Francis Deng and The Dinka socila system
Read the works of Francis Deng
About the Dinka
A vision in the works of Francis Deng
The cultural structure of the Dinka
A vision in the works of Francis Deng
The studies of Dr. Francis Deng are one of the examples of contemporary efforts in serving the issue of social (sociological) understanding of Arab-African relations. Through more than six of his works focusing on the Shifa Dinka heritage, what is recorded in him is the social fabric that connects the Dinka to the broadest ancestral groups extending in the east and west of the continent. Thus, he makes this partial fabric complementary or integrated with the larger African fabric on the continent. Then he moves from that to examining the intersection of the Dinka fabric with the Arab fabric. Starting from the direct relationship with the neighboring “reds” and moving to the similarity with the social-spiritual heritage with the North of all Middle Eastern religions, it thus establishes the basis of communication and continuity between local and general issues on the continent, most important of which is the issue of social and cultural overlap between Arabs and Africans, or what can be called “the social structure of Arab-African relations.”
There is no doubt that Francis Deng’s study within the framework of Sudanese studies in general is one of the most qualified studies to reach very important results in this field, and this is not only because of Sudan’s location in the heart of Africa, but also because of the social process that took place on the land of Sudan and made it a crucible for the melting of the Arab element and its transformation into a part of this Arab-African fabric, and thus made the Sudanese reality respond to many statements and even respond to many exaggerations in which Arabs or Africans alike fall outside this region - the heart. The Sudanese model here does not provide a “historical” example like other regions or mixing, but it provides living material for the social structure that expresses the process.
A quick look at Francis Deng's works reveals the sum of his knowledge of his country's social-spiritual heritage...among the Dinka specifically. Between 1971 and 1978, Francis Deng published in English "Heritage and Modernization" (1971), "The Dinka in Sudan" (1972), "The Dinka and Their Songs" (1973), and "The Dynamics of Unity or Identity Formation" (1973, “Folk Stories about the Dinka” (1974), then finally “Africans and Two Worlds - The Dinka in Arab-African Sudan” (1978).
The scientific and cultural history of Francis Deng qualifies him to say a lot about the issues he dealt with, as much as his social origins allow him in this regard as well. He is one of the sons of Chief Deng Majok, head of the Dinka-Ngok tribe, which is located on the social border between the so-called North and South in Sudan. He studied in one of the higher secondary schools in the North and graduated from the University of Khartoum, where he was appointed to teach law there for some time. Then he traveled as an envoy to obtain a doctorate in law from Bell University in the United States of America. He also studied African law at the University of London. After that, he taught anthropology at New York University and also worked in the Human Rights Department at the United Nations. His first publications presented him for the Herscovitch Prize in African Studies. Following the peaceful solution to the South Sudan problem in 1972, Deng was appointed his country’s ambassador to Scandinavia and then the United States. Then he came to Khartoum as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (1975).
Deng's approach to his studies was influenced by his social position on the one hand and his academic path on the other. His study of anthropology and African law led him to be interested in oral heritage and to rely on "folk tales" about history and social relations. This provided him with abundant material about the deep spiritual heritage of the people of his tribe. His study of law also led to his interest in "relations" within the tribe. His status as the son of one of the presidents influenced his tendency to study the power relations between these presidents and the position of some social groups towards them, although this sometimes limited his recordings to the context of the presidents, despite his indication that he did not ignore the common man who presented - in his opinion - material that was close to what the presidents narrated.
This consequently affected his socio-economic analyzes and their effects on the development of relations between the Dinka and others because he did not proceed with analyzing developments in the economic reality and its general national and regional surroundings. Despite his awareness of this dimension in more than one place when he dealt with the wealth of the tribe, its system, and the social groups that are formed within this framework, his adherence to the methods of functional anthropologists at times or the historical school [for more on the functional and historical trends in anthropology see: theoretical anthropology] itself at other times did not make him carry the results much to their expected range.
