Sudan’s Contemporary Crisis: An Anthropological Perspective

SUDANESE CURRENT CRISIS: an anthropological perspective

Osama Elnur

An anthropological vision of Sudan’s current crisis

D. Osama Abdel-Rahman Elnur

1999/11/25

British colonial policy in Sudan

In 1955, what became known as the Southern Rebellion began, a rebellion that became the beginning of the First Southern War, which continued to rage from then until 1972. Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi had presented, in a lecture he gave in Kampala, a reading of what he called the Southern War, assuming that its causes lay in British colonial policy. The truth is that it is necessary to agree with Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi in his assumption. In 1919, after the outbreak of the revolution in Egypt, the British weakened and reduced the Egyptian role in the administration of Sudan and became more stringent in their new policy, which they adopted starting in 1920 in the name of the Southern Policy, in which the colonial administration called for the necessity of separating the development of northern Sudan from its south, which would lead to excluding the possibility of the process of complete assimilation between the two parts arriving and obstructing the spread of the national tide, and thus began to encourage Imposing the English language as an official language in the South and paying attention to local southern customs and traditions. In this context, Wilson Cash wrote, expressing his annoyance: “...the government represents a fair and appropriate facility for both Muslims and pagans alike, and in religious aspects it adopts a strictly non-partisan position. Missionary activity does not constitute part of the work of the government, but rather its burden falls on the missionaries alone, and it is they who determine whether those southern pagans will be left to fall into the grip of the Islamic religion.” Or can they be won over to Christianity?

The adoption of the Southern Policy was accompanied by the enactment of specific procedures: In 1921, the British governors of the southern provinces (Bahr al-Ghazal, Equatoria, and Upper Nile) were exempted from attending the annual meetings held in Khartoum for the governors of the various provinces of Sudan, and were allowed instead to establish direct contacts with their counterparts in Kenya and Uganda. In 1922, the Passports and Leaves Law was issued, which limited the entry of foreigners into Sudan, and the Closed Areas Law, which limited the travel of northern Sudanese to the south in a way that linked ratification to the mood of the authorized authority. The Closed Areas Act, which was later made clear in 1930 by the Administrative Secretary at the direction of the Governor-General, stated: “It is the policy of the Government in Southern Sudan to build up a body of independent tribal or ethnic units with a composition and organization based on local beliefs, customs and traditions to the extent required by the needs of justice, equality and respectable government. The Government of the Sudan will, as far as possible, encourage Greek and Syrian traders over the Jellaba (Northern Sudanese traders). Allow For the latter group, it must be decided without courtesy, but gradually, and only for the best Jalaba whose interests are clearly linked to the business and who adhere to legitimate trade routes. It is very important to limit their trade in cities or paved roads, and an effort must be made to make the English language the main means of communication among the population and to exclude the Arabic language completely.

Thus, the delegated authorities have the right to grant permission to carry out commercial work in the South by law, and they have absolute freedom to refuse the permission or renew it after its expiration without specifying the reasons. In similar cases, they have the right to cancel any permission without notification, and the beneficiary must finish his work in the area specified in the permission within a time determined by the competent authorities. The colonial officials tried to justify preventing Sudanese from the geographical north from engaging in commercial activity in the south by claiming, as Henderson put it, that: “For the British administrator, the northerner is either a merchant or a slave trader. Until the mid-twenties, the Baggara continued to collect slaves in the areas south of the river to sell them in the distant markets of the north, in addition to hunting elephants and giraffes and plundering livestock. When they worked in simple trade, they would, for the most part, deceive the people of the primitive Nilotic tribes, cheat them, and deal with them.” In a false way, the Galabi merchant was in the opinion of the British an undesirable person in the south because he enriched himself at the expense of the villagers, sold trivial goods at high profits, and spread sexually transmitted diseases. He was always defrauding the southerners, and now he threatened to speculate, just as the Indians were doing in East Africa by monopolizing the sector trade and commercial agriculture.

It is clear beyond doubt that the Closed Areas Law aims to curb the process of acculturation between the two parts of the country, regardless of the justifications given by the British administrators who left their distant island to supervise the process of draining the peoples of our African continent.

