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http://allafrica.com/southsudan/> South Sudan: A Civil Society Deferred -
We - the 'Sudanese' - Have Not Been Liberated Yet
Abdullahi Gallab
24 November 2011
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Analysis
On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became the world's newest state. If "all dates
are conventional" as Burno Latour says, 2011 and 1821 (the date of the
'creation' of Sudan under Egyptian rule,) are "a little less so than some."
The creation of this new state will have an impact not just within the
remaining part of the Sudan, East, West, Central and the Horn of Africa--as
South Sudan forges new relationships with its regional neighbors--but also
for the wider international community. The Sudan, the largest country in
Africa and formerly in the Middle East, remained broadly within its pre-July
2011 borders and human composition since 1821. And, the Sudanese as a nation
or historic people, have existed within imagined borders and real complex
past experiences for a far longer time than that.
The Sudanese human experience--before the founding of the Sudan as a
geographical and human space--has transformed into a series of complex
developments and different forms of interrelationships. The different modes
and systems of development, and their environments, have created the
Sudanese as a people. Significant human experiences have moulded and shaped
the Sudanese mutual encounter with time and place, have acted together and
separately to internally and externally provoke violence, allowing for
systems of domination of nature and over each other, means of production of
and modes of regulation. There is more to the Sudanese experience in its
complexity than meets the eye.
From the creation of the Sudan in 1821 the Sudanese saw their lifeworld
colonized, civil experience constrained, and evolution of their society
deferred. The declaration issued on July 9, 2011, splitting North and South
Sudan, occurred as a result of the Islamist regime's attempt to exercise a
tighter grip over the Sudanese lifeworld. They have split Sudan into two
states, and turned the rest of the country into hot or cold battle grounds
between the regime and other Sudanese groups. Are we now ready to look back
into this long and complex human experience and ask how the Sudanese civil
society has been deferred and ask the most serious question are we--the
Sudanese people--been liberated yet?
Liberation comes in many different ways, yet here it would be qualified not
only from totalitarian rule itself, but alsofrom two distinctive practices
which must be well-defined if they are to become germane. This is the
liberation from a myriad series of contrivances and mentalities of
'totalist' politics, ideologies and systems; and from the devices-the
state-created to give effect to such rule.
Every now and then we have been reminded of what most Sudanese people and
observers describe as the "Sudanese dilemma." Alexis de Tocqueville would
have explained the "Sudanese dilemma" as a reflection of the sharp
contradictions between, on the one hand, the spontaneous vitality of the
Sudanese social life -- the tendency to create associations that lies at the
heart of civil society--and, on the other hand, the different forms of
violence that the Sudanese have historically experienced. There can be no
doubting that ripping of the country into two republics is an outcome of a
crisis the Sudan has been undergoing for a considerable period of time. It
is almost equally clear that this crisis is serious enough to threaten the
country with fragmentation. But, similar as to with other serious
situations, the diagnosis of the Sudanese condition and its consequences is
at the heart of an Sudanese and non-Sudanese academicians' inquiry and of
intellectuals' and knowledge workers' ijtihad.
In our search for an explanation, we have to consider the accumulative and
singular role the central state has played in the Sudanese life since 1821.
From the time of the Ottoman Wali [viceroy] - Mohammed Ali's invasion of the
Sudan and the creation of a centralized state in 1821, to the current
totalitarian rule of the Islamists (1989-present). The state in its
different formations has delineated, focusing on (a) the charters of the
conventions of hidden and manifest structures of violence and (b) the
all-embracing and monopolizing power over all means of a brand authority by
which the conduct of the population is governed, disciplined and coerced.
The state emerged and continued to act as a vessel for extraction, a major
manufacturer of inequalities, racial engineering and social stratification
on a grandiose scale. Its public and heavy hand has always been a silhouette
in the shadows and a hound in the light of these developments.
