[citation needed] The Gumuz have traditionally been grouped with other Nilotic peoples living along the Sudanese-Ethiopian border under the collective name Shanqella (Pankhurst 1977).

As "Shanquella", they are already mentioned by Scottish explorer James Bruce in his Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile, published in 1790.

According to their traditions, in earlier times they inhabited the western parts of the province of Gojjam, but were progressively banished to the inhospitable area of the Blue Nile and its tributaries by their more powerful Afroasiatic-speaking neighbors, the Amhara and Agaw, who also enslaved them (Wolde-Selassie Abbute 2004).

Descendants of Gumuz people taken as slaves to the area just south of Welkite were found to still be speaking the language in 1984 (Unseth 1985).

Feuds between clans are common and they are usually solved by means of an institution of conflict resolution, called mangema or michu[4] depending on the region.

Though a transit road has been built and commercial farms established in the lower basin the Gumuz people were seen in 2018 as politically "peripheral" in regard to the Ethiopian highlands that hold the power in the country.

[8] In the Metekel conflict, starting in 2019, Gumuz militia were allegedly involved in attacks against Amhara, Agaw, Oromo and Shinasha civilians.