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Preface

The Murahileen chain people

as the fisherman chains his catch with a rope

The Murahileen take us into servitude in their land

The Murahileen drag us on the surface of our land

but we will not let go of our land

Sudan is our land

This verse is from a Dinka song that describes the experience of the people of South Sudan and the Nuba of central Sudan with the recently revived slavery and slave trade. It was in some ways inevitable that I would focus on this area of study. I am a South Sudanese anthropologist who has been studying Sudan all my academic life. I now teach at a university in the United States. My career as a Sudanist, without a doubt, began with the knowledge I acquired from personal experience as a native son. But this knowledge became more specialized after 1993 when I undertook field study in South Sudan for my doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles. That research project examined the impact of the unresolved North-South civil war on the family, gender relations, and reproductive health in northern Bahr el-Ghazal in southwestern Sudan.¹ Moreover, while I was in Bahr el-Ghazal conducting research, I also worked for a humanitarian relief agency, and this role enabled me to travel extensively in the areas that have now become the subject of this book.

Having been seriously understudied due to war, which made travel in the region difficult, South Sudan presents an ambitious researcher with the temptation to do it all. Therefore, while I was documenting the interaction between the behaviors and attitudes of militarized youth, on the one hand, and traditional gender relations, on the other, during my first period of fieldwork, my research extended into more issues than I had planned. Such topics as household decision making regarding pregnancy, abortion, sexuality and sexual violence, sexually transmitted diseases, childbirth, care for the young, and other reproductive health issues took the center stage of my dissertation research.² Yet, the temptation to document other tragedies such as government militia raiding, displacement, loss of assets, preemptive migration, and the dismal future of the family was far too great to resist. By 1995, about twelve years after the second round of the civil war began, South Sudan had lost a third of its population to war, famine, and displacement to the North or neighboring countries. Suffering abounded and there was an immediate need to understand it. Basic services were almost completely nonexistent and mortality rates were extremely high. The traditional structure of the family was so reconfigured that the individual person was left without the care that the society had always provided in times of need. People were in a state of almost total despair, and there was no end to this misery in sight. There is still none.

I returned to California in 1995 with loads of notebooks on varied topics after two years of dissertation research. I went back to South Sudan every summer thereafter. The topic for the present study became clear in my mind in 1998 because of my own interest in questions of ethnic nationalism and nation building and the need to expose the tragic human rights situation in Sudan.

This book chronicles the current wave of slavery in Sudan. The history of slavery in Sudan goes as far back as the earliest alien encroachment, but the current revival began in 1983 with the beginning of the second round of North-South conflict. Northern Sudanese Arabs capture and sell (or exploit in other ways) large numbers of African Sudanese, primarily the Dinka, Nuer, and Nuba of central Sudan. The Arab slave raiders, although traditionally hostile to Nuer and Dinka, are currently engaged in slave taking for slightly different reasons than before the civil war. Since the beginning of the war, successive governments in Khartoum have sought different means to exploit the traditional animosity between the Dinka and the Arabs and have supported the Arab side in order to fight the war by proxy. These cattle-herding Arab tribesmen, known as the Baggara, were recruited as a low-cost counterinsurgency militia and deployed against the southern opposition force, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA). However, instead of confronting the SPLA, the militia force waged war against the civilian population of northern Bahr el-Ghazal, which the Sudanese government considers the support base for the SPLA. Soon after the initiation of the militia system, the Baggara discovered a very effective method of suppressing the rebellion in the South: destroying civilian villages and frightening the population into deserting their homes. But mere suppression of the southern revolt only satisfied the government; the Baggara received only meager government assistance. It was more lucrative to capture large numbers of women, children, and any able-bodied men they could subdue and take them into slavery in their northern provinces of Darfur and Kordofan. In addition to benefiting from the slave labor, the Bagarra hoped that helping implement the government’s military strategy would earn them extra government resources. This book explains the intricacies and nuances of how a counterinsurgency militia became a slave-taking army.

The problem with writing this book is that its topic is controversial. When one writes from the perspective of one’s own people and when one has a responsibility toward the whole country, there is a certain degree of ambivalence involved. There is no doubt that I will be seen as focusing on the concerns of Southerners, but if I do not focus on the victims of the crisis I am studying I could also be blamed for trying to marginalize the very people whose agony I am trying to expose. I am conscious of the possibility that my having only worked in the South could bias my views. But I have made an equally conscious attempt to be objective in presentation. While no one writing on Sudan’s tumultuous and tragic history can claim absolute neutrality, I have tried to express the concerns of Southerners without being anti-North.

