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Introduction

Slavery in Sudan: Definitions and Outlines

Many decades after independence from Britain in 1956, Sudan, the largest country in Africa, continues to make news headlines for calamities such as its war-ravaged lands, bankrupt economy, violent Islamic militancy, cultural and religious conflicts, and killer droughts and famines. But the disaster that has most engaged the attention of the Western world has been the revival of slavery and the slave trade, aided by the indifference and complicity of the Sudanese government. The successive Khartoum regimes since the start of the current civil war between the North and the South in 1983 have been notorious for encouraging enslavement of southern blacks, and increasingly Christian Sudanese, by northern Arab Muslims. Armed by the government as low-cost counterinsurgency militias, the Arab cattle-herding tribes of Darfur and Kordofan provinces, known as the Baggara, targeted in particular the Dinka of northern Bahr el-Ghazal and Abyei. The main reason for these atrocious assaults is that the Dinka are accused of supporting the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), the southern opposition army confronting the North in the longest war of the twentieth century.¹ Khartoum governments have reasoned that if the SPLA’s support base were destabilized, the rebel army would be easy to defeat.

The capture and sale of Dinka women and children from South Sudan into slavery in the North has been going on since 1983. The total number of captives at a given time is estimated at 10,000–15,000. I say at a given time because much of the slavery in Kordofan and Darfur could best be described as temporary. Some abducted slaves are released after they become regarded as unfit. Others escape. Others are redeemed through the assistance of Arab middlemen, or freed by legal recourse. This transitory character of slavery does not mean that while in captivity, the victims are any better off than those who are in bondage permanently. It simply means that some people become free as suddenly as they became slaves. In addition to people abducted for the sole purpose of enslavement, there are hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese displaced to the North by the raiding, the civil war, and the consequential famines that have plagued the southern region since the start of the war. Many of these displaced Southerners have also experienced enslavement. The impermanent nature of slavery does not bother the slavers, for they can always obtain more slaves. They have no fear of any legal measures since the government and the authority of the state stand behind them.²

This situation has generated many puzzling questions about how slavery could be happening in this century. How can the government of a modern country encourage such a horrendous practice against its own subjects, simply because they are Africans and non-Muslim? How is it possible that the southern guerrilla force, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army, allows people in the areas under its control to be constantly raided and taken into slavery? Why is the world standing by, despite such misery, and not putting the necessary pressure on the government of Sudan to halt this practice?

Some of the nagging questions surrounding the issue of slavery in Sudan have to do with its scale and volume. How many slaves are we talking about? How badly are they being treated in the North? How do we know about their conditions in captivity in the North?

When I returned to Bahr el-Ghazal in 1993, ten years after the start of the war, the local authorities estimated that at least 14,000 Dinka men, women, and children had been abducted and driven to the North. Nobody knew anything about the fate of these captives. Many families had already started to venture into the North, particularly Kordofan and Darfur, in a tireless effort to find their enslaved relatives. Some have found their relatives and helped them out of slavery. Others have only recognized their cattle in cattle auctions in the North, and are still searching for their people. It is worth noting that many young boys were captured while grazing their herds and trying to prevent the raiders from looting the cattle. Therefore, when a man recognized his cows in the North, his hopes were raised that he might also find his child in the vicinity of cattle auction.

The slaves are almost constantly in transit between capture, sale, release, redemption, escape, dumping, and capture again. No one has any idea how many slaves there are exactly. In 1987, human rights groups, including the Anti-Slavery Society, estimated that there were 7,000 children and women being enslaved in Darfur and Kordofan.³ Other reports put the number much higher based on the fluctuating market price of slaves. Between 1987 and 1988 the price of a slave boy went down from $90 to $10 (note that the price of a cow in northern Sudan was over $100).⁴ It is hard to determine the cause of the fall in price for slaves, but going by the usual determinants of market prices—supply and demand—falling slave prices in North Sudan may be attributable to an oversupply of slaves, which in turn could mean that Baggara raids have increased. Robert Collins asserts that the falling prices may have been due to the abduction of children from the camps of displaced Dinka in western Sudan. It is also suggested that, in the face of desperation, Dinka parents may have been pawning their children to Arabs who might feed the children.⁵ The SPLA authorities in the South, working closely with their own sources in the North, have estimated that 25,000 slaves are held in Darfur and Kordofan in a given year. They are victims of a devastating government retaliatory campaign. This campaign is compounded by the deteriorating climate in Darfur and Kordofan, which has pushed the Baggara to seek greater access to the grazing lands of the Dinka, as will be made clear in the following chapters.

