The
Scramble for Arab Genealogies
With the weakening of the Christian kingdoms, between the 14th and
16th centuries, new Islamic and Arabized kinglets began appearing
and eventually succeeded in replacing the old regime [Yusuf Fadl,
1973; Shibeika, 1991]. The first was the Kunuz (Bani al-Kanz) kingdom
around Asuan area in present-day Egyptian Nubia, to be followed
a little later by the Rabi?a-Beja Islamic kinglet of Hajar. In the
late 15th century the Islamic kinglet of Tegali (Togole) in the
Nuba Mountains came into existence. A century later the Ottoman
Sultan Selim the Second made a thrust deep in Nubia in the aftermath
of which appeared the Northern Nubian Islamic kinglets of the Kushshaf,
Mah$as, and Argo. Two centuries later the Fur kingdom of Keira was
established upon the fall of the Tunjur kinglet. But the most important
was the Funj Sultanate which came into existence in the early 16th
century and which succeeded in spreading its influence over most
of these kinglets. In fact the unification of such kinglets along
with many other tribal shaykhdoms is what has constituted the State
in ancient and present-day Sudan.
The Funj Sultanate came into existence with slavery looming in the
background and with the black colour fully stigmatized by being
synonymous to ‘slave’. By the turn of the 15th century,
Soba, the capital of the last Christian kingdom of Allodia, fell
at the hands of the Arabized Nubians (known in Sudan as the Arabs)
led by ?Abdu Allah Jamma? al-Girenati (‘Jamma?’, an
adjective literally meaning the ‘gatherer’ for unifying
the divided Arabs (?Arab al-Gawasma); ‘Girenati’, a
diminutive adjective literally meaning ‘of the horns’
in reference to the royal horned headgear as was the case in the
Christian Kingdoms). Immediately after the fall of Soba, a black
African people called the Funj appeared led by ?Amara Dungus. He
achieved a treaty with the Arabs after defeating them following
which the Funj Sultanate was established. As the founders were mostly
blacks, it was also called “al-Salt,ana al-Zarqa’”,
i.e. the ‘Black Sultanate’. As it came in response to
the growing influence of the Islamo-Arabized Sudanese it explicitly
showed an Arab and Islamic orientation. The new formations of Arabized
tribes began claiming Arab descent supported with traditionally
authenticated genealogies. The transformation from African identity
to Arab identity is reflected in the ideological cliché of
dropping the ‘matrilineal system’, where descent through
the mother’s lineage is only recognized, and adopting the
‘patrilineal system’, where descent through the father’s
lineage is only considered. The small family units compensated for
their vulnerability by claiming the noble ‘sharif’ descent,
i.e. descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Eventually they would be enabled
by this claimed descent to appropriate both wealth and power, something
the immediate descendants were not ordained to have while Prophet
Muhammad was still alive. To be on an equal footing with these tribes
in matters pertaining to power and authority, the black Funj also
claimed an Umayyad descent. Scholars in Arabic and Islamic sciences
from other parts of the Islamic world were encouraged to settle
in the Sudan.
The Paradox of the Black Arab who is Anti-Black
Thenceforward the Arabized Africans of middle Sudan will
pose as non-black Arabs. Intermarriage with light-skinned people
would be consciously sought as a process of cleansing blood from
blackness. A long process of identity change has begun; in order
to have access to power and to be at least accepted as free humans,
African people tended to drop both their identities and languages
and replace them with Arabic language and Arab identity. The first
step in playing that game is to overtly deplore the blacks and
dub them as slaves while being themselves black. A new ideological
awareness of race and colour came into being. The shades of the
colour of blackness were perceived as authentic racial differentiations
[cf. Deng, 1995]. A Sudanese-bound criterion for racial colour
was formed by which the light black was seen as an Arab, wad ?Arab
and wad balad, i.e. white or at least non-black. The jet-black
Sudanese was seen as an African, i.e. slave (?abd). The shades
of blackness go as follows, starting from jet-black (aswad), black
(azrag, literally blue), brownish-black (akhdar, literally green),
light-brownish (gamh%i, i.e. wheat-coloured), then dark-white,
which is considered as ‘properly’ white. This last
sub-category is paradoxically stigmatized more than the jet-black.
Then a host of derogatory terms was generated in the culture and
colloquial Arabic of Middle Sudan, which dehumanized the black
Africans, such as farikh, gargur, etc. In this context the properly
white or light-coloured, as mentioned above, are also discredited.
