Darfur Allegory

Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780226761725, 9780226761695
• eBook ISBN: 9780226761862
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Social Sciences

The Darfur conflict exploded in early 2003 when two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, struck national military installations in Darfur to send a hard-hitting message of resentment over the region's political and economic marginalization. The conflict devastated the region's economy, shredded its fragile social fabric, and drove millions of people from their homes. Darfur Allegory is a dispatch from the humanitarian crisis that explains the historical and ethnographic background to competing narratives that have informed international responses. At the heart of the book is Sudanese anthropologist Rogaia Abusharaf's critique of the pseudoscientific notions of race and ethnicity that posit divisions between "Arab" northerners and "African" Darfuris.
 
Elaborated in colonial times and enshrined in policy afterwards, such binary categories have been adopted by the media to explain the civil war in Darfur. The narratives that circulate internationally are thus highly fraught and cover over—to counterproductive effect—forms of Darfurian activism that have emerged in the conflict's wake. Darfur Allegory marries the analytical precision of a committed anthropologist with an insider's view of Sudanese politics at home and in the diaspora, laying bare the power of words to heal or perpetuate civil conflict.

1

Encountering Darfur and Its Troubles

Where Is the Field? Encountering Darfur

Three distinct memories of Darfur’s difficulties have helped to shape my interest in the ethnography of conflict and mediation and contributed to my view of fieldwork as an act of reciprocity. In retrospect, these scattered autobiographical experiences have significantly impacted my understanding of the anguish of the region, a crisis that observers such as Colin Powell have described as “the first genocide of the twenty-first century” and an “African Holocaust.”

The first memory was formed in primary school at Teachers’ Training College in Omdurman, Sudan, in the 1970s. Founded by the British in the 1930s, the college was located near the tomb of Imam Mohamed Ahmed Al-Mahdi, a revered nineteenth-century revolutionary who fought colonization and in the process mobilized the people of Darfur to rise against the occupying Turco-Egyptians. Its location represents a supreme irony of history and politics in the city many would prefer to replace Khartoum as the national capital. Ringing of the colossal, majestic copper bells in the college’s schoolyard always marked the end of the day, as well as the beginning of holidays. I remember the loud clank at the start of the four-day religious holiday, Eid al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, which follows the end of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Eid is celebrated to give thanks to Allah for replacing Abraham’s son Ishmael with a sacrificial lamb.

On one particular Eid, the headmistress gathered all the pupils for an important announcement before we dispersed. As I recall, she explained how we could contribute to a project called “Fighting Thirst in Western Sudan Provinces of Darfur and Kordofan,” regions hundreds of miles away from Omdurman. She asked us to request that our families donate the skins of their sacrificial lambs to be fashioned as water containers for people dying of thirst. Ordinarily, sheepskins and hooves, with other less desirable parts of the animal, would have been given to the butchers who had slaughtered and skinned the animals. This time, she told us, volunteers would come to collect the sheepskins.

Sure enough, Eid Day arrived, and so did the butchers with their sharpened knives and axes, roaming from house to house in their bloody clothes and uttering a short prayer before they cut the sheep’s throats. For three days before the slaughter, we children had watched these animals eating grass, drinking water, and sleeping when night fell. Their slaughter brought only horror to us, but not so to the elders, who exulted at fulfilling a pillar of the faith. Eid brought families and neighbors together, and relatives from near and far joined in feasting to commemorate the solemn occasion. On that cold day, trucks piled high with the skins of lambs in variegated colors, their fatty entrails intact, drove through one neighborhood after another, picking up remains. For me, the cause of saving the thirsty and dying in a drought-stricken land did not mitigate the horror of the frightful events I was witnessing. My memories, even as I write today, stir emotions of horror. In retrospect, the slaughter helped concretize for me the political economy of scarcity. As I reflect on why I am interested in Darfur’s anguish, I see that scarcity was stacked on those trucks dripping with blood and spewing exhaust from loud mufflers as they drove through the narrow alleys and bumpy roads of Omdurman.

