In any book of the longue durée there is the danger of reading back into the past identities that were centuries in the making. With South Sudanese still debating their own national identity, it would be an anomaly to apply the terms South Sudan or South Sudanese to earlier periods. At the risk of offending South Sudanese readers, I will refer to southern Sudan and southern Sudanese for periods before the mid-twentieth century and to South Sudan and South Sudanese when describing the evolution of nationalist politics. I will use the administrative terms of Upper Nile, Bahr el-Ghazal, and Equatoria where convenient, even though the composition of those regions changed over time (the Zande kingdoms, for instance, at different times were part of Bahr el-Ghazal, Equatoria, and Western Equatoria).
Themes of violence and war run throughout this book, but there are other aspects of the shared experience of South Sudanese that have promoted coexistence in the past and might be the foundation for reconstruction in the future. Ancestral southern Sudanese societies were part of a Sudanic culture with other Nile Basin communities and drew on a common pool of symbols, images, religious ideas, and patterns of authority. Modern South Sudanese societies are products of a long process of cultural assimilation and borrowing of ideas and institutions between communities.
Mobility and migration are common themes through several historical periods. South Sudan is a mosaic of settled agricultural communities, centralized states, and mobile nonstate pastoralist societies. States fostered assimilation of different peoples, often by force. Nonstate societies provided an alternative to states, even for northern Muslim pastoralists who sought refuge among Nilotic border communities to escape the demands of the northern sultanates.
South Sudan has experienced an escalation of violence ever since the intrusion of external powers in the nineteenth century. New technologies of war brought new forms of military and political organization. The Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan radically altered relations between many southern Sudanese communities and between southern Sudanese and their northern neighbors. The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were greater in scale than the wars of the nineteenth not only in their levels of violence, the involvement of external powers, and their impact on civilian communities but in their legacies of violence during subsequent periods of peace.
Warfare on an expanded scale accelerated population dispersal and the formation of new communities through the recombination of scattered peoples. The introduction of slavery and the international slave trade created the new phenomenon of south Sudanese diasporas, exported to other parts of Sudan and beyond, or combined into the military formations of multiple armies. The refugee diasporas produced by Sudan’s postindependence civil wars have been scattered across the globe. They are now returning, as earlier diasporas did, with acquired experiences and skills that will have a significant impact in shaping South Sudan’s future.
The experience of multiple colonialisms defined the territorial and political outlines of South Sudan and helped shape the definition of who was South Sudanese. The trade empires of the nineteenth century shifted regional connections and created networks that began to knit together the different territories of southern Sudan. The dual colonialism of the twentieth-century Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, where Sudan remained an Egyptian colony governed by Britain, left a contradictory legacy. Local administration was established by force but is remembered as benign in the creation of an administrative system based on customary law and customary institutions, though neglectful of education and economic development under the restricted terms of the Southern Policy.
The history of Sudan and South Sudan since the mid-twentieth century is a history of contested nationalisms and the failure of the politics of national unity. The power struggle between the northern nationalist parties left the southern provinces and other rural regions marginalized from the centers of economic and political power. The emergent South Sudanese political elite began to fashion a coherent nationalist ideology of its own, based mainly on opposition to the northern parties’ construction of a national identity around the external ideologies of pan-Arabism and Islamism. South Sudan’s struggle was and continues to be part of a wider struggle in postindependence Sudan, a struggle that remains unresolved by South Sudan’s own independence referendum. The failure of the politics of national unity in Sudan has contributed to the current failure of the politics of national unity in South Sudan.
There is as yet no single comprehensive history of South Sudan, and this short history can be no more than an introduction to some basic facts, ideas, and interpretations, illustrated by vignettes of specific persons or events. It cannot name-check all the peoples of South Sudan or do justice to all their historical traditions. It is offered to stimulate conversation, debate, and further research about South Sudan’s past. All historical writing is a work in progress, and this book is no more than an interim report.
2
South Sudan in the Nile Basin
In 1929 a German tourist reading a local paper on the verandah of Khartoum’s Grand Hotel was surprised by a story about the recently destroyed “Pyramid of Dengkurs” in the village of the “wizard” Guek Ngundeng. Having viewed the remains of the step pyramids at Meroe and declared them debased African versions of Egyptian prototypes, his imagination raced backward and forward in time. “A pyramid!” he exclaimed. “What pyramid? Who has been buried there, thousands of years ago: demigod, priest, or Ethiopian king? And wizards? What sorcery are they practicing, what is this, what is still living there in those impenetrable swamps?” (Bermann 1931, 19).
This encounter illustrates how the history of Sudan has often been obscured by the assumptions of Egyptology. Influences flowed in one direction from the Egyptian heartland, and a conical mud shrine in the “impenetrable swamps” of the Upper Nile could only be understood as a degenerate pyramid. Yet, as the archaeologist David Wengrow reminds us, the ancient civilizations of the Nile Valley and Near East “were the products of interaction and exchange, rather than isolation.” They were “the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale” (2010, 13, 175). Recent advances in archaeology and historical linguistics now recognize that ancient Egypt, rather than being the source of all invention, often built on innovations originating further up the Nile. Exchanges and borrowings flowed both down- and upriver between the Nile’s African heartland and the civilizations along its middle and lower reaches, contributing to the spread of a shared pool of cultural ideas and practices from which Nile Basin societies drew, however distant from each other in time or space. The peoples of southern Sudan, whose geographical, political, and cultural isolation from the rest of Africa is commonly assumed, were active participants in these exchanges and interactions.
Nilo-Saharan Populations
Most South Sudanese belong to the Nilo-Saharan language family, the bearers of the ancient Sudanic civilization that originated in the Middle Nile, stretching from the Niger bend to the Red Sea coast. In the differentiation of languages and the movement of populations through and beyond the Sudanic belt over several millennia, Nilo-Saharan peoples “drew on a common fund of basic ideas about politics, social relations, and religion” (Ehret 2001a, 224).
The homeland of the ancestral Nilo-Saharan speakers straddled the two Niles from their confluence southward to Lake No. The two primary branches of Koman and Sudanic began to emerge some thirteen thousand years ago. The modern representatives of Koman include today’s Gumuz, Uduk, and Koma located along the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, close to their ancestral homeland. The more numerous Sudanic branch is further subdivided into Central and Northern subbranches. The modern representatives of