ETHNOCULTURE (Vol.1, 2007 pp. 72-84)
ETHNICITY AND POST-CONFLICT RECONSTRUCTION
IN THE NUBA MOUNTAINS OF THE SUDAN:
PROCESSES OF GROUP-MAKING, MEANING PRODUCTION, AND METAPHORIZATION
Leif Manger
University of Bergen
Introduction
The fate of the Nuba people of Central Sudan is well known among those who follow developments in the area. The Khartoum regime (Government of Sudan, or GOS) staged a military "jihad" campaign to force their version of Islam and Arabism upon the Nuba, denying them access to land necessary for survival, and relocating them to so-called "peace villages". On the other hand, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, and its Army (SPLM/A), fought this and set up their own systems of government and administration in areas that they came to control. Through this fight the Nuba were positioned against Arabs; Muslims against non-Muslims. The cessation of hostilities under the negotiated Cease Fire Agreement between the GOS and SPLM/A Nuba, even with its significant shortcomings in the initial phase, contributed to an improvement of people’s lives in the region and allowed for increased freedom of movement as well as improved access to assets and resources, including land, though to a limited degree. The Cease Fire Agreement came into force on 22 January 2002 and a Joint Military Commission (JMC)/ Joint Military Mission (JMM) was established to monitor the cease-fire, with the broader objectives of promoting a just, peaceful and comprehensive settlement of the conflict. The cease-fire guaranteed the free movement of civilians and goods throughout the Nuba Mountains and was intended to facilitate the creation of conditions conducive to the provision of assistance to conflict-affected persons, including the internally displaced.
The cease-fire was very successful in putting an end to open warfare in the Nuba Mountains. But some of its central features – increased stability, increased freedom of movement, the opening up of areas hitherto considered no-man’s land – re-introduced new sources of conflict that the war had caused to subside, all of them tied to the issue of land. These include the return of pastoralists and their herds, the return of the mechanised farming equipment and the return of people – all of which represent major future challenges. Thus it might be said that the cease fire in the Nuba Mountains led to a series of positive developments, and has provided the region with a better starting point from which to develop peaceful relations following the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (signed in January 2005). But, as we also see, the challenges are many.
Historical legacies
Sadly, the contemporary situation of unrest is not a new experience for the people in the region. A quick glance into the history of the Nuba Mountains show that the contemporary struggle can be said to generally represent a violent phase of a situation that has always characterised the region’s history and the adaptation of various regional groups. Two basic themes stand out: the one of territory, and the one of identity. Both contribute to a constant struggle of the regional population for their sovereignty and for their right to deal with their own development. The history goes like this: Nuba groups have been living in their hills and the Arabs on the plains not as a result of any natural situation but rather because of unequal strength during periods of slavery. The British colonial rulers moved the Nuba down to the plains, pacified the areas and started economic development, the plains being exploited to grow cash crops, first through traditional technology and later by the introduction of mechanised farming. These processes have continued through the decades of Sudanese independence, promoted by independent governments backed by foreign development aid. All through the periods the competition over territory and resources has been couched in ethnic terms, in religious terms, and in racial terms, with the Nuba history as a slave population being a central part of how the relationships between groups have been conceptualized.
This history has brought the Nuba into a key process in Sudanese history, that members of certain communities and groups have been considered as second-class citizens. Examples of such groups are the Nuba, the Ingessana and groups in Darfur, commonly called the zuruq (the blacks) which is a derogatory term. Such a system of discrimination is sustained and reproduced through complex socio-economic and socio-political dynamics that relate to processes of Arabization, Islamization, Sudanization, Commercialization and Modernization. They all represent major processes that indicate in which direction the integration is moving. People from various local groups have been exposed to new socio-economic forms, new behavioural patterns and new religious thoughts and activities. Wage labour is increasing in importance, and new patterns of economic differentiation appear to be based on the availability of cash. This relates to people’s involvement in labour migration to the Khartoum area. The activities of Islamic missionaries brought influences producing changes in social organization as well as in the basic notions people hold about the world and their place in it. Such missionaries have traditionally been members of various Sufi brotherhoods. As several groups are considered former slave populations, with a stigma on their identity, the process of social adaptation becomes particularly crucial. The ways different categories of people deal with this stigma is an important factor explaining differentiated behaviour among the groups themselves, how networks are established and how they relate to the outside world. This internal variation provides an entry into the actual processes by which wider cultural variation occurs.
The problem relates to the general history of the southern Sudan as well as such areas as the Nuba Mountains, Ingessana and Dar Fartit, as frontier regions. This frontier was a field of economic and human exploitation through raiding and slaving. It was also a zone where ethnic and societal transformations took place, often as a consequence of assumptions of inferiority and superiority, assumptions reinforced by religion and assumed descent. In this century, the areas have seen an influx of jellaba traders, West African Fellata, and others due to the opening up of commercial activities and the availability of wage work that followed. As a consequence of all this, the localities around market centres in this region are highly complex in their ethnic and cultural composition.