In 1946, the British colonial administration presented an alternative project that excluded the southern policy and replaced it with a policy through which the population of the geographical south of Sudan would remain within the framework of a unified Sudan, provided that they would be prepared through indirect administration, education and economic development to “stand as equals to the northerners” in the future, and then the Juba Conference was held in June 1947 to declare that the north and south would be one state on the basis of the autonomy of southern Sudan. In December 1948, the first meeting of the Legislative Assembly was held, which included ten representatives directly elected from the cities, a membership of forty-two appointed from the rural areas of the northern part, and twelve members from the southern part. The Governor-General appointed ten representatives, and an executive council of twelve members was chosen, seven of whom were British.

We believe that the realization of the British colonial policy in Sudan, as is the case in the rest of the British colonies, and the adoption of the Southern Policy in 1920 and then abandoning it and replacing it with the policy of self-rule in 1946, must not be isolated from the development witnessed by British social anthropology, as it is known that this branch of knowledge had achieved a major breakthrough in the period 1860-1880 with the emergence of the works of the pioneering evolutionary school such as Bachofen’s Mother’s Right, and primitive society according to Taylor, and kinship systems and ancient society according to Morgan, and within a few years the foundations of ethnography, or what became known in Britain as classical anthropology, began. In that particular period, as is known, colonization also began. Our belief is to realize British colonial policy

Such a consensus that we wanted to point out may not mean anything at the beginning, but there are principles that suggest that such a consensus was not a mere coincidence, because there is no doubt that a consensus arose at that stage between colonial ideology and the ideological orientations of this emerging anthropology, meaning that these anthropological theorists were, in other words, consciously or not, theorists of colonialism, whether Mayne, Taylor, or Lebbock. The only exception is Morgan, who disagreed. About them, not in terms of his position on civilization, but on the entire bourgeois system as it crystallized in the nineteenth century. Emerging anthropology has become a new practice, just like scientific colonialism, and has no meaning except from within scientific colonialism. Its purpose is either to describe the conditions of the primitive existence of the colonized peoples in the stage preceding the arrival of colonialism, so as to provide a description of the pattern of this existence before it becomes eradicated, or it will deal with the description of this existence as colonialism created it. Thus we find Lebbock writing: “The study of primitive life has a special importance for us English, citizens of a vast empire that has its colonies in every part of the world and whose people constitute different Civilian degrees.”

Then Lebbock quotes Hunter as saying: “We have studied the peoples of the Low Countries in a way that no victor has done, and in a way that no controlled tribe has studied or understood. We know their history, their needs, their customs, their weaknesses, and even their prejudices, and this special knowledge has allowed us to provide a basis for political guidance that can be translated into administrative caution and the necessary reform at the time.” Thus, anthropology, as one of the assets of colonialism, will attempt to carry out practical duties, then it must use all its resources and transform into applied anthropology in the service of peoples. In any case, the moment of the West’s self-certainty is also the moment of anthropological practice’s self-certainty, it is the moment of true ethnic conscience.

In fact, anthropology did not become an independent science until the field research phase began, and the practice of field research assumes the presence of colonialism, but field research was able to create a distance between it and colonialism and contribute to transforming colonial ideology, even to a relative degree. There is no doubt that the role of anthropology in the colonial vision of the world by the central states did not go beyond the role played by every superstructure. Colonialism is not economic expansion and control. It is cultural control and ethnocentrism because it assumes belief in a single culture. This is what Jack Burke expressed by saying, “Imperialism imposed on the world a way of consciousness at the same time that it imposed a form of management.”

In 1902, Saussure’s work “The Psychology of Colonialism” appeared, in which he tried to base the colonial policy of assimilation on the principles of linear evolution: “The policy of assimilation is based on tempting arguments, since the primitives showed resistance to the advantages of civilization that we bring them, so we are told, and this is due to their prejudices that do not allow them to understand the advantages that they can benefit from, and these prejudices remain in their lives, and are the result of their deteriorating situation, the result of their faith.” And their language, then it is our duty to eliminate these remnants that date back to a distant past... In order for us to be able to achieve similarity with races that differ from our own, we must be convinced of the ability of those races to be similar, that is, we must believe in the formative unity of human nature.”

