The Dinka people are known by several different names. The name they call themselves if they are from the upper Nile is the Jieng people or if they are from the Bahr el Ghazal area, they call themselves the Mony-jang).
The people number more than four million and live in the savanna country which surrounds the central swamps of the Nile basin primarily in Africa's South Sudan. Large groups of the Dinka are found in Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile and Southern Kordofan regions. Each Dinka section has a separate political entity with established rights to a well-defined territory and each group is internally segmented into smaller political units with a high degree of autonomy. |