The problem with writing this book is that its topic is controversial. When one writes from the perspective of one’s own people and when one has a responsibility toward the whole country, there is a certain degree of ambivalence involved. There is no doubt that I will be seen as focusing on the concerns of Southerners, but if I do not focus on the victims of the crisis I am studying I could also be blamed for trying to marginalize the very people whose agony I am trying to expose. I am conscious of the possibility that my having only worked in the South could bias my views. But I have made an equally conscious attempt to be objective in presentation. While no one writing on Sudan’s tumultuous and tragic history can claim absolute neutrality, I have tried to express the concerns of Southerners without being anti-North.
Many South Sudanese living under the Sudan government’s oppression have asked and encouraged me to write about their suffering and its history. They long for a voice, and I have agreed to lend them mine. An academic factor that strongly influenced my decision to write this book was the existence of an excellent body of anthropological, historical, and journalistic material on important aspects of how the war has triggered the revival of slavery. Robert Collins has written extensively and perceptively on the history of slavery and the slave trade on the Upper Nile, the role of the current war on the reemergence of slavery, and relations between Arab Northerners and African Southerners.3 He has also recently authored an insightful analysis of why the Baggara raid the Dinka.4
The Dinka historian, the late Damazo Dut Majak, a native of northern Bahr el-Ghazal from the Malwal section, conducted a historical survey throughout the region in the 1980s and wrote a compelling dissertation and numerous articles on the history of alien encroachment in his home region.5 His work provides a detailed ethnographic and historical analysis of the arrival of Arab traders who later became the slave traders in Bahr el-Ghazal, and is complete with genealogies and maximal family systems. He gives examples of the families that were at the forefront of confrontations with the Arabs, the French, and the British, and provides an overview of economic activities before and during the occupation of the region by slave traders (1821–98)—the Turkiyya (1821–81) and the Mahdist era (1881–98)—and under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium rule (1898–1956).
Historians Martin Daly and Douglas Johnson have both written instructive accounts on how the colonial governments dealt with the question of North-South relations and the role of slavery in these relations.6 A North Sudanese, Ahmed Sikainga, has also written important books on the relationship between Bahr el-Ghazal and Darfur in terms of slavery and trade as well as exchanging cultures.7 In more recent times, a great deal of ethnographic research has been devoted to changing circumstances in war-torn South Sudan. In the anthropological literature, Sharon Hutchinson’s book on how the Nuer are coping with the war and the state is most compelling.8 Francis Mading Deng, a Dinka legal anthropologist, has been an authority on North-South relationships and the debate on the identity of the country, particularly the relationships between the Baggara and his native Dinka section of Ngok.9
In the field of journalism, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the South African Mail and Guardian, as well as a number of European and Canadian magazines and newspapers have all carried extensive accounts of slave raiding since 1995. Many of them have tried to expose the role of the government in slave taking. They have also debated the issue of slave redemption discussed later in this book—that is, the practice whereby Christian and antislavery groups from the Western world purchase the freedom of slaves and return them to their home villages in the South. Another issue for these newspapers and magazines has been the disturbing silence of the international community, especially powerful industrial countries. But the most systematic and instrumental journalistic writing on slavery in Sudan has been that by Sudanese journalist and former government minister Bona Malwal. He pioneered the campaign to expose this tragic practice in the 1980s as editor of the Sudan Times, the only English-language newspaper in Khartoum at the time. When he went into exile in England, Malwal started publishing a newsletter, the Sudan Democratic Gazette, which focused on the slavery issue.
Although it has been mostly South Sudanese who have spoken out against slavery, there have been a few North Sudanese who have felt that slavery cannot be tolerated in a modern nation-state that is seeking to build its identity on ethnic, religious, and racial diversity. Among these very few Northerners were two courageous university professors who risked their lives to write candidly to expose this inhuman practice they thought had only remained as a bad mark on the pages of history but no longer existed in their country. Having read numerous reports in the Sudan Times, Ushari Mahmud and Suleiman Baldo traveled to ed-Da’ein in Darfur in order to ascertain the rumors they had heard about slavery, only to return with disheartening accounts of a massacre of some two thousand Dinka by the Baggara Arabs. Their booklet Human Rights Abuses in the Sudan, 1987: The Diein Massacre: Slavery in the Sudan caused an outcry among rights activists, South Sudanese, and the government. The activists and citizens of South Sudan were outraged at the government’s complicity, and the government was furious at the two professors for “defaming” the good name of the country. The authors were accused of being “fifth column” and supporters of the southern rebel army, and were classed as traitors.
More and more such reports prompted the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to send a Special Rapporteur to Sudan in 1994 and 1995 to examine the allegations of human rights violations by the Islamist regime in Khartoum. Special Rapporteur Gaspar Biro wrote a detailed report centering on the question of slavery.10 He documented how the militia force operates and how the army violates all the known conventions on the conduct of war. He also described the kind of destruction both the regular army and the militias mete out in the Dinka areas, and the fate of the captives, who are physically and emotionally abused and sold as slaves or forced to work under conditions amounting to slavery. The response of the government of Sudan to this report was one of fury. Gaspar Biro was accused of harboring anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiments, and the government made a request to the High Commissioner for Human Rights to remove Biro as the Special Rapporteur on Sudan. In 1999, another Special Rapporteur for Sudan, Argentinian lawyer Leonardo Franco, was appointed. He also produced a detailed examination of the question of slavery incriminating the government of Sudan.11
Many historians, anthropologists, and journalists have worked or traveled in the communities where most of my research for this book was done. And I am pleased to report that numerous people mentioned them to me as soon as I said that I was writing a book on the issue of slavery. I heard many stories filled with praise for the journalists and human rights investigators. I also took copies of magazine articles and newspaper clippings with me to the field and discussed their main findings with people who had provided the information to the researchers. I found that these local people almost always agreed with what I told them the researchers had recorded. As it is with all literate South Sudanese cut off by war from any sources of reading material, the people of Bahr el-Ghazal were over-joyed when I brought these materials. They also lamented that although these works were the foundation of a history of modern South Sudan, the seventeen years of war had deprived several generations of South Sudanese of education so that no one will write that history and most South Sudanese will not comprehend what outsiders write about them. Still, at a time when many academics in social sciences and humanities are quick to criticize the production of journalistic literature as historical evidence, I found that many journalists familiarize themselves with the anthropological literature and have an understanding of Sudanese cultures before traveling to Sudan. I therefore find these sources to have value, not just for me but also for the local people. In preparation for this work I compiled (with the appreciated assistance of many aid agencies) a large body of documents, reports, unpublished papers, student theses and dissertations, and scholarly publications, which have informed this study directly or indirectly; those works most directly relevant are appropriately cited in the notes. I have also drawn on my own knowledge as a Sudanese.
This study began in a serious and systematic sense in 1998, when