Madi people
ethnic group
The Madi or Màʼdí are a Central Sudanic speaking people that live in Magwi County in Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan and the districts of Adjumani and Moyo in Uganda. From south to north, the area runs from Nimule, at the South Sudan Uganda border, to Nyolo River where the Maʼdi mingle with the Acholi, the Bari, and the Lolubo. From the east to west, it runs from Parajok/Magwi to Uganda across the River Nile.
Language
The speakers refer to themselves as Maʼdi ("people"). the letter ʼd is an implosive sound. The speakers refer to their language as maʼdi ti, literally meaning Maʼdi mouth. Among themselves, Maʼdi refer to each other as belonging to a suru (tribe), which may further be broken down to pa (clan), which in some cases overlaps with suru. While a Maʼdi can only marry someone from outside their clan, they must normally marry within the group that shares the Maʼdi language.
Many neighboring speakers of Moru–Madi languages go by the name of Maʼdi.
Brief history
Source:
Etymology of Маʼdi
According to one popular folk tale, the name Madi came as an answer to a question by a white man to a Madi man.
“Madi people” enters the record as ethnic group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Madi, people and ethnic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1905026. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Madi people” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.