Girault, who started from evolutionary positions calling for uniformity, defined uniformity as making others similar to oneself, but uniformity is a process that cannot be imposed: “Because the primitives do not want it in the first place, and then we have no interest in imposing it on them, and therefore imposing a single form is not out of the question, except because our European institutions have the value of the absolute doctrine that must prevail regardless of the circumstances, and therefore we must first prove this superiority in many cases.”

In 1911, the First World Congress of Races was held in London, and the contributions of the participants highlighted a new concept represented in what was called the contact of cultures, which represented an attempt to deny the hypothesis of the superiority of the West under the influence of what was considered a discovery of the magic of multiculturalism, a multiplicity that must be preserved as much as possible by following a policy based on respect for the institutions of indigenous peoples. This is how the concept of acculturation was replaced by an alternative that replaces evangelism that carries civilization. Durkheim wrote in In 1912: “For us, the word “civilization” has one value, and we do not want to admit that it can develop on social and political foundations contrary to what we have. We must first acknowledge the necessity of convincing others in advance of these new issues.” He also believed regarding the evangelism that carried civilization that the rulers, administrators, and judges all started from the unbending conviction of original superiority and unlimited confidence in the value of the principles that confront the principles of others and that experience never lets them down. The resistance they face is not due to the incompleteness of the system, but rather to the stubbornness of the child peoples who did not realize the benevolent intentions of their educators.” Durkheim then deduces from this the necessity of colonialism adapting to local institutions by following a primitive, enlightened policy that takes into account all peculiarities.

Thus we see how future functional anthropology cannot be isolated from the development of colonial concepts, a process that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century and from within evolutionary ideology itself, based on the difficulties faced by colonialism. Such anthropological propositions had to push the colonial authorities, due to the ongoing difficulties, objections and rebellions, to reconsider the policy of direct administration with the help of local chiefs, and thus the idea of ​​indirect administration began to crystallize in place of direct administration, which came to mean not recognizing the legitimacy of traditional local chiefs, but rather recognizing the will of the British administrators to leave small matters to the traditional local chiefs (collecting taxes, resolving disputes, etc.). The application of indirect administration had begun in Nigeria for specific reasons that we will not go into here, at the hands of Lugard, who later recorded his experience in applying that policy in his book entitled “The Dual Mandate in British Equatorial Africa,” which was published in 1922. Frederick Lugard indicated that he followed a dual goal of maintaining and developing colonial rule, and then establishing new relations between the colonizer and the colonized peoples, in addition to applying the policy of divide and rule. Thus, Lugard was not seeking to prepare Nigeria for independence, but rather, in his opinion, he wanted to do what was appropriate for the primitive institutions, and then the first step, in his opinion, was to find an influential man and make him a leader and subject more villages and regions to his authority, then make him understand how to extend his control and make him understand the meaning of authority and the meaning of responsibility.

We do not believe that the dimensions of the southern policy in Sudan in 1920 can be understood in isolation from the report that Lugard submitted to the British Colonial Administration, entitled a political memorandum, in which he stated: “It is clear that this referred to policy (meaning indirect administration) must be applied in a varying manner, especially with regard to the tribes that do not know at all any senior leadership. We must understand this tribal organization and prepare it as a framework upon which we can build in the future. It is best to carefully study primitive values, especially those that affect Their mentality, taking into account the possibility of considering it as appropriate factors in creating a administrative system that suits the situation of those tribes.” It is also not permissible to isolate the adoption of the southern policy from the British Empire’s policy in East Africa, as Lugard’s colleagues began to implement indirect administration, especially Cameron, who considered anthropology an important part of the cultural administrative toolkit.

