War and Slavery in Sudan. Jok Madut Jok
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policy kept the South from developing economically, and for this reason, South Sudanese were completely confused about the British stand in the North-South conflict. South Sudanese dealt with the colonial government from a distance and were unable to gauge colonial intentions. Their immediate contact with colonial administration was through the linchpin of the colonial system, the district commissioner, who had very little influence on events regarding the future of the colonies. Southerners, therefore, did not know whose side the British were on. If the overwhelming discontent in the South following independence is anything to go by, one could safely assert that the South did not wish to remain in a united Sudan.26 If they had their wish, the people of South Sudan would have liked the colonial government to maintain the closed districts policy while it promoted education and economic development in the South at the same rate as it did in the North.
Contrary to all that the South had hoped for, the British decided in favor of the North. In 1946, a decade before independence, this policy was reversed under the pressure of a growing Sudanese nationalist movement against colonialism in the North. Movement between the two regions was allowed. The Arab traders and Muslim missionaries were able to enter the South. The British then consolidated the polity of Sudan, forcing Southerners to be joined with the North.
When independence came in January 1956, the British transferred the administration to Northerners. Southerners had only insignificant roles in the newly “Sudanized” government. Northerners hurried to resume all the activities that the Southern Policy had interdicted. Arabic was established as the only official language of administration and education, more Muslim preachers flocked into the South, and northern merchants who also acted as missionaries poured in to exploit southern resources. Two Islamic missionary concepts prevailed. First, if Southerners were left alone, they would go on living as before, and that would mean living in the moral degradation of the unbeliever or the pagan. Second, the period of the Southern Policy had damaged North-South relationships and a quick effort to repair them was warranted. The way to do this was to integrate the South into a national polity via commercialization and commodification of the southern means of livelihood. Large numbers of Arabs, who were better educated under colonial rule, overwhelmed the region, monopolizing all the institutions in the South. The Arabs soon controlled the civil service, finance and banking, education, and the secret police. The South had no say in the formation and the shaping of the country’s identity. From the privileged position inherited from the colonial administration, the North resumed everything the colonial government had attempted to inhibit. Efforts of Islamization, Arabicization, labor exploitation, and extraction of southern resources were the crux of the Khartoum governments’ policies. The future of a nation was utterly diminished. Very little, if anything, went to the South in return. The South realized that the government had much more to take than to give.
The result was two devastating civil wars. The first war took place from 1955 to 1972; the second, which began in 1983 and is still going on, led to the revival of slavery and the slave trade. The slave trade this time erupted with intensity and violence that reminds us of all the horrors of the nineteenth-century slave raiding and trading that explorers like Samuel Baker wrote about. Since the recorded history of Sudan shows the presence of these factors throughout its history, one may ask why slavery occurred during some periods and not others. In other words, is history simply repeating itself or are the circumstances different this time around? Could it be that slavery has never ceased in Sudan, and that it existed at all times in different forms? The following chapters will address these questions.
Part I
The New Slavery in Sudan
A typical Dinka homestead in peaceful times. Cattle and plenty of farmland are the pillars of the Dinka economy.
After a Baggara raid, a Dinka homestead is destroyed and its inhabitants displaced. A child orphaned by the slave raiders sits in the middle of the ravaged compound.
Chapter One
The Revival of Slavery During the Civil War: Facts and Testimonies
The roots of Sudan’s unresolved civil war have a long history, but the modern context relating to the current wave of slavery was set in times of alien intrusion, starting with Turco-Egyptian rule in the nineteenth century (1821–81) through Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule (1898–1956).1 By providing an overview of the current Sudanese conflict, I will analyze the causes and consequences of the ongoing slave raiding. There is concrete evidence that slavery is not buried in the past, especially since one still finds today the conditions that allowed it to flourish in the nineteenth century. For example, those Dinka areas that have witnessed the resurgence of slavery since the early 1980s were the same areas that had formed the slavery zone in historical times. The present slave-catching communities of Darfur and Kordofan were part of the slave frontier in the nineteenth century. The same Arab groups currently engaged in slavery were slave raiders during both the Turkiyya and the Mahdiyya. Long after Sudan joined the world community in ratifying antislavery conventions and formulated legal provisions that prohibited slavery, the practice persisted among the slaving communities in the North, as its ideology has been coded into the Baggara Arabic language, folklore, daily humor, and poetry. South Sudanese continue to be referred to as abeed (slaves) by North Sudanese, whose privileged position today has much to do with their history as slave masters in the past. It is this long tradition of an ideology of dominance that Arab governments in Khartoum have always used to treat the South as a mere source of material resources, and its inhabitants as cheap laborers who can be useful only when they are stripped of their freedom. This long-standing racial/ethnic prejudice has partly prompted the current wave of slavery.
During the first civil war, which took place between the North and the South from 1955 to 1972, the Baggara did not play a significant role. They continued to use Dinka grazing plains and fishing waters. Hostilities between the two groups were occasional. The Baggara even carried on with their traditional barter trade with the Dinka as well as with the southern rebel forces, the Anyanya. There were also extended periods of peace established by the traditional chiefs of the two groups on the basis of mutual interests, especially between the Misseria and the Ngok Dinka. At times, the two groups engaged in social relations that involved interethnic marriages, especially between the Rezeigat and the Malwal Dinka. They also established mechanisms for defusing individual conflicts between subtribes, most notably the truces signed by the leaders of both sides. Many accords were reached during the 1960s and the 1970s, including the 1976 Babanusa accord between chief Deng Majok of the Ngok Dinka of Abyei and Nazir Babu Nimr of the Misseria and the 1976 accord reached in Safaha between the Rezeigat and the Malwal Dinka of Aweil, brokered by the then-commissioner of Bahr el-Ghazal, Isaiha Kulang Mabor, and Sudan’s vice president, Abdel Majid Hamid Khalil. These agreements, although breached on many occasions by the Baggara, brought relative peace to the borderland between the Baggara and the Dinka for many years.
But when the second civil conflict broke out in 1983, the agreements disintegrated and Dinka-Baggara relations turned into almost irreconcilable hostilities. The hostilities were caused in part by the massive influx of Baggara pastoralists into Dinka and Ju-Luo territories to graze their livestock during the drought in Darfur and Kordofan. In addition, these pastoralists became hunters, killing small and big game in the nearby forests, and thereby provoking Dinka attempts to deny the Baggara access to their grazing areas and fishing zones. The Baggara started arriving in Dinka areas prepared to use military force to make their way south of the Kiir River if they met with resistance. Intense conflict ensued.
These hostilities would have remained sporadic and manageable, as they had been for many generations, had the government of Sudan not decided to manipulate them for its political designs as a cheap way to bring the South under control. The government tolerated the illegal acquisition of guns by the Arab pastoralists. The Baggara were often better armed than the Dinka because of their access to guns coming into Sudan from neighboring Chad, which was embroiled in its own civil war in the early 1980s. The war in Chad had serious security implications for western Sudan, but in