camps unless they are with local staff. Any displaced persons seeking to talk to the foreign aid workers during visits are secretly taken and tortured. Displaced Southerners in the North, therefore, are unable to report their experiences to foreign investigators.
Children and women slaves, however, who had changed hands from one slaver to another, some many times over, related terrifying experiences with the slave trade. They talked about transactions involving the sale of children by their original abductors soon after they arrived in Baggaraland. These former slave children have also talked about the forced Islamization of slave children by their masters. As my interviews with former slave children indicate, almost every child or woman who has been captured and sold into slavery was subsequently forcibly converted to Islam. Conversion to Islam means being forced to drop their Dinka names, learn some Koranic verses, pray five times a day, fast during the month of Ramadan, and undergo certain North Sudanese rituals including female genital mutilation. I spoke with one woman who had been “circumcised” and three men whose wives had also been forced to undergo the procedure. Those resisting these practices were beaten, verbally rebuked, or killed.
In response to reports of slavery, the Sudan government has angrily issued statements denying that slavery and slave trade are practiced in northern Sudan. In fact, the government of Sadiq el-Mahdi reacted to such reports by arresting Ushari Mahmud and Suleiman Baldo, the two university professors who were the first and only northern Sudanese to report on slavery in writing. They were accused of wrongfully defaming the nation. Various Khartoum governments have since obstructed efforts by human rights groups and aid agencies to investigate these reports. In response to the large number of western media reports, especially from the United States, the National Islamic Front government has claimed over the years that what is happening in southern Kordofan and Darfur is a part of the traditional tribal abduction that has been practiced by the Dinka and Baggara throughout history. It also said that the constitution of the country prohibits slavery and that if it were taking place, the culprits would have been punished. More recently the government responded to the increasing evidence of slavery by forming a committee to investigate the issue. But what is certain is that there is already evidence implicating the government in the practice of slavery, and that the committee is merely a part of a campaign to disinform the world. Otherwise, the government should have invited journalists, members of nongovernmental organizations, diplomats, human rights groups, and members of the civil society including Southerners to participate in such an investigation in order to end these accusations, if they are false, once and for all.
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
