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When Does Ethnic Identity Turn into Racism
By
Heather J. Sharkey
In 2003, as the
current round of war was erupting in Darfur, the
historian Douglas H. Johnson published a book called
The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars. His use of
the plural—‘wars’, not ‘war’ in his title—was
significant. Johnson argued that the civil war that
plagued Sudan from 1955 to 1972 (usually called the
‘first’ civil war); the war that afflicted the country
from 1983 until, arguably, the signing of a Sudan
Government-SPLM/A treaty in 2005 (usually called the
‘second’ civil war); and other internal conflicts in
modern Sudan, had all been related to each other
organically.64
His framework has
made it easier for scholars to situate the current
Darfur conflict within the plurality of Sudanese civil
conflicts, and to show linkages between Darfur, the Nuba
Mountains, and Southern Sudan. Two connections are
salient. First, many observers suggest that the
political rhetoric of John Garang inspired and
emboldened the Darfurian rebels of the Sudan Liberation
Army (SLA), whose attack on government garrisons in El
Fashir 2003 are said to have precipitated the current
violence.
Garang extolled the
possibility of a ‘New Sudan’—a Sudan that would be
ethnically pluralistic and socially inclusive, and
inherently ‘Africanist’ rather than ‘Arabist’.65 Darfurian rebel leaders later envied what Garang and the
SPLA secured in the ‘Comprehensive Peace Agreement’ with
the Beshir regime in 2005: promises of a sharing of
power and wealth, and of a degree of political
decentralization (much as in the accord of 1972), but
this time with an escape clause – namely, a planned
future referendum on whether Southern Sudan should
remain part of the whole or secede.66
De Waal and Flint
have suggested that Garang’s death in an apparently
accidental helicopter crash in 2005, a mere two weeks
after the signing of the treaty, was a blow for Darfur
as well; had Garang lived, he might have placed a check
on the Khartoum regime’s efforts to egg on and abet the
Arab militias.67
The second salient
connection is that the conflicts in Southern Sudan, the
Nuba Mountains, and Darfur also occurred within the
context of Arab militarization. In the mid-1980s, the
Northern Sudanese government decided to arm Arab tribal
militias in order to wage proxy wars against Southern
Sudanese and Nuba ‘rebels’ and civilians. These militias
were the forerunners of the Janjaweed who now ravage
Darfur, even though the exact tribal composition of
these armies has differed.
Similarly, in the
late 1980s and the 1990s in Southern Sudan and the Nuba
Mountains, as now in Darfur, militias on the ground were
supported by the central government’s military
intelligence and aerial bombardment campaigns.68 But Darfur’s militarization was aggravated by another,
external factor: in the 1980s, the Libyan government
began to arm Darfurian Arabs, in this case with the idea
of using them to topple the Chadian regime of Hiss`ene
Habr´e.69
Reflecting the
offbeat pan-Arabist ideology of Mu’ammar Qadhafi, who
had a vision of creating an Arab Muslim belt in Sahelian
Africa, the Libyan government also recruited some
Darfurian Arabs into the Tajammu’ al-’Arabi, which de
Waal described as a crucible for Arab racial supremacist
ideology.70
In 2004, under the
leadership of Musa Hilal (whom deWaal and Flint call one
of the most powerful leaders of the Janjaweed militias)
Tajammu’ al-‘Arabi issued a directive that called upon
its supporters to ‘change the demography of Darfur and
empty it of its African tribes’.71 When does Arab ethnic
identity become Arab racism?
Amir H. Idris has
pointed out that racism in the Sudanese context has been
rooted in local histories of slavery and in the unequal
distribution of wealth and power between regions and
social groups. But in the post-colonial period, and now
especially in the context of Darfur, Idris has argued
that racism has sharpened within the climate of fear
surrounding Arab pastoralists—who are buffeted by
drought and desertification, awash in guns but not in well-watered grazing lands, and abetted by a regime that
is determined to retain its power by crushing internal
rebellions.72
Racism has been
flourishing amidst violence, among disproportionately
well-armed Arabs who can kill with impunity. One could
perhaps extend the adage that ‘a language is a dialect
with an army’ to say that, with regard to Sudan today,
Arab and African ‘races’ are ethnicities with armies.