They are given the derogatory name of ‘h%alab’ i.e.
gypsy. A Sudanese Arab proverb says that ‘the slaves, i.e.
black people, are second class, but the h$alab are third class’.
Stigma vs. Prestigma
It is in these folk racial attitudes that the seeds of
a Sudanese ideology of Arab-oriented domination over Africans
was sown. It works through the mechanism of categorization, using:
(1) the stigma of slavery, which
condemns blackness and people of African identity to the margins
or bottom of society and the cultural hierarchy, forcing them
to dwell at the periphery of Sudanese national life, and
(2) the prestigma (coined by the
present writer from prestige to serve as a countering term to
stigma) of the so-called free, non-black and Arabs, to entrench
them in the power, affluence and influence centers of Sudan. This
racial ideology, in its drive to achieve self-actualization, underlines
a process of alienation and domination, creating a category of
black African people who do not recognize themselves as black
Africans. While posing to be whites, they do not hold proper white
people in high esteem. They tend savagely to dominate the Africans
by enslaving and stigmatizing them, and then they largely indulge
themselves in the process of arabization to be more like the Arabs
with whom they identify.
This ideology of alienation has prevailed for the last five centuries
up to the moment. It has been consolidated by successive political
regimes – whether under the Turco-Egyptian or Egyptian-British
or national rule. It finds its roots in the vice of slavery. No
wonder slavery was once again in full swing by the late 20th century
as a result of an extreme intensification of arabization, or the
process of prestigmatic Islamo-Arabism, by the State. By sublimating
the Arab as their model through this erroneous and confused concept
of race, the Arabized people of Sudan have made themselves permanent
second-class Arabs. The consequences of this do not only affect
them, but also their whole country, now split up between Arabism
and Africanism. It has never dawned on them that speaking a language
does not necessarily equate becoming of the nationality bearing
that language. In fact the so-called Arabs in Sudan comprise different
peoples with different cultures but one language: they are Arabophone.
The Sudanese people are Arabophone Africans just as there are
Francophone and Anglophone Africans.
A Belated Self-Discovery?
The weak fabric of this colour concept was torn into
tatters when Sudanese prestigma or arabization came in contact
with the Arabs Proper in the mid 1970s, when they worked as expatriates
in the rich petroleum countries of Arabia. There, at the historical
milieu of this racial bigotry, they were regarded as nothing more
than black Africans, i.e. slaves. It caused a turmoil that triggered
a slow process of self-discovery as a result of which the ideology
of domination was eventually weakened. By the mid 1990s the image
of the rebel leader of SPLM/SPLA, John Garang, who is a jet-black
African from Southern Sudan was much more acceptable to a great
number of the Arabized Sudanese as the real leader of the whole
movement of the political opposition to the Islamic regime of
Khartoum. The military weight of SPLM/SPLA would have never mattered
in making that acceptance possible if the ideology of domination
was still intact.
Centro-Marginalization
Although roughly situated in the middle of the country
if considered in terms of urbanization, the Sudanese economic
centre is neither restricted to geography nor to ethnicity. Rather
it is a centre with its own culture that comprises both power
and wealth. Making Islamo-Arabism its main ideology, the centre
poses as representing the interests of the Arabized people of
middle Sudan, a notion erroneously believed by many sectors. People
from the periphery are continually encouraged and tempted to join
the centre by renouncing their African cultures and languages,
in order to become Arabized. This complex process is made to look
like a natural cultural interaction that takes place out of the
necessity of leaving one’s home village and coming to live
in a town dominated by Arabs. The cultural relegation of the periphery
eventually ends up as developmental relegation. Within the Arabized
people of middle Sudan itself there are different circular castes.
As the centre is basically made up of Arabized Africans, an Arab
proper would not merit any prestige. This is how the purely Arab
tribe of Rashayda has become marginalized to the extent of taking
to arms against the centre. The Sudanese power centre is very
complex. In essence it is not only racial nor cultural nor geographical,
not merely about Islamic nor Arabic origins and associations,
but really about elitism, existing as an elitist centre of power
and wealth, which makes use of all available sectarian clichés
to determine and entrench status and privilege among the people
of Middle Sudan. Its depiction as Islamo-Arabist is merely a reference
to its core ideological bearing or leaning.
