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
