1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bari (tribe)

BARI, a tribe of Nilotic negroes, living on the banks of the upper Nile some 200 m. N. of Albert Nyanza. They have as neighbours the Dinka to the north, the Madi to the south, and the Galla to the east. The men are tall and thin, the women fat and under middle height. Their colour is a deep dead brown. The men and unmarried girls go practically naked, the married women wearing a goatskin dyed red. The body is ornamented with red clay and the lower incisors are often extracted. Their sole wealth is cattle and their chief food milk and blood; meat is only eaten when a cow happens to die. They live in round grass huts with conical roofs. Twins are considered unlucky, the mother is divorced by her husband and her family must refund part of the marriage-price. The dead are buried in the hut; a square grave is dug in which the body is arranged in a sitting position with the hands tied behind the back. The most important men in the country are the rainmakers, who are reverenced even more than the chiefs, and, indeed, are famous among the surrounding tribes. The Bari warriors have been much recruited for the Egyptian army and were formerly used as slave-hunters by the Arab traders.

See Sir Samuel Baker, The Albert N’yanza (London, 1866); Friedrich Muller, Die Sprache der Bari (Vienna, 1864); G. Casati, Ten Years in Equatoria (London, 1891); W. Junker, Travels in Africa (English ed., 1890–1892); R. C. Owen, Bari Grammar (1908).