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BOOK
REPORT TITLE: WHITE
NILE BLACK BLOOD
War, Leadership, and Ethnicity from
Khartoum to Kampala
EDITED BY: Jay Spaulding & Stephen Beswick
Publisher: The Red Sea Press, Inc., P.O. Box 48, Asmara, Eritrea. 2000
PAGES: 325
PRICE: US$79.95 (Hardcover); US$21.95
REVIEWER: KOFI AKOSAH-SARPONG
Of late Sudan has been in the news not because its long-running
war is a recent thing but because it has become clear that the war is more economic and
slave raiding than anything, with the forced transfer of southern Sudanese wealth to
Khartoum, and with some multinational companies bankrolling the Khartoum regime in order
to secure oil fields. The light on the dark recesses of the Sudan civil war has been
heightened by international human rights organizations that have been alerting the world
of slave trading and other inhuman treatments.
The civil war in Sudan, Africa’s longest, maybe between the
Muslim Arab north and the African south but the complications go far beyond this simple
north-south divide. And the war has not been going on only 40 years but 200 years. Despite
this divide what links this people together is the Nile River. As the lifeline of northern
Nubia and Egypt, the Nile moves southward from the confluence to embrace a vast region
that includes south Sudan, touching upon Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, the Congo and the
Central African Republic. Despite its wide expanse and its beauty, this Nile region
"has been host to one of the world’s and Africa’s longest civil wars."
The cause of the 20-year civil war is often attributed to ethnic or
religious diversity—African Christian south versus Muslim Arab north—or that the
war emerged from the artificial European-drawn borders. The authors say the above reasons
are superficial. "In reality, the heart of the Sudan’s incessant conflict is the
continual transference of wealth from the country’s extremely wealthy southern
heartlands into the hands of an elite few who reside in the impoverished north." This
has passed through stages and reveals modern Sudanese history. The Sudan as we see today
on the map is the creation of the Turkish-speaking regime of the 19th century
Egypt, which went south up the Nile at the close of 1820. By the 1880s this has pushed its
perimeter to Sudan’s modern boundaries.
At the start of the Turkiyya (1820), as the first colonial
government was known in Sudan, the Turco-Egyptian monarch penetrated the south Sudan to
exploit its wealth and slaves. The more the monarch wanted to increase its army for its
wealth exploitation, the more it drained the south for its slave labour via raiding the
peoples of the upper blue and White Niles, Nuba Mountains, and southern Sudan. The editors
add "for the peoples of the White Nile watershed, however, this was less a government
than a chaotic age of violent exploitation epitomized by enslavement." And this slave
raiding snowballed into what is called "houses of death" in raiding
"districts" in the African south, with invaders from Egypt, collaborated by the
Europeans, and flood of intruders from northern Arab Sudan, conventionally called jallaba.
In August 1877 Britain and Egypt moved to halt and prohibit slave trafficking. However,
this saw the emergence of a Sudanese nationalist leader, Muhammad Ahmad and his Islamic
fundamentalist movement, the Ansar, also called the "Madhi" in the 1880s. The
Madhi first sought to get independence from the Turkish colonialists, succeeded in talking
the southerners, especially the Nilotic Dinka, in supporting them since it would be in
their interest. But the Madhi had ulterior motive, which was the same as the earlier slave
raiders. Full-scale slaver intensified during which almost 400,000 African Sudanese died
of disease and 700,000 in the warfare.
After many battles and deals, mainly between Britain and Egypt,
Sudan got independence in 1956 on largely northern terms, "precipitating instability
at the center and revolt in the south. The limited political rights of southerners were
withdrawn; southerners were now perceived as inferior and incapable of representing
themselves. The south’s recently acquired, if imperfect, new-found liberation from
northern plundering, was, however, not to be willingly yielded. Civil war erupted and
lasted for seventeen years," write the editors. The years since independence, in the
view of the White Nile people, could be divided into 3 key periods. The first civil war
snowballed into a military movement called the Anya Nya. In 1972 junta leader, Jaafar
al-Numeiri, ended the civil war by granting some measure of regional autonomy to the
south. However, government financing of the south was resented by some powerful northern
elites.
In 1983 with al-Numeiri aging, a clique of fundamentalist under
Hasan al-Turabi, the financing of the south became a burning issue. Oil discovered in the
south saw the redefinition of boundaries in favour of the north. Added to this was the
building of the Jonglei Canal within the swampy heartlands of the pastoral Nuer and Dinka
land of sadd to serve the north’s increased need for water while at the same
time permanently altering the southerners watery habitat. The result was war in the face
of all these, and Khartoum’s enacting of laws to take control of the
southerner’s wealth within their homeland. Sharia was to become the law of the whole
Sudan; giving limited fruit of southerners prepared to be Muslim. This violated many
agreements, especially the Addis Ababa one, and war broke out anew, giving birth to a regional resistance called Southern Peoples’ Liberation
Army/Southern Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLA/SPLM) led by John Garang de Mabior.
In recent years, Khartoum has declared holy war against the African
south. But the south sees this jihad more as attempts of economic and political
control and less from Islam or ethnic differences. The editors inform us that Khartoum do
not differentiate between opponents who are Muslims and those who are Christians or
practice traditional African religion. Everything boils down to oil, slavery and water,
and as the case of the Nuba illustrates the true motives of Khartoum in its war against
the south. Since most Nuba are Muslim the government bid to grab their land for mechanized
agriculture saw Khartoum burned scores of their villages and thousands of villagers killed
in assaults by government forces and their allies in recent times, including reported
Chinese soldiers and prisoners. As the injustices against the south become clear some
Muslim northerners and southerners, including qadis (judges), are
sympathizing and supporting the African south seeing nothing Islamic about the holy war
against the south. A typical case is the predominantly Islamic region at the Nuba
Mountains who have transferred their royalties to the SPLA; "the strategy of cultural
cleansing pursued by the government entails harsh attempts to depopulate vast areas. Once
jihad was declared…it was clear that even Nuba Muslims were targeted." Or to cut
supply lines to the SPLA-occupied areas in south Sudan, Khartoum have been supporting
Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army, a militant guerilla movement based in northern Uganda.
Such policies support the southern viewpoint, floated by the late
Damzo Dut Majak, that Khartoum aim at "inflicting genocidal killing and forced
resettlement upon the country’s African, non-Arab ethnic groups so that the favored
Muslim Arabs may move in and take their land." The editors say foreign observers
agree, discovering that Khartoum’s strategies are "aimed at [Southern] civilians
and the deliberate creation of huge population movements," and "the discriminate
bombing of civilian targets" has resulted in "the uprooting of populations and
the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands who are forced to leave their homes." And
this has come about through what Khartoum calls istaamil al-abid an yaqtalu al-abid (use
the slaves [Southern Sudanese] to kill the slaves!). Aside from this famine has also been
a key genocidal weapon, see almost 2 million African Sudanese died in the last 15 years of
the civil war.
The book is painful read, in terms of its revelations, but well
written by 17 experts on Sudan, with maps and diagrams and good index. The back of the
book says, "This pioneering volume introduces and defines a new realm of scholarly
investigation. Over the course of a half-century of independence the former Anglo-Egyptian
Sudan has been torn by extended periods of warfare, during which the southern Sudan,
roughly defined by the basin of the White Nile, has acquired an ever-greater sense of
separate identity.
During the same interval the Southern Sudan has been drawn
increasingly into a web of diplomatic and geopolitical ties with neighboring lands, with
regional powers such as Egypt, Israel and the oil states, and occasionally with major
international powers and interests. The stakes of the conflict in Southern Sudan rises
with the passage of each decade."
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