Stated more precisely, the state within its different formations and
designations through time, became a secular Tertullian theology: "I believe
it because it is absurd and I know it because it is impossible." Going
against that state or persuasion of any act of resistance to its tyrannical
grip would most likely be considered as heresy that should be dealt with in
the most violent manner. The surge of peaceful or violent resistance to
state designs must always not only be criminalized but also be destroyed as
an enemy force. The state during the Turkiyya period (1821-1875), during the
Mahdiyya period (1875-1898), under British colonial rule (1898-1956) and
under every form of military rule (1958-1964 and 1969-1985) continued to be
the central focus of all these forms of conduct from the center that grew
and intensified through time.
Within its rhizome-like nature, the state is based upon a system originally
established by colonizing powers and military rule. The two types of
Colonialism the Sudan experienced - al-Turkiyya al-Sabiqa (1821-1875) and
al-Turkiyya al-lahiqa (1898-1956) as the Sudanese describe them -
constituted a continuum of historical events that shared guiding
differentialist ideologies. Each operated within its own historical and
material circumstances. Together they contributed to the construction of the
conditions that deeply affected the creation of the country's center and its
margins. Al-Turkiyya al-Sabiqa established the boundaries of what would
become the contemporary state of the Sudan. Khartoum was built as a new
capital in 1830 and, around it and firmly connected to it; the center grew
faster than other parts of the country.
It was the Turko-Egyptian colonial regime that first mapped the confines of
Sudanese peoplehood. According to these confines, the southern part of the
country was ruled as an "open district" where slavery became a function of
the state. Simultaneously, the northern part of the country was ruled as a
"closed district" for heavy taxation. That regime came to an end, Khartoum
was destroyed and Major-General Charles Gordon, Governor General of the
Sudan, was killed when the army of the Mahdist revolution stormed the city
in 1885. For a majority of Sudanese, the end of the Turkiyya with the
Mahdist revolution was the core of a political and religious culture of
resistance that was supposed to curate the inner soul of the people who
were, in contrast, opposed to all forms of colonialism. Khartoum symbolized,
to the British crusader's mind and their collective memory, a Golgotha of
sorts, and its ruined palace represented Gordon's crucifix. So, their second
coming was characterized with vengeance and the masses of Sudanese who were
'saved from death' by Kitchener's oppression had fallen back into
exploitation and marginalization.
The residue of that abuse and oppression, exercised by the two colonial
states, piled up in the collective memory and the popular consciousness that
shaped individual and group worldviews. All versions of violence experienced
by that state against the Sudanese continued to have their distant
historical resonance. Yet the nature and intensity of each form of violence,
together with the territorial differentiation that emerged out of that
experience, planted and maintained something that has reached beyond
generalities and generations. Most importantly, that experience - which
entailed certain racist postures as auto-referential impulses that lead to
the construction of different, real and imagined communities and districts
that could be colonized and opened up to different systems of subjugation -
were also subjected or "closed" to another form of subjugation as during the
British colonial period. That situation produced what I would call a form of
homo-referential impulse.
A homo-referential impulse and its different forms of prejudice emerges when
that particular practice of auto-referential racism nominates some of those
who were subjected to prejudice and colonization and they begin to see
themselves as different from other groups within their same human milieu.
Colourism, which is typically characterized in the Sudanese case by how dark
one's skin colour is, is one aspect of that impulse. Khudra dogaga - that
is, fine black skin color in comparison to coarse blackness - as an example,
makes colourism a moral predicament as the first would maintain the greatest
social distance from the second. Moreover, the psychological fixation
surrounding colourism, as a way of thinking and acting for the creation of
social distance, has made of that homo-deferential impulse the "last taboo"
among the Sudanese, who have discriminated against one another for decades.
Because it has long been considered unmentionable, it has always been denied
and never mentioned within the national discourse.
The focus of such a differentiation, which ranks groups and individuals in
terms of specific and sometimes imagined phenotypic characteristics and
attributes, reflects a subtle way of social positioning of those particular
and comparable groups and individuals, riverians or shamaliyyin (from
Northern Sudan), garaba (Western Sudanese), Nuba (from the Nuba mountains
region), Ghanobiyyin (from South Sudan) and halab (from Turkish, Egyptian or
Levant origin). Like other types of prejudice, homo-referential impulses and
its consequential production of the social zoning of the other, which can be
traced back to the time and auto-differential racism of the Turkiyya
colonial experience, are historically and culturally rooted, socially
learned and self-regulating in response to different or new conditions,
confrontations or structural situations. A tremendous progressive trend in
this respect was clear during the Mahdiyya period toward al-Khalifa
Abdullahi and those who were called alwalad al-Gharib of Western Sudan.