Slavery or Slander: Defining Slavery in Sudan

Defining what constitutes slavery in the Sudanese contexts has been the persistent concern and subject of tense debate among human rights investigators and activists, government officials, social scientists, and other scholars since the first claims of slavery were made in the mid-1980s. Many have questioned the use of the term slavery as an accurate description of what has been happening in the border area between the Dinka and Baggara that has now become known as the “transition zone.” The government of Sudan continues to deny that the phenomenon of abducting women and children is slavery and insists that the whole matter is no more than traditional Dinka-Baggara tribal feuding over resources. I will show, however, that the practice is indeed slavery by any definition.

The Slavery Convention of 1926 defines slavery as the status of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. Slave means a person in the condition or status of being owned. Slave trade is defined as all acts involved in the capture and acquisition of a person with the intent to sell, exchange, or dispose of him or her.⁶ The use of the term slave trade to describe the phenomenon in Sudan has been much debated. Some journalists have argued that slave trade does not apply in Sudan’s context since the term attempts to equate Sudan’s case with historical practices such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The government of Sudan, especially Hassan al-Turabi, the head of the ruling National Islamic Front, for example, has deliberately widened the definition of slavery to include all forms of exploitation. In this way, the government reduces the practice to a benign sort of aberration common in all societies, rather than the horrific case of chattel slavery practiced now in Sudan. Many people, however, have argued that evidence justifies the use of the term slave trade to describe the practice in Sudan, including the practice whereby South Sudanese children or young persons under eighteen are forcibly taken away from their parents or guardians and exchanged for favors or material goods in the North. There is also evidence that these children are put to work by Arab households without remuneration. All this could not be described by any term other than slave trade.⁷

In more recent times, the emergence of the notion of “the new slavery” has provided other definitions that fit the Sudanese phenomenon. Kevin Bales argues that the special characteristic of slavery is that slaves were property of the master; they are also coerced, and the labor of the slave is at the complete disposal of the slaveholder. Bales also notes that while slavery is fundamentally tied to labor, slavery differs from other types of labor such as wage labor, serfdom, and clientage. Many people doing these other types of labor are also subject to gross exploitation, a practice that disguises slavery as so-called wage labor. In countries as varied as India, Mauritania, Thailand, Brazil, and France, as Bales reports, slaves do not have the right to their own sexuality and to their reproductive capacities. In most cases, they do not have a choice to walk away from their desolate conditions, whether because of physical coercion or economic desperation. They are punished by flogging, confinement, deprivation of food, increasing the amount of work, or sale. As cheap commodities, slaves are bought and sold in ways so subtle that no legal measures can be taken against the slaveholder. New slaveholders or masters, according to Bales, are not concerned with the slaves’ physical and psychological well-being because slaves are easy to obtain, and in fact, slaveholders find it cost-effective to dispose of slaves in order to acquire new ones.⁸ Nearly all the practices in Sudan fit the definitions. Slavery in Sudan is initiated through violent raiding, which reduces the status of an abducted person from a condition of freedom and citizenship to one of slavery, cheap laborer, and a liability when physically unfit. Most important is that citizenship and entitlement to legal protection are undermined, whether through lack of laws or violation of existing laws, leaving the state unable to protect individual rights. Difficult as it may be to provide a succinct definition of slavery, the organized raiding and kidnapping of Dinka children and women from their communities and their subsequent exploitation in the North indicate that slavery is practiced in Sudan.