Many South Sudanese living under the Sudan government’s oppression have asked and encouraged me to write about their suffering and its history. They long for a voice, and I have agreed to lend them mine. An academic factor that strongly influenced my decision to write this book was the existence of an excellent body of anthropological, historical, and journalistic material on important aspects of how the war has triggered the revival of slavery. Robert Collins has written extensively and perceptively on the history of slavery and the slave trade on the Upper Nile, the role of the current war on the reemergence of slavery, and relations between Arab Northerners and African Southerners.³ He has also recently authored an insightful analysis of why the Baggara raid the Dinka.⁴

The Dinka historian, the late Damazo Dut Majak, a native of northern Bahr el-Ghazal from the Malwal section, conducted a historical survey throughout the region in the 1980s and wrote a compelling dissertation and numerous articles on the history of alien encroachment in his home region.⁵ His work provides a detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of the arrival of Arab traders who later became the slave traders in Bahr el-Ghazal, and is complete with genealogies and maximal family systems. He gives examples of the families that were at the forefront of confrontations with the Arabs, the French, and the British, and provides an overview of economic activities before and during the occupation of the region by slave traders (1821–98)—the Turkiyya (1821–81) and the Mahdist era (1881–98)—and under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium rule (1898–1956).

Historians Martin Daly and Douglas Johnson have both written instructive accounts on how the colonial governments dealt with the question of North-South relations and the role of slavery in these relations.⁶ A North Sudanese, Ahmed Sikainga, has also written important books on the relationship between Bahr el-Ghazal and Darfur in terms of slavery and trade as well as exchanging cultures.⁷ In more recent times, a great deal of ethnographic research has been devoted to changing circumstances in war-torn South Sudan. In the anthropological literature, Sharon Hutchinson’s book on how the Nuer are coping with the war and the state is most compelling.⁸ Francis Mading Deng, a Dinka legal anthropologist, has been an authority on North-South relationships and the debate on the identity of the country, particularly the relationships between the Baggara and his native Dinka section of Ngok.⁹

In the field of journalism, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the South African Mail and Guardian, as well as a number of European and Canadian magazines and newspapers have all carried extensive accounts of slave raiding since 1995. Many of them have tried to expose the role of the government in slave taking. They have also debated the issue of slave redemption discussed later in this book—that is, the practice whereby Christian and antislavery groups from the Western world purchase the freedom of slaves and return them to their home villages in the South. Another issue for these newspapers and magazines has been the disturbing silence of the international community, especially powerful industrial countries. But the most systematic and instrumental journalistic writing on slavery in Sudan has been that by Sudanese journalist and former government minister Bona Malwal. He pioneered the campaign to expose this tragic practice in the 1980s as editor of the Sudan Times, the only English-language newspaper in Khartoum at the time. When he went into exile in England, Malwal started publishing a newsletter, the Sudan Democratic Gazette, which focused on the slavery issue.

Although it has been mostly South Sudanese who have spoken out against slavery, there have been a few North Sudanese who have felt that slavery cannot be tolerated in a modern nation-state that is seeking to build its identity on ethnic, religious, and racial diversity. Among these very few Northerners were two courageous university professors who risked their lives to write candidly to expose this inhuman practice they thought had only remained as a bad mark on the pages of history but no longer existed in their country. Having read numerous reports in the Sudan Times, Ushari Mahmud and Suleiman Baldo traveled to ed-Da’ein in Darfur in order to ascertain the rumors they had heard about slavery, only to return with disheartening accounts of a massacre of some two thousand Dinka by the Baggara Arabs. Their booklet Human Rights Abuses in the Sudan, 1987: The Diein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan caused an outcry among rights activists, South Sudanese, and the government. The activists and citizens of South Sudan were outraged at the government’s complicity, and the government was furious at the two professors for “defaming” the good name of the country. The authors were accused of being “fifth column” and supporters of the southern rebel army, and were classed as traitors.

More and more such reports prompted the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to send a Special Rapporteur to Sudan in 1994 and 1995 to examine the allegations of human rights violations by the Islamist regime in Khartoum. Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro wrote a detailed report centering on the question of slavery.¹⁰ He documented how the militia force operates and how the army violates all the known conventions on the conduct of war. He also described the kind of destruction both the regular army and the militias mete out in the Dinka areas, and the fate of the captives, who are physically and emotionally abused and sold as slaves or forced to work under conditions amounting to slavery. The response of the government of Sudan to this report was one of fury. Gaspar Biro was accused of harboring anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiments, and the government made a request to the High Commissioner for Human Rights to remove Biro as the Special Rapporteur on Sudan. In 1999, another Special Rapporteur for Sudan, Argentinian lawyer Leonardo Franco, was appointed. He also produced a detailed examination of the question of slavery incriminating the government of Sudan.¹¹