The evolving relations between such groups are not only defined by the local
scene but also by the position of the various groups in the wider Sudanese social
context. The main factor influencing this is that of the social power carried
by participants in the local arenas of interaction. This distribution of power
is clearly in favour of certain Arabic groups, against the non-Arabs and non-Muslims.
This is related to the long history of Arabization and Islamization in the Sudan.
Many societies went through this process centuries ago, but for areas in the
south and in the so-called ”transition zone” (Nuba, southern Blue
Nile, Dar Fertit) it is a contemporary process and the presentation of behaviour
that can be accepted within the Arabic and Islamic code is necessary.
In addition, there is a contemporary process of change going on in the Sudan.
This process of social change is not one of accepting the Islamic religion or
Arabic language and customs alone, but rather, that ethnically diverse groups
living on the Sudanese periphery adapt to the dominant lifestyle of the centre.
Non-Arab and non-Islamized groups like the Dinka, Nuer, Nuba etc. show the most
dramatic expression of such processes, but Arab groups already Islamized are
also going through similar processes. This does not mean that people only want
to catch up with the mainstream Arabic culture, but rather, as Paul Doornbos
has argued (1984), that they want, materially and spiritually, to participate
in society in the same way as members of the stratum of traders and officials,
and to be taken seriously, to be considered trust- and credit-worthy throughout
the Sudan.
This is a complex phenomenon related to different agents of social change. Traders are among the major agents of this change, so are modern schools, local courts and Islamic brotherhoods. This way of life is characterized by non-manual labour, non-drinking, seclusion of women and a clear public display of Islamic identity. The jellaba traders represent such a way of life while the zuruq (the blacks) represent the opposite of this, still being considered a non-Muslim, non-Arab population, with a past history as slaves, and still marginal to society. These groups suffered particular harassment in Sudanese towns during the final years of the Nimeiri regime, when sharia law was most actively applied. Also in the socio-economic field they are mostly at the bottom, serving as cheap labour in urban industries, being domestic servants or working as casual labour. An important point to understand is that there is a stigma on their identity with which they have to deal, if they want to participate fully on that scene. The acceptance that they themselves have an inferior social status in the wider stratification system of the Sudan can bring about a process of emulation. But this is not new. All through this century, the gradual integration of various groups into society at large has produced similar problems, leading to processes of ethnic dichotomization. The difference is that today this integration process is more penetrating than it was before. By the overall commercialization of the Sudan and the increasing degree of labour migration, the exposure to, and the need to relate to other groups in a continuous manner has increased.
The general picture, then, is no longer a simple dichotomy of subsistence-oriented farmers and pastoralists versus the jellaba commercial groups, who are the main agents of commercialization. It is rather a complex setting in which most groups have become deeply involved in the commercial process and are looking for investment opportunities to further improve their position. Thus it is important to note that we are not talking about a change from a unified, traditional culture into a more disintegrated one, with new elements existing along with old ones. What I have called "traditional" culture is not altogether gone, nor have old people living a "traditional" life disappeared. But with the emergence of new adaptive opportunities, the complexity of local adaptation has increased and new "agents of change" have entered the scene. The process is characterised by local groups emulating the lifestyles of the dominant Arab and Muslim groups, thus trying to change a marginal and stigmatized identity into a socially acceptable one. But alternative strategies are also used, for instance by joining in the war to actively fight the same process, thus shifting the focus from "integration" to "resistance". In such a context this process is being interpreted as racial oppression by dominant groups, an oppression that has to end if local communities again shall be able to develop their identities.
The conceptual challenge
To deal with a case like the one described above we have to seek an understanding of the social process on different levels of analysis. Certainly there are groups here who represent distinct culture-carrying entities. In the Nuba Mountains the ethnic picture would be defined by groups claiming to be Nuba, Arab, Fellata, Umbororo etc., each group with its own language and with Arabic as the lingua franca. But we can not assume that ethnicity will provide the primary ordering of identities. For instance, the Nuba are divided into many different groups that, although sharing some traits, represent different languages and localized cultural traditions. Similarly, the Arabs are made up of many groups that, again, might be described as reflecting ethnic variation rather than a unified ethnic identity. Rather than privileging "the ethnic" we need to put ethnicity among other elements, within a broader model of cultural complexity. In the Nuba Mountains such elements would be religion, which would define people in reference to different Sufi-orders within Sunni Islam, Christianity and traditional Nuba religions. But as we have seen above, history and descent also play a role in the way people understand themselves, with certain groups being stigmatized as descendants of former slaves. Occupation and class plays a role as do settlement and lifestyle (the distinction between camp, village, town), gender, kinship and age.