By the 1980s, the narrative of Darfur’s suffering shifted from roaming butchers to human catastrophe in desert regions ruined by drought and desertification. Famine propelled hundreds of thousands of people to flee from Darfur and Kordofan. They arrived in Khartoum in droves, seeking refuge and abode, and settled in an ad hoc camp called Al-Muailh in the southern part of the city, many miles from the national palace where President Gaffar Nimeiri lived in extravagant luxury, oblivious to the tragedy of those living under plastic tents in sweltering heat in yet another merciless desert. This was the context of my second Darfur memory, as my family and neighbors discussed how best to provide aid to the displaced women and children. In due course, clothes, mattresses, bedsheets, food, and over-the-counter medicines were being amassed. We, the youth volunteers, were instructed to inspect donated clothes for wearability before packing them neatly in cardboard boxes. I enjoyed the task. I basked in an atmosphere brimming with a sense of purpose and industry. Although we took pride in the philanthropy of kith and kin, my family emphasized that such effort is necessary but not sufficient. What would have been sufficient was a systematic effort by the state to exercise its responsibility toward citizens who had fallen on hard times. Populations displaced by these climatic conditions are currently referred to as “environmental refugees.” The language is far from benign, for it gives the state a rationale for abdicating its responsibility.

These experiences opened up my thinking about the relation of politics to the appalling disparities between my conditions and those afflicting fellow Sudanese. Their memory stayed with me as my thinking slowly matured. As the country’s leaders bemoaned “Mother Nature’s wrath” over which the government had no control, citizens were left thirsty, hungry, and adrift. I concluded that the environmental factor in the devastation was due to the malignancy of the state’s political and economic neglect and the complicity of those within the region whose material interests were aligned with those of the government to which they pledged allegiance. Environmental degradation was, in fact, a combination of “mother nature” and “father nature,” the dictators who viewed daily transitions into vulnerability as the natural order of things. The causes of the Darfur crisis, which are multitudinous, with a complex range of narratives, truths, and approaches to understanding, became crystal clear to me even back then.

Upon graduating from college, I joined the Sudan Development Corporation (SDC), the largest development corporation in the Sudan, founded by the late Mohamed Abdel Majid Ahmed, Sudanese ambassador to France and Belgium, in the early 1980s. It was there that my third memory of Darfur was formed. Against incalculable odds, the SDC provided assistance and loans ranging in scale from small amounts of microcredit to large sums for projects such as iron ore foundries, marble quarries, and agriculture. I was appointed a junior development information officer, and my job was to maintain contacts with national, regional, and international partners and donors and create a trilingual (Arabic, English, French) newsletter to report progress on all three phases—feasibility, appraisal, and implementation—of development projects. I participated in field visits with international teams, an experience that exposed me to the economies, discourses, and practices of international development. My work for the SDC allowed me to see how some European companies viewed the Sudan at the time. For example, we received repeated requests from a European company to market asbestos products banned in the West to Sudanese building contractors, to which our CEO responded with a resounding “no!” Through experiences like this, institutionalized disparities on a world scale became obvious to me. Profit outweighed serious health risks to Third World people. Permanent lung damage and pleural disorders were of no concern to the company in question. Although efforts by the SDC were important for development projects in Western Sudan, including Darfur, unfortunately it could not by itself reduce poverty or change decades of institutionalized neglect. Western Darfur, like the South, was an incubator of grievances.

All three encounters taught me much about the underlying and persistent violence Darfuri people have had to endure from the colonial era to the present. Thus was the ibra, the lesson learned. These encounters also signified to me the importance of understanding the particular ways in which Darfur understands its own social, political, environmental, and economic grievances. My SDC experience in particular compelled me to engage in a sustained effort to understand the disparate voices, practices, and representations through which the stories about the Sudan are told. Later, as I embarked on my Darfur project, these memories propelled me to ask myself: Was my fear of the piles of bloody sheepskins on the backs of the trucks misplaced, or was it a sign of horrors to come?

