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

8. The Creation of the Margin

8 The Creation of the Margin The theme of the margin and of marginalization has an enduring hold on the contemporary Sudanese discourse. As a central concern for different Sudanese political and social groups and individuals, this theme spread like wildfire through scholarship, media, and everyday language. It developed its own proponents and practitioners. No one disagrees as to what the term and the theme mean, except, depending on the way it is articulated, marginalization might represent different actions or reactions loaded with unsettling predispositions. Within this sense, the margin theme and marginalization are dicey and multilayered concepts. To a large extent, marginalization is a shifting phenomenon, linked to a region, a peoplehood, an economic system, a political status, or a placement within a country and its total population. In the Sudan, the margin theme is applied to the various regions of the country that continue to be marginalized from the main society. Their marginalization developed as a result of practices, zoning, certain policies , and programs that had the potential to contribute negatively to the needs of certain groups of people. Marginalization occurs also as a result of deliberately ignoring or denying some people the opportunity to fully participate in the society to which they belong. Defining and focusing the debate over the southern part of the country, a certain functional imperative arises. At the same time, the discourse of marginalization—its proliferation demands, rights, and entitlements—has expanded to include other areas in western Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and the Blue Nile, as well as the eastern parts of the country. This represents only the visible forms of marginalization. Other, invisible forms of marginalization include women and the rural poor. By way of euphemism and other forms of expression, the theme of marginalization—in all its different and uniform constitutive dimensions, The Creation of the Margin · 165 such as underdevelopment—was part of the local, regional, and international debate. Now and again, as the Sudan’s system of government changed, the different-minded people who formulated the debates and representations of marginalization brought with them other ideational, scholarly, and political platforms. Although this theme was never immune to totalizing discourses and contestations, nothing could be more totalizing than the colonial discourse that meant to organize, instruct, and colonize the country and the lifeworld of some or all of its different groups. Many factors and inventions have created the Sudan; both in its objective reality, which lies within its geographical configurations, spacetime factor, human veracity, and experiences, and in its subjective reality, which lies within its people’s and other people’s minds. Neither objective nor subjective reality claimed to have created any form of uniformization, except for their humanity and being “genetically continuous groups.” However, certain internal and external aspects of power and discipline acted to regulate, control, and colonize the lifeworld of some or all of the Sudanese people. Using the powers of spatial control and discourse, the colonizing states produced maps in order to confine people to certain imaginary geographical zones. However, in the process, some deeper effects took hold. The invention of peoplehood emerged from the system of magnitude that operated and produced zones and margins in line with the colonial states’ projects of control and order. The aim—and essence— of that order was to create margins and centers. In this chapter I will address the creation of the margin and marginalization in order to demonstrate that the outcome of the formal and informal processes, or structural socioeconomic changes, which governed the Sudanese people’s conduct, was subject to different colonial polarizing experiences of openness and closure. The dynamic relationship between openness and closure within the colonial system was the production of the regional confinements that the ruling colonial states labeled as the south, the east, and the west in addition to unlabeled invisible forms of marginalization. The structure and the differential chances of visibility and invisibility, together with discourses and the labels attached to each group, correspond, in turn, to what the colonial states made sense of, and attributed meaning to, as location, peoplehood, and representations of the margin and marginalization in relation to the north as the prime illustration of the center’s core. At the heart of these labels and discourses 166 · A Civil Society Deferred lie the different forms of practice that one needs to examine in order to discover how and to what extent the colonizers labeled, characterized...