Thus it becomes clear that the concept of acculturation became linked to the colonial reality and to the attempt of the British functionalist school to make it an acceptable concept. Colonialism, for the administrative anthropologist, is a practice and a policy that must be followed. Hence, applied anthropology was born from the desire of the functionalist school to apply its work to administrative policy. Was Malinowski not one of those who focused strongly on the applied value of anthropology? He wrote in 1922: “Every branch of knowledge can be used by first applying it to management.” The study of savage and colored tribes has a practical value, as it is primarily concerned with the goals of colonial administration and the relations between white peoples and colored peoples. Secondly, ethnic studies can expand our outlook on human nature, allowing us to build a specific social theory that addresses the future of scientific behavior for human actions.”

Likewise, it is not permissible to consider applied anthropology a school that followed functionalism or that it was a school that was founded alongside academic analysis. Rather, it is functionalism to the extent that it is aware of itself as a science with its own applied ambitions. In fact, it may be said that most of the anthropological work that was done in that period was linked to this new trend. This is how Seligman wrote in 1932, at the request of the colonial government of Sudan, his book The Pagan Nilotic Tribes of Sudan, and Evans Pritchard also wrote, at the request of the government of Sudan, the book The Nuer. It is worth noting the praise expressed by Malinowski for the establishment of applied anthropology in Africa, declaring his support for the policy of indirect administration and its general principles, saying: “The decisive result of the dispute between direct administration and indirect administration is to provide room for the study of the various processes through which European influence reaches an indigenous tribe. The real difference between direct administration and indirect administration is that the former assumes the ability to create a new system at one stroke, and to transform Africans into false Europeans.” Or fake civilizations in a few years. As for the indirect administration, it is certain that it is impossible to achieve a magical transformation of this kind, and the reality is that every social development is a slow, gradual development that emanates from within.

What are the developments that led to the shift from the southern policy to the autonomy policy in Sudan?

In 1944, Herskovitz published his important study on national self-government, in which he directed a harsh criticism of colonial proposals, strongly attacking the policy of liberal indirect administration and enlightened imperialism that was defended by the functionalist school. Herskovitz pointed out that the functional school highlighted the existence of political institutions in all societies (pointing to Evans Pritchard’s work on the Nuer and the book African Political Systems that Fortes supervised in collaboration with Pritchard), but functionalists did not, in his opinion, conclude all possible results from that, as African societies are capable of governing themselves on their own according to their own political traditions, and he says that “no matter how complex or uncomplicated these political systems are, linked to large or small societies, It is capable of filling the functions of the state as it understands it, that is, it is capable of monitoring a person’s relations with his counterparts, and of organizing the battle for power functionally.”

Herskovitz is credited with inventing the term cultural relativity, which dealt a blow to colonial applied anthropology. Since 1925, American anthropologists such as Sapir, Boas, and Kroeber have proposed a distinction between indigenous cultures and non-indigenous cultures, with the former living in harmony and balance in total conformity with itself, in contrast to the latter, which turns man into a state of rust and also generates repression and alienation. In his book Man and His Actions, Herskovitz succeeded in developing this concept, which was only the lines of his American colleagues: “How can value judgments be made about this or that culture, or about primitive culture in general, as long as these judgments are based on experience, and as long as each individual interprets the experience within the limits of his own acculturation?”

Thus, Herskovitz says that there is no sensory, artistic, religious, etc. experience. In itself, as long as every experience is relative to the cultural system of society, and as long as every society is a system of experience and judgments. Thus, anthropology announced its attack on colonialism, its functional school, and what was called indirect management, as starting from the illusion of making reasoned judgments on other cultures, judgments that became the basis for colonial practices.

Applied anthropology in the 1920s turned colonial reality into a kind of cultural friction between different cultures. However, after the crystallization of the new anthropology, no one talks about cultural change, but rather about social change, and colonialism is nothing more than a manifestation of social change. Whereas previously the focus was on the frequencies and contradictions created by cultural friction, at the end of the thirties the focus was on the universality and nature of social change. Thus, Fortz saw in cultural friction “a pattern of other social interaction processes, whether in societies that know writing or in societies that do not know it. It continues in the African regions that whites have conquered for centuries, and in those that have only recently entered their field of interest.”