The ways Southerners are displaced by raids, civil war, and subsequent famines, exploited as cheap labor, and used by the government as magnets for foreign aid in the North, equally amount to slavery. The raids of Dinka villages force people to seek government protection and therefore migrate to the North. The government classifies them as refugees as a way to solicit foreign disaster relief. When such assistance arrives, the government assumes the responsibility of distributing it, gaining several advantages. Foreign aid gets taxed, and the food is used to coerce people into religious conversion. In this regard, Mark Duffield recently wrote:

Aid policy has furnished a complementary form of desocialization through propagation of the IDP [internally displaced persons] identity and predominance of economistic forms of analysis. What has been the impact of food aid on the role of displaced Dinka as cheap labour? … Since 1989, government of Sudan has consistently pressed to limit food aid to displaced Southerners, arguing that it creates dependency, demeans both the beneficiary and the image of Sudan, and conflicts with the government of Sudan’s plans to integrate them into the national labor force. It was not until 1992, three years after OLS [Operation Life-line Sudan] began and following strong lobbying from the aid community, that displaced Southerners settled around Khartoum were allowed to come under OLS.⁹ However, this only applied to those displaced people who were settled in formally recognized “peace camps” around the capital; those outside these designated areas received no official aid.¹⁰

The degree of suffering inflicted on Southerners by raiding and by the living conditions for captives and the displaced in the North has led many observers and commentators to conclude that the institution of slavery has been resurrected in Sudan.¹¹ The practice in Sudan includes all the realities and images that the word slavery evokes. The focus of this book is not to “prove” the existence of slavery in Sudan, but rather to document, describe, and expose the flagrant abuses of human rights in Sudan since 1983. This book attempts to place the issue of slavery and slavery-like practices in the context of the North-South conflict.

Factors Underlying the Persistence of Slavery

Sudan is a country where old habits die hard. When Samuel Baker, the British explorer of the White Nile, arrived in Khartoum in 1862, almost six decades after England had declared slave trade illegal, he noted that it was the slave trade that kept Khartoum going as a bustling town. Baker observed that a slave trader would sail to the South from Khartoum in the dry season with armed men and find a convenient village. The slavers would surround the village in the night, then just before dawn fall upon the village, burning the huts and shooting to frighten the people. Having caused disarray and turmoil in the village, the slavers would take mostly women and young adults, place forked poles on their shoulders, tie their hands to the pole in front, and bind children to their mothers. Everything the village lived on would be looted—cattle, grain, ivory—and what was of less value to the slavers was destroyed in attempts to render the village so poor that its surviving inhabitants would be forced to collaborate with the slavers on their next excursion against neighboring villages. Probably nothing more monstrous and cruel than this traffic had been experienced in South Sudan. These were indeed painful days that the survivors would have wished to forget. But they have to be recalled by those who wish to understand the recurrent indignities South Sudanese experienced then and continue to experience. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British had reduced the scale and volume of the slave trade, especially the export of slaves. Yet the physical and moral damage had already been done, and this has continued to cast a dark shadow on the country. Very little has changed, as slavery and its strong foundations in Sudanese society remained critical issues during the twentieth century. These foundations have made it possible for slavery to recur every time the conditions are ripe for it. War, displacement, and poverty function now as triggers for twenty-first-century slavery.

The factors that fueled the practice in the old days persist in Sudan because of the racial setup, religious ideological conflict, poverty, labor exploitation, and political instability. When such conditions escalate in any society, one might add, they almost always trigger slavery or slavery-like practices. The reemergence and increase in slave-raiding expeditions and the sale of victims in Sudan are build upon the racial construction of the country and the cultural ideologies that make up the identity of the Sudanese people. After all, the raiders of the new slavery are radical Muslims, self-perceived as racially superior, and they usually arrive in Nilotic (Nuer and Dinka) areas with no compunctions about killing non-Muslims and non-Arabs, if killing is what it takes in order for them to achieve their desired goals. However, race, religion, ethnicity, and economics could not have brought about the current resurgence of slavery without a strong catalyst. This factor was the second round of the unresolved civil war between the South and the North. The war became the driving force for slavery as well as the shadow that concealed the practices of slavery from the outside world. The war gave government interlocutors the opportunity to explain away the new forms of slavery, or justify the capture of slaves as the inevitable consequence of war. But the point to be made in this book is that the war alone is not a sufficient explanation. Without the strong notions of racial, religious, and cultural superiority held in the North, the war alone would not have caused the resurgence of slavery in Sudan.

