archaeologists found that the fort was built by the Madi people, who interacted much with the Arabs. Their findings will guide experts in developing the area where the fort was constructed, to make it economically beneficial to the Madi people who occupy the border area of southwestern Sudan and northwestern Uganda.

Dufile is on the western bank of the Nile in Moyo District, West Nile region, a 45-minute boat ride from Nimule in Sudan.

The survey, headed by Posnansky Merrick, professor emeritus and director of the Dufile Project at the University of California, was conducted from December 2006 to January 2007. Prof Merrick is the founder chairman of the Uganda Historical Monuments Commission and former head of the Uganda National Museum.

The lead archaeologist was Bosman Murrey of the University of Ghana, while other researchers came from the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, the Uganda National Museum, and Ugandan students from Makerere and Kyambogo Universities in Kampala.

Much of the information on the site was provided by Nigel Fitzpatrick, who was part of a 1965 expedition into the area to discover more about Emin Pasha's old forts, which are dotted along the Nile in Uganda and Sudan.

"We did test excavations on the ruined buildings and the ditches on the river banks. We surveyed the area and identified some features like the harbour that was not identified by the earlier investigation because it was submerged under the Nile," a member of the team and Conservator at the Uganda National Museum, Nelson Abiti, told The East-African, adding that, the next phase of the project is to design a conservation plan. "We are looking at tourists paths, camping sites, exhibition panels and local community participation. The advantage is that it's located in the Dufile Wildlife Reserve, the local people know the history and its importance and will, therefore, contribute to its preservation," he said.

The fort is one of 335 national sites and monuments in Uganda. The Dufile project was initiated in 2004 to find out more about the Madi, one of the African societies most heavily impacted by the 19th century slave trade.

Merrick says, "Contrary to some beliefs, the African slave trade did not end in the early 19th century with the restrictions on trade in the Atlantic, but has continued until the present day. The abuses of power in the Darfur region of the Sudan are currently leading to women and children being transported hundreds of miles to northern Sudan for domestic slavery in Khartoum and parts of the Middle East. The Darfur terror is reminiscent of slavery in the Upper Nile in the 19th century."

The Madi people inhabit the southwestern part of Torit district in Southern Sudan where the River Nile makes a sharp bend into Uganda. In Uganda, they are found in west Nile districts of Moyo and Adjumani. The Madi speak Madi tongue - a Sudanic language related to the Moro, Lugbwara, Keliku and Avukaya, which might point to their common origin.

According to the Gurtong Peace Trust, the porous nature of the border between Sudan and Uganda means the Madi settled freely on either side of the border during the civil wars in the two countries. The just concluded 22 year civil war diminished the number of Madi in the Sudan and most of their villages are now occupied by displaced people from other parts of the South.

Madi territory is hilly and traversed by rivers and streams. The Madi are a sedentary agrarian community. Their economy is based on subsistence agriculture, in which the main crops are sorghum, maize, cassava, groundnuts and tobacco. In the 1960s, the farming of tobacco was introduced as a cash crop but this was disrupted by war. The Madi rear small herds of cattle, goat and sheep as well as fowl.

In the 1830s, Egyptians moved south into the Sudan. Their attraction was ivory, then in high demand for making piano keys, billiard balls and cutlery handles.

The other commodity eagerly sought was slaves who were sold in Egypt but were also shipped to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.

The societies of the Upper Nile, among the most materially impoverished communities in Africa, were particularly vulnerable.

The abuses of the traders were noted by such Nile explorers as Samuel Baker in the early 1860s and ultimately led to an attempt by the Egyptian government to establish an administration to control trade and end slavery.

BAKER AND LATER COL Charles Gordon were appointed governors of the area and began establishing military stations to enforce Egyptian control.

The Sudanese troops, Egyptian officers and European commanders represented the first imperial contact with an area that had had virtually no contact with the outside world.

The rise of the fundamentalist Islamic leader, the self-proclaimed Mahdi, in the early 1880s ultimately led to the collapse of Egyptian power in the Sudan.

Khartoum fell and Gordon was killed in 1885. The Ugandan portion of the Upper Nile, part of the Sudanese province of Equatoria, remained under the control of Emin Pasha.

The Egyptian military stations were substantial. Dufile, surrounded by banks, up to 15 feet high from the bottom of the surrounding ditches, and with a man made harbour for four steamships, covered nearly 12 acres.

At its strongest, it may have housed up to 4,000 troops, their families, workers and camp followers.

Merrick's survey in 2005-06 sought to accurately survey the fort, locate the battleground where the forces of the Mahdi were repelled, and find out where the Madi lived.

In 1891, Emin Pasha's troops were moved 500 km south to the Kampala area of Uganda to form the nucleus of the Uganda Rifles, the country's first army. More than 9,000 family members, most of them Madi women and children and servants acquired by the Sudanese troops, were brought along.

Over the past century, these people have developed into a significant Muslim population of over 100,000, locally known as Nubians, dispersed over Uganda and Kenya.

The Dufile project aims to look at both their language and material culture to gain insight into cultural transformations over the past century, to help in understanding some earlier population displacement of the African diaspora.

"Previous work on the Equatoria forts, like Patiko and Wadelai, had concentrated on the forts themselves, paying little attention to the contacts between the imperial forces and the local population," Merrick observes.