Later Encounters

My experiences with Darfur have continued, and my quest to understand its endless troubles has resulted in more than ten years of ethnographic research in the Sudan, Qatar, and the United States. When I undertook this research, I saw that its purpose was not to create another book on Darfur, but rather to illuminate the wider meanings of the Sudan’s fallibility, hence the title of this book. I also see Darfur Allegory as a logical extension of my two previous projects on the Sudan’s polity: the identity, migration, and displacement of its people; and Sudanese refugees. Similar to these studies, this work is situated within the anthropology of war, forced migration, and broader questions of the global circulation of refugees. All have been envisioned as urgent interventions into the continuous humanitarian crisis in the Sudan, which is emblematic of the crisis in northeast Africa as a whole.

My main preoccupation has been to interrogate the categories used to represent race in Darfur, both historically and in the present. I draw attention to how these categories cannot be treated as a standalone subject, separate from their interaction and overlap within the local Darfuri sociopolitical sphere. I argue that these categories, especially the bifurcation of Arab versus African, derive from particular, culturally specific modes of thinking incongruent with the local understandings of Sudanese communities. Put simply, Arabism and Africanism were not on an inevitable collision course in the Sudan, as many observers have argued in their explanations of the primary causes of the crisis.

Furthermore, when I embarked on my first ethnographic project on Sudanese migrants and refugees in North America in the mid-1990s, Darfuri people were featured as fundamentally Northern Sudanese, no different from their countrymen and countrywomen from every part of the Sudan. No one identified himself/herself as Darfuri; no one used the idiomatic term “Darfurian” as a singular identity. Everyone was Sudanese first and foremost. The situation has changed, and the term “Darfurian” now signifies a newly assigned Black/indigenous identity, as opposed to that of a homogenized Arab Janjaweed perpetrator of ethnic cleansing. Journalists, NGO activists, and scholars who have applied earlier accounts of Southern Sudan to Darfur have been in error, insofar as those accounts turned centrally on a racial bifurcation that does not obtain in Darfur.

Unlike in my earlier work, my identity and methodology have intersected as this ethnography took new turns conceptually and experientially. It has led me to reflect on my subject position as a Sudanese anthropologist and on my own understanding of the early warning signs of disaster that I had pieced together from this earlier work. As a Sudanese writer, my subject position changed in 2011 after the secession of the South. Now, inescapably, I write as a northerner, with all the connotations of power this implies. Key anthropological debates on “the re-identification of the ethnographer” vis-à-vis ethnographic writing now lie at the forefront of my role.1 Nonetheless, this involuntarily acquired identity does not diminish my concerns about national self-definition, displacement, borders, political violence, and cross-cultural mediations, nor does it limit my concern with competing narratives of the situation in Darfur locally, regionally, and transnationally. Even more than my earlier work, this ethnography is rooted in the urgency of the present moment.