The most prominent benefit in Francis Deng’s study is his awareness of the African framework in its entirety and paving the way for conclusions regarding African and African-Arab relations alike, as the reality between the Dinka and its neighbors is similar to the reality that we can meet in Ethiopia, Chad, Nigeria, Mali, Niger, and other areas of cultural contact and the resulting interactions and interactions known to history and contemporary reality.
In this regard, Francis Deng does not study the Dinka heritage to search for similarities only with the Arab heritage or the spiritual heritage of “the countries of the Middle East,” as he puts it, but he also presents the circumstances of the contradictions that arose within the Dinka heritage that are hostile to unity with others. He uses a scientific anthropological approach when the source of the similarity is not necessarily due to the direct contact that has arisen recently in the last two centuries, but rather the similarity is due to the similarity of human phenomena in different parts of the earth.
However, the Dinka is similar to other tribes in Sudan, Africa, and the Arab world, and it benefits from this to suggest its direct influence on the issue of searching for the identity of the Sudanese nation and the integration of the elements of the North and South in the process of building the nation, and even on building Arab-African relations themselves. What Deng records of ancient accounts of the old Dinka "chiefs", in turn, transmitted from their old ancestors as well, does not see in it the trace of modern contact as much as it refers to the ancient human heritage inherited in the Dinka.
In his books “Dynamics of Identity Formation” and “Africans and Two Worlds,” Francis Deng moves us into the single, dual world of the Dinka, the world of African myth and the world of Middle Eastern heavenly religions, starting from another basic statement that sees Sudan, both its north and south, knowing this diversity in social structure and spiritual heritage, which connects it - in its entirety as a cultural complex - to the worlds of Africa and Arabism in a process of interaction that does not know this duality. The arbitrariness that isolates the Arabs from the Africans. Indeed, in more than one place in both books, he reveals a diversity of narratives between different social groups within the Dinka itself, similar to the diversity at the Sudanese level as a whole. Indeed, when he dives into history, he discovers these similarities between the Dinka heritage and the ancient Egyptian Pharaonic heritage.
Social structure of the Dinka For the social structure of the Dinka
The Dinka, a human group whose number is estimated at about three million people, is the largest ethnic group in Sudan, which includes about five hundred other ethnic groups. The Dinka are descendants of the Nilotic, sharing this with the Nuer and Shilluk. Geographically, they extend north of the directorates of the southern region (Bahr al-Ghazal - Upper Nile) all the way to South Kordofan (around the course of the Nile), where their contact with the Baggara tribes begins. On a known area of this area (Abyei), one of the Dinka tribes (Njok) meets one of the Baggara tribes (Al-Hamr).
The Dinka forms part of a broader ethnic and cultural complex, which is known as the Luo-speaking group of peoples extending into the regions of East Africa, with a distinct physical similarity with the Maasai (Kenya), the Tutsis (Rwanda-Burundi), and even with some human groups that extend west of the continent as far as Mali and Senegal (tall height, dark skin, and non-Negro features).
The most important areas of the Dinka are the Ngok, Abuk, Adut, Ban Aruthem Al-Bor, and Al-Nuik Malual, where everyone moves to graze between South Kordofan, the Bahr el-Ghazal region, and the Upper Nile until Bor (the Jonglei Canal Project area). Thus, we are facing a social complex that does not confine us to these isolated tribal frameworks that anthropologists talk about and call the reality of fragmentation in Africa. Rather, we are facing a part of a whole that makes the African reality a complex social fabric that extends over vast areas of the continent, which requires a more comprehensive sociological view of the meaning of the African university.
The works of Francis Deng represent a contribution to this trend by emphasizing the noticeable similarity between the social structure of the Dinka and other social components of the Sudanese people. There is also a clear similarity between the Dinka and the Nilotic groups that can be compared to the similarity between the spiritual legacies of the Dinka and the religious heritage in particular of the peoples of the Middle East. By meeting this complex on the land of Sudan, providing sufficient factors to build the Sudanese nation, this necessarily leads us to not severing the duality of cultural or even ethnic composition between northern and southern Sudan. Then between the West and Africans.