However, not every
expert on Sudan is ready to accept the argument that
Arab racism or racial supremacy is a real factor in the
current Darfur conflict, or in Sudanese internal
politics more broadly. In 2005, in a review of G´erard
Prunier’s recent book on Darfur, for example, the
development economist Michael Kevane expressed
scepticism about Prunier’s contention that ‘the Arab vs
African clash [in Darfur] is not a local and ethnic one’
but rather ‘a national and racial one’.
Prunier ‘lays it on
thick’, he wrote, in claiming that ‘the northern elite
has been deepening its self-conception as a racial
group, characterized by Arabness’, Kevane also expressed
scepticism about what he called Prunier’s pop-psychologizing
tendency to ascribe the intensity of the Sudan
government’s Arabization agendas to a sense of
inadequacy within the larger Arab world—that is, to a
sense that Sudanese Arabs, because of their dark skins
and their experiences of facing discrimination in the
Middle East, were somehow not Arab enough.73
Many scholars and
activists nevertheless agree with Prunier in contending
that a kind of racial self-consciousness lurks behind
the Sudan government’s Arab ideology. Al-Baqir al-Afif
Mukhtar made this claim about Sudan’s Arab identity
crisis particularly strongly. ‘Northerners think of
themselves as Arabs, whereas the Arabs [sic] think
otherwise. Northerners’ experience in the Arab world,
especially in the Gulf [where many have migrated for
work], proved to them beyond any doubt that the Arabs do
not really consider them as Arabs, but rather as ‘abid,
slaves . . .. Almost every Northerner in the Gulf has
had the unpleasant experience of being called ‘abd.’
Northern Sudanese
aspire to full inclusion in the Arab community, Mukhtar
concluded, but their experiences in the wider Arab
world, combined with their experience of being
categorized with ‘blacks’ when they migrate to Europe or
North America, have compounded their anxieties.74 The
unease of Northerners may be deepened by first-hand
awareness of Arabic’s non-hegemonic status in Sudan – a
reality that one can apprehend merely by spending time
on a public bus in Khartoum, and listening in on a
multiplicity of languages.
In their
introduction to a volume on Race and Identity in the
Nile Valley (2004) Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Kharyssa
Rhodes noted that the study of racism in the Nile Valley
has been so sensitive a topic that it has been largely
avoided. Those accused of being racist tend to deny it,
while those who claim to have experienced racism feel
its barbs sharply and testify to its relevance in
day-to-day life on the streets in Cairo and Khartoum.75
Even a cursory look at Sudanese post-colonial writings
in Arabic and English shows that this subject warrants
much deeper study, since discourses about race as a
social category in Sudanese post-colonial society
(generally between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’), and about
the high position of Arabism in Sudan’s cultural
hierarchy, are very common.
References to Arab
cultural superiority abound in Arabic works. Consider,
for example, the work by a respected Northern Sudanese
intellectual, Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim. In a study of
Sudanese thought written in 1965 and published in at
least two subsequent editions (in 1976 and 1989),
Ibrahim described Sudanese Arab culture as the product
of historical ‘cross-pollination’ through which there
‘emerged a new creature who was the modern Sudanese, who
was formed neither of pure Arab blood nor of pure
African (zanji), but who certainly combined in his
tissues the two kinds of bloods, and carried in his
brain the product of the more powerful and more perfect
culture: Arab culture’. In Ibrahim’s view, Arabization
had proceeded historically as Africans either ‘exchanged
their idolatrous and Christian religions for entering
into Islam’, or ‘as Africans withdrew into the
equatorial forests, [so that] the echo of their national
cultures died down’.76
Metaphors of Arab
cultural conquest are also common. In 1979, one Northern
Sudanese historian described the country’s rural
peripheries as zones where, in the early twentieth
century, educated Northern Sudanese Muslims carried out
a ‘conquest’ (ghazw) for the spread of Islam, while in
the early 1990s another praised Northern Sudanese
government employees who, upon being posted to Sudan’s
peripheries, ‘rushed into battle unsheathing the weapons
of modern science amidst surroundings . . . like
something from the Stone Age’.77
Discourses about
race are also abundant, even in cases where writers
dismiss its relevance. In the late 1960s, for example,
the historian Muddathir Abdel Rahim made a plea for the
irrelevance of the Arab–African divide, and argued that
Sudan should be understood as an Afro-Arab composite.