Other factors might also be added to this list, but the point here is that these domains of identity are only bounded to a limited extent and people may cross the boundaries between them. Hence, it is perfectly possible in such a situation to have interaction among members of different groups based on codes of behavior in which the members of different groups can exist, allow others to exist and maintain or avoid closer relations. In such a situation the ethnic boundary may be based on different cultural elements. The focus of analysis, therefore, should be on explicating the cultural meanings people realize through their practice of social relationships. Such meanings are partly formed through daily life interactions and they are always evaluative. Our task is to see how such systems of meanings are construed, how people living in particular societies understand the unequal distribution of prestige, power and privilege.
A separate factor that will affect these processes is the one of violence. In periods of conflict more rigid identities tend to emerge and the walls between groups may grow taller. In such situations identities may themselves be strategically tied to the conflict through active "We" and "Them" codifications in which the Other is seen as a threat to the preservation of the We-group. This may lead to a reassertion of cultural values as part of violent opposition, stressing common ancestry and sharing of common insults and suffering. This does not mean that cultures are actually made more different.
Such perspectives on culture and knowledge do not see cultures as a series of clear-cut continuums with clear-cut boundaries, but rather as a phenomenon that is in constant flux. But still the flux is not total. It is patterned through social practice. Meaning that the flux is not so much originating in our cultural ideas, but rather in our specific experiences. We need to enter into the realm of actual interaction between people, to see what they do and in what directions their interaction leads them. Rather than integrated social formations our starting point should be variation. We seek to understand modes of practical action in society, not by seeking "sub-cultures" but rather "modes of signification". People may disagree on the meaning of symbols and still hold similar identities. In short, we need perspectives that include the distinctive logic of "world-views", "mental habits" or "styles of thought" and at the same time are able to expose how knowledge is connected to the social context within which it exists, realizing that such connections are human constructions, historically evolved, culturally located, and collectively reproduced. How can we show, then, that there is some reality to cultural patterns, without assuming that everyone embraces the culture in the same way, nor assume that everyone reads symbols in the same way? How can we understand that people who live within the same "culture" can organize and emphasize differences among themselves, differences that, when pulled into the realm of social identity formation, can be very strong indeed, but also that people may chose not to highlight certain differences and make them into social boundaries?
Where to put "ethnicity" ?
In a comment on his own perspective on ethnicity Barth (1994) suggests we approach the modelling of the ethnic process on three different levels. A micro-level analysis, in which we see individual identities established, through specific experiences. These experiences may differ between generations and the sexes, but also more randomly as an effect of the different choices individuals make in their lives. What is important is that these experiences, whatever they are, become resources for ethnic processes. They shape people’s understanding of themselves, of who they are and who others are, thus in a very basic way affecting how they understand the world around them. This is important in understanding how various stereotypes develop and give further shape to such understandings. Barth also argues for the continued importance of a middle-level analysis of ethnic groups, ethnic associations etc., i.e. the level on which so much of the ethnicity debate has focussed. This is the level of ethnic politics and organizations, of entrepreneurship of leadership, of rhetorical strategies and of stereotypes set in motion. The macro-level includes the state, religious groups and others, who operate within the state sphere and hence also the international arena. Barth’s interest is to see the state as an actor, with interests to pursue to maintain state control, but at the same time being constrained by an increasingly globalized international arena characterised by a multitude of actors.
The basics of our being in the world
Following this general outline I will further explore in what ways we can go about analyzing ethnic processes in the Nuba Mountains. In a recent paper, Fredrik Barth (2000) has developed some views on how to deal with the fact that individual experiences must be part of the understanding of the ethnic boundary-making process. The context for Barth’s argument is his influential approach to the study of ethnicity, and whether ethnic identity is in constant flux, dependent on what goes on at the ethnic boundary, or whether there are essential features to that identity that must be included in order to talk about ethnic identities at all. Rather than making this into an instrumentalist versus primordialist debate, Barth in this paper shifts the discussion to a more basic level, the level of human boundary maintenance in general, not only related to ethnic groups, but to nations and so on.
The function and significance of boundaries may vary among cultures, and at this basic level some (referring to the Basseri and the Baktaman) are not particularly focussed on boundaries at all. And even if there are boundaries, they may not keep people apart, since there may be significant social engagement across boundaries. Thus social practice provides a template for the indigenous conceptualization of social boundaries. Barth agues that fundamental to the socializing and educative competence of such practice is personal experience of bodily boundaries. And as with groups, individuals experience this differently. But for both, they extend themselves into the world through the webs of their relationships, economic activities and their inscriptions of themselves on the landscape.
