A Civil Society Deferred: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the Sudan

1. The Sociopolitical Construction of a Country

1 The Sociopolitical Construction of a Country The assumption that the name Sudan is an expression of its people’s identity, color, or racial construction is a crucial misconception. There is more to the Sudanese experience in its complexity than meets the eye and what color alone can capture. The multiple names others have applied to the country, however, raise a difficult sociopolitical and intellectual question.1 Unlike many countries of the world, the names others have applied to the Sudan have always connoted the color of its population. These names have turned the Sudan’s human landscape into a sightseeing vista perceived by others as leaving behind multiple hierarchies and proliferations of stigma and few legacies of privilege. The semiotic systems and the history of articulations in this long descriptive narrative emphasize stigma more than privilege in this respect. Such a phenomenon has produced evolving essentialist orientations and claims of difference with implications that go far beyond labeling different groups of people who have lived in the place. On different levels and at different times, such objective reality has remained, in certain ways, an integral part of constructing the Other. They have continued to be sources of constraints and power enforcements , as well as sources of hegemonic impulses, that colonial powers inspired and that internal Sudanese culture and its ongoing discourses in part reflected. That is not to say that the Sudanese construct their collective self through what the Other stipulates. On these two different levels and in these two different times, the Sudanese defined themselves by many identifiers other than color. Their referential declarations to themselves range from relation to a sultanate or region (al-ßul†ana al-Zarqa, also known as Funj and Sinnår, Taqali, Musaba'at and Darfur, Dar Hamid, Dar 2 · A Civil Society Deferred Hamar, or Dar Zaqaua), an ethnic group (Danagla, Kababish, Beja, Nuba, or Dinka, Fur, or Fallata), a city (Shandi, Óalfa, or Kassala), or a village. As early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, multiple economic, cultural, and religious transactions helped form growing networks across local geographies. They formed urban and semiurban centers that facilitated and strengthened the emergence of social classes of holy men (fuqarå'; sing., faq•h, or faki, in colloquial Sudanese), and merchants (jallaba and khawajat); the latter “appropriated the surplus of its subordinate producers through diverse means unknown or unacceptable to ancient custom, but characteristic of commercial capitalism.”2 More than that, the “making” of this new middle class helped create and fashion “institutions which defined the identity of middle class itself, its relations with the subjects, and with the ruling establishment.”3 This institutional differentiation is important because it affected long-standing patterns of reproduction of social relationships, civic discourse, and corresponding transformations that all gave meaning to the organized mode of living. Jay Spaulding explains that organized modes of living from that time comprised three inner and outer acts of power relations. First, “the new middle class claimed Arab identity, practiced patrilineal descent, employed coin currencies, and bound itself in its dealings by the standards of Islamic law.” Second, “it elicited alms, purchased slaves, monopolized exchange relationships, and imposed perpetual indebtedness upon its free subjects.” Finally, “it imposed its own legal and ideological concepts upon the government, demanded exemption from all obligations to the state, and took up a variety of duties hitherto exercised by the state or the nobility, such as the administration of justice and the collection of taxes.”4 The end of the Funj kingdom, in 1821, was the beginning of a complex relationship between different actors within the model of centralized government. Different types of resistance to the Turkish occupation of the Sudan generated diverse processes of exercising centralized violence over a defined territory, its population, and their organized mode of living. The Turkiyya colonial regime (1821–84), a period in which Mu˙ammad 'Ali’s Egypt5 “experienced an exercise in imperial imagination . . . that proved to be highly influential on successive generations,” is one such example.6 This imperial imagination found its fulfillment when Mu˙ammad 'Ali “followed the practice of early European mercantile countries like England and France, who sought to build colonies in the New World, and The Sociopolitical Construction of a Country · 3 for the same reasons. That is why he regarded military expansion and imperialist designs as essential for independence.”7 Hence, invading the Sudan was part of a plan that gave Mu˙ammad...