‘Both [Arab and African], according to popular
conception, are indicative of certain racial groups and
are therefore regarded as being mutually exclusive,’ he
wrote. ‘In fact, however, Arabism is a cultural,
linguistic and non-racial link that binds together
numerous races: black, white and brown.’
In a similar vein,
the Egyptian scholar of Sudanese Arabic literature, ‘Abd
al-Majid ‘Abidin, reflected in 1972 on Sudan’s
Arab–African hybridity and averred that Arabs are simply
those who speak Arabic, that there is no difference
between a pedigreed and assimilated Arab, and that
Blacks can be Arabs as well. ‘Abidin argued that Arabism
transcended tribalism or racism, while Arab identity was
the only force capable of binding Sudan’s diverse groups
together. ‘Abidin stated, further, that embracing
Africanism (tazannuj) would be divisive precisely
because Africans (zunuj) were so heterogeneous and, he
claimed, lacked a basis in language or civilization.
‘The call to Africanism . . . would lead to a call for
division, fragmentation, and tribalism in this
country.’78
What counts, of
course, is not what Arabism should be according to its
theorists; what counts is rather what Arabism and
Arabization have been, on the ground, in Sudan. In this
spirit, Nyombe remarked, regarding the Northern Sudanese
nationalists’ desire to spread Arabic and Islam, that
‘These were not bad objectives in themselves, but
immoderate northern zeal to convert southerners into
Moslems and Arabic language speakers in the shortest
time possible often drifted into extreme and intolerant
policies. . ..’79
Idris remarked in a
similar spirit that successive post-colonial Sudanese
regimes have treated non-Arabs and Arabs as though they
have different ‘entitlements’. ‘Those who are considered
Arabs by the racialized state are treated as citizens,’
he wrote, ‘and those who are perceived as non-Arabs are
treated as subjects.’80 Still others have rejected
Arabism’s totalistic claims: some have not wanted a
Sudan with cultural unity; some have preferred a Sudan
that recognizes and tolerates difference. This rejection
of monoculturalism and assimilation is what prompted
John Garang, in the end, to call for a New Sudan that
would be a ‘united, secular, democratic, multi-racial,
multi-lingual, and multi-religious Sudan’.81
Successive Sudanese
governments—parliamentary and dictatorial alike—have
cherished the ideal of the Sudanese Arab so much that
they have insisted on assimilation, rather than
pluralistic inclusion and acceptance of difference, as
the only approach to national unity. In trying to pursue
their agendas in the context of civil wars, they have
turned Arabization and Islamization into martial
policies. The Beshir regime has been particularly clear
on this score: Beshir declared in the 1990s that his
regime was ‘fighting for [the] Sudan’s Arab-Islamic
existence’, that its policies to impose Islamic law and
Arabic were merely a reflection of divine will, and that
its war against dissidents was a jihad.82
But the policies
that Beshir ascribed to God’s will have bred only ill
will, particularly since his regime has supported
Arabization in a country that has had a post-colonial
political and economic culture of Arabs-take-all. In May
2000, an anonymously authored and distributed ‘Black
Book’ made the rounds in greater Khartoum, eluding
government censorship: it purported to show ‘what
everyone knew but never articulated: that the vast
majority of government positions in Khartoum, from
cabinet ministers to their drivers and all the
bureaucracy in between, were held by members of three
[Arab] tribes which represented only 5.4 percent of the
population’.83 Some claim that the book’s authors had
ties to the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of
the two rebel groups that took to violence in Darfur in
2003.84
Such is the depth
of ill will that many non-Arab Sudanese today appear to
look upon Northern riverine Arab elites as outsiders,
enemies, colonizers, and usurpers—certainly not as
compatriots. In 2007, the Arabic language continues to
spread as a lingua franca, particularly in Darfur
(including in displaced people’s camps),85 among
Southern Sudanese refugees, and in southern towns,
though the appeal of Arab identity and ideology appears
more limited than ever. . . .