Under the weight of the change that affected anthropological thought after World War II, British colonial officials were forced to conduct a complete review of their policies and to research the issue of indirect administration in particular. The review had begun after the Labor government took power in Britain in 1945. As soon as the workers came to power, indirect administration was transformed into self-government. “The principle of administration by the local population and by their old or new institutions is a principle that cannot be abandoned. It must also be recognized that development is not possible except by grafting ambitions Africans contribute to the most dynamic and flexible element towards the current conditions of change. This does not mean curbing this policy through the traditional conservatism that characterizes African societies, which was the conservatism that was based on the principle of indirect administration. The policy must go beyond the desires of change and adaptation of the Africans. The local administration must develop projects that contribute to social and economic progress at a time when we also develop the people’s political awareness. Therefore, the traditional system cannot be accepted unless it is developed.

Based on this declaration of principles, the workers’ government began implementing the policy of self-administration in Africa, and under the pressure of the ongoing uprisings in southern Sudan (the Dinka, Zande, Nuer, Nuak, and Buya starting from 1901 until 1929, and the Toposa uprising, which was eliminated only in 1926, and the continuing uprisings in the Nuba Mountains until 1948, when the last pockets of Liri resistance in the Thelesh Mountains were liquidated). The colonial administration was forced to cancel the southern policy and announce the project of self-rule within the framework of a unified Sudan.

An anthropological view of the political power struggle

Based on what we said about the nature of the ethno-cultural structure and colonial policy, we can now take a more in-depth look at the political-ideological debate in Sudan, north and south. We say at the beginning that our vision rejects the traditional view of the so-called southern issue or the problem of the south, and then the Sudanese political-ideological debate will be addressed as a unified whole in the south and the north, a debate that includes forces that we call deconstructive in the north and south at the same time, and forces that we call monotheistic, northern and southern alike.

We would first like to point out that this classification that we will adopt, as shown above, does not reflect the actual reality among the Sudanese masses in general, but we are referring to the prevailing reality among the educated and active elite in the political and intellectual movement, which played a major role in crystallizing a popular conscience that shows an amount of what is known in anthropology as the term ethnocentrism, which represents a tendency summed up by the position of one who believes that his lifestyle is better than all other styles. It is a tendency characterized by naivety and no one can find it. Justified, we say that such an individual tendency to despise or misappreciate other cultures is necessary for all cultures and does not distinguish, anthropologically, one culture over another. However, this narrow ethnic tendency, due to the behavior of the political and intellectual elite in Sudan, has become an issue that should not be overlooked or ignored when trying to take an anthropological view of Sudan’s current crisis. Likewise, we believe that it is time for us, now that the unity of the Sudanese nation is in danger, to look at the crisis with scientific detachment, based on Francis Deng’s saying, “What divides the Sudanese is what is not said.” While preparing this lecture, I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of Mansour Khaled’s new book, “South Sudan in the Arab Imagination,” in which he rightly pointed out that if “we are truly seeking reconciliation with oneself, then reconciliation with oneself requires frankness and clarity, as well as intellectual honesty and tolerance toward the other, and intellectuals have a role in this. Reconciliation with oneself also removes the internal contradiction that causes most people in the South and North to be confused about who they are.” Mansour goes on to say honestly that these matters should not be left to politicians, despite their impact on politics,  because he believes that “politics is too important to be left to politicians, and true thinkers and intellectuals must  search for the transcendent connotations of history.”

