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.
Part I
The New Slavery in Sudan
A typical Dinka homestead in peaceful times. Cattle and plenty of farmland are the pillars of the Dinka economy.
After a Baggara raid, a Dinka homestead is destroyed and its inhabitants displaced. A child orphaned by the slave raiders sits in the middle of the ravaged compound.
Chapter One
The Revival of Slavery During the Civil War: Facts and Testimonies
The roots of Sudan’s unresolved civil war have a long history, but the modern context relating to the current wave of slavery was set in times of alien intrusion, starting with Turco-Egyptian rule in the nineteenth century (1821–81) through Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule (1898–1956).1 By providing an overview of the current Sudanese conflict, I will analyze the causes and consequences of the ongoing slave raiding. There is concrete evidence that slavery is not buried in the past, especially since one still finds today the conditions that allowed it to flourish in the nineteenth century. For example, those Dinka areas that have witnessed the resurgence of slavery since the early 1980s were the same areas that had formed the slavery zone in historical times. The present slave-catching communities of Darfur and Kordofan were part of the slave frontier in the nineteenth century. The same Arab groups currently engaged in slavery were slave raiders during both the Turkiyya and the Mahdiyya. Long after Sudan joined the world community in ratifying antislavery conventions and formulated legal provisions that prohibited slavery, the practice persisted among the slaving communities in the North, as its ideology has been coded into the Baggara Arabic language, folklore, daily humor, and poetry. South Sudanese continue to be referred to as abeed (slaves) by North Sudanese, whose privileged position today has much to do with their history as slave masters in the past. It is this long tradition of an ideology of dominance that Arab governments in Khartoum have always used to treat the South as a mere source of material resources, and its inhabitants as cheap laborers
