Akin to the historical overview of trends and lines of development in African history (Chapter 3), this chapter is meant to introduce some broad lines of historical developments that have shaped the area of Africa that is today the territory of the Republic of South Sudan as well as the peoples that inhabit South Sudan. All in all, this introduction to South Sudan’s history is to facilitate the understanding of the concepts and conundrums that will show up in the coming chapters that analyse the South Sudanese state and nation through the lens of the typology developed in the preceding chapters on postcolonial African statehood and nationhood. What is more, while each of the analytical chapters on the South Sudanese nation-state will make mention of particular episodes or historical turning points that are relevant for the respective argument, in order to assess and locate specific events in the grander scheme of South Sudanese history the reader can return to this brief outline. As a matter of course, this section relies on secondary literature and rather than striving for novelty of argument, I will concentrate on those things that I take to be pertinent to contemporary developments in the country. History in this reading mostly refers to political history understood, however, so as to encompass anything with a lasting effect on the local, regional or national organization of political authority, i.e. slave raiding may be deemed social or economic history but is clearly of political relevance then and now.
When discussing and analyzing the history of South Sudan, it is inevitable to look at and consider Sudanese history writ-large. For by far the largest part of its modern history, South Sudan has been shaped by the political union with what is today the Republic of Sudan. South Sudan’s status as a disadvantaged, minoritarian and exploited constituent part of a greater political unit – be it Ottoman Egypt, the British Empire or independent Sudan – clearly conditioned events to such an extent that leaving out a depiction of South Sudan’s geopolitical environment would be a sign of ignorance.
Including the historical circumstances that shaped the South from outside and triggered Southern reaction is, however, not tantamount to denying agency to the inhabitants of Equatoria, Bahr al-Ghazal, Upper Nile etc. altogether. As a matter of fact, establishing a history of South Sudan independent of perspectives shaped either by Western anthropologists or Northern historians is a vital task for intellectuals and politicians alike in contemporary South Sudan and constitutes a major step toward the construction of a genuine nation-state (see Chapter 7.1 on Nationbuilding).
While the focus will lie on the more recent historical past, several historical events from the more distant past are referred to because they are held to be of continuing import to present-day South Sudan and South Sudanese. Divided into four sections, I will start in 5.1 with a look at pertinent events from South Sudan’s precolonial history to the end of British colonialism in 1956, then in 5.2 look at the Anya-nya rebellion and the Southern Regional Government until the resumption of war in 1983, move on to 5.3 and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA)’s war against Khartoum and the intra-Southern fighting in the 1990s all the way until the signing of the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement in 2005 before in 5.4 dealing swiftly with the main events of the period of investigation in this research project, i.e. the CPA period from John Garang’s death until independence and the rebellion in 2013/14.
Beforehand, the next page shows the two Sudans on a contemporary map courtesy of Media and Cooperation in Transition.
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5.1. Precolonial times to Sudanese independence in 1956
The history of South Sudan as it has been narrated by mostly non-South Sudanese historians, archaeologists and anthropologists, habitually starts in 1821 when Muhammad Ali’s troops
conquered the Funj Sultanate of Sinnar in Northern Sudan and began to establish Ottoman rule over the territories of the pre-2011 Sudan677. For the pre-colonial period, it used to be said that “*i+t is impossible to reconstruct any history of the past of the southern Sudan”678. In recent decades, some attempts have been made in combining archaeological evidence with oral histories to look behind the precolonial curtain. Of these, Sarah Beswick’s work is arguably the most impressive (and audacious) in that it traces Dinka history to 14th and 15th century migrations from the Gezira in Northern Sudan to their present-day abodes679. These histories, however, even at their best shed a light only on the collective memory of one particular ethnic group and are not conducive to a national history of South Sudan as opposed to a history of, say, the Zande680 or the Shilluk681. Even though 1821 is the customary starting point of (South) Sudanese historiography, it was only in 1839-40 that a Turkish sailor managed to navigate the previously impenetrable Sudd swamps on the White Nile and thereby opened up the Southern Sudan to traders682 who, failing to find much ivory, resorted to raiding slaves for markets in Egypt and the Middle East683. Hence, the North-South divide in Sudan in its earliest forms dates to the aftermath of the Turco-Egyptian conquest (the so-called Turkiyya) as harsher demands in taxation led to hardship in the North, which was one of the main factors for the expansion of slave raiding and trading684. The presence of the Egyptian state was manifested in fortified garrisons (zariba), which are in many cases, including the capital Juba, the precursors to the modern-day towns in South Sudan.