We believe that it is possible to identify the emergence of two main intellectual currents in Sudan, with their branches, that were crystallized years before independence. The first current is described here in a way that expresses its actual content...deconstructive, crystallized by the behaviors and writings of an elite group of intellectuals in the geographical north based on a concentrated Arab-Islamic tendency, while it crystallized in the geographical south in the behaviors and writings of the elite based on an African-centric tendency. The advocates of the Islamic Arabist tendency start from the fact that the majority of the people of the geographical north are Arabized Kushites and Arabs, among whom the Islamic religion represents the greatest common denominator. Then the advocates of this closed tendency claim that the dominant identity in Sudan is an Arab-Islamic identity, while the other Sudanese who have not been Arabized constitute minorities with an undefined identity who deserve to be treated as people of the era, as Al-Sadiq put it. Al-Mahdi in an interview with the Arab News Network station last July 2000, in Sudan, an Arab Muslim. Thus, the advocates of this current assume that these minorities must submit to the fait accompli represented by the dominance of the majority carrying the Arab-Islamic culture, while ensuring that they retain, to a greater or lesser extent, the rights recognized by the Arab and Arabized Muslim majority, and these are rights whose extent the advocates of this current differ, but in all cases, the ultimate goal of the advocates of this current, regardless of their schools, is to complete the process of unilateral representation (Arabization) of the minorities and their final assimilation into the Arab and Arabized Muslim majority in one fell swoop, as they put it. Malinowski, and as soon as possible, the thing that forces resorting to all means of violence and coercion, which is what distinguishes the program of the political minority party currently ruling in Sudan, which is trying, through its project called the Islamic civilizational orientation, to impose the process of Arabization and Islamization immediately through the so-called jihad. As for the liberals who advocate the trend of Islamic Arabism, they look to completing the process of assimilation with Malinowski’s concept of acculturation: “Every social development is a slow development and is best achieved through slow, gradual change emanating from within.” The Arab-Islamic tendency with a liberal tinge appears in the writings of many of its thinkers, which were published years before independence. Thus, we find Muhammad Ahmed Mahjoub, one of the most distinguished leaders of political thought in the Umma Party, writing in 1941, “The ideal of the intellectual movement in this country is that it be a movement that respects the teachings of the true Islamic religion, that it has an Arab appearance in its linguistic expression, and that it draws inspiration from the ancient and modern history of the people of this country and the traditions of its people. This is how we can We create a national literature, and this literary movement will later transform into a political movement leading to political, social and cultural independence.”

Thus, the theses of British social anthropology appear clear in the speech of Al-Mahjoub, who did not realize the concept of independence except through himself and his Arab-Islamic identity. He missed that independence for the other Sudanese ethnic groups, which must constitute part of the Sudanese nation, was linked to a different mode of existence since times that preceded the Arab migrations coming in later times to Sudan. He missed that independence is insisting on the will to live according to special values, values for themselves and not In instilling the superiority of Arab-Islamic values, Al-Mahjoub ignored the fact that the essence of colonialism is violence in its natural state, and that the removal of colonialism that the Sudanese aspire to means the actual denial of this reality. If Al-Mahjoub had realized this, he would have known that as a result of this violence that refuses to control, the removal of colonialism cannot be considered merely the repossession of political power and economic wealth. He missed the point that Sudan must restart its history from where the British neglected it.

On the other side of the coin of Islamic Arabism is the deep-rooted fundamentalist Islamist tendency, according to the words of our great writer Tayeb Salih, who was astonished by their illegitimate arrival to power through their ill-fated military coup against the democratically elected government. He shouted at the top of his voice, asking where did these people come from? Suffice it to repeat what Abdullah Bula said, that this fundamentalist Islamic regime is the only one of all the coup regimes in Sudan that dared to declare that it came by force, despite the will of the people, because the people are backward and ignorant of their religion and that they are a people with corrupt beliefs in the sense that their Islam is entwined with pagan beliefs and superstitions that have no place in the parsing of the sound and upright belief, and that large segments of it are not of a religion at all.

The general features of the political thought of the ruling National Islamic Front are evident in the writings of its guide and first theorist, Hassan al-Turabi, and then in its program, which was formulated in the third democratic period in the light of his ideas. Al-Turabi sees the enormous ethnic and cultural diversity with which God bestowed Sudan as a bad fate and a test from God. He says: “It was our destiny in Sudan to be afflicted with a complexly built country that almost represents all the African peoples with their languages, characteristics, races, and customs.” Such arrogant rhetoric can only lead to a complete denial of Sudanese cultures other than Arab.

This deconstructive current is repeated in the opposite way in the geographical south, calling for the denial of Arab-Islamic culture based on an Afrocentric tendency. Its advocates, as a result of colonial policy on the one hand and in reaction to the Islamic Arabism trend on the other hand, see the necessity of separating the southern part from the north in order to preserve the identity of the threatened African Nilotic and Sudanese ethnocultural groups, which, in the belief of the advocates of this current, constitute an ethno-cultural complex that is completely different from The ethno-cultural complex in the geographical north of Sudan.