Remnants of that period's expressive culture are still alive. It has been
even clearer in the attitudes of some of the ruling groups of the Islamists
towards the Darfurian members of the party and South Sudanese citizens who
were not members of the party.
The above attitude reflected itself in three aggregates of identity
management. The first reflects itself in the social status, aptitude, ethnic
relations and attitudes that qualify or disqualify individuals and groups
from (or for) certain rewards. These groups within their distinctive
regional and ethnic characteristics and backgrounds came to be housed in a
collective imagined stratum within the changing Islamist structure as a less
worthy class. The enormity of the feelings of that group and the
consequences of such actions added to the grievances of the Darfurians
towards the state and their fellow Islamists and served only to further
their call to arms against the regime. The status inconsistency between
those Darfurians' achieved and ascribed status located them in "a place of
involuntary exile." Daud Bolad's ill-fated dissention and Khalil Ibrahim's
bitter fight against the regime stand as a prime example of the effects of
this development. [See the First Islamist Republic: Development and
Disintegration of Islamism in the Sudan]
The second - the homo-referential attitude toward the South as a peoplehood
and the Nuba of the southern region of Kurdofan, who are all Sudanese
citizens in the first place and who include Muslims - nevertheless were
subjected to jihad instigated by the Islamist state and propagated by its
media. The third is the Islamists' homo-referential impulse's hidden
language highlighting certain tribes' superiority - organised and fashioned
within the daily conversations and jokes but which became the end-result of
notions and actions that rank these tribes according to position of power.
This conduct supports very specific forms of what is described by the
Sudanese as tribal domination and tribal damnation - as the Islamist state
continued to be the prime distributor of rewards and inequalities. The
promotion of the tribe among the Islamists represents a phenomenon which is
psychological rather than physical, exclusionary rather than inclusionary,
and to some extent an absurd tribal supremacist agenda in which the
association of the individuals to a group accentuates belonging to a
communality that binds together some of those competing groups within the
ranks of the Islamists.
All this leads to an even bigger issue: the colonizing of religion in
general and Islam in particular. The colonial state created in and of itself
a new religious entity via its monopoly and control over the Sudanese open
religious space. The state could deploy its authority strategically to
regulate, impose certain rules and roles and deny access to particular
religious fields and markets. The enforced social, political and religious
fragmentation turned different religious representations into appendages of
the state after making a distinction between "good" Islam, which would be
accommodated, and "bad" Islam, which should not be tolerated.
The policy of regulating orthodox Islam occurred while vigorously combating
what they called the heretical sects of Sufi Islam, which "cannot be allowed
to be re-established, as they generally formed centres of unorthodox
fanaticism." The promotion of that form of orthodox Islam as a state
religion and the later evolution of this policy - as reflected in the
government's integration of Islamic studies into the curriculum at Gordon
Memorial College and in the institutionalization of the orthodox "'ulam?'"
as the only interpreters of Islam, produced an uneasy and a continuing
ideological conflict between what was perceived as modern and official
Islam, which is perceived as orthodox, and that brand of Islam that is
described as traditional, backward looking and anti-modern, composed of
"heretical sects" namely, Sufis. As a consequence of that disposition, the
Sufi majority was relegated to a minority status in terms of stratification
of power, privilege and prestige. At the same time, such attitudes towards
other forms of Islam remained recurrent within the consequent developments
in the Sudanese political arena, and continues to play an important role in
the political theory and practice of different strands of Islamism,
community of the state and civilian and military regimes.
