Abstract
Building on the emergence of rebel narratives in the early 1960s, this chapter charts the development of the “Southern Problem” in the oppositional literature of the Sudanese government. It unpacks the government’s responses to the discursive attacks launched by rebels in exile. Crucially, the state enlisted pro-government Southerners, thereby taking advantage of the fissures between Southern elites. By delineating the rhetorical strategies in the internationally circulated government’s literature, the chapter demonstrates that the Sudanese state understood the Southern rebels as rivals in a battle for legitimacy. It argues that the subsequent diplomatic duel between the Sudanese government and Southern exiles, with words as their weaponry, constituted a crucial terrain of the first civil war.
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Notes
- 1.
L. Kurr, ‘“The Problem of the Southern Sudan”: Origin of Sudan Government violent attack on Great Britain and the Institute of Race Relations’, Voice of Southern Sudan, 1/3 (1963), p. 3.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Government of Sudan, Basic Facts about the Southern provinces of the Sudan (Khartoum, 1964), ACR, A/85/2.
- 4.
Sudan, Basic Facts, p. 43.
- 5.
Ibid, pp. 1–4.
- 6.
C. Boswell, ‘Knowledge, Legitimation and the Politics of Risk: The Function of Research in Public Debates on Migration’, Political Studies, 57 (2009), pp. 165–186.
- 7.
S. Herbst, ‘Political Authority in a Mediated Age’, Theory and Society, 32/4 (2003), p. 484.
- 8.
Sudan, Basic Facts, p. 4.
- 9.
J. S. Trimingham, Islam in the Sudan (Oxford, 1949), p. 5.
- 10.
Barkan suggests that as early as the end of World War I, ‘[a]mong leading scientific circles in the United States and Britain, race typology as an element of causal cultural explanation became largely discredited…One reason for this decline was a lack of epistemological foundations for racial classification, a lack which led to endless irresolvable inconsistencies and contradictions.’ E. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the world wars (Cambridge, 1992), p. 3.
- 11.
Sudan, Basic Facts, p. 6.
- 12.
Ibid, p. 91.
- 13.
For example, J. Glassman shows that the pre-revolution Zanzibari government also rhetorically maintained the myth of a multiracial island ‘in which most people were “mixtures of mixtures”’. However, despite this rhetoric of assimilative and harmonious identities, in a similar fashion to Sudan, Zanzibar experienced an eruption of racial violence. Glassman, War of Words, p. 7.
- 14.
‘The Peoples of the Sudan’, The Directory of the Republic of the Sudan, 1957–58 (London, 1958) p. 15. The directory carried the same excerpt, verbatim in the 1959 version on p. 21; in 1960, on p. 24; in 1961–1962, on p. 22; and in 1963, on p. 16.
- 15.
‘The Peoples of the Sudan’, The Directory of the Republic of the Sudan, 1964 (London, 1964) p. 14.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Sudan, Basic Facts, p. 44.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Sudan Weekly News, No. 53, p. 6, cited in Sudan, Basic Facts, pp. 44–5.
- 20.
‘The Peoples of the Sudan’, The Directory of the Republic of the Sudan, 1957/58 (London, 1958) p. 150.
- 21.
A. K. Abdelhay, ‘The Politics of Language Planning in the Sudan: The Case of the Naivasha Language Policy’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2007), p. 134.
- 22.
S. Poggo, The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955–1972 (Basingstoke, 2011), p. 32.
- 23.
S. Poggo, The First Sudanese Civil War, p. 42.
- 24.
Omi and Winant’s work on the meaning-making process of racial identities is instructive here. M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York, 1989), p. 62.
- 25.
S. Deng and A. Wol, Let’s Speak the Truth: Presentation of Facts and Views by Two Prominent Sudanese from the South (Khartoum, 1963), p. 7.
- 26.
Deng and Wol, Let’s Speak the Truth.
- 27.
After William Deng began embracing moderate unionist politics, Ambrose Wol joined SANU-inside. Chapter 6 provides the details.
- 28.
‘Problem in Sudan, Will Test All Africa’, Bennington Banner (Bennington, Vermont) (7 November 1963), p. 6. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/63025533/ (accessed on 20 February 2016).
- 29.
W. G. Landrey, ‘Sudan Facing Grave Weld Job’, Desert Sun (California) No. 57, 9 October 1963.
- 30.
Deng and Wol, Let’s Speak, pp. 7–8.
- 31.
Ibid, p. 15.
- 32.
Ibid. Emphasis in original.
- 33.
Ibid, pp. 15, 12.
- 34.
Ibid, p. 8.
- 35.
Ibid, p. 8.
- 36.
Ibid, p. 15.
- 37.
Ibid, p. 8.
- 38.
Ibid, p. 16.
- 39.
Ibid, p. 12
- 40.
Ibid, pp. 9, 12.
- 41.
Ibid, p. 18.
- 42.
Ibid, p. 10.
- 43.
Ibid, p. 11.
- 44.
The practice of including photographs was not altogether unusual for government documents for public consumption in Sudan. The Nimeiri administration from 1969 included the photographs of the leaders mentioned therein. Southern exiles used images of leaders a great deal in their propaganda as well, and thus it seemed relatively conventional.
- 45.
Santino Deng took particular issue with the allegations of the persecution of Christians. In his essay, he countered them by listing the names of seven Christians from the South who had attaining senior roles in Sudan. Through a brief discussion of the achievements of Southerners in various arenas, ranging from education to health services and agriculture, Deng attempted to argue that Southerners were thriving in Sudan. He argued that all Sudanese people were equal, and that any of the problems the country had were the result of the colonial ‘plan to separate the South from the North.’ See Deng and Wol, Let’s Speak, p. 5.
- 46.
Ibid, p. 6.
- 47.
Ibid, p. 17.
- 48.
W. Deng, ‘Betray not your people’, Voice of Southern Sudan, 2/2 (1964), p. 30.
- 49.
‘Editorial Comment’, Voice of Southern Sudan, 1/2 (1963), p. 1.
- 50.
F. Cooper, ‘The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and labour movements in post-war French Africa’, in P. Duara (ed), Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London, 2004) p. 427. Alina Sajed has identified similar discontents in Indonesia, recognising that ‘while the anti-colonial nationalist project removes from power the colonial administration and the colonial political rule, it fails to dislodge the colonial logic of modernity by leaving such hierarchies intact or even by instating new hierarchies.’ A. Sajed, ‘Peripheral modernity and anti-colonial nationalism in Java: economies of race and gender in the constitution of the Indonesian national teleology’, Third World Quarterly, 38/2 (2016) p. 3.
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Manoeli, S.C. (2019). ‘[A] Nation Is Not Physically of One “Blood”’: Portraying Sudan as Non-racial. In: Sudan’s “Southern Problem”. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28771-9_4
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