The second trend, which we call monotheistic here, is represented in both the north and the south by advocates of the Sudanese tendency, who see the Sudanese identity as the result of non-unilateral processes of similarity between the authentic Cushitic cultures in the geographical north of Sudan with the imported Arab-Islamic culture, and the product of the acculturation process between the authentic Nilotic cultures in the geographical south and the emerging cultures in the geographical north due to the processes of similarity that have taken place. The processes of assimilation and acculturation led to the emergence of an ethnic-cultural complex that is diverse and unique in nature, which constitutes the current Sudanese identity and which has the ability to formulate a project to build the Sudanese nation.

Theoretically, it seems possible to say that the advocates of the monotheistic movement in the geographical north belong to two schools. The first is of a nature that appears to us to be somewhat conciliatory, and its followers are trying, in the words of Abdullah Bula, to correct the distortions of the methodology of viewing the problem of identity. The best example of this school is expressed in the writings and poetry of Muhammad al-Makki Ibrahim, the late Muhammad Abd al-Hay, al-Nur Othman Abkar and other poets of what became known as the Jungle and Desert School, who started from the words of Muhammad al-Mahdi al-Majzoub: Muhammad Abdul HaiAl-Nour Othman Abkar

I have stubborn races of Negroes, even if the Arabs rant about my poetry

They chose Sennar as their forge to formulate the Sudanese identity and a reference and model for restoring African Cushitic authenticity.

I will return today, Sinar, where the symbol is a thread

Of black brilliance, between echo and sound

House of ripe fruit and old root

Are you a Bedouin?

No,

From the country of Zanj?

No,

I am one of you, lost

He sang again with tongue

And he prays with a tongue

Returning to Sennar carries for these leaders of this school a latent meaning that refers to ethnic and cultural mixing. Sennar is the capital of the first Islamic kingdom in Sudan. Its kings were the original Funj who converted to Islam and accepted it as a religion and claimed for themselves an imaginary Umayyad lineage assigned to them by Al-Samarqandi, the jurist coming from Central Asia, as we referred to at the time. However, the discourse of the forest and desert poets presents, if looked at carefully, an anthropological project in which there is no room for the legitimacy of difference and then continuing to remain within the framework of the one Sudanese nation, as Abdullah Bola pointed out earlier. It is a project that assumes the completion of the process of assimilation as a condition for Sudanese identity and culture, which becomes an Afro-Arab hybrid. Abdullah Ali Ibrahim had said that the necessities of national coexistence might oblige southerners to acquire the Arabic language or an Arab-Islamic custom. However, as he put it, “they will resist every tendency to make them adopt an Arab lineage alongside their confirmed original African lineage, and the call to reproduce them through cultural mixing as a later edition of the Sinnar man will seem to them a kind of cultural fraud, not dialogue.”

The Kingdom of Sennar, the Blue Sultanate, was based on a confederal alliance between the Funj in the peninsula and the Abdalab Arabs in the north, with their capital in Qarya. Trimingham described the Blue Sultanate as “more of a loosely connected confederation than a state. There was no concentration of power and no common institutions. Only the land between the two Nile (white and blue) was under the direct rule of Sennar, as the Fung kept the regional rulers as vassal kings and allowed local institutions to continue.”