Methodologically, my research in disparate locations throughout the world has convinced me of the fluidity of the field as a locus of ethnographic research. Following James Clifford’s view that “ethnographic texts are inescapably allegorical, and [that] a serious acceptance of this fact changes the ways they can be written and read,”2 the specific contexts and situations in which I encountered “the field” shaped my ability to consider Darfur as allegory for the realities of a fragile state. In Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson interrogate the notion of a “field science,” thereby opening theoretical and methodological possibilities for anthropologists to engage with beleaguered societies and global crises. As they write, “Anyone who has done fieldwork, or studies the phenomenon, knows that one does not just wander onto a ‘field site’ to engage in a deep and meaningful relationship with ‘the natives.’ The field is a clearing whose deceptive transparency obscures the complex processes that go into constructing it.”3 By constantly navigating and crossing frontiers of thought and experience, I have amassed ethnographic materials that tie the crisis in Darfur to the overall predicament of the Sudanese state and the politics of Darfuri refugees abroad. Working from life histories and more focused narratives, participant observations, and statements and postings in the Sudanese blogosphere, I have been able to emphasize the competing narratives that drive national and international responses to the devastation of Darfur. As I have attempted to knit together several strands from these disparate field locations in what may be termed cartographies of mutuality, I have come to harbor no qualms as an anthropologist undertaking a prismatic role. For I hope to highlight wider “parallels and paradoxes,” even if the task of illuminating my understanding of mutuality warrants an account of who I am. And so while I believe readers can discern my ideological position vis-à-vis the Darfur crisis by reading between the lines of what follows, they might also want a more explicit statement. I have no doubt that the crisis was—and remains—an act of state-sanctioned violence, a “counterinsurgency on the cheap” in the words of Alex de Waal.4 Darfuris had every reason to rise up against decades of marginalization imposed upon them by then-president Al-Bashir and his predecessors. Yet it is also true the Justice and Equality Movement, which led the insurgency, was Islamist and ideologically not that different from Al-Bashir. Nonetheless, its breakup into two factions, the result of an internal power struggle, resulted in a movement away from Al-Bashir and had much to do with the intensification of violence in Darfur. Having said that, I reiterate that genuine grievances in the region cannot be brushed under the rug. That is why I concur with Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub’s class-based analysis, one that does not turn on the Arab/African binary but rather adopts a more holistic view of the state-sanctioned exclusions and enforced silences of those who disagree politically with the ruling elites.

Let me conclude then by saying that through this work I have been made more aware of anthropology’s deep engagement, both theoretically and practically, with contemporary predicaments, a move to be expected as we write “ethnography in today’s world” and one that is timely and critical in Darfur. I see mutuality and urgency, concepts gaining currency in anthropology, as complementary, propelling us both to interrogate our subject positions vis-à-vis the interlocutors we encounter in fieldwork situations and to move beyond detachment and other “persuasive fictions of anthropology.”5

Darfur in the Sudan

Darfur, the Sudan’s westernmost region, is a frontier society. Its vast territory covers nearly 500,000 square kilometers within the Sahelian zone. Over the centuries, Darfur existed as an autonomous African sultanate like the other Sudanic kingdoms, including Sennar, Wadai, Bagirmi, Bornu, Hausa, and Melle, among others.6 It shares borders with Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic, and the Republic of South Sudan. By virtue of miscegenation and shared communities straddling these frontiers, Darfur’s territorial and ethnic borders have been porous and fluid. Cosmopolitan networks facilitated an impressive mobility, circulation, and exchange, contributing to the diverse peoples of this African sultanate. These forms of circularity were evidenced in oral and written accounts before and after Darfur’s annexation to the Sudan by the British in 1916. Since the Sudan’s independence in 1956, Darfur has witnessed a sizeable population increase.7 These populations are invariably Muslim people who speak a number of languages and hail from different ethnicities.

Darfur’s geography falls within four primary zones, including rich savanna in the south, poor savanna in the middle, arid zones in the north, and desert in the west. The most prominent topographic feature is the Jebel Marra range. Darfur comprises the following states: Northern Darfur (capital, El Fashir), Western Darfur (capital, El Geneina), Southern Darfur (capital, Nyala), Central Darfur (capital, Zalengi), and Eastern Darfur (capital, Ed’dain). Nomadism and agriculture dominate economic activity in the region, although there are some mixed economies. Land is central to social and economic arrangements. It is important to understand the role the system of land ownership known as hakoura has played in the region’s crisis. It is linked to the notion of dar, meaning abode; Darfur acquired its name as the abode of the Fur. The dar has historically been linked to sultanic grants of land ownership afforded to the three largest indigenous groups, the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit. Smaller non-Arab ethnic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prelude: Unmuting Darfuri Voices
• 1. Encountering Darfur and Its Troubles
• 2. Producing Knowledge, Historicizing Racial Categories
• 3. Some Views from the Sudan
• 4. Qatar Notes
• 5. “All Dust and Panic”: Sinai Desertscape
• 6. Darfur’s Jam for Justice in America
• Postscript: Darfur the Rhizome
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index