By entering into the logic of cultural circles in his writings, Francis opens the door wide. As for the various studies in this regard, he, for his part, is limited to studying the system of values and beliefs only - by virtue of his standing on the methods of the functional school - in order to prove his great statement.
Although Francis Deng does not make much of a connection between the social and economic structure of the Dinka in order to observe the effect of this in formulating internal structure relations and the relationship with the outside world, such connections appear indirectly in many of the phenomena that he addresses. The land on which they settled is “the best place in the world, even its center,” and the fact that their local economy is based on cow herding makes the ownership of herds the focus of evaluating the social position in the tribe, and even the focus of aesthetic and literary formulations about cows. Its colors are endless. “The market” is the center of dealing and exchange, both social and economic, between clans and at the same time guarantees individual independence. Exogami marriage (from outside the clan) is another occasion for the exchange and movement of wealth, and migration is an opportunity for wage labor that is not provided by the limited social reality of the tribe.
While the Dinka are characterized by a spirit of racial self-centeredness, this does not mean strong feelings of unity within them because in reality they perpetuate the manifestations of internal fragmentation in a noticeable way that makes unity come about from non-unity, and it also makes them always vulnerable to manifestations of discord and conflict.
In this structure, leadership becomes a great source of unification, while the family and even the individual become the unit of society. Indeed, within the framework of the family, the capable man becomes the foundation of the social and economic structure, and the position of women withdraws to the point of subordination. With the interest in reproduction and reproduction, continuity is confirmed through men, not women, because the male aristocrats are the ones who provide the tribe with leaders and guarantee immortality in the face of annihilation - and here the aesthetics of the Dinkawi man’s body emerge. In this context, a number of defensive values arise, such as sentimentality and mutual respect that reaches the point of idealism, which is what the Dinka call “denge” in relation to the special framework of relationships that go beyond wealth to estimation of the oldest in age or estimation according to gender (men - the Sieng).
This does not prevent the existence of negative values such as aggression, violence, “cow complexes,” or boasting about one’s ownership...although that does not lead to disturbing the social balance that is protected, in Francis’ opinion, by a well-known tendency among the Dinka toward “conservatism” or resistance to change. But Francis does not believe that this last characteristic has a “static” stability. The Dinka accepted Islam and Christianity, and migration spread among them in search of work in the geographical north, even though this is condemned within the framework of the tribe’s values. The Dinka even respected the authority of modern governments and took democratic forms as a gateway to their acceptance of modernization.
Rather, their ability to change included their social composition itself, while the former beliefs hold that a foreigner cannot be a Dinka and that the latter cannot integrate outside the Dinka, “even if they kidnap him and cut him into pieces, because the Dinka soul cannot be captured.” Despite this, Francis records on the authority of some chiefs how the Arabs integrated into the Dinka, that mutual captivity occurred on both sides and eventually led to intermarriage between them on a remarkable scale, and that the story of the marriage of Muhammad (the Arab) and Thelma (the Dinka) finds currency in Dinka folklore...etc. Which proves the influence of new factors on the openness of the Dinkawi social structure. Here, Francis points out that it was the period of British rule that worked to strengthen conservatism and isolationism among the Dinka to the extent that made the traditional leaders see this as an advantage for the British, while the younger generations set out outside this siege process to open up to other human groups throughout the Sudanese homeland. With the exception of the interests of the “educated elite” of youth in the direction of isolation, the broader base, in Francis’ opinion, tends to move “outward,” which constitutes a prominent element in the friction movement. Cultural, social and economic influence on building one large society.
