War and Slavery in Sudan. Jok Madut Jok
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messages begging us to allow them back. They have the right to think of us as dumb, but we are not. We simply think that we have too many mutual economic interests to be in a constant strife with them. The Baggara are shortsighted, unfortunately. You can offer your wife to a Baggara in exchange for peace, and he will turn around before reaching home to come and demand your mother. They are people who cannot have enough of another’s property. Their way of worship is strange, they pray in a strange way, they claim to be God’s people and yet commit things of which God as we know of him would not approve.15
Two events are commonly cited by the Dinka as examples of why they think the Baggara are bent on aggression for no good reason. One was the truce that the two groups had reached in 1989 over cattle vaccination against the bovine virus Rinderpest. The government veterinary services were not reaching the Baggara from the North, while the Dinka were being served by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Dinka invited the Baggara to bring their cattle for vaccination, fearing that if Baggara cattle were not vaccinated, they could reintroduce the disease into Dinka herds in the future since the herds sometimes meet in the grazing valleys of the Kiir River. The Baggara were welcomed into Dinka territory, and after they had their herds vaccinated, instead of returning peacefully, they attacked Dinka villages and cattle camps and the truce broke down.
The other event followed the truce signed in 1990 to enable the Baggara to conduct trade at three major Dinka markets: Warawar, Abin Dau, and Manyiel. The Baggara were allowed to enter Dinka territory and trade for the whole dry season, but at the end of the season when they were going back, they killed people, took slaves, and burned the markets to the ground. Some markets, such as the one in Abin Dau, have not been revived since, and the people in this area have had to travel much longer distances to other trading towns.
Both truces were renewed in 1991, and every year thereafter until 1998, when the Dinka decided they had had enough of peace agreements with the Arabs. The truces failed because the government conspired to undermine them. Peaceful coexistence between the Baggara and Dinka means the government cannot recruit anti-SPLA militia among the Baggara and thus failure of the Islamic project, of which the Baggara were to be the implementers. The government sent security agents to Dinka areas disguised as traders or cattle herders along with all the other Arabs. These agents were to get as much information as possible on the SPLA military hardware and movements and inform the army. They were also charged with creating mistrust between the leaders of the two groups. For example, some of these agents would cause havoc in the market by picking a fight with a Dinka person, which sometimes escalated, resulting in a bigger Dinka-Baggara fight. On other occasions, the security agents entered the market with guns. When the Dinka realized this and became suspicious of all the Arabs, the situation resulted in expulsion of the Arabs and shooting and retreat of the Baggara back to their areas on the borders. Once peace was destroyed in this manner, the Baggara had a pretext to carry out raids. For this reason, Simon Wol Mawien, the civilian commissioner of Aweil West County, told me in an interview at Nyamlel in June 1999 that he will not allow another peace treaty between the members of his county and the Baggara. “We cannot have another truce with these people, they do not keep their word, and they are being used against us by the government; so until they come to their senses about our common good, we will cooperate no more.”
Labor Exchange Between Groups
Slavery in Sudan occurs within a historical context of southern labor migration, especially agricultural labor, to the North. The interaction between wealthy merchant farmers in the North and southern laborers who are comparatively poor has produced asymmetrical relations that are not necessarily restricted to economic power. Racial prejudice, cultural bias, and religious intolerance have also led to exploitation of the weak as the norm. Laborers’ demands for higher pay or unpaid dues have been met with both physical and verbal violence. Over time, violence has escalated even at high levels of authority, supported by dominant ideologies that view southern workers as disposable. This was particularly true in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the North witnessed an expansion of commercial agriculture in southern Darfur and western Kordofan, for which Dinka migrants provided—and continue to provide—much of the labor. When the civil war started, the ordinary flow of migrant laborers to the North could be increased by violence inflicted on southern villages. This also makes the desperate Southerners easy to exploit. One of the factors that incited Baggara raids on the Dinka was the Baggara need to form a pool of labor for this agricultural expansion, supported by the government and Islamic banks. “There was nothing we could offer the Baggara that was equivalent to the value of seizing our cattle, fishing our pools, hunting our animals to the finish, abducting our people, and occupying our grazing land,” a Dinka elder declared in an interview in June 1999 in Nyamlel.16
Recent research in Baggara territory indicates that militia raids are motivated by a combination of Baggara need for cheap labor to compete with expanding mechanized farming and the government’s “peace from within” and “peace camps” concepts. These are programs similar to the South Korean strategy during the Vietnam War, when farmers were forced at gunpoint into special areas, enclosed with barbed wire in order to put the locals out of the reach of the Vietcong, which the Koreans euphemistically called New Life Villages. “Peace camps” in Sudan are camps set up by the government to relocate the rural people in an attempt to bring all the possible supporters of the SPLA into government-controlled areas. To attract people into these camps, the government distributes propaganda among the villagers that those who move into these camps would be taken good care of by the government. Those who do not believe the propaganda are forced to go. These camps, however, have been described as no less than “concentration camps.”17 As more South Sudanese are displaced to the North, the government can undermine the SPLA administration more easily. The displaced also become hostages who attract foreign aid, which the government then taxes heavily. Because they are the “host” communities, the Baggara also demand part of the aid intended for the displaced Southerners. Displaced persons’ camps are attacked periodically to seize foreign relief, and the Baggara then use these relief items to pay for southern labor.18
Religious and Cultural Ideologies and Notions of Superiority
Slavery existed in nineteenth-century Sudanese society only because certain elements were present. First, the slaver had to create an atmosphere of enmity to justify the violence which was institutionalized in the razzia—the slave raids of the period of Turco-Egyptian rule (the Turkiyya, 1821–81) and the Mahdi’s Islamic revolution (the Mahdiyya, 1881–98). Second, the society to be enslaved was regarded as inferior and its humanity denied to justify the kinds of treatment characteristic of slavery. This subhuman status could be given on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, or regional identification. Third, the exploitation of the enslaved communities followed the exploitation of natural resources in their territory, which were used to strengthen the slaving forces against any resistance by the enslaved communities. Current slavery is also built upon these practices.
Indications that the North assumes superiority to justify slavery are omnipresent in the intellectual discourse of North Sudanese. Note how Sadiq al-Mahdi explains the genesis of the superiority of Arab culture, which is inseparable from Islamic culture. “The word Arab is used in the cultural sense. Arab refers to those who use Arabic as their mother tongue. Since Arabic was the language of Islam, and since the Arabs played a major role in the establishment of Islam, there is a close affinity between Muslim and Arab…. The people of the world of Islam were culturally Arabized and acquired the Islamic outlook…. Arabic, the language of a handful of desert people, became the universal language of an international community.”19 It has been the opinion of virtually all the leaders in Khartoum that the influence of British colonialism prevented Islam from spreading south, beginning first with South Sudan and hopefully into the rest of black Africa. As the foregoing statement suggests, North Sudanese hold an eclectic view of Islam that combines Arabism, Arabic language, and Arab culture in general, a sense of Arab nationalism deeply integrated with their religious identity as Muslims. They have dreamed of the day when this notion will run through black Africa, but believe that South Sudan, due to colonial influence in the area, has interrupted the mission to spread Islam in Africa. This is why the policies of assimilation and Arabization in the South have been so vigorous and bloody, turning South Sudan into a graveyard over the years. The objective has