Afro-Arabism, with its Sinari model, may carry the meaning of a political structure based on confederation, although the poets of the forest and desert never expressed this. What is noteworthy is that the advocates of fundamentalist Islamic Arabism, as always in their habit of emptying concepts of their content when they find popularity, also began to express the longing for a return to Sennar, but in a very different sense. This is how Hassan Makki - one of the most prominent thinkers of the National Islamic Front - began to say in his book “The Sinnar Culture” by rejecting all previous cultures as mere cultures of ignorance and decadence. Recently, Hassan Makki and his Sheikh Hassan Al-Turabi, under a feeling of frustration at the complete failure to which their political and Islamic civilizational project was exposed, which they founded not through thought, but through brutality and persecution of other opinions, are trying to talk and call for the project of Islamic cultural blending. However, we cannot consider such a fundamentalist Islamic project, in light of its dominance, as an element that constitutes the whole and can lead to cultural mixing. There is a moral and cultural gap that separates Al-Hassan and other advocates of this project from non-Muslim minorities and from Muslims who do not join it. We cannot talk about mixing fundamentalist Islam with Sudanese cultures. Rather, we can talk about the transcendent position of dominant and subjugated practices. The basis of cultural change in the perspective of Al-Hassanin and his brother, who are advocates of the fundamentalist Islamic movement, no matter how much the professor and his sheikh practice intellectual deception, is control. Care must be taken not to confuse a change imposed from outside the cultural complex with a change that is in itself a means to an end: cultural sovereignty. It is true that the will to preserve cultural details in a society that is authoritatively subject to the fundamentalist Islamic project has no meaning (and this is not certain), not because the policy of the Islamic authority of the National Front is a conservative policy, but rather because change must take place from within, it must be the result of the sovereignty of unity in diversity. Therefore, the contradiction remains between what Islamists claim to do and what they actually do, and instead of pushing the wheel of cultural change, they actually know how to stop it for the benefit of their project when it conflicts with it. Describing culture in some way as an essence that needs development is part of the justification of Islamist politicians: the necessity of educating the people Islamically, and this is for the benefit of the people! Every element in the total complex of total political and Islamic acculturation: education, art, religion, music, language, and the shifting ladder of values, is actually influenced by what is imposed by the hegemony of the fundamentalist Islamic project.

The second school of the monotheistic movement is what we call the acculturation movement, whose advocates start from the concept of unity in diversity, rejecting in general and in detail the various assimilation projects that call for placing Sudanese cultures under the wing of one dominant culture, rejecting the theses of the puritanical and liberal northern deconstructionist movement, which calls for imposing the dominance of a particular element of the ethnic cultural complex that makes up the Sudanese identity over the other constituent elements, and the southern one, which calls for rejecting unity in diversity, fighting for the separation of an element of the complex. The cultural ethnicity that makes up the mosaic of the Sudanese nation. Thus, the advocates of the acculturation school completely reject the concept of a dominant majority and minorities as a concept that leads to the disintegration of Sudan and obstructs the project of building the Sudanese nation. The acculturation project includes highlighting the phenomena that arise from direct and continuous contact between different cultures and ethnic groups in Sudan (1).

[Currently, this museum has been eliminated by separating it from the General Administration of Antiquities and National Museums, and privatizing it under the management of what is known as the Sudanese Civilization Institute]

Footnotes and references

(1) When I was Director General of the General Administration of Antiquities and National Museums during the last democratic government, the administration, with financial support gratefully provided by Lower Saxony, implemented the reorganization of the Heritage Museum and changed its name to become the Sudan National Museum of Ethnography in accordance with the concept of unity in diversity. This is the project that caused the famous problem that broke out between the General Administration of Antiquities and National Museums and the Minister of Culture and Information at the time, called Abdullah Muhammad Ahmed, the Islamist fundamentalist who was infiltrated at the time in the Umma Party. He stood in opposition to the vision of the Sudanese movement expressed by the policies of the leaders of the General Administration of Antiquities and National Museums at the time, which said that the unity of Sudan is embodied in its diverse cultures that practice processes of give and take between them without any preference, sovereignty, or hegemony of any one of them over the rest of the cultures, and sought to ensure that the methods of museum display respond to this intellectual orientation. Last year, Mr. President of the Republic Omar Hassan Al-Bashir issued a decision to remove the National Museum of Ethnography from the body of the General Administration of Antiquities and National Museums and privatize what became known as the Sudanese Civilization Institute, which is “owned” by the Islamists in the person of a specialist in the Arabic language and Islamic studies, Mr. Jaafar Mirghani... excluding the concept of unity in diversity and acknowledging the unilaterality of the Sudanese Arab-Islamic identity.

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