Francis Deng gives the cultural structure priority in understanding the social structure of the Dinka, and thus the world of religious beliefs and perceptions or “mythology and philosophy” of the Dinka occupies a prominent place in explaining many phenomena in the field of cultural or social contact between the Dinka and others. Francis devotes the bulk of the book "Two Africans and Two Worlds" to presenting the Dinka's perceptions about the creation of the world, life, and man, and the migration of the Dinka to their current region, in order to study through this the similarities and overlap between this culture and other cultures, especially the culture of the "Middle Eastern countries" and their heavenly religions. He suggests that this similarity is not due to direct contact, but rather to a similarity in structure that ultimately denies the duality of the cultural structure within Sudan or between Arabs and Africans.
About the creation of the world
The Dinka believe that the greatest God - Dieng, is the one who created the world and things and is the one who also destroys them, since the world is annihilating. Therefore, religion for the Dinka emphasizes the moral content or its opposite, a source of forgiveness or deprivation. In both issues, in Dinka mythology and philosophy, kinship lies with the universal characteristic of the Middle Eastern religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Therefore, it is easy for one to explain the close connection that occurred between the Dinka and the missions that reached them. Francis believes that the roots of this The connection is deeper than just the historical connection that occurred recently.
The Nilotic religions were not just for the sake of human happiness in living society, but in reality they establish a spiritual relationship with an underworld, a world that is relatively mysterious and not completely similar to the world of heaven and hell known in Christianity and Islam. For them, immortality is achieved in this world through the continuity of the human name in his male children. Therefore, one of their prominent values is increasing births, which is the main duty of women. The Dinka believe in one God, and even in unity in God, although they also believe in a hierarchy of deities and their diversity, for good or evil or according to the clan, and they are united in the end in the greatest God. Some of them call the defilement a god, even though it is a spirit of deification of God, and some of them even unite the defilement with the greatest God.
Al-Ding created the first human from clay, and in other accounts specifically from clay, and when the human complained to God about his loneliness, the God took his rib and created the woman from it. This person tried to reach the sky in the same way as the legend of the tower in the Middle East tells. The Dinka narrates that after God created the world, things, and trees, he forbade the first man and the woman to eat the sacred tree, but under the temptation of the snake, the woman broke her promise to the god, and then her husband followed her to share the same fate, so the three of them met his punishment, as the god threatened them with an unhappy life, and made them crawl. Then he gave the man farming tools and threatened the woman that her children would kill her, and he created her heart small, so it is easy to change. Then the Dinka heritage goes on to tell a lot about the status of women as wives and mothers at a lower level than men, to the extent that family members do not use the title of mother, for example, but rather call her by her name as evidence of disrespect, while men are unique in that.
After that, God created all people and gave each his own language and way, but they are all interconnected. However, the Dinka are distinguished from others, and so are their cows. Despite this distinction, one of them narrates, “Africans and Two Worlds, p. 72,” that the Dinka and the Arabs came from one source in creation, but when they left the “pen of creation,” each of them had his own cow, just as the Dinka had their spotted bull. The Dinka gives great importance to interpreting the role of the leader or commander in a mythological manner, and there are many interpretations about this, just as there are many about the problem of creating the world itself. The Juk among the Dinka is the leader, compared to the Ngok - the people. God gave the spear to the Jok, the founding father, who then led the people and made the spear for all blacks in the world. Then there are many stories about the Dinka’s leadership of the entire world thanks to the leadership of the founding man, the father of the tribe and the representative of God. When this leader wanted to cross the sea with the Dinka, and people threatened them with death and extinction, the leader offered his daughter as a ransom to “the people of the sea” so that they would let the Dinka cross after he parted the sea for them. From this fertile Dinka mythology, Francis concludes the striking similarity between these narratives and the stories of the Bible and the Qur’an: the narratives about God creating man from clay and woman from his rib, how the serpent deceived the woman and God’s punishment of them, the holy leader who parted the sea for his people to cross, and the birth of a prophet without a father and his miracles by speaking as a child and then his message to the people. Francis Deng conveys the opinions of Evans-Pritchard and others who share his opinion in this similarity, and addresses the issue of the possibility of being influenced by The Dinka in the period following the arrival of the missionaries, but it confirms the transmission of this heritage from the elderly from their ancestors for periods that long preceded this modern contact with the missionaries.