Egyptian rule came to an end in Sudan when an army raised by Muhammad Ahmad, who had revealed himself to be the Mahdi, i.e. the returning prophet, swept away the Egyptian armies and their British aides in the early 1880s. While parts of Southern Sudan were affected by the Mahdiyya, a time that according to Francis Deng is remembered among Dinka as ‘the spoiling of the world’, large parts of the South were unaffected and “[t]he worst most Southern Sudanese were subjected
677 Seri-Hersch makes a convincing case that 1821 is typically chosen as the start of modern Sudanese history not least because it represents the beginning of Europeanization – rational-technological (education, health care) and ideological (administrative state structure) progress – which is widely and mostly tacitly equated with Sudan’s modernization.Seri-Hersch, Iris, “La modernité dans l’historiographie du Soudan”, Cahiers d’Études africaines, Vol. 52, No. 208, 2012, pp. 905-935.
678 Arkell, Anthony John. A history of the Sudan: From the earliest times to 1821. London: Athlone, 1955, p. 209.
679 Beswick, Stephanie. Sudan's Blood Memory: The Legacy of War, Ethnicity, and Slavery in Early South Sudan.
Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006, pp. 25-26.
680 Ivanov, Paola. Vorkoloniale Geschichte und Expansion der Avungara-Azande: eine quellenkritische Untersuchung. Studien zur Kulturkunde, 114, Köln: Köppe, 2000.
681 Mercer, Patricia, “Shilluk Trade and Politics from the mid–seventeenth century to 1861”, The Journal of African History, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1971, pp. 407-426.
682 Prunier, Gérard, “Le Sud-Soudan depuis l’indépendance (1956-1989)”, in Lavergne, Marc (ed.) Le Soudan Contemporain. Paris: Karthala, 1989, pp. 381-433, p. 382.
683 Klein, Martin A., “Slavery and the Early State in Africa”, Social Evolution & History, Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2009, pp. 168-194, p. 183.
684 Johnson, Douglas H. The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars: Peace or Truce. Oxford: James Currey, 2011, pp.
4-5.
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to were the occasional foraging parties of Mahdist armies based in the north or in Equatoria”685. A Nuer army in fact conclusively defeated a Mahdist force near Tonj in 1895686.
Following the downfall of the Mahdist state in 1898 and the reconquista of Sudan by the British (who established a nominal condominium with Egypt), the pervasive and persistent southern resistance and the British government’s view of the people of the South as savages led the British to appoint military men (so-called ‘bog barons’) as administrators in the South for the first two decades of condominium rule687. This ‘pacification’ campaign led to expeditions against Dinka, Nuer, Anuak and Beir that were first carried out from 1910-13688. British colonial rule in Southern Sudan in the initial period consisted in little other than punitive excursions (mostly staffed by Northern Sudanese or Ugandan soldiers) with ample use of brute and homicidal force to subjugate the population. Apart from that, “throughout the Southern Sudan during the 1920s colonial presence was confined to riverbanks and on the northern and southern fringes of pastoral country”689 as the number of Europeans per province could be counted on one hand. Outside of the central region, political control of the British was typically much less tight than imperial self-conceptions would have it.
Formalised in 1930 with the introduction of Closed Districts Ordinances, the British pursued what became known as the ‘Southern Policy’, which effectively separated the Southern provinces from the North in administrative matters but also opened up the South to Christian missionaries while
expelling Northern traders (jalaba) whose permits were not renewed. Kenneth Henderson, who worked for the Sudan Political Service, describes the thinking of British authorities that inspired the exclusion of Northerners from the Sudan: Northerners were seen as either raiders or poachers, while Northern traders were taking advantage of Nilotes by selling overpriced and useless goods, spreading venereal diseases and generally standing in the way of progress690.
British support for Sudanese self-government after the Second World War was a tactical move to dispel Egyptian claims to the Sudan in the immediate post-war period. When Egypt renounced its claims after the 1952 revolution, Britain could not halt the momentum for Sudanese independence while paying no attention to the situation in the South. “In the end, what was negotiated for the South was the transfer of the colonial structure intact from Britain to the northern Sudanese nationalists”691. A cornerstone in this transition from Southern Policy to reintegration of the two unequal halves was the Juba Conference in 1947 between Southern chiefs and representatives of the North. While the details of the two-day event are hotly contested up to the present day692, it is
685 Johnson, Douglas H. “Prophecy and Mahdism in the Upper Nile: An Examination of Local Experiences of the Mahdiyya in the Southern Sudan”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1993, pp. 42-56, p.
46.
