The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland: The State and Self-Determination in the Era of Heightened Globalization

8. Nation-Building in the Sudan

139 8 Nation-Building in the Sudan INTRODUCTION The similarities between Ethiopia’s and neighbouring Sudan’s nationbuilding projects have been discussed by many scholars. As Markakis notes, “what the ruling groups in Ethiopia and in Sudan perceived as the ‘national’ identity was their own ethnic identity writ large” (1998: 112). This signalled a departure from the common African experience in which “the association between ethnic identity and the nation was typically indirect” (Donham 1999: 128) and incidental. In Sudan and Ethiopia nation-building consisted of little more than coercive assimilation to forge the rest of the populace into the ruling groups’ “ethnic identity.” However, “forced assimilation not only was rejected by subordinate groups, but also encouraged them to invoke their own cultural symbols, most often religion and language” (Markakis 1994: 226). Hence, homogenization triggered the contrary process of increasing particularization in both the Sudan and Ethiopia. In the Sudan, however, only the role of religion in projecting the nation and its historical roots served as the causes of controversy. Language did not seem to pose a problem as even John Garang (the leader of Sudan Peoples Liberation Army) declares “Arabic …must be the national language in a new Sudan and therefore we must learn it” (1992: 133; italics added). The view of grassroots communities may, of course, be to the contrary; elite political actors rarely seem to take them into consideration. ISLAMIZATION IS ARABIZATION Conversion to Islam did not lead to the assumption of Arab identity in most of black Africa.Only in North Africa did Islamization result in Arabization as well. However, contrary to what prevails in adjacent Moslem black Africa, “Northern Sudanese Muslims…see themselves as Arabs despite the African element in their skin color and physical features” (Deng 1997: 337). Their determination to create the rest of the Sudanese in their own image was bound to lead to endless trouble.Members of the northern Sudanese elite often used imaginative metaphors to describe their role and position in Africa. The Sudan is described as “a geographical spearhead of the Middle East into Africa, south of the Sahara” (Deng 1995: 360), according to Mahgoub, a famous northern politician. And the mission of this spearhead stuck in the heart of Africa is holy, according to Assadiq al-Mahdi, the Mahdi’s great-grandson. He emphatically declared that “the failure of Islam in southern Sudan would be the failure of the Sudanese Muslims to the international Islamic cause. Islam has a holy mission in Africa, and southern Sudan is the beginning of that mission” (Malwal 1981: 41). This mentality lent urgency to a revocation of the former British policy that sought to curb the dual processes of Islamization and Arabization of southern Sudan, and achieving such a revocation commenced immediately after independence and was pursued with ever-increasing vigour. The achievement of precipitous Islamicization and Arabization meant that the more common gradual and personal conversion to Islam had to be dispensed with, and it now had to be a statedriven process. Coercing “southern chiefs and state employees…into taking Muslim names,” derisively called “government” names (Markakis 1987: 72), became the most absurd distortion resulting from this urgency. Christian southerners naturally responded by clinging to their faith while hastening the conversion of remaining adherents of traditional African beliefs. Pre-Colonial Sudan Competing interpretations regarding “national” history emerged also in the Sudan, as happened in neighbouring Ethiopia.This was due to another departure from approaches to “national” history in the rest of Africa. The history of the post-colonial state is rarely equated with that of the pre-colonial empire or other form of state in much of the rest of Africa. The birth of the nucleus of a Sudanese nation-state, however, is frequently traced back to the Mahdist era (Hurriez 1989: 89) in the northern Sudanese discourse. Some scholars go further to state that “the followers of the Mahdi created both an Islamically identified political system and the first independent Sudanese ‘national’ state” (Esposito and Voll 1996: 78). The projection of contemporary Sudan’s history to the Mahdist era has generated a number of implications. The Horn of Africa as Common Homeland 140 First, a number of developments prompted the northern and southern Sudanese to outclass each other as having a more ancient existence as a people. One thing can be inferred from some of the Mahdi’s pronouncements . His proclaimed intention of ultimately conquering and cleansing...