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
