Slavery has been endemic in Sudan for thousands of years. Today
the Sudanese slave trade persists as a complex network of buyers,
sellers, and middlemen that operates most actively when times are
favorable to the practice. As Jok Madut Jok argues, the present day
is one such time, as the Sudanese civil war that resumed in 1983
rages on between the Arab north and the black south. Permitted and
even encouraged by the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, the
state military has captured countless women and children from the
south and sold them into slavery in the north to become concubines,
domestic servants, farm laborers, or even soldiers trained to fight
against their own people. Also instigated by the Khartoum
government, Arab herding groups routinely take and sell the Nilotic
peoples of Dinka and Nuer.
Jok emphasizes that the contemporary practice of slavery in Sudan
is not the result of two decades of civil war, as conventional
wisdom in the media would have one believe. Instead he revisits the
historic hostilities between the Islamic world to the north and, to
the south, the Black African peoples, many of whom are Christian
converts.
For Arab traders "the nation of the blacks," or Bilad Al-Sudan, has
traditionally been the source of slaves. When the slave trade
developed into corporate enterprise in the nineteenth century, the
slave-takers articulated distinctions based on race, ethnicity, and
religion that marked the black, infidel southerners as indisputably
inferior and therefore "natural" slaves. Such distinctions have
survived for decades and have fueled various forms of oppression of
the black south, even during those periods when slavery has not
been authorized by the government. When it is authorized, as it is
today, slavery then becomes the extreme form of this systemic
oppression.
War and Slavery in Sudan exposes the enslavement of black
peoples in Sudan which has been exacerbated, if not caused, by the
circumstance of war. As a black southerner and a member of the
Dinka, a group targeted by Arab slave traders, Jok brings an
insider's perspective to this highly volatile subject matter. He
describes the various methods of capture, explores the heinous
experience of captivity, and examines the efforts of slaves to
escape. Jok also assesses the efforts of Dinka communities to
locate and redeem, or buy back, slaves through middlemen, a
strategy that has been supported by Western antislavery groups and
church-based humanitarian agencies but has also been the subject of
great moral debate. Throughout the book, Jok stresses that the
search for settlement of the north-south conflict must be made in
conjunction with a campaign to end slavery. He challenges the
international community to move beyond diplomatic measures to take
more coordinated action against the slave trade and bring
liberation to the people of Sudan.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0058-4
Subjects: Anthropology
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