Since 1983 northern Arab cattle herdsmen (the Baggara) have carried out government-sponsored systematic attacks against the Dinka of Bahr el-Ghazal to pillage for cattle, to loot grain, and to capture scores of Dinka women and children and sell them into slavery in the North. In the face of all the war-provoked misery in South Sudan, the outside world could not see beyond famine to notice that slavery had become part of the government’s war machine. When the news of slave taking first came to the attention of the outside world, quick statements were made about slavery being exclusively a product of war, not to mention that most people in the West could not really conceive of chattel slavery in this day and age. Later careful examination revealed that it was not just because of war that the Baggara were persuaded to act as executors of northern ambitions. Moreover, longer-term survival issues energized the slave raids. Under these circumstances, we need a better understanding of the forces sparking and sustaining slavery and the slave trade in Sudan. Five broad approaches to analyzing Sudan’s slavery and the slave trade stand out; I will outline them here.

The Racial Structure of Sudanese Society

Although race in Sudan is a very slippery subject in terms of its biological expression in the population, it matters a great deal in the way people relate to one another. In terms of skin color, which is perhaps one of the most obvious characteristics for lay classification of races, an outsider may regard all Sudanese as black. But as far as the social construction of race is concerned, North Sudanese regard themselves as Arabs, whereas South Sudanese identify themselves as predominantly African, or rather call themselves by the specific ethnic groups to which they belong. These defined racial identities, the history and evolution of which will be explained below, do not stop at that. They evoke emotions of superiority of one group over the other. Sudanese society has become terribly polarized along these perceived racial lines as each group is engaged in either proving the superiority of its culture or disproving the allegations of inferiority made against it. The violent enslavement of Southerners is a result of enslaving communities having developed a racist ideology which ascribes subhuman status to the enslaved communities. The perpetrators of slavery in Sudan, the Baggara Arab herdsmen, use this racial ideology to generate enthusiasm among the young: when a call for raiding is made, they race to the front to prove their assumed superiority. One of the notions used to promote slavery has been the alleged natural inability of the Dinka to confront the more intelligent and militarily agile Baggara. The two main sections of the Baggara, the Rezeigat in Darfur and the Misseria in Kordofan, have both attempted to assert their assumed superior cultural capacities to justify slave raiding. These two Baggara tribes are Arabic-speaking Muslims. The victims of Sudan’s slavery are black Africans, mainly from the Dinka sections of Malwal, Ngok, and Tuic, who are non-Muslim and speak a Nilotic language, using Arabic only as a second language, if at all.

In a cover story in the South African Mail and Guardian, the respected journalist Cameron Duodo characterized Sudan’s tragic years as follows: “The conflict is both of a racial nature and a religious one, between the Arabised black-skinned north and the negroid-Africans, Christians and animists, called by the Muslims the ‘abids’, which means ‘slaves.’”¹² A mention of Islam or imposition of Arab culture as important factors in the North-South strife in Sudan frequently arouses discord with non-Sudanese Muslims and Arabs. They often express unease about this supposedly unfair characterization of Islam and Arabs as violent and intolerant. In this fashion, Muslim writer Khadija Magardie responded to Duodo’s article with anger for having suggested that culture and religion have a hand in the Sudan’s war. She demonstrated such utter ignorance about Sudan that her readers must have wondered whether she has ever seen a Baggara person. She suggested “the ‘Arab versus blacks’ framework [used by Duodo], is questionable since anyone who has visited Sudan and knows Sudanese history will know that the Baggara tribal militias, to whom slave-raiding is attributed, are physically identical to the Black southerners.”¹³ Well, obviously, if we go by the biological classification of races, the distinction between Baggara and Dinka may be somewhat blurred, given that the Baggara carry African blood and no longer look like the Arabs of Arabia or North Africa. But if race is socially constructed as it is in Sudan and elsewhere, Magardie could not be more wrong. Dinka and Baggara see each other as unequal and make no apologies for maintaining such views about one another. When a Dinka person sees a Baggara attacker on horseback, he/she knows the attacker is an Arab. For Sudanese, race is as plain as the different shades of blackness. If outsiders want to ignore the characteristics that the Sudanese themselves see as suggestive of racial differences, so much the better for the future of Sudan. However, race in Sudan is not necessarily based on appearance alone, but also on people’s own racial categorization of themselves. The North Sudanese provide a strong example for the social and cultural construction of race. Now the distinction between Arabs and non-Arabs in Sudan, whether culturally determined or biologically expressed, is as obvious as the colors on the Sudan’s flag.¹⁴