686 Alier, Abel, “The Southern Sudan Question”, in Wai, Dunstan M. (ed.) The southern Sudan: The problem of national integration. London: Cass, 1973, pp. 11-27, p. 13.
687 Collins, Robert O. Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan, 1918-1956. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, p. 14.
688 MacMichael, Harold A. The Sudan. London: Ernest Benn, 1954, p. 92.
689 Burton, John W., “Pastoral Nilotes and British Colonialism”, Ethnohistory, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring 1981, pp.
125-132, p. 127.
690 Henderson, Kenneth D. Sudan Republic. London: Benn, 1965, pp. 162-63.
691 Johnson, Douglas H. The Root Causes (2011), p. 22.
692 Different versions argue that the Southern members of the conference were duped with false promises, bribed, had a genuine change of heart, etc.
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certain that after rejecting integration into an independent Sudan on the first day, Southern chiefs agreed to it on the second and final day of the meeting.
5.2. Anyanya rebellion to the end of the Southern regional government in 1983
After the first Sudanese elections in 1953 in which the hastily founded Southern Party competed as sole representative of the Southern provinces, the Sudanization of the civil service introduced the theme of Southern marginalization in independent Sudan as Southerners – for lack of qualification as much as for Northern discriminatory selection procedures – only received a few subaltern posts in the state’s administrative structure693. Parliament in Khartoum was dominated by two political parties, both affiliated to Muslim sects, that have persisted as stalwarts of Sudanese politics ever since: the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) relying on support from the Khatmiyya order and the Umma Party headed by the successors to the Mahdi, the Ansar. Parliamentarianism, however, ended quickly as a military junta headed by General Abboud seized power from 1958 until it was toppled by popular protests in 1964. It was during this period that the first civil war in Southern Sudan got underway, driven by exclusion, racist attitudes and infringement on the lives of Southern Sudanese.
“While the *Abboud+ military regime did examine possibilities of forwarding economic development in the Southern Sudan, the main concern of government policy lay in Arabization and
Islamization”694. Mission schools were closed down, all missionaries expelled in 1964 and Arabic enforced over English as language of instruction695. As such, the South between independence and 1972 has been likened to an internal colony696.
The canonical starting point of the Anya-nya697 war is the rebellion in 1955 by the army garrison in Torit (present-day Eastern Equatoria), which refused to relocate to Northern Sudan. Convincing arguments have been presented that the smouldering conflict only erupted into full-scale guerrilla warfare sometime during the early-to-mid 1960s698. Throughout much of this period, the Southern rebels were marred by internal quarrels, lack of coordination between political and military actors and their inability to muster significant international support for their cause which had shifted from autonomy to self-determination. Towards the end of the 1960s, the Southern movement was increasingly streamlined under the leadership of General Joseph Lagu (partly thanks to his access to Israeli military aid) while in the North in 1969 a coup by Jamal Nimeiry ended the democratic
interlude. The situation in Southern Sudan between the Anya-nya rebels and the Sudanese army had reached a state of military parity which along with the urgent need for a major political success
693 Grandin, Nicole, “Sud-Soudan: une élite dans l'impasse”, Cahiers d'études africaines, Vol. 13, No. 49, 1973, pp. 158-162, p. 161.
694 Niblock, Tim. Class and power in Sudan: the dynamics of Sudanese politics, 1898-1985. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1987, p. 224.
695 Sanderson, Lilian P., “Education in the Southern Sudan: The Impact of Government-Missionary-Southern Sudanese Relationships upon the Development of Education during the Condominium Period, 1898-1956”, African Affairs, Vol. 79, No. 315, April 1980, pp. 157-169, p. 168.
696 Heraclides, Alexis, “Janus or Sisyphus? The Southern Problem of the Sudan”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 1987, pp. 213-231, p. 217.
697 Anya-nya is the name for a snake venom and after initially only referring to one of the Southern factions later came to symbolize the entire armed struggle for Southern independence.
698 Rolandsen, Øystein H., “The making of the Anya-Nya insurgency in the Southern Sudan, 1961-64”, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, May 2011, pp. 211-232.
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persuaded Nimeiry to negotiate the 1972 Addis Ababa Peace Agreement that established regional autonomy in the South under a Southern Regional Government (SRG)699.
