zyta17
08.02.05, 18:40
INVISIBLE AFRICAN: Sudan: Land of the Blacks
A member of the so-called “Janjaweed” (in camouflage) walking through a
community of supposedly “non-Black” Arabs in Gineina, in the Darfur region of
western Sudan.
Salah Ahmed
When I saw the lights in my rearview mirror, I knew we were screwed. On the
radio, a commercial blared, “There’s more than corn in Indiana.”
The radio wasn’t lying. Indiana also had the Ku Klux Klan, and on our way to
Indianapolis, my brother and I were taking the scenic route through
Martinsville — KKK country.
“Where ya’ll goin’?” the thick-accented, pork-bellied cop asked us, pointing
a flashlight at my face. Fields of corn rustled around us.
“Indianapolis,” I replied. “Okey-doke,” he said in his corn-fed drawl, “So
where y’all from?”
I figured we were screwed anyway. “Sudan,” I confessed. “Sudan?” he asked,
scratching his head in bewilderment. “Ain’t that over by Muncie?” I seized
what I saw as my only chance: “Yup.” “Well, s***!” The cop’s eyes lit
up. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? How’s their basketball team
doin’ these days?”
Officer Billy Bob wasn’t alone. Almost anytime I would tell anyone I was from
Sudan on my father’s side, the reaction would be similar: a confused look,
followed by a stupid one after I revealed Sudan was only the largest country
in Africa.
Americans would usually have less trouble with my mom’s side, especially in
Indiana, where I spent part of my childhood: “Poland — ain’t that over there
by McCormicks Creek State Park?”
Today, Sudan is all over the news, and with good reason. Thousands have been
killed in the west of the country, where the Sudanese government is said to
be complicit in the violence waged by so-called “Arab Janjaweed” against so-
called “Black Africans.”
But who are the Janjaweed?
“The rebels spread the word Janjaweed as if it were an organization,” Musa
Hilal, an alleged Janjaweed leader, told UK’s Guardian newspaper
recently. “As a political group, there is no specific concept called
Janjaweed . . . It means nothing, but has been used to mean everything.”
What’s happening in Sudan is as horrible as it sounds. The photos taken by
the BBC, The New York Times and other news organizations don’t lie. But the
violence isn’t between Africans and Arabs, as many reports suggest, but
between Africans and Africans.
Sudan is a Black country, and references to “Arabs” and “Black Africans” by
Darfur refugees are both new — and imported. Some Sudanese identify more
closely with Arab culture than others, but that isn’t to say there is a Black-
white component to the violence, as many news reports strongly suggest.
The sudden interest in Sudan, where a separate, decades-old civil war in the
south has claimed more than 2 million lives without the world lifting a
finger, is religion — particularly the effort by foreign-based Christian
organizations to do what they like to do best around the world: proselytize.
Groups like these have been trying to convert Sudanese to Christianity for
years, both from Islam and various animist traditions. These groups have an
advantage in reducing Sudan, truly a melting pot, to “Arabs” and “Africans”
because, understandably, it makes their job a lot easier.
Their efforts may explain why Darfur refugees and rebel soldiers have taken
to using the same terms when the press come calling. In the meantime, the
issue of why the violence is happening gets clouded.
The western part of Sudan is occupied by various tribes, almost all of them
Muslim.
Desertification has made already scarce natural resources even scarcer. That
recently prompted rebel groups in the region to take up arms against the
government, to get it to pay more attention to Darfur.
If news reports are correct, the government responded predictably — with
force, only it used local people to do it. It wasn’t anything new; the
government has pitted one group against another for years, wherever it needed
to squelch popular dissent.
“The labels Arab and African are rather misleading, given the complexity of
the region’s ethnic history,” Brendan I. Koerner wrote recently in Slate
Magazine, in a rare, but telling, instance of journalistic integrity.
In Sudan, people are dying in violence caused as much by poverty as by
politics. Growing up, I lived in the north of the country, in Omdurman, often
described as a suburb of Khartoum, the capital. We were supposed to be the so-
called economic middle-class, yet even our house was made of a combination of
mud, straw and cow dung.
The unmistable thing, however, is that the people I grew up around — on the
streets, in the market place, at weddings — were all Black. We spoke
different languages, prayed differently and practiced different traditions.
Being half-white, I stuck out like a light bulb, but we were all, simply,
Sudanese. That is why the conflict in Darfur isn’t about race.
For the Sudanese government the conflict is about money and power; for
foreign Christian organizations, it is about winning the hearts and minds of
more and more converts.
Meanwhile, the poverty afflicting all of Africa has hit Sudan upside the
head. And while the international community gets whipped up about a conflict
that has been boiled down to easy, inaccurate terms, the Black people of
Sudan, Africa’s largest country — far away from Muncie, Indiana — continue to
die.