To capture these processes Barth argues strongly for a differentiation between cognitive categories, which tend to be definitive, and lived experience, which tends to be murky. To develop the cognitive implications of this way of thinking Barth refers to the various contributions by Lakoff and Johnson. Lakoff, for instance, argues that our basic concepts and categories are closely linked to our experiences as living and functioning human beings in an environment (1987). They are not constructed in Aristotelian fashion as arbitrary symbols that take their meaning from their correspondence with objects that exist in the real world, and that are defined by distinctive properties. Instead, our concepts build on three kinds of perceptual sources: a) our capacity for gestalt perception of part-whole configurations, b) our experience of bodily motor movement in space, and c) our ability to form rich mental images of perceived objects in the world (Lakoff 1987:269ff). From these we build kinesthetic image schemas, i.e. patterns that constantly recur in our everyday bodily experience. From such prototypes, our basic-level conceptual categories are enriched and fleshed out through experiences, and include similar experiences. The kinesthetic image schemas emerge as generalizations of what is experienced and repeated as compelling connections. Then they are extended by metaphorical mapping and serve as instruments of reasoning and comprehension.
Categories thus structure and order the world for us and facilitate massive cognitive, social and political simplification. But the important point here, argues Barth, is that metaphorical use does not come from logical necessity but as a source of motivation. And in situations of shared realities, where people are locked into a social organization of vested interests and mutual controls, there will be positive encouragement for cognitive assent and agreement with the others who share those interests, and sanctions will be brought to bear against its breach. People are not acting out integrated structures, but are each a locus of reasoning and construction.
Linking this type of argument to the situation in the Nuba Mountains I think one promising avenue might be to see such processes as a "politics of subjectivity". Subjectivity always presupposes inter-subjectivity, and we need to write the history of such inter-subjectivity, which require a combination of the personal, the political, the economic, and the moral. The making of subjectivities can be seen as taking place on three levels – it is a political process in so far as it is a matter of subjugation to state authorities with very different rules of the political game; it is moral, as it is reflected in the conscience and agency of subjects who bear rights, duties and obligations; and it is realized existentially, in the subjects' consciousness of their personal relations. Michael Lambek puts it well: "In assuming responsibility and rendering themselves subject to specific liturgical, political and discursive regimes and orders, people simultaneously lay claim to and accept the terms through which their subsequent acts will be judged. People are agents insofar as they choose to subject themselves, to perform and conform accordingly, to accept responsibility, and to acknowledge their commitments. Agency here transcends the idea of a lone, heroic individual independent of her acts and conscious of them as objects" (2002:37-38).
Let us link this to the religious situation in the Nuba Mountains. It is easy to see that Islam is part of the conflict in the area and also that there is a tendency among some Nuba to forge identities in opposition to this oppressive form of political Islam. Hence the struggle takes on the form of Muslims versus non-Muslims, and in the case of the Nuba, Muslim equals Arab, and non-Muslim equals African. But again, these are constructed differences, not essential ones. Let us look at the category "Muslim". At all times there has been disagreement within Islam about what it means to be a Muslim and the fact that, from time to time, some of these disagreements enter the political field should not surprise us. Certainly it is of interest to analyse cases of "political Islam" but I also feel we should not only look at Muslim politicians, but pay more attention to how "ordinary" Muslims themselves argue concerning this issue, not only within the field of political Islam, but in everyday discourses about what is right and wrong, what is proper behaviour etc. Although less spectacular than fatwas about jihad, such mundane issues nevertheless open up an understanding of how Muslims themselves experience their religion. Such a perspective of course will show us that the problem of defining who is a Muslim in the Nuba Mountains in no way started with the Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of state power in Sudan in 1989.
To illustrate. While doing fieldwork (late 70s and early 80s, see Manger 1994) among the Lafofa Nuba in Liri, I was struck by the way people presented themselves as being Muslims. Any Lafofa would claim to be Muslim, but there was no agreement among people that their neighbours actually deserved that label. Older people would talk about their old way of life, left long ago, when they went without clothes and when they kept pigs. But today they claim to be Muslims although they still treasure the memory of those bygone days. Younger men argued strongly that the elders were still holding on to the pre-Islamic customs, that they are ignorant and do not understand the modern world. Talking to groups of Arabs in Liri, they would hardly recognize any Lafofa as being a Muslim. They recognized the fact that some of the young people were trying to leave their old ways and become Muslims, but few of them were known to pray and even fewer were fasting.