Francis Deng believes that the Dinka narratives about their ancient homeland and then their migration to the current homeland, which they cherish with legendary pride, also explain a lot about the Dinka’s foreign relations, although anthropologists did not care about this subject because it was introduced - in their emancipation - into the science of history, and historians did not care about it because the available material is only oral history and not written history.
Francis's oral recordings indicate that the prevailing general belief is that the Dinka came from the "east", referring to the sun and life, and one of them even stated to him that they did not come from the "front" (ie the battle front in the south). The narratives begin to multiply with different connotations regarding our topic. There is a narrative about their coming from Sinar, the Zarqa Sultanate, and another narrative about the Dinka coming from Shendi, north of Khartoum, where their first creation and emergence from the water took place... into social life... because the first creation was prior to that among the Dinka.
Francis Deng interprets these accounts of the Dinka coming from afar to their headquarters as a depiction of their quest for pasture, and that the Dinka have now settled in the “best place” as part of their pride in their land. In my opinion, despite the importance of this interpretation in the economic field, it has another very important significance, which is the indication of the direction of the Dinka’s migration from different regions in Sudan to their headquarters, even though they belong to the Nilotic family extending to East Africa, which makes the folklore material about beliefs and perceptions more significant than traditional anthropological interpretations of the classification of races and their origins.
In his various writings, Francis rejects the principle of dualistic cultural structure based on Arabism and Negroism, or the North versus the South in Sudan, as he confirms the spread of Arab and Negro cultural elements among all the so-called Nilotic and Semites, or Arabs and Negroes in the north and south. On this basis, his social approach begins to address the issue of autism in Sudan. This approach thus leads him to investigate mutual influences or intertwined relationships whenever possible during the study of the social structure of the Dinka, especially in the field of belief and perceptions. Based on the fact that the Beja, Nubia, and Fur in the north have a clear Negro character, ethnologists also point to Hamitic and even Caucasian elements in many areas in the south, and just as the Negro tribes sometimes live Arab traditions and organizations of society, there are, on the other hand, Arabs in the north who live a Negro heritage that is not hidden.
While his studies focus on the Dinka, Francis enumerates many aspects of the application of these ideas to their heritage. The Dinka accepted Christianity as well as Islam, and their masses represented the Arabic language (the language of communication - lingua franca), while English was only used by elite intellectuals. As for the Egyptians and Turks, they knew that the position of mayor and sheikh was similar to the ancient Pharaonic burial rituals and their Dinka counterparts. The procedures for decorating bull horns on ancient Egyptian walls were revealed, and the rituals of dealing with bull horns among the Dinka.
When the Mahdi revolution broke out in Sudan against Turkish and British colonialism, it was reflected in the Dinka’s representation of the concept of “Mahdi” in their religion, and the Mahdi became the son of the great spirit of heaven, Ding (Akok), to whom the Dinka prayed “and begged for him... sanctify the clan.” The Dinka, in turn, were influential as they were influenced, and since the study does not extend to following up on these influences on those around them on a large scale, the influence of the Arab tribes close to the Dinka can serve this observation. The Baggara, who pride themselves on their Arabism, clearly reflect such Negro influences in their dealings with women, the rhythms of the dance, the human relationship with the herd of cows, the vocabulary of the Dinka language, and other forms of influence by the Dinka behavior patterns and their culture.
Francis Deng addresses, with many significant details, a very vital issue in the relations between the Arabs and the various human groups on the African continent, whether Negroes, Nilotic, Hamites, etc. This is the issue of the facts of history on the one hand, and the process of history, popularly or officially, on the other hand. This issue often determines the nature of relationships or perceptions around them, which helps facilitate or strain them, according to the nature of the socialization, education, or media methods used.