Many historians, anthropologists, and journalists have worked or traveled in the communities where most of my research for this book was done. And I am pleased to report that numerous people mentioned them to me as soon as I said that I was writing a book on the issue of slavery. I heard many stories filled with praise for the journalists and human rights investigators. I also took copies of magazine articles and newspaper clippings with me to the field and discussed their main findings with people who had provided the information to the researchers. I found that these local people almost always agreed with what I told them the researchers had recorded. As it is with all literate South Sudanese cut off by war from any sources of reading material, the people of Bahr el-Ghazal were over-joyed when I brought these materials. They also lamented that although these works were the foundation of a history of modern South Sudan, the seventeen years of war had deprived several generations of South Sudanese of education so that no one will write that history and most South Sudanese will not comprehend what outsiders write about them. Still, at a time when many academics in social sciences and humanities are quick to criticize the production of journalistic literature as historical evidence, I found that many journalists familiarize themselves with the anthropological literature and have an understanding of Sudanese cultures before traveling to Sudan. I therefore find these sources to have value, not just for me but also for the local people. In preparation for this work I compiled (with the appreciated assistance of many aid agencies) a large body of documents, reports, unpublished papers, student theses and dissertations, and scholarly publications, which have informed this study directly or indirectly; those works most directly relevant are appropriately cited in the notes. I have also drawn on my own knowledge as a Sudanese.

This study began in a serious and systematic sense in 1998, when I collaborated with Sharon Hutchinson on a research project funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation to investigate the militarization of Nuer and Dinka ethnic identities since the split of the SPLA in 1991, and the violence against civilians that ensued from the split. That research consisted of concurrent surveys, with Hutchinson working in the Nuer areas and I in the Dinka areas, with the aim of establishing a list of factors that the people thought fueled the ethnic conflicts between the two groups, and possible ways to mitigate them. One of the important factors in conflicts among South Sudanese ethnic groups that I investigated further for the present project was the role of the central government in fanning these ethnic wars as a way to weaken these groups in their confrontation with the North. Significant results from that research are instrumental to the present study. Also, my travels throughout northern Bahr el-Ghazal in the summers of 1998 and 1999 allowed me to administer interview schedules for this study; I thus gained more than a total of six months of firsthand experience in observing the aftermath of the slave raids. Most of my time during these trips was spent at various relief stations and market towns in Aweil East, Aweil West, and Tuic Counties.

During most of these trips, I had either set out to do research on a topic other than slavery or to work as a consultant, but the issues surrounding slavery were always paramount for my respondents, and there was no way to brush them aside simply because I had come to do something else. I remembered Cynthia Nelson, my professor at the American University in Cairo, commenting that if an issue is of obvious importance to one’s research subjects, then that issue should be the topic of one’s research.¹² I established contacts with local officials, traditional administration (chiefs and headmen), SPLA officers and commanders, spiritual leaders, laypersons, and former slaves who either had escaped from bondage or had been freed through redemption programs. All of them invariably regarded slave raiding to be the most tragic experience they have had during the civil war.

My most intensive and systematic data gathering took place between June and August 1998 and during June 1999. As on previous visits, I concentrated my work in the areas just a day or two days’ walk to the Dinka-Baggara border, which include the villages of Gok Machar, Manyiel, Majak Baai, Marial Baai, Warawar, and Beech, all in Aweil West and Aweil East Counties. I also traveled and conducted well over a hundred interviews in Tuic County, where both the Tuic people and the displaced Ngok have suffered constant assault by the Baggara. Most of the people with whom I spoke in these parts of northern Bahr el-Ghazal were either displaced from the border areas, returnees from displacement, or living in dilapidated villages destroyed during the raids. My interviews also included people from other parts of northern Bahr el-Ghazal who had either witnessed the destruction themselves or were host to thousands of others who were displaced from their villages. I have also interviewed local civilian officials, SPLA military personnel, chiefs, and clan leaders. The interviews about slavery focused on the experience of enslavement or bondage itself, the volume of the slave trade, the local efforts to redeem the slaves, and attempts to rebuff the militias and prevent the capture of slaves. I also probed the respondents about the fate of ex-slave children or women who have been returned to their villages but who had lost their families, and about people’s rationalizations of the resurgence of slavery. I have also conducted interviews on local perceptions of Arab and African relations and the cultural differences, racial tensions, and history of contact between these groups; why these relations create conflicts; and how these conflicts might be mitigated. The most important interviews, in my opinion, were those conducted with former slaves, for without their testimonies and narratives of what happens to the slaves, there would be no substance for this book.