This evident difficulty in agreeing on who is a Muslim, and what it entails to be one, is not something that is special for the Lafofa and the southern Nuba Mountains. In most Muslim areas there are constant debates over what is proper Islam and what is not, what behaviour is derived from proper Islamic principles and what derives from other sources. What is special in this case is that the Lafofa, as a Nuba group, are a non-Arab, non-Islamic people among whom the process of conversion is a contemporary phenomenon. The debates in Liri are thus not only between different Islamic traditions but between an Islamic tradition and a non-Islamic, "tribal" one. But such a discussion cannot focus on religion in isolation. The way the Lafofa participate in this discourse is not an isolated process of religious conversion, but it is in a basic way the product of a people adapting to the realities of the day. Hence the discussion must deal with wider social identities. And as we have outlined above, the determination of personal identity has always been an issue in the Nuba Mountains. As a frontier region with a history of slave hunting, of exploitation of ivory and gold, and as part of the battlefield between earlier savannah states, it has always experienced a high rate of movement, resettlement, and of new groups coming together. The establishment of one's identity within broader categories, such as Nuba/Arab, slave/freeman, Muslim/non-Muslim has always been of importance. A single-minded focus on religion alone would be as problematic as the one on ethnicity and race.
But, as the general history as well as more recent events in the Nuba Mountains show, such processes are not only characterized by a "voluntary rendering". Violence can be a basic part of the process of the politics of subjectivity. In the Nuba Mountains the result of the dynamics of the three levels is a movement away from peaceful co-existence, in which people acknowledge that various sorts of political and moral ambiguities, ambivalences and uncertainties are a normal state of affairs in such a transition zone, to one in which dichotomizations based on claims to cultural authenticity dominate. In such a process mutual respect and ethical rules constraining aggression may become transformed in violent inter-ethnic conflicts. The political dynamics represented by the civil war strengthen these processes and help introduce new boundaries between people.
A few examples can illustrate the point. First, part of the Nuba Mountains areas are administered by GOS, other parts by SPLM/A, and their two systems of government have very different levels of involvement of local people, thus creating differences between members of the same adaptive and ethnic groups. Furthermore, as SPLM/A is suggesting a Western based educational system based on the English language, whereas GOS favour a Muslim oriented curriculum, plans in the educational sector will have a long-term effect on new generations. Thirdly, the parties disagree about how the land resources of the area are to be developed, with GOS encouraging private investors from outside and SPLM/A arguing the case of local people, two strategies that have important repercussions as land, land use, and land tenure relate also to social institutions as well as to cosmological dimensions relating to land, fertility, and ancestry.
Finally, a cease-fire and an international control force is in place in the area and can provide a platform for further humanitarian interventions, and the beginning of general reconstruction and development, a fact that also brings several international actors like the UN and various NGOs actively into the picture. This international involvement may help break down boundaries, but it may also function to strengthen the divisive tendencies through the political "pragmatism" of accepting the rules of the game set up by the warring parties in order to be able to operate at all.
Nuba identity politics
In the discussion at the beginning of the paper I claimed that the issue of marginalised groups represents a larger, national issue in Sudan. The issue is one of citizenship, and includes the challenge of how to compose a national identity in which not only Arabs and Muslims feel at home but also non-Arabs and non-Muslims. Reading the available literature on Sudanese history and society it is easy to be struck by the extent to which the processes of Arabization and Islamization have been taken for granted in the history of that country. One basic assumption among Sudanese elites seems to be that this wave of socio-cultural change is a natural process, and that it rolls by historical necessity from the "centers" in the Nile Valley towards the "peripheries" in eastern, western and southern Sudan. It follows then that it is only a matter of time before the whole country is Arabized and Islamized. One tragic effect of such assumptions is that the political realities behind this spread of Arabism and Islam have not been dealt with in Sudanese politics. The problem is not one that can be restricted to the present regime and this civil war. Obviously the Islamists in Khartoum go further in expressing their intentions towards Arabization and Islamization than earlier regimes and they make no secret of their views of people not sharing this type of identity. The policies of the present regime thus dramatizes the issue of race in Sudanese politics. But the issue of defining and constructing a Sudanese identity will not go away with this regime and unless it is solved the future for the Sudan looks very bleak indeed.
This type of problem is also seen when we look at the various attempts at political and ethnic organization among the Nuba. Such attempts indicate that the Nuba themselves see different answers to this question. The General Union of the Nuba Mountains (GUN) headed by Father Philip Abbas Ghaboush, a Christian, and Mahmoud Hazeeb, a Muslim, was for many years the only Nuba political organization, and it is interesting to see its basic political orientation. GUN was based on a regional idea of securing Nuba resources for the Nuba people, i.e it focussed on the lack of development of this particular region, and clearly organised its supporters around a claim for territory. This strategy also meant that GUN sought to include Arab groups in the same region.
