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At the 1993 meeting of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), representatives of indigenous peoples of southern Sudan delivered interventions for the first time in the history of that UN body. The Nuba people made one of the interventions; the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM) made the other. These presentations were an auspicious sign that the global agenda of indigenous peoples' politics is spreading into not only Sudan but more generally into Africa. The WGIP has studiously avoided indigenous issues in Africa, largely because they are highly controversial and politically explosive. The case of Sudan clarifies how similar indigenous experiences in Africa are to those in all other parts of the world.
It is commonly believed that the war between the "Muslim North" and the "Christian South" has raged in Sudan for only the past thirteen years. In fact, the war has continued intermittently since Sudan achieved liberation from British colonial rule in 1956 and actually has its origin in the ancient past. The war's first roots date from the frontier raids of 651 A.D., when Muslim Arabs under Amr ibn al-As invaded the region along the Nile, south of the First Cataract (near Aswan, Egypt). At that time, the two Nubian Christian kingdoms of the territory successfully resisted Arab conquest and achieved a peace which lasted until 1277, when they were overcome by Arab colonialism which has lasted until the present. The colonial experience has been characterized by forced Arabization, slavery, exploitation and brutality. War, famine, and devastation have resulted from this oppression and the indigenous resistance against it.
The Arab and Arabized statists who control the Sudanese government today are attempting to suppress the insurrection of an amalgam of indigenous peoples who are usually referred to as "Christians and animists" of the southern part of the country. In fact, most of these peoples are distinct racially, culturally, and linguistically, as well as religiously, from northern Sudanese; they are members of the mostly tall and very-black-skinned Nilotic race and include the Dinka (with the largest population), Nuer, Nuba, Bari, and about a dozen other nationalities.
From about 1969 to 1972, the "Anyanya" movement of Latuko, Madi, Bari, Acholi, Zande, and other peoples from the mountainous southern border region of Sudan waged a defensive war against invaders from the north. The word "Anyanya," which means "snake venom" in the Madi language, stood for a concept around which the mobilization took shape; the image was the snakesmall but deadly, especially if stepped on. The war against Arab invaders represented southern peoples' pride in their ancestral heritage and the will to defend their homelands. The movement apparently achieved success when the South was granted "autonomy" by Jafar al-Numeiri, who had seized control of the Sudanese government in a coup in 1969. The peace was not to last, however.
In 1983 Numeiri reversed his policy, divided the South into three federated states and imposed Shari'a (Islamic) Law throughout the region. In response, the peoples of the South (this time, largely the Dinka, Nuer and Nuba peoples, whose lands then came under assault) organized the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army (SPLA) under the leadership of Dr. John Garang, a Dinka colonel with a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Iowa State University. The war continued after Numeiri was overthrown in 1985 by Sadiq el-Mahdi, who was himself overthrown in 1989 by Lt. General Omer Hassan el-Beshir, who rules today.
The Sudanese government has a general policy of Arabization for the native peoples of the South. It intends ultimately to achieve a homogeneous Arab identity for all Sudanese subjects. The goal would be reached through forced miscegenation (mixing of races), and culturally through language domination (of Arabic) and socio-political engineering. As a major part of that plan, the government also is attempting to achieve religious homogeneity today through Islamicization of the South.
It has been, in fact, an "ethnic cleansing" program (comparable to that in Bosnia), in which the government has confiscated peoples' traditional homelands and handed them over to Arab or Arabized Sudanese. The dispossessed have been sold into slavery or simply cast into the desert. The government has encouraged its soldiers to rape indigenous women with the explicit intent of causing the dilution of African blood with Arab blood. Soldiers who can prove that they have had children by or have impregnated indigenous southern women are given special financial rewards (as documented by the US State Department and confirmed by indigenous observers and refugees). An unusually high rate of pregnancies has been the result; many of the children produced are then kidnapped by Arabs to become slaves. Africans are at best second-class or third-class citizens in Sudan; Arabs regard themselves as a superior race.
The British Anti-Slavery Society, the International Labor Organization (ILO), Africa Watch, Amnesty International, and other human rights monitoring organizations have all provided documentary evidence of Arab enslavement of indigenous people of the Nuba Mountains, the southern Blue Nile Province and elsewhere throughout the South. Some 75,000 women and children are estimated to be enslaved. The ILO reported in February 1993 that "traditional slavery ... survives in modern-day Sudan [and] ... seems to be on the increase." Africa Watch concluded in 1990 that there is evidence of kidnapping, hostage-taking, pawn-brokering, and other monetary transactions involving human beings "on a sufficiently serious scale as to represent a resurgence of slavery." The military dictator Beshir himself is reputed to have had Dinka and Nuer slaves in his own home since the time he was a military commander in Southern Kordofan.
Fourth World Bulletin • December 1993
Copyright © 1996 by the Fourth World Center
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