War and Slavery in Sudan
The Ethnography of Political Violence
Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
War and Slavery in Sudan
Jok Madut Jok
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2001 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jok, Jok Madut.
War and slavery in Sudan / Jok Madut Jok.
p. cm. — (The ethnography of political violence)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3595-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 0-8122-1762-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Slavery—Sudan. 2. Sudan—History—Civil War, 1983– 3. Racism—Sudan. I. Title. II. Series.
HT1381 .J65 2001
| 305.8′009624—dc21 | 00-052774 |
Contents
Introduction Slavery in Sudan: Definitions and Outlines
Part I The New Slavery in Sudan
1 The Revival of Slavery During the Civil War: Facts and Testimonies
2 Slavery in the Shadow of the Civil War: Problems in the Study of Sudanese Slavery
3 The Suffering of the South in the North-South Conflict
Part II Underlying Causes of the Revival of Slavery in Sudan
4 The Legacy of Race
5 The South-North Population Displacement
6 The Political-Economic Conflict
Conclusion Has No One Heard Us Call for Help? Sudanese Slavery and International Opinion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
The Murahileen chain people
as the fisherman chains his catch with a rope
The Murahileen take us into servitude in their land
The Murahileen drag us on the surface of our land
but we will not let go of our land
Sudan is our land
This verse is from a Dinka song that describes the experience of the people of South Sudan and the Nuba of central Sudan with the recently revived slavery and slave trade. It was in some ways inevitable that I would focus on this area of study. I am a South Sudanese anthropologist who has been studying Sudan all my academic life. I now teach at a university in the United States. My career as a Sudanist, without a doubt, began with the knowledge I acquired from personal experience as a native son. But this knowledge became more specialized after 1993 when I undertook field study in South Sudan for my doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles. That research project examined the impact of the unresolved North-South civil war on the family, gender relations, and reproductive health in northern Bahr el-Ghazal in southwestern Sudan.1 Moreover, while I was in Bahr el-Ghazal conducting research, I also worked for a humanitarian relief agency, and this role enabled me to travel extensively in the areas that have now become the subject of this book.
Having been seriously understudied due to war, which made travel in the region difficult, South Sudan presents an ambitious researcher with the temptation to do it all. Therefore, while I was documenting the interaction between the behaviors and attitudes of militarized youth, on the one hand, and traditional gender relations, on the other, during my first period of fieldwork, my research extended into more issues than I had planned. Such topics as household decision making regarding pregnancy, abortion, sexuality and sexual violence, sexually transmitted diseases, childbirth, care for the young, and other reproductive health issues took the center stage of my dissertation research.2 Yet, the temptation to document other tragedies such as government militia raiding, displacement, loss of assets, preemptive migration, and the dismal future of the family was far too great to resist. By 1995, about twelve years after the second round of the civil war began, South Sudan had lost a third of its population to war, famine, and displacement to the North or neighboring countries. Suffering abounded and there was an immediate need to understand it. Basic services were almost completely nonexistent and mortality rates were extremely high. The traditional structure of the family was so reconfigured that the individual person was left without the care that the society had always provided in times of need. People were in a state of almost total despair, and there was no end to this misery in sight. There is still none.
I returned to California in 1995 with loads of notebooks on varied topics after two years of dissertation research. I went back to South Sudan every summer thereafter. The topic for the present study became clear in my mind in 1998 because of my own interest in questions of ethnic nationalism and nation building and the need to expose the tragic human rights situation in Sudan.
This book chronicles the current wave of slavery in Sudan. The history of slavery in Sudan goes as far back as the earliest alien encroachment, but the current revival began in 1983 with the beginning of the second round of North-South conflict. Northern Sudanese Arabs capture and sell (or exploit in other ways) large numbers of African Sudanese, primarily the Dinka, Nuer, and Nuba of central Sudan. The Arab slave raiders, although traditionally hostile to Nuer and Dinka, are currently engaged in slave taking for slightly different reasons than before the civil war. Since the beginning of the war, successive governments in Khartoum have sought different means to exploit the traditional animosity between the Dinka and the Arabs and have supported the Arab side in order to fight the war by proxy. These cattle-herding Arab tribesmen, known as the Baggara, were recruited as a low-cost counterinsurgency militia and deployed against the southern opposition force, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA). However, instead of confronting the SPLA, the militia force waged war against the civilian population of northern Bahr el-Ghazal, which the Sudanese government considers the support base for the SPLA. Soon after the initiation of the militia system, the Baggara discovered a very effective method of suppressing the rebellion in the South: destroying civilian villages and frightening the population into deserting their homes. But mere suppression of the southern revolt only satisfied the government; the Baggara received only meager government assistance. It was more lucrative to capture large numbers of women, children, and any able-bodied men they could subdue and take them into slavery in their northern provinces of Darfur and Kordofan. In addition to benefiting from the slave