In the early 1970s a new organization was formed, called KOMOLO, by a certain Yusif Kuwa Mekki. This youth organization took a more racial stance, and worked explicitly for Nuba issues, first through government organisations, and later in opposition to the same government. Yusif Kuwa joined the SPLA in 1984, established the New Kust Division in 1989 and was, until his death in March 2001, the SPLA commander in charge of the liberated areas in the Nuba Mountains. In 1985 Philip Ghaboush formed the Sudan National Party (SNP) and took it into alliance with parties from Southern Sudan. In addition to local Nuba, the support for the party came primarily from Nuba migrants in the various Sudanese cities like Khartoum and Port Sudan. GUN has continued and is now more influenced by younger Nuba intellectuals and trade unions. However, as such political organizations developed the Umma government of Sadiq al Mahdi, they encouraged the arming of Baqqara Arabs, and made them form the militias (murhaleen) that spread terror among Nuba and Southern groups just south of the border. This brought the SPLA, in alliance with KOMOLO, into the mountains, and at the end of the war they controlled sizeable areas in the central parts of that territory, developing a civil administration since 1992, with a South Kordofan Advisory Council, village councils, focus on health, education and relief, as well as on farming. The NIF government declared jihad in the area since 1992, developing a mixed strategy, with military initiatives and uprooting of people to Peace Villages (dar al salaam), and low-intensity warfare called "combing" (tamshit), but also with attempts to recruit prominent Nuba (Peace from Within, salam min dakhal) and mobilization of pro-Nuba (nafir al shabi).
This particular "climate" in the Nuba Moutains of course gives the Nuba struggle a distinct characteristic. But it also shows that people have several alternatives as to whom they want to support politically, depending on their interests and opinions. The 1990s also brought a new dimension into the struggle, that of the rapidly increasing Sudanese diaspora. Throughout this diaspora we have also seen the mushrooming of various Nuba organisations (like Nuba Mountains Solidarity Abroad and Nuba Survival in London, and Nuba Relief, Rehabilitation and Development Society in Nairobi), and the emergence of newsletters like Nafir and later The Nuba Vision in London, and the various positions in the Nuba struggle being presented in various Western foras, like The House of Lords in the British Parliament. In this process we also find Western organisations, primarily NGOs (like "Africa Watch") providing information on atrocities and also engaging themselves in solidarity work.
A quick look at issues being raised in Nafir seems to support my main points. The topics are by no means new: "What is Slavery?", "Agriculture in the Nuba Mountains", "The Question of Land", "Nuba Songs", "Nuba Culture", to mention just a few headlines. But there are also stories about the new NGOs operating in the area, and pieces written by representatives of such organisations. My point is not that this is wrong. On the contrary, I support most of what I see. My point is that the dynamics provided by contemporary developments in the Nuba Mountains are similar to those of many other situations in regions and among people who take up struggle against oppressive power-holders. The discourse of resistance is taken into international arenas, and the exploitation of modern media provides new flows of information. The process is complex, and can not be reduced to a simple state vs. society, or state vs. civil society type of dichotomy. Rather than look for neat categories I believe what we can expect to find are groups and actors that are neither "state" nor "society", but linked together in networks in which resources, people and ideas travel. Some of those networks are today global in scope. We are all participating in this game; not only development economists and planners from multilateral institutions like the World Bank, bilateral donor countries, or national governments. The Western press also contributes. As do Western academicians, such as myself. But so do local Africans, politicians and activists alike, often in alliances with NGOs. This is so because what goes on is part of the effects of the general process of "globalization" in which we are witnessing an interaction not so much based on "real world events" but rather on a constant battle between different discourses of interpretation and explanation. This puts us squarely back in the realm of the social and economic power of the various actors involved, and their ability to shape the discourse.
I stress this point because I see a tendency in the way the Nuba are being portrayed in various "centres of resistance" in Europe and the USA that tends to privilege a certain type of Nuba. The hegemonic view in the contemporary discourse of the Nuba is one based on the Nuba of the Central Mountains, of the areas liberated by SPLA. They are not from the southern areas where I have done most of my work. In those areas, around Talodi, Liri and Kalogi people are "Islamised", "Arabised" and "Sudanised" to a degree that carries little resemblance to the Nuba as portrayed in newsletters like Nafir. Furthermore, they are living in Government territory, which means that they are under very different types of civil administrations compared to the Central Mountains. Politically they have been dominated by the commercial groups, and also by the political alliances built around the Talodi Arabs, who have been supporters of the Umma through their late political leader, Gemr Hussein.