Altogether, I conducted and recorded more than two hundred interviews on the topics of militia raiding and slavery over the entire period of my research stay in Bahr el-Ghazal since 1993. Some interviews were confined to individual respondents and others were done in a group setting. Each interview lasted between half an hour and one hour, not including time I spent answering respondents’ questions about America, how I got there, and why other South Sudanese in diaspora do not go back to visit their homeland as I do.

The interviews were conducted with men, women, and children. They were open-ended exchanges in which we discussed a particular topic to a point of saturation. The specific topics we explored varied but always related to war, militia raids, and their upheavals. Some interviews focused on insecurity, disruption of trade networks between North and South, food shortages as people have lost their crops and livestock to raiding, and the aftermath of the raids. Others dealt with history, the relationship between government and people, the state power or lack thereof, and SPLA administration compared to the prewar government. Still others revolved around identities, race relations, local ideas about the status of a South Sudanese person in the constitution, the state laws, and whether or not the people of South Sudan feel that they are represented in the center. The interviews with former slaves focused on their experiences while in captivity, how they got their freedom, and how they are fitting back into their communities.

I need to insert a note at the outset about three terms that are used throughout this book. They are the Kiir River, South Sudan, and Sudan. Kiir is the Dinka name for the river that the reader will find on maps as Baḥr al-‘Arab, which is the Arabic name for the same river and means “Arab Sea.” The valleys of this river serve as the dry season pastures for both groups and have historically been the source of confrontation. As I am writing from the perspective of the Dinka, I use the Dinka word for the river.

My use of “South Sudan” (instead of “southern Sudan,” used by most writers) reflects the views of my informants, who believe that the expression South Sudan confers a distinct and bounded national identity for the people who live in this region. It has a secessionist connotation, and most people I interviewed, including SPLA personnel, talked about a future nation comprising the three southern regions of Upper Nile, Equatoria, and Bahr el-Ghazal separate from the North.

My use of “Sudan” rather than “the Sudan” reflects both my ideological standpoint and a historical fact. “The Sudan” is a colonial term coined during the scramble for Africa to distinguish between the country as we know it today and the rest of bilād as-sūdān, the term used by Arab traders in reference to the whole region stretching from Senegal to the Nile Valley. Because the rest of Africa that was included in the Sudan has long been carved up into different countries, only one place bears the name, eliminating the need for the definite article.

I covered a great deal of complex material under serious time constraints and from a vast territory where travel is extremely difficult and where security is a constant concern. I was able to do this because of my association with relief agencies, without whose assistance this project would have been impossible. I have flown in aid agency aircraft from the northwestern Kenyan town of Lokichokio, where the relief consortium Operation Life-line Sudan (OLS) is based, to northern Bahr el-Ghazal. From whichever bush airstrip I was dropped off, I again relied on the hospitality of aid agency field staff for accommodation, vehicle rides, or bicycle loans. The enthusiasm of the people of Bahr el-Ghazal about this project further eased my task. Local officials were quick to turn over copies of their reports on slavery, lists of names of people in captivity, and other relevant material. I also appreciated the willingness of many people in northern Bahr el-Ghazal to tolerate my questions, which to them sometimes sounded absurd coming from a native of the area. Because I am a Dinka myself, it was difficult for some to comprehend why I was asking questions I supposedly knew the answers to. Nevertheless, they graciously and eloquently taught me much about the cultural aspects of Sudan’s current war, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to all the people of northern Bahr el-Ghazal. Many people in this region helped in numerous ways beyond the specific interviews I had with them. Unfortunately, I cannot mention them all by name; however, I sincerely thank them all.

I am also grateful for the assistance provided by my colleagues John Ryle and Philip Winter, who are both Sudan area specialists and have worked in South Sudan in various fields including humanitarian assistance and research. During my summer 1999 trip to Bahr el-Ghazal, I had the opportunity to be on a consultancy team with Ryle and Winter; the discussions I had with them on this project have sharpened my thinking.

I gratefully express my appreciation to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation for a joint grant to my colleague Sharon Hutchinson and I, which covered a significant part of my expenses for fieldwork and writing this book. I thank the foundation for its long-standing interest in research on violence and aggression in general, and its interest in our Sudan project.

Loyola Marymount University provided support for this project, including a faculty research grant for the summer of 1998. I appreciate this support and also thank Kenyon Chan, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, for providing formal letters of introduction to foreign consulates in order to obtain visas for travel to East Africa on my way to Sudan. I also thank Joseph Jabbra, the Academic Vice President at LMU, for his enthusiastic encouragement of this project. Among many LMU colleagues who provided useful comments were Lawrence Tritle and Lisa Marovitch.

I feel especially fortunate to have had the enthusiastic commitment and encouragement of able editors Patricia Smith and Noreen O’Connor. I also acknowledge with gratitude comments made on the manuscript by two anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions for revision of the book were most helpful.