The Baggara and the Dinka, therefore, have significant ideological and cultural differences. The differences are at the levels of race, language, religion, and other cultural patterns. But despite these differences, the two people have similarities in their economic activities. Both groups are cattle-herding people, and share borders where they graze and seek water for their livestock. The main resource they share is the grazing plains of a river called the Kiir by the Dinka and Baḥr al-’Arab by the Baggara. Recurrent scarcity of pastures due to droughts has historically led to disputes over pastures and land. For example, northern Darfur and northern Kordofan in the 1970s experienced a period of drought and famine which drove Rezeigat and Misseria cattle keepers farther south in search of grazing areas. When the Dinka resisted them, hostilities ensued and the Khartoum government was quick to back the Baggara using the ideology of racial superiority.

Nioltics’ and Arabs’ Views of One Another

Perhaps the most common view held by the Baggara, about Southerners in general and Nilotics in particular, is that the latter are naturally slaves. In the summer of 1999, Baggara chiefs and militia leaders stated that their strife with the Dinka was a result of the bad nature of the Dinka. The statement explained that Dinka insistence on controlling the grazing plains of the Kiir River was due to the cultural problems among the Dinka which prohibit progress. This statement also suggested possible ways to deal with the Dinka, including raiding them as usual. They also demanded that the government train and arm the Baggara if efforts at Arabicizing the Dinka were to succeed.

In their colloquial language, Arabic groups in the North always use the word abd (slave) to refer to a person of a certain low social class. It is also used to describe the obscene, a person lacking in moral stature, and even the physical appearance of a filthy person. Over time this term has become associated with poverty and only with certain groups within Sudan. At present, it is hurled principally at South Sudanese and the Nuba, particularly because the majority of migrants from the South and the Nuba Mountains now living in the North are comparatively poor. They are less educated, perform demeaning jobs, and adhere to non-Muslim faiths, all of which are reflected in the term abd. These varied uses of the word suggest that they go hand in hand with the roles and status of slaves, and since Southerners and the Nuba have historically been the slaves, the phrase has stuck with them.

This is why slavery in Sudan is not a mere accident of war, but rather a practice deeply embedded in North Sudan. The war has provided only a stimulus and a pretext for something the North has long desired. Conversely, slavery in Sudan could be perceived as cumulative in its effect. Even if one were to make an argument that Sudanese slavery is a product of war, the war itself is a result of degrading views that Northerners hold of Southerners, and these views are responsible for slavery. I do not want to reduce the tragic experience of slavery to the mere use of a word, but the Arab notion that Southerners are people who are naturally slaves goes beyond demeaning terms. Many North Sudanese government officials and lay persons act out their beliefs in many areas of life such as allocation of jobs, distribution of public services, and the language used in their daily interaction with Southerners.