One may argue that this situation is a fact, and there is nothing one can do about it. My concern is about the future effect of these processes on the possibility of building a peaceful society throughout the Nuba Mountains region. Not that I don’t support the struggle of the Nuba, but I must also confess a certain worry that if the Nuba succeed in achieving self-determination based on an understanding that: "The Nuba live in a well-defined territory called the Nuba Mountains, which was a separate province during the British rule in Sudan with its own administration and its capital at Talodi until amalgamated in 1929, during the British rule, into the larger Kordofan" (Nafir, vol.6, no. 3, December 2000), we might get a few surprises. In such an understanding, which of course is historically correct in the sense that there actually was such a province, lie hidden many of the problems of any future settlement of what place the Nuba Mountain region should be given in a future settlement in Sudan. One problem that the statement under-communicates is the heterogeneity among the Nuba themselves. Another problem is the existence of other, non-Nuba groups in the region. A focus on ethnicity and race alone may hide the fact that many of the groups share a common predicament and that alliances should be sought across ethnic boundaries.
The importance of the state
We also have to take into consideration the contemporary importance of the nation state as a distributor of resources of importance to the population and keep a close look on how groups and individuals operate in order to get access to what they want from the state. Katherine Verdery (1994) opens a similar avenue relating to the existence of the state. She argues that ethnicity is a product of state-making, that national identities do not build on ethnic identities, but that the first generates the second. Thus one result of the history of colonialism and nationalism in different areas was the formation of new ethnic identities. We are approaching Foucault here, and his perspective on the role of the state and the creation of modern subjects through practices of state power. To cover this aspect of ethnicity, says Verdery, we need a perspective based on political science and historical sociology, all types of perspectives that anthropology has moved away from (e.g. Roosen, 1994). We have to look at the historical processes that produce particular forms, and also at what forces of differentiation and homogenization are operating.
Referring to the situation in the Nuba Mountains, an important problem relates to how we can understand the direction of change, and at what level of social life such changes occur. One concept that is used in discussions of processes of the kind we are dealing with, is that of assimilation. The Lafofa as described earlier would be an example of such a process of assimilation, in which people try to become similar to the majority way of life, in order to be treated as equals. But the use of assimilation ends up lumping together many processes and confuses local borrowing between groups with the force of those integrative processes that are supported by society at large, including the State itself. To my mind, the processes of Arabization and Islamization, and the contemporary one that Paul Doornbos (1984) coined, "Sudanization", are of a different nature than local borrowing between groups.
This brings us squarely back to the role played by the Sudanese state in dealing with various peripheral groups, particularly blacks who are regarded as not being proper Muslims, and as being Africans rather than Arabs. The political tensions inherent in these issues surfaced in Sudanese politics in 1982, with President Nimeiry’s introduction of the September Laws, giving Islamic sharia law dominant status in the Sudanese legal system, extending also into the realm of criminal law (hudud). Seen from within Sudan it was obvious from the beginning that this was a political move, meant to boost the president’s weakened position. This was further underlined by giving the Muslim Brothers a central political role. However, the effects were devastating. It not only ended the era of optimism prevalent in the 1970s, but resulted, as we know, in political turmoil that swept Nimeiry’s regime away and in a civil war that might tear the country apart. An important element of the conflict is the definition of the Sudanese identity, and the application of the sharia dramatized to people of Southern Sudan, as well as northern groups such as the Nuba, that their identity was at stake and that their position as equal citizens in their country was far from settled.
However the problem did not originate in 1982. The 18th and 19th centuries represent periods when there was an active pursuit of slave populations. The British colonial policy was aimed at isolating the African populations from Arab and Muslim influence. This policy was based on positive discrimination, but served as a stumbling block for later attempts at integration. During the 1960s there were attempts by various regional groups (Beja, Nuba, Fur, as well as southern groups) to create political organizations that could further their interests in the new national center and counter the dominant position of the national parties, the Umma and DUP. With Nimeiry’s takeover in 1969 such organised political forces were abolished. They were replaced by the Sudanese Socialist Union, a party and a national force meant to bridge tribal and regional differences. The success at ending the civil war in 1972 and the ambitious development strategies of the 1970s actually provided considerable optimism. However, no real integration took place and the old elites remained dominant in Sudanese politics. And old attitudes did not go away easily. My point is well demonstrated by a quote from Mansur Khalid, a key member of Nimeiry’s regime from 1969 to 1978, who writes in his book The Government They Deserve: The Role of the Elite in Sudan’s Political Evolution (1990): "In the closed circles of northern Sudan there is a series of unprintable slurs for Sudanese of non-Arab stock, all reflective of semi-concealed prejudice" (p. 135).