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Notes
64. Douglas H.
Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Indiana
University Press, Bloomington, IN,
2003).
65. Kevane, ‘Lako
Tongun discusses his life and the situation in Sudan’;
and Idris, Confict and Politics of Identity in Sudan, p.
89.
66. Alex deWaal, ‘I
will not sign: reflections on the Darfur peace
agreement’, London Review of Books 28, 23 (30 November
2006).
67. Flint and de
Waal, Darfur, pp. xii–xiii.
68. Flint and de
Waal, Darfur, pp. 24–5.
69. J. Millard Burr
and Robert O. Collins, Africa’s Thirty Years’ War:
Libya, Chad, and the Sudan, 1963–1993 (Westview Press,
Boulder, CO, 1999).
70. See also
Amnesty International, ‘Beyond any doubt: Sudan uses and
supports the Janjawid in Darfur’ (AI Index No.
41/028/2006, 8 December 2006).
71. Flint and de
Waal, Darfur, pp. 38–9. 72. Idris, Conflict and Politics
of Identity in Sudan, p. 80; see also Burr and Collins,
Africa’s Thirty Years’ War, pp. 243–4, 259.
73. Michael Kevane,
review of G´erard Prunier’s Darfur: The ambiguous
genocide, in Sudan Studies Association Newsletter 24, 1
(October 2005), pp. 15–18.
74. Mukhtar, ‘The
crisis of identity in Northern Sudan’ in Fluehr-Lobban
and Rhodes, Race and Identity in the Nile Valley, pp.
213–24.
75. Fluehr-Lobban
and Rhodes, Race and Identity in the Nile Valley, pp.
xiii–xiv (see also the essay in this volume by Maurita
Poole, regarding Cairo, pp. 265–77); Zeineb Eyega,
‘Sudanese black identity’ (talk given at the Darfur
Symposium, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1
March 2007).
76. Muhammad al-Makki
Ibrahim, al-Fikr al-sudani: usuluhu wa-tatawwuruhu,
second edition (Matba’at Aru al-Tijariyya, n.p., 1989),
pp. 11–12.
77. Ahmad ‘Abd al-Rahim
Nasr, al-Idara al-baritaniyya wa’l-tabshir al-islami
wa’l-masihi fial-Sudan (Wizarat al-Tarbiya wa’l-Tawjih,
Khartoum, 1979), pp. 25–6; Mirghani Hasan ‘Ali,
Shakhsiyyat ‘amma min al-Mawrada (n.p., [Omdurman, early
1990s?]), p. 43.
78. ‘Abd al-Majid
‘Abidin, Dirasat Sudaniyya: majmu’at maqalat min al-adab
wa-al-tarikh, second edition (Khartoum University Press,
Khartoum, 1972), pp. 38–40.
79. Nyombe, ‘Survival or
extinction’, p. 109.
80. Idris, Conflict and Politics of
Identity in Sudan, p. 83.
81. W¨ondu and Lesch, Battle for
Peace in Sudan, pp. 33–4.
82. Lesch, The Sudan, p. 22.
83. Flint and de Waal, Darfur, pp.
17–18.
84. Abdullahi Osman
El-Tom, ‘The Black Book of Sudan: imbalance of wealth
and power in Sudan’, Journal of African National Affairs
1, 2 (2003), pp. 25–35, at
OSSREA (1 May 2007).
85. Consider the
emergence of the Arabic monthly newspaper Afiya Darfur:
launched in 2006, with the financial support of European
governments, this periodical targets a readership of
Darfurians in displaced people’s camps. Simon Haselock,
'Overview of the Albany AssoARAB'.
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Source: Heather J. Sharkey.
“Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics of
Language, Ethnicity, and Race.” African Affairs Advance
Access published December 18, 2007.
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posted 31 march 2008 |
