South Sudan. Douglas H. Johnson

state’s reliance on armed commerce in its southward expansion brought about a massive change in power relations and population distribution within southern Sudan. The military forces of state agents, trading companies, and their armed allies created new power centers that had a direct impact on indigenous social and political systems.

      From the 1820s up to 1840 southern Sudanese contact with the expanding state was confined mainly to the Shilluk and Dinka between the two Niles. During the next two decades more areas in the interior were opened up to river-borne trade as government flotillas and trading companies expanded into the southern waterways. In the 1860s power shifted to the commercial companies as their private armies spread through the zariba system, a network of fortified trading stations. Commerce was founded on the trade in ivory and slaves, the latter seized in warfare, and relations between traders and southern Sudanese, in Richard Gray’s telling phrase, descended into a “vicious spiral of violence” (1961, 54).

      Egypt attempted to assert its control over indigenous peoples and merchant companies alike, recruiting a succession of European administrators in the 1870s and 1880s ostensibly to expand government authority, suppress the slave trade, and support legitimate commerce. The power of the traders was broken by 1879, but the methods and even the personnel of the Egyptian administration scarcely differed from that of the traders as government troops occupied the same sites and continued to plunder local peoples for food, supplies, and captives. The outbreak of the Mahdiyya in the 1880s precipitated a rapid collapse of the Egyptian administration in its southern provinces, but the Mahdists were unable to retain control of more than a few river ports, from which they sent out raiding parties until expelled from the region by Belgian, French, and Anglo-Egyptian forces in the late 1890s. Patterns established in the nineteenth century continued well into the twentieth.¹

       Tribal Zones and Deep Rurals

      The early colonial history of southern Sudan is an example of expanding states creating “tribal zones” along their peripheries through trade and war. Progressive militarization transformed indigenous social relations, political structures, and patterns of warfare, leading to wars of resistance, panethnic alliances, ethnic soldiering with indigenous peoples fighting on the side of or under the control of the expanding state, and internecine wars to control trade or seize plunder (Ferguson and Whitehead 2000).

      But there is a parallel process in response to encroaching commercial networks of the sort that southern Sudanese experienced in the nineteenth century. The accepted picture of southern Sudan at this time is one of relentless destruction, a “rape of the Sudd” with whole communities defenseless against the onslaught of foreign exploiters. As Cherry Leonardi has pointed out, this is only part of the story, and the nineteenth century was also a time of engagement and adaptation by many southern Sudanese societies (2013a, chap. 1). We can understand this period better through the anthropological concept of “deep rurals,” a term first applied to West Africa to describe the ambivalent relationship between market centers and peripheral agricultural communities. To maintain their autonomy within regional systems created and dominated by plantations and markets, deep rural communities adopt a number of strategies, including selective trading with markets, absorbing runaways and debtors, and living symbiotically with more mobile pastoralists (Jedrej 1995; James 2015).

      The late nineteenth-century history of southern Sudan illustrates these related processes. Foreign state presence constantly redefined itself, first facilitating the activities of commercial companies, then subduing them and grafting government administration onto the network of trade centers and caravan routes the companies had created, before giving way to the militant Mahdist theocracy operating through a much reduced network. Indigenous communities, too, alternated between accommodation with and resistance to the new powers in the land. Communities living in close proximity to the new military-commercial centers became captured labor, while other communities adopted deep rural strategies to maintain their autonomy.

       The Rape of the Sudd and Patterns of Authority

      At the beginning of the nineteenth century each of the Sudanic states had their own tribal zones. The Tunisian traveler and scholar Muhammad al-Tunisi identified them as the lands of enslaveable peoples: the Nuba south of Sinnar and the Fartit south of Darfur. Neither Nuba nor Fartit were specific ethnic labels, but expressed the combination of ideas about religion and ethnicity that defined the categories of “free” versus “slave,” who could raid and who could be raided (O’Fahey 1982, 77; Ewald 1990, 48). It is significant that al-Tunisi’s list did not explicitly mention the Shilluk and Dinka. Before Egypt’s invasion of Sudan, both peoples were as often raiders as raided. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the whole of southern Sudan had become a tribal zone of the old Turco-Egyptian empire followed by the advancing Anglo-Egyptian state.

      For some two centuries the Shilluk dominated the White Nile, using canoes to raid Baggara cattle keepers and downstream Muslim villages, and alternately taxing or disrupting trade where the east-west trade routes crossed their territory. By the end of the eighteenth century Aba Island was a Shilluk island and the river from Alays to Kaka was known to neighboring Arabs as “Bahr Shilluk,” the river of the Shilluk (Mercer 1971, 407–18).

      Armored cavalry were at the core of the armies of Sinnar and Darfur, but they were of little use against canoe-borne raiders. Nor did they have a marked edge over Dinka spearmen, who developed their own tactics to neutralize cavalry’s advantage, as the Turco-Egyptian army learned to its cost in its first foray into the White Nile plains in 1827 (Bartoli 1970, 7–8, 34–35). In the west the formal cavalry-mounted slave raids launched from Darfur into the forested valleys of western Bahr el-Ghazal had become a stylized form of warfare during the first half of the nineteenth century, aimed at increasingly scattered communities of Fartit rather than the stronger Malual Dinka who, together with the Ngok Dinka to the east, controlled most of the river Kiir, the geographically misnamed Bahr el-Arab (O’Fahey 1980, 93–94). Despite often being in conflict with these demographically strong Shilluk and Dinka societies, the Sinnar sultanate and the Baggara also often sought them as allies (Hofmayr 1925, 66–68; Henderson 1939, 63–64; O’Fahey 1980, 99).