War and Slavery in Sudan

Abstract

Slavery has been endemic in Sudan for thousands of years. Today Sudanese slave trade persists as a complex network of buyers, sellers, and middlemen that operates most actively when times are favorable to practice. As Jok Madut Jok argues, present day is one such time, as Sudanese civil war that resumed in 1983 rages on between Arab north and black south. Permitted and even encouraged by Arab-dominated Khartoum government, state military has captured countless women and children from south and sold them into slavery in north to become concubines, domestic servants, farm laborers, or even soldiers trained to fight against their own people. Also instigated by Khartoum government, Arab herding groups routinely take and sell Nilotic peoples of Dinka and Nuer. Jok emphasizes that contemporary practice of slavery in Sudan is not result of two decades of civil war, as conventional wisdom in media would have one believe. Instead he revisits historic hostilities between Islamic world to north and, to south, Black African peoples, many of whom are Christian converts. For Arab traders the nation of blacks, or Bilad Al-Sudan, has traditionally been source of slaves. When slave trade developed into corporate enterprise in nineteenth century, slave-takers articulated distinctions based on race, ethnicity, and religion that marked black, infidel southerners as indisputably inferior and therefore natural slaves. Such distinctions have survived for decades and have fueled various forms of oppression of black south, even during those periods when slavery has not been authorized by government. When it is authorized, as it is today, slavery then becomes extreme form of this systemic oppression. War and Slavery in Sudan exposes enslavement of black peoples in Sudan which has been exacerbated, if not caused, by circumstance of war. As a black southerner and a member of Dinka, a group targeted by Arab slave traders, Jok brings an insider's perspective to this highly volatile subject matter. He describes various methods of capture, explores heinous experience of captivity, and examines efforts of slaves to escape. Jok also assesses efforts of Dinka communities to locate and redeem, or buy back, slaves through middlemen, a strategy that has been supported by Western antislavery groups and church-based humanitarian agencies but has also been subject of great moral debate. Throughout book, Jok stresses that search for settlement of north-south conflict must be made in conjunction with a campaign to end slavery. He challenges international community to move beyond diplomatic measures to take more coordinated action against slave trade and bring liberation to people of Sudan.