The reverse is also true to a certain degree: the Dinka do not hold favorable views of Northerners. The difference, however, is that southern views of Northerners do not emanate from the perspective of superiority. Most people in the South acknowledge that their cultures are different and that is the end of it. There is no indication that Southerners at any point in history have tried to change the North on account of southern cultures being superior. The South has always been on the defensive against Northerners’ efforts to become overlords in the whole country. The two wars between North and South speak for the southern rejection of Northern culture. The Dinka have cited their notions about Arab culture and Islam as one of the reasons for their vigorous opposition to the encroachment of northern cultures in the South. For example, in an interview in Nyamlel in 1998, one Dinka spiritual leader and community elder was asked to explain from the Dinka vantage point why the Arabs attack them. He characterized the Baggara as follows:

No amount of things, hard work, courtesy, or generosity of heart could one ever give the Baggara that can please them. We allow them to graze in our areas during the dry season, but when the rains begin, they do not just take their herds and go. Instead, they would look for a pretext to fight with us in hope of seizing our cattle. They do not take a moment to think about the next year. The following year, they would send peace 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 been to find areas in Uganda and Kenya where Muslims reside and then export not only Islam, but also the Sudanese politicized version of Islam, to these areas. Unfortunately, South Sudan has functioned as a stumbling block; thus the onslaught.

Although Dinka-Baggara relations have historically ranged from peace to sporadic skirmishes through frequent hostilities to full-blown war, the period beginning in September 1983 was a turning point. This was the year that Islamic shari‘a laws were imposed by then-president Nimeiri. These laws undermined the religious diversity of the country, and the South bitterly opposed them. The southern objection to these laws and to a host of other policies imposed by Khartoum was perceived in the North as anti-Arab and anti-Islam. As a result, the Nimeiri government encouraged the Baggara to attack the Dinka of Bahr el-Ghazal, who were considered sympathizers and members of the SPLA. This policy was continued at a more organized scale by the government of Sadiq al-Madhi after the fall of Nimeiri. When the current National Islamic Front government came to power in 1989, the government support for the Baggara assumed a new ideology, the determined commitment of President al-Bashir and his junta to escalate Khartoum’s jihad. Al-Bashir called on young Muslims to proceed to training camps. Islam in Sudan was quickly converted from its supposedly historic principles of decency that Sadiq al-Mahdi often spoke of into ideals that justify slavery and murder. One Dinka man asked, “What happened to the benevolence and peace of Islam that we always hear about? Could the Sudanese Islam be different from the rest of Islam?”²⁰ One can hardly fail to sympathize with the Dinka. They were a merry lot, but they are a people fighting for what they believe to be their birthright, their pride, and their survival, both physical and cultural. They have never given up because of the belief that the suffering they face during the resistance would not equal what they could experience under Arab domination.

Historical Factors

In 1994, Ahmad Sikainga wrote that “The contemporary history of the Baḥr al-’Arab region [the Kiir River to the Africans] has been a panorama of raids and counter-raids, ethnic conflicts, and competition over water and pasture principally between the Dinka and Baggara Arabs.”²¹ Although there is much truth in this appraisal of Dinka-Baggara relationships, the assertion that their conflict is that of recurrent raiding and counterraiding is slightly misleading. What has happened over the past two decades could be more justly described as the government-assisted Baggara assault on the Dinka. As the Baggara are those in need of pasture south of the Kiir River—a Dinka territory—the Dinka have not had a reason to invade the northern Kiir River region. What the Dinka did was simply to attempt to stem the influx of Baggara herders and livestock into the grazing plains south of the Kiir River. Fearing overgrazing and depletion of wildlife resources and fisheries, the Dinka tried in the late 1970s to regulate and limit the Baggara influx. Any Dinka attack on the Baggara who happened to be grazing in the Dinka territory during this period was to avenge previous Baggara raids. Large Baggara cattle herds were commandeered in this manner without a Dinka raiding force ever setting foot in Baggara territory. Historically, especially in colonial times, the cross-border hostility was dealt with through government actions to restrain Baggara movements. The postcolonial governments, however, decided to use the border strife to their advantage by strengthening the Baggara position, to push them against the Dinka as a way to impose rule over them.

