Civil War looms in the southern Sudan. al-jazeera reports on continued build up of supplies. Heavy fighting has broken out in the states of Unity and Upper Nile (http://english.aljazeera.net/...). A land grab is going on by foreign companies (http://www.bloomberg.com/...) heating up competition for control. The UN should investigate means to invalidate such activities and claims to help cool off the rush to civil war.
It is no mystery why there is such concern over the situation in Sudan. Articles in the media ranged in the past two years from predicting civil war to years of legal conflict over a separation of assets and people. Most Western news desks acknowledged a systematic support by the present government in the north for the massacres of the Jagawineed and the mounting suffering of the displaced refugees and its suppling arms used to kill and drive people from their homes. Usually the developed north is compared with an underdeveloped south with little explanation for the situation. There is an implied understanding that this is how things have always been. But when one looks at the history of the Sudan, and the adjacent areas of Libya, Fezzan and Tibesti, etc. and of the background of current events, the situation is less clear. For several thousand years the Egyptian Empire and various Sudanese peoples and kingdoms fought for domination and self-determination in the Western Sahara and Sudan. From a variety of states that existed in the Kanem-Bornu and Kano areas in the 7 century B.C.E. or the kingdoms of Wadai and Darfur in the 18th and early 19the centuries we can trace a long history of established functioning organizations.
This was continued with the rise of Islam and the failure of its armies to conquer the Sudan. The history of the Sudan is linked to that of the Horn of Africa as well as the Arabian Peninsula, especially that of Yemen, though some African scholars dispute the significance of these contacts (see Cheikh Anta Diop, 1955;1967) Islam permeated the Sahara, but largely by missionaries. In 1820 Muhammed Ali Pasha, an Ottoman official ruling Egypt, accomplished this task and set his son on the throne. However while the colonial powers focused attention on the political entities, they ignored a more substantial trans-Saharan, trans-national organization that grew up around the Sanusi movement. This primarily mystic and spiritual brand of Islam originated in Cyrenaica in the early 19th century and spread west and south producing a substantial infrastructure of oasis-based monasteries (or lodges for the members the sanusiya) with supporting tribal heads who administered food production and provided safety along the trade routes across the Sahara. The organization was headed by a religious scholar, the Grand Sanusi, the most prominent of which was al-Sayyid Muhammad bin’Ali al-Sanusi.
The Grand Sanusi attempted to stay independent of both the Ottomans to the east and the colonial powers, France to the south and the Italians and British to the north. Nevertheless, colonial aggression advanced, especially the French who invaded across the Sahel and from the west, destroying indigenous kingdoms as they came. The Grand Sanusi refused to join the rebellion of the Mahdi, hoping to keep his organization from being embroiled in war. This failed and eventually the defeats of the native resistance and the massacres that followed left no alternative but war. By 1911 when the Italians invaded Libya, colonial powers had destroyed the sanusi organization, and in almost all the oases, the sanusiya lodges.
From 1879 on European powers intervened across North Africa and in 1882 British ended independent rule in Sudan. After the Mahdist revolt was suppressed they consolidated their hold on the country.
Two of the most significant works on the peoples of the Sudan were written by S.F. Nadel (1942 & 1947), an anthropologist who argued that anthropology had to be active and that a "value-free anthropology is an illusion." (Nadel, 1951). It is incontestable that the Sudan as a modern state is the product of British colonialism. In the basic infrastructure of roads, bridges, city design and management, bureaucratic organization, educational patterns of employment as well as economic history of investment and banking, all hark to British influence. As mentioned above , pre-existing systems were crushed. The British colonial authorities had a long history in the Sudan by the time Nadel arrived in 1938 after having proved his abilities at research in Nigeria under the International African Institute. His tenure after the Nuba research in 1941 included assignment with the British Military Administration. Allied interests in the military assets of the Anglo-Sudan were substantial to counter German designs on Egypt.
As in other parts of the British Empire, conflicts with tribal peoples had proven to be uneconomical at best, and in the context of growing threats of war in Europe a more cooperative arrangement was sought. Integrating the Nuba and other peoples in the Sudan into a supportive unit for Allied purposes was needed and it could be seen that pagan tribes like the Nuba could be used in the future as buffers to militant Islam from the North. Containing Islam and Arab influence was an important colonial goal. Government policy attempted to halt this influence by preventing development and population movements from the North and led to a poorer economic base in the south of Sudan than the Islamic north. Nadel, unlike his colonial administrators, looked upon the Christian missionaries with the same distaste as Arab infiltrators. In both cases they were elements that would cause the Nuba both discomfort and displacement.
The British banned movement of people from north and south, thereby insuring a division that was basically oriented around the Islamic North and animistic South with some Christianized peoples. Independence led to war between these two parts and different religions in 1955 ending in 1972. The more modernized and developed north had the advantage. The war ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement which guaranteed a semi-independent South. This ended in a new civil war when the central government decided on a federalized state and no international pressure was brought to bear to save the Agreement.
War in the Sudan has generally been acted as proxy wars of surrounding nations with Ethiopia playing a central role, but Egypt and Libya involved as well. The real prize in the post World War II period was the mineral and oil resources in the south. With no central organization, the south was victim to the intrigues of foreigners and transnational corporations and their clients. Instability will provide access to tremendous profits so it is unlikely that any peaceful transition to nationhood could be achieved unless the unreal possibility that all outside interests could be kept out and some southern regional solution be fashioned internally. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that rebel groups in the south are not already being influenced by agents from various interests and it is nearly certain that the civil war will be bloody. Peace might be supported by an arms embargo but that would be unlikely as well, since mining interests would have too much to gain not to get weapons to their clients.
Diop, Cheikh Anta, Nations Negres et Culture, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1955.
Diop, Cheikh Anta, Anteriorite Des Civilisations Negres, Presence Africaine, Paris, 1967.
E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, originally published by Oxford University Press, 1949, now available as an ebook via ACLS Humanities.
Nadel, S.F., The Foundations of Social Anthropology, London, 1951.