EARLY HISTORY
Flashpoint for Conflict
Encouraging Hostility
Rise of the Jallaba
Vivid Memories
"My Cousin Mohamed" - poem
Seasonal Migration
Dawn of Abolition
Darfur
BEFORE INDEPENDENCE - 1900-1956
Pacification & Closed Districts
"Sudanisation"
AFTER INDEPENDENCE - 1956-1989
1956-1989
The First Civil War
Abyei - A Premonition?
A Ngok Dinka Song
"Islamic" Law
Civil War re-ignites
The SPLA
Loss of Moral Authority
Uprising
The current inhabitants of Southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains and Ingessana Hills are the people whose forebears remained free. Their tribes and families have vivid folk memories of the slave-raiding "Arabs" which influence their relationship with the Northern Sudanese today.
The bloodlines of many present-day inhabitants of Northern Sudan, by contrast, are an intermingling of Arab and African genes, and many are the descendants of enslaved Africans.
POEM - My Cousin
Mohamed
- from The Myth of Freedom and other poems, by Sirr
Anai Kelueijang (see also This Sudan!)
You, Mohamed, and I, are not brothers.
You're the son of my aunt - You're my cousin!
Long ago your Arab father came,
with the Holy Koran and his traditional ways,
But without a mistress for his wife!You, cousin Mohamed in the Northern Sudan,
are an offspring of my slave-aunt
who in her wretchedness stooped to conquer
- by blood-strength -
a reality as large as the Imatong Mountains!You are no longer a pure Arab like your father.
You are the hybrid of Africa
The generous product
of many years of bloody war
on the African land
Your African Motherland!My cousin Mohamed
says he knows everything
because he is educated.When I sing songs
about Freedom, Justice and Equality,
My cousin gets angry and shouts at me:"You Abid!
You also want to be free,
and be equal to me!"
