The Sudan Handbook

Religious   PRactice & belief 103

religious rhetoric, spread to Darfur from   2003     onwards. This was a region

where Christian missionaries had never been allowed to operate and

virtually all the population were at least nominally Muslim. The language

of religion thereafter seemed to morph into racial terminology. Although

splits occurred within the NIF, and the coalition of interests at the centre

of the state has adopted a muted rhetoric, the extremist voices of the

new political Islam, for example in attempting to control women’s dress

in the capital city, are still heard across the world.

Meanwhile, in the camps of refugees and displaced people that have

burgeoned in Sudan and across its borders, and in and around military

garrisons, there is evidence of new forms of mixing and matching of

religious ideas and observances. Among the Blue Nile refugees who

spent a generation in camps in Ethiopia, there have been strange visions

of angels, monsters, and of Jesus calling people home. At other times,

the local diviners have started to make diagnoses of possession by

tembura spirits – the same as those invoked in Omdurman and Sennar –

a pan- Sudanese phenomenon which they had not been acquainted with

before.

Something of the fervent mix of hope, suffering and excitement that

marks the current religious scene in the Sudan is well illustrated by

the remarkable attention paid to a Catholic saint, St Josephine Bakhita,

in several parts of the country. Born in Darfur in the mid-nineteenth

century, she was snatched by slave-traders, bought eventually by an

Italian diplomat, and ended her days in Rome, as a nun, in 1947. She was

canonized in 2000, the first native Sudanese saint. With the outbreak

of major conflict in Darfur, her fame spread through the whole of the

substantial Catholic community in Sudan and among non-Christian

Darfuri Sudanese refugees in Cairo. A Reuters report of     5    September

2008     described a packed service in St. Bakhita parish church, situated

in Jabarona, an IDP camp outside Khartoum, punctuated with songs

honouring the saint. Most of the church members, the report explained,

were southerners who had originally fled north during the civil war, but

after the fighting escalated in Darfur they turned to the saint for solace.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors A^ displaced^ person^ from^ the^ Nuba^ Hills^ said:^ ‘We^ all^ pray^ through^ her^

(www.riftvalley.net).