There are numerous accounts, provided by slaves who have run away and by human rights reports, about the way slaves in northern Sudan are treated. These accounts are reminiscent of the way slaves have always been exploited throughout history. The Dinka girls and women held by Arab families become sexual slaves as well as household domestics and farm workers. Consider the following accounts.
When they raided our village, captured me with my children, and marched us to ed-Da’ein, we were quickly distributed to the relatives of the man who had captured us, and I ended up with another man who had several adult sons. I was told of my daily chores right away and I was made to do everything from milking the cows to cleaning the house, cooking, and washing. What I was not told was that I was to become somebody’s woman. I was not even given to one specific man. Whenever any of them wanted to be with me, he just showed up at night and there was nothing I could do. When I expressed my objection to their advances toward me, I was threatened with gruesome violence. I was told I could have my breast cut off, my children could be killed, or I could die. One man was coming to me so often that I think his wives became outraged. After some time, when I did not know anymore what had happened to my children, I found a way to escape so I could search for them. Now I have heard from others that two of them are in el-Fasher.22
Another woman made the following observations: “During cultivation times, the grown-up Dinka is sent to the farm to cut the weeds from morning to evening, and if a Rizeigi has a son, he will not send him for errands anymore. Only the Dinka child is sent to do these things. Old Dinka women are made to work in the house and on the farm. They wash the dishes and do many household chores. These enslaved Dinkas are given nothing. If they are barefoot they remain so. The Dinka girls who grow up there are made their ‘women’ and the virgin girl who is brought to you is also made a ‘woman.’ ”23
A young woman I interviewed in Turalei in the summer of 1999 provided further illustration. When Teresa Amou Arou was abducted from Bulal in Abyei County at age twelve, her father was killed and her captor, Bakhur Ahmed from the Misseria clan of Awlad Kamil, took her to Chiteb, a Misseria town between Abyei and Muglad, and her name was changed to Zahra. When she was in captivity, she worked on the farm and went to fetch water. Every morning, she took the millet and pounded it in the mortar or ground it on the grinding stone. She went to fetch firewood and cooked the meals every day. She also worked in cutting karkade or hibiscus, drying it and packing it in bags.24 Fearing that she might escape, her captors would not let her go far without the company of her master’s boys. She slept on plastic sheeting in a makeshift hut where she cooked the meals for the family. Her master and his sons abused her sexually, and fearing further physical harm she obeyed their commands. One season, the family moved close to the Kiir River with their cattle, and there, Teresa found an opportunity to escape in 1998. She now lives in Turalei at a boarding school set up by the local community for all the former slave children and supported by the diocese of el-Obeid.25
Sexual exploitation could be regarded as another form of slavery that may have gone unexposed under the pretext of ordinary domestic service. At present, such practices against southern slave women is common. In many instances, the slave master not only demands sexual services from his female slaves, which causes an outrage among his wives,26 but also instructs his female slaves to give sexual lessons to his young sons. This is a practice long reported by Dinka women who worked as domestic servants in Arab Muslim households throughout the 1960s and 1970s.27 The explanation given by some of the women who have experienced this was that, given the Islamic strict separation between boys and girls in public places and between households, the fathers have often found themselves in a dilemma: they want to instill proper Islamic behavior in their sons, such as maintaining a distance from women, while they worry that their sons might become homosexuals if they have no exposure to members of the opposite sex. It is granted that slave women have no right to object to any sexual advances by the master and his sons. But the female slaves of modern-day Sudan are forced not only to tolerate sexual advances by the masters’ sons, but also to arouse the boy’s sexual urges toward females. Many testimonies provided by freed slave women attest to a myriad of sexual abuses by slaveholders and their young sons. One young former slave woman, whom I interviewed in Warawar in the summer of 1998, said that given the horrible atrocities that the Arabs have often committed during the raiding, she could expect sexual coercion. “But to be [gang-raped] by an old man and his children is just not human. Where else on earth do members of one family force themselves on one woman. Even cattle know their sexual boundaries.”28
Sexual abuse of slaves is not limited to women. Many boys have told adult slaves, with a great sense of humiliation, that they were raped repeatedly by their masters. Upon returning home, one escaped slave boy from Gok Machar was said to have told his mother that the forced sexual contact between him and his captor had happened so often that he had sometimes wondered whether this was a natural occurrence for all men, and he almost believed it was so. When I heard of this boy and went to interview him in 1998, he told me that his only indication that this was unnatural was the pain he had experienced, the dreadful anticipation of his master’s visit upon him night after night, and the shame he had felt the day following the molestation. He said that he could not stand the look on people’s faces when he considered the possibility that other people knew what this man was doing to him. He still recalled the faces of other boys and girls still in captivity, and the possibility of similar things happening to them made him nauseous.
Another escaped slave provided a further insight about slave experiences. Angong Chan, a mother of three children, was captured in Warawar market during the May 1998 joint PDF-Murahileen attack. She was captured together with her children. The slaver Babikr Salah took her to al-Nuhud and renamed her Zeinab. He was from the Misseria branch that had once reached a truce with the Dinka and he had worked at the Warawar market. He sold two of Angong’s children. Her other children were kept away from her because the slaver thought she would not run away leaving her children behind. In the interview, Angong said:
There was no point for me to be there since I was not with my children anyway. Every day, I was made to carry big water plastic containers from the borehole five to seven times a day. I brought water for bathing, washing cloths, and cooking. I would bathe the children. When they wanted me to go to the borehole after dark a male adult had to go with me as a guard. I was also grinding and pounding grain and cooking. For the whole time that I was staying in al-Nuhud, I was made to do all kinds of chores including things that were not traditionally women’s activities in Dinkaland such as going with the cattle to distant pastures29
Some of the most horrifying examples of abuse came from freed slaves, those who managed to escape, those who were allowed to leave by their compassionate masters, or those whose freedom was purchased through the various slave redemption programs.30
One woman, Abuk Akot, was captured during a raid on Marial Baai in February 1999 and was taken to the North. She had a very young child left behind, and she kept begging her captors to release her for the sake of her infant. The captors thought that she definitely acted like someone who was going to attempt to escape, and they chained her arms together at the elbow. Because her arms were tied so hard, there was no circulation and they started to rot. Yet she was determined to run away. She said, “I refused to be a slave of the Arabs. I was ready to do anything to prompt them to kill me instead, and I told myself that running away would either get me killed or get me home. I managed to escape only to come and find out that my husband had been killed during the raid and my property was totally destroyed, and my arm is rotting…. I will not accept to be disabled by this. I will do everything possible to regain the use of my arms. It is the only thing I have got now.”31
Garang Anei, a forty-year-old man from Aweil West, had lived in western Sudan before returning to Dinkaland. He had witnessed the slave trade and explained that “Many Dinka women who were abducted