The solidity and functioning of the peace deal, however, rested less on institutional safeguards but on the personal relationship and trust between Nimeiry and the head of the SRG, Abel Alier700. At the same time, this personalization weakened the institutions designed to manage North-South
relations, e.g. the allocation of budgetary funds to the South701, which became evident when Alier was replaced by Joseph Lagu in 1978. During this period, tension between different Southern regions and ethnic groups intensified – especially between Dinka and Equatorians – which triggered a debate over division (kokora) of the South into three sub-regions. Alier himself blames Nimeiry’s
reconciliation with the Islamist forces in 1977 and the Chevron oil finds in Southern Sudan in 1978 for the unravelling of the Addis Ababa Accords702. Nimeiry’s unilateral decision to abrogate Southern regional autonomy, the failure to stand by promises of development and financial transfers to the South as well as the introduction of sharia and hudud punishments703 in what became known as the September Laws all combined to lead to a resumption of civil war in 1983.
5.3. New Sudan to the Naivasha Peace Agreement in 2005
Actual fighting broke out over Khartoum’s decision to relocate Southern battalions consisting of many former Anyanya fighters to the North for training purposes. This order met with resistance and led to an attack by the Sudanese Armed Forces on Bor, Pibor and Pachala in May 1983704. It took about a year of serious infighting until John Garang had achieved supremacy inside the newly founded Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and until the SPLM/A had taken on the leadership of Southern Sudanese resistance against the Khartoum government. Crucially, the SPLM/A which in the period until 1991 relied heavily on support from the Communist Derg regime in Ethiopia, did not call for Southern secession but for a reformed decentralized ‘New Sudan’705. The SPLM/A’s insistence on fighting for the liberation of the whole of Sudan deprived the Khartoum government of the propaganda tool of ‘anti-secessionism’, forcing it to rely instead on calls for jihad and defence of Arab civilization706.
Fighting in the South continued after Nimeiry had been ousted from power in 1985. A critical role in the continuation of fighting in the South was the failure by the different governments in the
democratic interlude (1985-89) to abrogate the September Laws, with the final straw being Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi’s refusal to accede to the Sudan Peace Initiative that DUP and SPLM had
699 Howell, John F., “Horn of Africa: Lessons from the Sudan Conflict”, International Affairs, Vol. 54, No. 3, July 1978, pp. 421-436, pp. 425-27.
700 Kasfir, Nelson, “Southern Sudanese Politics since the Addis Ababa Agreement”, African Affairs, Vol. 76, No.
303, 1977, pp. 143-166, p. 147.
701 Malwal, Bona. People and power in Sudan: the struggle for national stability. London: Ithaca Press, 1981, p.
213.
702 Alier, Abel. Southern Sudan: Too Many Agreements Dishonoured. Exeter: Ithaca Press, 1990.
703 Hudud refers to predetermined punishments for certain classes of crimes like theft, apostasy or adultery that include flogging, the amputation of hands and capital punishment.
704 Scott, Philippa, “The Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement (SPLM) and Liberation Army (SPLA)”, Review of African Political Economy, No. 33, War and Famine, Aug. 1985, pp. 69-82, p. 70.
705 Garang, John. The call for democracy in Sudan. London: Kegan Paul International, 1992, p. 203.
706 Kok, Peter, “Between Radical Restructuring and Deconstruction of State Systems”, Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 70, Dec. 1996, pp. 555-562, p. 561.
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negotiated in November 1988707. The overall situation changed once again with the coup d’état in 1989 which brought Omer al Bashir to power, backed by Hassan al Turabi’s National Islamic Front (NIF), the political wing of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood708. The second major sea-change in Southern Sudanese affairs was the fall of the Derg regime in the wake of the end of the Cold War, which meant that the SPLM/A lost its foremost backer as well as its rear bases in Ethiopia. Also in 1991, the movement suffered a split whose ripple effects are still felt today: two senior figures of the movement, Riek Machar and Lam Akol, tried to depose John Garang and, failing to succeed
immediately, set up a separate wing of the SPLM/A in Nasir (hence commonly referred to as ‘Nasir-split’).
Much of the 1990s was characterized by fighting between the SPLM and a varying number of
Southern militias, many of whom (including Machar and Akol709) somewhat paradoxically both stood for secession and received arms and support from the government in Khartoum that used them as proxy battalions710. The SPLM/A, at the same time, cooperated with the Northern Sudanese opposition organized in the National Democratic Alliance. Only after hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, had died – an estimate of all people that died as a result of the war in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains for only the period 1983-1998 arrives at a figure of more
Southern militias, many of whom (including Machar and Akol709) somewhat paradoxically both stood for secession and received arms and support from the government in Khartoum that used them as proxy battalions710. The SPLM/A, at the same time, cooperated with the Northern Sudanese opposition organized in the National Democratic Alliance. Only after hundreds of thousands of people, most of them civilians, had died – an estimate of all people that died as a result of the war in Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains for only the period 1983-1998 arrives at a figure of more