The Sudan Handbook

78 the sudan handbook

Skin-colour, it may be noted, though it is not a matter of indifference

to Sudanese, does not map onto ethnic divisions, here or elsewhere. Thus

the Juhayna group also includes the Shukriya in the Butana region and

the mainly pastoralist Rufaa al-Hoi and Kenana on the Blue Nile. The

latter two groups tend to be paler-skinned than other Sudanese, with

more recent narratives of arrival from the Arabian peninsula. (The most

recent of all Arab migrants to Sudan are the Rashaida, who settled in the

eastern borderlands in the 1860s.)

From the 1920s onwards Sudanese nationalists, mainly from riverain

groups, worked to develop a self-consciously Sudanese Arabic cultural

identity. After independence, accordingly, a policy of arabization, tariib,

was adopted by successive governments in Khartoum and propagated

in every region of the country. But government policies of Arabization

and Islamization, which involved, among other measures, the expulsion

of western missionaries from the south and the replacement of English

with Arabic as the language of instruction in southern schools, served

to sharpen differences rather than elide them. The near-monopoly of

political power on the part of elites from the central riverain region

encouraged the growth of an idea of Arab racial supremacy. Southerners,

in particular, were often targets of ethnic prejudice that invoked an earlier

history of enslavement of people from the south. This contributed, in

time, to insurgencies in the peripheries, first in the south and then in the

west. In the civil wars that followed successive governments in Khartoum

resorted to an ethnically based counter-insurgency policy that involved

the use of tribal militias recruited from Arab groups to attack non-Arab

communities in areas of rebel support, a strategy that has provoked

polarization between these communities.

The Limits of Arab Influence

In the heart of Darfur, before the colonial era, the forebears of the

non-Arab Fur established the Darfur sultanate on the fertile slopes of

the Jebel Marra massif, and ruled there, from the seventeenth to the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors twentieth century (with an interruption during the Mahdiyya), over an

(www.riftvalley.net).