Jok Madut Jok - Sudan: Race, Religion, and Violence

Sudan

Race, Religion and Violence

JOK MADUT JOK

A Oneworld Book

Published by Oneworld Publications 2007
Reprinted 2008, 2009
This ebook edition published by Oneworld Publications 2011

Copyright Jok Madut Jok 2007

All rights reserved
Copyright under Berne Convention
ACIP record for this title is available
from the British Library

ISBN 9781780740515

Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India
Cover design by Design Deluxe

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Many people and institutions have helped make this book possible. I am particularly grateful to a large number of Sudanese, many of whom I cannot mention here by name for their own safety. I am thankful to the United States Institute of Peace for their financial support of research in Sudan (Grant number SG-31-00) and to the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for a year-long fellowship, which provided a wonderful environment to do research, think and interact with a cohort of other fellows. Much of this book was written during my tenure at the Wilson Center and I cannot give enough thanks to the staff of the center for their assistance with various research questions, colleagueship, and support. I also want to thank Duana Fullwiley for reading parts of this book. I am particularly indebted to John Ryle, Chair of the Rift Valley Institute and all the staff of the institute for facilitating my trips to Sudan. Coordinating flights, logistical requirements, and obtaining travel permits would have all been beyond my capacity without the institutes support. My special gratitude goes to the publisher and the editorial staff of Oneworld Publications, and to the anonymous readers, whose comments have greatly helped improve the manuscript. But I must quickly add that any enduring mistakes and weaknesses of the book are entirely mine.

In the summer of 2003, I chanced upon a meeting between Lazaro Sumbeiywo and a Dinka community in the town of Malualkon in the Bahr el-Ghazal region of southern Sudan. Sumbeiywo is a retired Kenyan army general who was the chief mediator in the Sudanese peace negotiations under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Agency for Development (IGAD). He had landed in the town during a tour aimed at acquainting himself with the popular opinion from a cross-section of Sudanese communities and civil society groups regarding the peace process. At this meeting, I was particularly struck by a speech given by one of the tribal chiefs, Makwec Kuol Makwec of the Malwal section of Dinka. In passionate remarks addressed to General Sumbeiywo, the chief enumerated, with a noticeable anger, the racial differences that set southern and northern Sudanese apart and the reasons why he thinks they cannot belong to a single polity. His reasons, which were received with applause from the crowd, included such practices as ritual female genital cutting prevalent in northern Sudan and Islamic ritual ablutions that the Arabs do after they defecate, all of which he took to be markers of what he called racial differences, and that these racial differences are evident in the peoples moral attributes, conduct and in the way the Arab-dominated government has treated the south. He went on:

When you visited the north, you must have noticed the differences between the Arabs in the north and us here in the south ... they are red-skinned and we are black ... their names were Ali, Muhamed, Osman, etc. and our names here are Deng, Akol, Lual, etc., we have no shared ancestry, they pray differently but they want to force us to believe in their gods, they try to impose their language upon us

The northeast African nation of Sudan is a country where relationships between ethnic and regional groups are ravaged by violence and the country is now on the verge of disintegration both literally in terms of some of its regions seeking to break away from the polity, and figuratively in terms of the state lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the citizens. The purpose of this book is to use ethnographic and historical methods to explain how the wars and subsequent humanitarian catastrophes have threatened the unity of the country. It examines the intersection of race and religion as sites for the violent contestation of identity of the Sudanese nation. The book argues that the state, largely controlled by groups that self-identify as Arabs, has sought to forge the Sudanese national identity as Arab and Islamic while the majority of the population increasingly prefer to identify themselves by their specific ethnic/tribal names or simply African or Black. The problem is that, as the above quote has shown, these categories, which are clearly cultural and experiential identities, are taken by the Sudanese as the markers of racial identities, and they have become the basis for racial alignment as the state targets the non-Arab and non-Muslim groups for violent absorption into the Arab race, or for exclusion from state services if they insist on asserting their perceived racial or chosen religious identity. These categories are also part of the model used by the politically excluded groups to explain and historicize the structures of inequality that marginalize them. They use this explanation as part of their effort to forge forms of resistance on the basis that all the non-Arabs who feel excluded from the vital structures of the state share a common platform in opposition to racial and religious politics in the country.

While various Sudanese communities may categorize each other in the same way that racial groups are popularly categorized in the Western world, i.e. in terms of physical characteristics (Hannaford, 1996; Omi and Winant, 1994), the Sudanese popular notions of race are not based on phenotypes alone, and they are not fixed. They are also pegged to a host of practices such as religion, economic activities, material conditions, the naming of people and other cultural practices. The geographic distance between groups, the natural environment in which each group lives and their language are also considered part of the racial schema. In other words, these characteristics, which are not always part of the definition of race in contemporary social sciences, but are aspects of social relations, become the lines separating racial identities. This means that racial boundaries are very fluid in Sudan, and there are many ways in which people who may be classed as blacks could also pass as Arabs, while those who have been known to be Arabs could decide to label themselves as African or black if their political circumstance demanded and allowed it. For example religion, particularly Islam, is taken by those who self-identify as Arabs as a way to relate more closely to Arabian tribes of the Middle East because of the origins of the faith. The more learned in Islamic theology, the closer to being Arab a person becomes. This means that a non-Arab who wants to become one could racially pass through expressed devotion to Islam. Some northern Sudanese even try to trace their genealogy to the Prophet Muhammad as a way to claim both piety and Arab origins. Others choose to be Arabs on the basis of how good their knowledge of the Arabic language is, and having a native Sudanese tongue other than Arabic counts against ones pure Arabness. In other contexts, people who have become native speakers of Arabic or devout Muslims as a ladder to advancement of their status and expected to be socially and politically included as Arabs, have had the disappointment of being rejected from the Arab category due to their blackness, no matter how culturally Arab or learned in Islamic religion they had become. Interviews with many Sudanese Muslims have revealed a variety of ways in which race and religion meet to influence social relations. The political confrontations that have plagued the country are a manifestation of such racially and religiously based relations. One Darfurian informant said: