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Chapter Two

Slavery in the Shadow of the Civil War:

Problems in the Study of Sudanese Slavery

Studies of human rights in Sudan since 1983 have blamed the resurgence of slavery in Sudan solely on the civil war. From raids in 1986 to the famine of 1998 in Bahr el-Ghazal, an estimated two million died in the South and four million were displaced.¹ These deaths, unprecedented in number in Africa and the most since World War II, were caused by both famines and genocidal practices of the government of Sudan. As a result the UN and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) established Operation Life-line Sudan (OLS) in 1989 to provide humanitarian assistance.

This war has blighted the central as well as the regional economies, and has caused the political landscape between North and South to crumble. The war caused more destruction in each succeeding year than the year before, most of rural Sudan became increasingly impoverished, and political animosities were enlarged by the Sudanese regime’s plans to fight the war using militia forces. The conflict became beneficial to some,² and competition intensified among the Sudanese army, regime-sponsored militias, and northern merchants. Slavery and slave trade have provided some of the benefits to these groups.

Large numbers of publications have appeared on the subject of slavery being one of the unavoidable indignities of the civil war. The slave raiding by war-sponsored militias has resulted in the greatest forced movement of people of Dinka sections of Malwal, Tuic, and Ngok from their districts to seek refuge in other districts to the south or through the “enemy” lines into northern Sudan. The routes of slave raiding and the patterns of destruction and displacement are all too familiar. But the fate of the captives has been the subject of a controversy similar to the debate in nineteenth-century America on what constitutes slavery and what should be done about the slaves. The controversy that has arisen today over Sudan’s slavery is between those who doubt the credibility of the reports out of Sudan that chattel slavery could ever exist anywhere at the beginning of twenty-first century, and those who believe that the racial, economic, and cultural complexity of Sudanese society could easily cause a resurgence of slavery. Major newspapers and television networks in the United States have covered this issue since 1995. Schoolchildren in the United States who have learned about how “cheap” human beings are in Sudan collected their allowances to enable Christian groups and antislavery activists to purchase the freedom of Dinka slaves from the Arabs of northern Sudan.

A group of children, most of whom were freed from slavery, are housed at a camp in Panlit, near Turalei in Tuic County. The Catholic diocese provides school materials for them and the community donates food for their sustenance.

Virtually no scholarly research and writing has been conducted on this facet of the war. Although the number of Dinka children and women who have fallen and continue to fall victim to the Muslim northern Sudanese raiders and slave dealers can never be determined, there is no doubt that the traffic was carried on and that it continues today on a large scale. People of South Sudan started reporting the reemergence of slavery in 1983. The English language newspaper the Sudan Times, edited by Bona Malwal and published in Khartoum, carried articles about slavery from 1986 to 1988. Ushari Mahmud and Suleiman Baldo also reported on slavery in a booklet in 1987.³ In 1995, a report issued by Human Rights Watch described the conditions of displaced children in northern cities.⁴ So during the period from 1983 to 1994, much became known about the traffic across the Kiir River. After 1995, the international community became aware when Christian organizations from the Western world started a campaign to purchase the freedom of slave children and women and return them to their villages in the South.

An estimated 50,000 South Sudanese have changed hands in Darfur and Kordofan since 1983. Some of them had been slaves for as little as two weeks before they escaped, but many more remain in bondage. Slightly more than 5 percent of all the slaves were taken to Sudan’s borders with Chad to be enslaved to work with grazing animals, with the rest accounted for by the proliferating demand for free farm labor and domestic service in southern Darfur and western Kordofan. The need by the Baggara to clear brush from the vast territories of this region, and the curtailment by war of the traditional migrant farm labor from Bahr el-Ghazal and Abyei in the 1980s transformed Dinka-Baggara relations into a major area of conflict. As the traditional relationships between southern migrant labor and Baggara farm owners ceased due to war or decreased wages, slavery and continued raiding for slaves assumed an even greater importance as a source of labor. Vast territories belonging to Aweil and Ngok Dinka have been so frequently raided by Arab slavers that whole villages have been either depopulated by a combination of raiding and war-induced famines, or have been deserted. The population of Gok Machar, for example, has been tremendously reduced since 1985.

Southern Darfur and western Kordofan also took advantage of the war and met their labor needs through other war-related means. The population of Dinka, finding itself engulfed by war and famines, the worst famines being those of 1988 and 1998, has moved into the North in the hope of finding jobs or relief. The raids and war-provoked displacement of the Dinka are intertwined. Dinka territories were losing their population in uncounted thousands through displacement to the North. The following statement by a Dinka man who had been in Darfur before returning to Dinkaland illustrates some of the calculations made by Southerners seeking livelihoods in the North: “One had to choose between a possibility of starving here in the South or trying your luck in the North to seek employment. Others who have relatives already living in the North decided to join them hoping [the relatives] might assist them with jobs or access to relief. There is a Dinka saying, cath ee nguot—traveling is female. It means that it is better to move about—because you might run into something better—than to sit still.”

Many more Dinka among those displaced by the famine of 1988 had moved to the North thinking that the government would come to their rescue. But displaced Southerners in the North do not get any government assistance as a result of efforts to undermine their citizenship. Southerners lack political status in the North for three main reasons. First, they are not Muslims in a country where elite politics is increasingly Islamicized and secularism is declining.⁵ Second, they are excluded from public services as a result of widespread and virulent racial prejudice. Indeed, one report to a humanitarian donor agency noted that the Arab-African racial hierarchy that exists in Northern Sudan is in some ways comparable with that of apartheid in South Africa.⁶ Third, displaced Southerners lack legal redress against the gross exploitation because they have been readily stigmatized as supporters of the rebellion in the South and therefore undeserving of the protection of the law.

Two thousand of these South Sudanese became victims of an attack by the Baggara in what became known as the ed-Da’ein massacre. One afternoon in 1987, fearing that they were going to be attacked by the Baggara, displaced Dinka congregated in front of a police station in the town of ed-Da’ein, requesting and hoping for police protection. The police told them to spend the night in railroad freight cars. But the Arabs armed themselves and attacked the Dinka who were packed into the railroad cars, and the police watched as thousands of them were being slaughtered and burned inside the rail wagons.⁷