History begins with the multiplicity of Dinka perceptions about “the creation of peoples” or “white, brown, and black” man, and about the relationships that popular perceptions establish between these peoples or the characteristics they attribute to any of them, until it reaches the bitter talk about the facts of mutual enslavement. The popular narrative of history according to Francis is of special significance, as it constitutes for him the source of constructing official history itself.
For him, the history of the Dinka goes from the stage before foreign “control” in its various forms, the stage of the dominance of friendly relations between the north and the south, to the stage of Turkish-Egyptian and then British domination, to the stage of independence and nation-building or national unity.
Regarding the early stage in particular, there are many oral narratives about God’s creation of the white, Arab, and Dinkawi human, and how the first human (the father) took care of the white man because the mother did not breastfeed him, while he left the Arab and Dinkawi with their mother. Another third narration separates the three children from each other, or makes the children only two, the Arab (brown) and the Dinkawi (black), and then specifies each of its characteristics.
Also at this stage, various conflicts occurred between the Dinka and the Nuer, “and they exchanged sabotage,” which provoked conflicts between the Arabs and the Dinka, as they “exchanged enslavement,” although that did not prevent the intermarrying of Arabs and Dinka, as there was also enslavement by the Dinka of other Negro tribes, or vice versa.
The Dinka heritage indicates that the Dinka adopted the Mahdist revolution as a revolution against oppression, but the Mahdiya quickly resorted to tyranny like the Turks and the Egyptians, “so the world was corrupted” by the corruption of the Turks and the Danakils in particular.
Perhaps these recent references to “mutual enslavement” between the Negro tribes, as happened between the Arabs and others, may relieve Arab researchers from the hardship of the defensive position in which they strain themselves to defend themselves against the attack directed by those with a one-sided historical approach. Such social analysis, the details of which can be referred to in the studies of Francis Deng, may also alert them to the importance of studying the nature of the stages that societies go through according to objective conditions during which phenomena and relationships are created.
Because the subject of this article is not to address the historical relations between human groups or Sudanese regions and the mutual negative and positive influences, which Francis Deng put a great effort into in the context of his treatment of the issue of “nation building” in Sudan, we will not continue with him in the modern stages with his talk about British colonialism and its effects in the south or the conditions of “isolationism” and then the battle to build unity after that. But we suffice with quoting his conclusion that it is not possible to sever the dual cultural or racial composition of Sudan (north and south), and therefore there is a strong basis for unity and nation-building. The problem remains that political history is what emphasized the elements of division and supported the feeling of mistrust and hostility (Africans and Two Worlds, p. 227). Thus, it seems that treating the social fabric of relations is an objective response to treating “political history” alone, even though each is a given of the other.
The truth is that Francis Deng, despite his attempt to adhere to the social approach to escape his problems with history, remained captive to it in many parts of his two books, such that he often appeared to be in the spirit of wanting a balance. He tried to overcome this situation and get out of the circle of history to meet with signs that I personally believe are limited and less than what Francis Deng’s approach promises, such as his mentioning of the sources of Arab and African trends by presenting scattered footnotes on the studies of Sudanese historians who faithfully served the proposed “equation” (Youssef Fadl, Muhammad Omar Bashir, Al-Muddathir Abdul Rahman, etc., and sometimes he resorted to the poetic contributions of Salah Ahmed Ibrahim to serve this spirit.
There is another addition to which Francis pointed out, which is that, despite his interest in local history and the conflicts of traditional political forces, which spread their negative impact on the African level as well, this did not make him ignore the impact of the rise of the African and Arab national liberation movement on the formation of a new awareness among the Sudanese in the north and south of the importance of building national unity - building the nation in Sudan, as the rising national tide in Africa after independence determined the character of the Sudanese citizen between Arabs and Africans.
Human evolution is a biocultural process