This centre of power and wealth does indeed processes itself through
the cultural agenda of Islam and Arabism. This ploy has lured
many with power and wealth to identify with Islam and Arabism,
and then implicating them in the oppression or subjugation of
those who remain black and African.. Usually the spearheads used
by the Centre to maintain its hierarchy of privileges and denials
are people who originally belong to the margin, but subsequently
chose with their own free will to alienate themselves from their
people in order to appropriate wealth and power. The Arabized
people of Sudan are in fact also victims of the country’s
racial processing though they are deluded to believe themselves
winners. This is because the basis of their imagined centralization
are embedded in the permanent marginalization of the Arabized
Sudanese by Arabs proper.
However, where the process of prestigmatization is cultural, the
process of stigmatization is racial. Swung upon this paradoxical
axis, the ideology of domination is characterized by high maneuverability.
If the charge is that some particular Sudanese people are anti-African
or pro-Arab, the case of the Rashayda and other pastoral nomads
such as the Baggara can be brought forward. On the other hand
the evidence of anti-Arab prejudice in the Sudanese centre can
present a sufficiently strong counterweight to the more prevalent
accusations of anti African oppression. For five centuries, this
confused and confusing game, which is based on deception and alienation,
has been played. It has had its indigenous contributory factors
as well as its foreign factors, such as the Turco-Egyptian rule
and British-Egyptian colonial rule.
The “Melting Pot” Perspective
There remains the opportunity for a discourse on unity.
As different ethnic groups from the periphery are being culturally
reproduced in the centre, the mesh of these is being hailed as
the real Sudan. Hence we now have the concept of the “Melting
Pot” as the basis of discourses on national unity. The process
of a centred assimilation of cultural and racial differences at
the periphery seems to be gaining approval, but being based originally
on the processes of stigmatization vs. prestigmatization it will
always fall short of achieving integral unity right at the moment
when the assimilation is deemed complete. The jet-blacks of Sudan
who have been completely assimilated in the Islamo-Arab culture
and religion are not only being racially discriminated against,
but are still stuck with the stigma of slavery and consequently
being dehumanized. This is so because the whole process is built
on contradiction and paradox. Where the process of prestigma would
draw the people toward Islam and a pro-Arab culture, the process
of stigmatization continues to dismiss them on racial grounds.
One can acquire a new culture in a relatively short time, but
one can hardly change skin colour. So, blackness is always taken
as a stigmatic clue to slavery. It is very usual to hear a dark-skinned
Sudanese assuring others that there are also family members who
are light-skinned.
The Degree of Stigma
The more black and African you are, then, the more stigmatized
you become. Essential African features become part of this process
of stigmatization – thick lips, broad nose, and fuzzy short
hair. Other factors are blackness of colour, having an African
language, and, lastly, being a non-Muslim. The most stigmatized
are those who combine the three factors of physical features,
cultural traits and a non-Islamic religious faith, like the majority
of Southerners. The Africans of Nuba Mountains and Ingassana come
immediately after the Southerners. Then come the peoples of Western
Sudan regardless of their different tribal affiliations, and of
whom the most stigmatized people are those who are originally
from either Central or Western Bilad al-Sudan, like the Fulani
and Hausa etc. Then comes the Beja people of Eastern Sudan who,
although light-skinned, have their own non-Arabic language and
are very poorly educated and can hardly speak either standard
or colloquial Arabic fluently, and they are Bedouins, leading
a life that is - according to the unjust evaluation of the center
- very backward at its best. Higher up in the process than the
Beja are the Nubians in Northern Sudan who are the least stigmatized
for one main reason. These people of Middle Sudan, generally speaking,
are nothing but Arabized Nubians, with some survival of Christian
customs still manifested in their cultures. Nothing is wrong with
the Nubians of the North except their twisted tongue, that is,
their language, which clearly betrays their African origin. In
fact all the people under the stigma have their non-Arabic languages,
or rut$ana, their ‘vernacular’ (an equally infamous,
colonial derogatory term). In Arabic the word rut$ana means the
language of the birds, and this indicates just how far Arab dehumanization
of the Sudanese people has gone. Some people of the Mahas of middle
Sudan, who are the last of the Nubians to be completely Arabized,
now vehemently deny to have ever been of any rut$ana. They claim
to be of Aws and Khazraj, two antagonistically neighbouring tribes
in ancient Arabia. The fact is that only 100 years ago Maha elders
used to speak an African tongue, a rut$ana.