During the colonial period, environmental damage caused by overgrazing was avoided in areas along the borders by demarcating grazing territories between the Dinka and the Baggara Arab pastoralists. This was done by involving the traditional chiefs on both sides to negotiate new administrative borders between Bahr el-Ghazal, Darfur, and Kordofan Provinces in an attempt to resolve the border conflict and reach winter grazing, fishing, and hunting agreements. To enforce the resolution of the ethnic conflict, the British drew a line that ran through the middle of the Kiir River from the west to the east, demarcating pastoral and fishing borders as it had been before the British colonization of Sudan. Police patrols on both sides of the borders then maintained the peace between African and Arab ethnic groups on the borders. After Sudan’s independence, however, the Arab and Muslim rulers in Khartoum viewed the border demarcation as a colonial design to keep the Arabs and Africans apart. The Arab officials were quick to change every policy set during colonial times regarding North-South relations. One of the significant changes they made was the abolition of border demarcations, giving the Baggara Arab pastoralists the freedom to cross the Kiir River to graze and water their livestock, and fish and hunt without regard for the environmental integrity of the grazing plains of the borderlands.²² Dinka claims to the territory were dismissed as tribalism.

During the struggle for independence in the North, Southerners were aware of the possibility that they would fall under Arab domination when the colonial period ended, and to express this concern, they objected to the northern drive for independence in the 1940s and 1950s. They complained to the British authorities because various historical experiences in North-South relations prior to the British colonial period were extremely painful for the South, and were still fresh in the South’s collective memory. Despite all the resistance against colonial labor and economic policies, especially in Bahr el-Ghazal, the British had won southern support for themselves by the abolition of slavery. They were also comparatively popular in the South for administering the two parts of the country as separate entities. Now that the independence was supported in the North, the South was reminded that as soon as the British left, there was nothing to prevent the North from reverting to its old ways. The South feared that the North might resume the practice of treating the South as a mere source of slaves, natural resources, and land to be taken.

When Sudan was about to become independent, South Sudanese had two main opinions about independence: either the South should become a separate state, or the whole country should remain under colonial rule until such time as the South could prepare educationally and developmentally to the same level as the North. These opinions were expressed in various forums and in so many ways that today there is much confusion. For example, historians now assert that the South had no concrete position over the issue of independence.²³ But careful examination of archival material shows that South Sudanese were definitely opposed to independence if their fate was going to be left in the hands of the Arab North. In 1952, the chiefs of the Bari people of Equatoria made this statement to G. W. Bell, a colonial governor, on his visit to Juba from Khartoum:

We have the following [to] put before you: (1) we are all Sudanese, and we do not fully understand why the northern Sudanese are in hurry for self-government. While we in the South are still far backward in civilization, we see no reason why the northern Sudanese are so hurriedly in the self-government status. (2) The northern Sudanese got education before us, this education was introduced to Sudan by English government and even now the northern Sudanese are being sent to the UK for higher studies while the South is still longing for it. (3) We want education to be expanded first of all to southern Sudan to enable it to choose its own future wisely, and if this is being pressed by the northern Sudanese, it is for them and not for the South, and if this is approved by the English government, we beg that a visit by a politician be carried out in southern Sudan to obtain a full idea of the southern Sudanese. (4) A lame man cannot win a race with a man who is not lame. A blind man does not know what is beauty in the world. If my elder brother wants that our father should die, so that we may inherit the position of our father, we should say that it is not time for our father to die because we are still too young. We want the English people to carry out the administration of this country until we shall be able to choose our right. We the Bari wish that you will be on our side.²⁴

This opinion is presently regarded in South Sudan as the sentiment of the whole region regarding independence. The people of the South were aware of the role that the colonial government had played both in keeping their region behind in terms of development in favor of the North, and in creating the polity itself. Few South Sudanese can say that Sudan’s independence had a positive meaning for them.

One particular colonial policy, however, that caused South Sudanese to have mixed feelings about the colonial administration was the Closed Districts Ordinance. This policy, also known as the Southern Policy, barred North Sudanese from entering or living in the South. Through this action, the colonial government was able to speed up the abolition of the slave trade and the northern Arab and Muslim encroachment in the South. For these two reasons, the policy was applauded in the South.²⁵ But at the same time, the 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.