Obviously, the solution to this problem is not in a policy based on the continued assimilation of groups such a the Nuba into the majority culture. But this does not mean that all integration is bad. Obviously there must be some shared understanding for interaction to go on, such as a shared language, shared "ground-rules" etc. If such a "civic" type of integration is allowed to develop there might be some hope of holding Sudanese communities together. What the Sudanese will discover then, is something they already know from centuries of living together: that it is surprising how little we have to share in order for interaction to unfold. The political challenge is to provide space for people as subjects, not as objects to be made in the image of a majority culture. Which brings us back to where we started, with the individual as a key starting point for any understanding of ethnic processes.
Towards some conclusions
This paper has explored a situation in which a civil war such as the one in Sudan has been conceived as a conflict between ethnic and religious groups. By focussing on the Nuba Mountains in particular we see that this type of perspective easily presents the ethnic groups themselves as solid entities: they are presented as "actors" in their own right. This is further strengthened through a peace settlement that is also organized along such perceptions, channelling resources and access to the political systems on the basis of belonging to such perceived "groups".
This paper has challenged this type of "groupism". When we look at the Nuba Mountains we clearly see various processes at play, relating to ethnicity, race, nationalism, ethnic violence, identity, collective memory, migration, assimilation and the nation-state. Summarizing the central argument I have tried to put forward, it is my opinion that although many of these terms make us think about "groups", we need to focus instead on categories, schemas, encounters, identifications, stories, institutions, organizations, networks and events. That is to say, ethnic groups must be seen as "things in the making".
To substantiate this the paper refers to the various political discourses that have evolved from the complex situation in the Nuba Mountains. A complex history, a complex ethnic picture with Arabs and Nuba, a complex religious picture with Muslims and Christians and traditional Nuba religions, and a long civil war have produced a series of discourses that must be analysed. Through the analysis of some such discourses, from a "Nuba" perspective, from an "Arab" perspective, and as discourses in a religious field of "Muslims" and "Christians" I have tried to show that the realities behind such labels are not "things in the world" but rather "perspectives on the world", i.e. they are ways of seeing and interpreting more than they are "facts".
Such a perspective does not mean that ethnicity is not real and that there might not be groups organised on the basis of ethnicity. Rather, the point is that such groups are not "facts" but rather "events" and something that "happens" (Brubaker 2004). Hence, we must study group-making as process, including the games of meaning production and of processes of metaphorization that go into its legitimization.
It is true that in the Nuba Mountains we see a situation in which groups labelled as Nuba and as Arabs, as Christians and as Muslims have been through a civil war. But it is also necessary to make this picture more nuanced. First of all, in the Nuba Mountains it is not so much the ethnic groups that are organised, as the protagonists themselves, the Government of Sudan (GOS) and the opponent Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). Through these organisations, and the war machines at their disposals, people have been made to chose sides and to "appear" as one or the other of the available identities. Rhetoric has been heated on all sides, with claims to speak for larger groups of "Nuba", "pure Nuba", "Arab" etc.
Such processes are very real and have certainly had profound effects on the ground. But the effects observed can not be conceived as realities involving total groups. Rather, we are dealing with categories, processes and relations. And what we need to explain are the ways through which people and organizations do things with these categories and how they thereby channel specific effects, for instance on the relationship between members of so-called ethnic groups.
I also include issues of identity in this perspective. Rather than thinking of fixed identities we need to look at the processes of identifying. Again, through new processes, such as the Sudanese civil war, new collective identities might develop and form basis of new feelings among people about who they are, which again might get very real "group" consequences. But we want to understand the process behind it, not only take the result as a de-contextualized "fact".
In the Nuba Mountains region the direction of such processes has been deeply affected by the civil war. Which means that violence itself becomes a factor. Fears and threats are being constructed through narratives and cultural representations of "the Other", demonizing various groups in the process. Obviously this will affect the process of reconstruction after the war. Which brings us to the current situation.
With the "Comprehensive Peace Agreement"(CPA) of January 2005 this situation is now part of the political reality of the Sudan and must be dealt with in the process of nation-building. I don't know where these debates will take us, nor do I know in which direction the future of the Nuba Mountains will develop. However, on the ground, among the people who are still in their home areas, members of the various Nuba groups must deal with their predicament, as groups and as individuals. In the midst of all the unrest there is an ongoing process of defining and redefining what culture and ethnicity is all about, creating new solidarities between people and building a new sense of community. The issue is not so much to understand that this is so, but to understand how some versions of reality win over and replace other possible versions in these processes of transformation. Such processes must be acknowledged, also in the political process, because they will certainly affect the reality of any future political settlement. In this context it is important to differentiate between the Central Mountains in which relatively large Nuba groups control their territories and the southern areas where many groups are living together and where the dynamics of the local situation is quite different from that of the Central Mountains. At this moment, however, they belong together in a Nuba Mountains region, and the fate of this re-merger will be decided by the various ways the different "world views" now being developed are joined together and allowed to express themselves.
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