Not only was Islam regulated, but Christianity was as well. At the beginning
of the colonial British rule, some administrators opposed missionary work
for the protection of the primordial communities. As the colonized mosque
was organized, the church was amalgamated in and proliferated as one of the
departments of the state. As Francis Wingate, founder of the colonial state
in the Sudan and the its longest reigning Governor General until 1916,
claimed at the construction of the Khartoum Cathedral, it "would, more than
anything else, prove to the oriental mind the permanent nature of our
occupation."
The post-colonial state and its surrogate mother (the Sudanese community of
the state - the heir of the British community of the state) inherited all
that and added to it. The current regime, which is a strange mix between
Islamist totalitarianism and militarism, added to the colonization of
religion new and additional factors by declaring jihad against what they
labeled as the alliance of pagans and their supporting crusaders and
communists in the south of the country. Those who were tormented with such
aggressions were, in the first place, Sudanese citizens. The Islamist state
upgraded the capacity of the state apparatus of torture - which was
sponsored as a mode of "divine" conduct and practice - to deal with its
opponents in the northern part of the country.
The Sudan gained its independence from Britain in 1956, but the Sudanese
have not been liberated yet from the colonizing and after-colonization
effects of a state designed to carry out the duties of oppression,
production of racial difference and a major manufacturer of inequality.
Hence, this multi-faceted chain of events - the collective grievances, the
hierarchies of discontent that have been reflecting themselves for centuries
- is in its essence a quest for change. An opportunity availed itself for a
negotiated comprehensive peace agreement that would incorporate the
collective demands of the Sudanese for rebuilding their Sudanese nation,
state and a new socio-political order. Yet, "the chariot that leads to
[such] victory is of another kind."
The Sudanese of the Southern Sudan decided to liberate themselves from an
oppressive regime and a state that has a long track record of violence and
an uneven distribution of power and material resources that resulted in
inequalities--a state that only brought to the Sudanese people dictators and
misery.
Although the debate over the after effects of peril facing the Sudan as a
country stretches and sidesteps forward by the minute, one might say that,
although the Southern Sudanese have walked away from the regime and its
state, they have not walked away from the Sudanese fields of action. One
would agree with many that, when an understanding of the Sudanese
consciousness is able to influence their walk out of the current regime and
its oppressive state, a new and a trustworthy debate might become a starting
point to initiate and evoke the virtue of a new Sudan, bigger than what the
colonial borders mapped out in their day. Was there a missed opportunity?
Yes; but nonetheless, the wind of change is blowing all over the Middle East
and Africa. The street's chant for freedom - al-sha'b yurid isq?t al-niz?m
(The people want to bring down the regime) - could materialize into al-sha'b
yurid taqier al-niz?m (The people want to change the regime).
The Sudanese, who are experienced in leading successful uprisings and civil
disobedience movements against dictatorial rule (which they did in 1964 and
again in 1985), are certainly able to do it for a third time to finally
liberate themselves from the tyranny and totalitarianism of the inherited
state and its current and similar regimes. Then, perhaps, there would be a
new opportunity for building a new Sudan out of the Sudanese collective
order and its emerging good society. By that time, surely, the Sudanese
"habits of the heart" that ameliorated and molded the Sudanese character and
its deeper sense of civility (not the state or its regimes) would help them
examine themselves, create new political communities, produce a new social
contract and thus ultimately support and maintain conditions of democracy,
freedom, equality and human dignity. Then, the gentler side of the Sudanese
life, and the people's propensity for it, would, should and maybe will, as
Alexis de Tocqueville describes, "spontaneously [help create] the bonds of
friendship, trust and cooperation that lie at the heart of civil society."
The dominant impulse by that time, I would say, will be that a change for
the State of South Sudan will also be a change for the new Sudanese Sudan.
Let us keep our fingers crossed.
* Formerly a journalist, Abdullahi Gallab (PhD) teaches Islamic
studies in the African and African American studies and religious studies
department at Arizona State University. His major research areas include
current Islamist movements in Africa and the Middle East. His first book,
The First Islamist Republic: Development and Disintegration of Islamism in
the Sudan, was published in 2008
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Received on Thu Nov 24 2011 - 17:44:28 EST