The idea that Sudan is divided along racial lines was promoted by Southern elites in the post-colonial period to build support among anti-Arab international actors, writes Cathy Wilcock.

Typical understandings of Sudanese politics in the West are driven by an unhelpful focus on the ‘Northern-Arab versus Southern-African’ dichotomy. These tropes were dispersed globally in Southern Sudanese propaganda in the early postcolonial era. They did more to hinder, rather than help, the Southern cause. So why did Southern elites use them? Globally powerful backers – and not always the usual suspects – are one important reason behind the spreading of this narrative.

In the era of decolonisation, new African states were handed several impossible challenges. One of these was fomenting a national identity among communities who had very little in the way of shared history, language and culture. Another was remaining financially afloat with no tax base. These challenges were even more pronounced for elites who hoped to lead their own countries after decolonisation but were not given the status of an independent state; Southern Sudan is a prime example.

Newly independent African states and separatists alike had dual imperatives; 1) to rapidly consolidate a national consciousness inside their borders, and 2) to secure finance from outside them. Political propaganda was one important tool used by elites to address these two priorities, but problems arise when the latter need impinges on the former.

The nation-building propaganda written by the Southern Sudanese Liberation Movement was aggressively racial to the extent that it undermined their long-term vision for an independent South. One explanation for this narrative self-entrapment is that the propaganda was used to draw support from Israel: a small but influential global actor in postcolonial Africa.

African-versus-Arab tropes in Southern narratives

Written in the early 1970s, one leading Southern magazine the Grass Curtain, brimmed with depictions of Southern Sudan as a black African nation held hostage by genocidal Arab imperialists ruling from Khartoum. The South, named ‘Blackland’, was described as ‘a mauled gangrenous limb […] still treated as a fractious poisoned patient from whom the old blood is pumped out and a new “Arab” blood is transfused in incessantly’. There were numerous depictions of gratuitous Arab cruelty, allegedly motivated by ‘racial animosity’, including the torture of civilians, often children. Reports of castration underlined the supposed genocidal ambition of the Arab militias whose mission was described as ‘the sinister spearhead of Arab penetration and subversion into the heart of Africa’.

This oppositional nationhood is, in many ways, what one might expect. Communities in the Southern provinces had well-grounded claims of oppression. In the preceding centuries and decades, they endured Mahdist slave raids, colonial underdevelopment, and postcolonial political and economic isolation. Yet, in the propaganda of Southern separatists, these oppressions are tied to race in a way which belies historical fact and destabilised their own long-term political ambitions.

Narrative self-entrapment and Southern separatism

The main political ambition of the SSLM – to become independent of the North – was actively undermined by the promotion of an essentialised black African nationhood under threat from Arab imperialists. There were hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs residing in northern provinces who held identical claims to cultural erasure and economic suppression by elites in Khartoum. If race was the key dividing line, as the propaganda made out, it makes more sense to link with those other localities in the North rather than push for independence for the South.

The ‘African versus Arab’ core of Southern nationhood as presented in SSLM propaganda exposed Southern secessionism as morally and logically inconsistent. If their claims for independence were grounded in the ‘natural bonds binding them to black Africa’ – as their propaganda made out – why didn’t their nation building extend to their black brothers and sisters in the North? Why did it cut off at an arbitrary geographical border? The Southern Sudanese Liberation Movement’s political propaganda constructed a racialised national identity which threatened the raison d’etre of the movement which created it. While the South did end up seceding from the North; it didn’t happen for another 40 years, and under a very different Southern leadership.

There are many explanations why Southern elites scripted their nation in this way. But one important and underappreciated aspect is the pressure to attract and keep external backers on side. Let’s go back to the dual priorities facing postcolonial elites of 1) consolidating a national identity and 2) gaining support from powerful outsiders. The Arab-versus-African trope in Southern propaganda was part of a strategy to draw in and maintain support from Israel who were interested in spreading anti-Arab messages throughout the English-speaking world. The  African-versus-Arab trope in Southern propaganda was not simply invented to appeal to Israel; it had been part of Southern narratives before this. However, Israeli involvement in Sudanese politics is an important and underappreciated part of the puzzle in these crucial and formative years.

Israel in Southern Sudan

In the early 1970s, Israel was funding the Southern Sudanese militia to fight the Sudanese Army. They were themselves fighting the Egyptians in the Suez region and Egypt was substantially backed up by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). If Israel could strengthen the Southern separatists, Sudan would be too stretched to help the Egyptians.

In return for medical supplies, training and arms, the Southern Sudanese supplied Israel with a second front for the SAF, and crucially, an opportunity to spread anti-Arab messaging around the world, especially in the USA and Europe.

Yotam Gidron at Durham University, has exposed how Israel’s Mossad secretly funded and supplied the content for one of the Southern magazines, Anyanya. Photographs in the magazine ostensibly taken in the Southern bushland, had been staged by Mossad agents in Tel Aviv. While the other leading publication, the Grass Curtain, was written by Southern elites, the anti-Arab messaging was designed to re-iterate their commitment to Israel and bolster their pragmatic partnership. Supplies of arms and in-kind assistance continued to flow from Israel to Southern Sudan until the Addis Ababa peace agreement was signed between the North and the South in 1972. In this new era of tolerance, the two prominent propaganda magazines stopped printing, and the partnership between Israel and Southern Sudan came to an end.

This period of Sudanese history shows us that smaller global players were incredibly influential when nation building was in its infancy. Most attention has been paid to the former colonial powers and the big Cold War players. But these are not the only important external actors. For the early Southern Sudanese nation builders, Israeli support was so important that they were willing to jeopardise their own ideological commitments to secure it. If postcolonial African states had been given the right financial grounding to delink from external backers, perhaps national identities would have developed more organically and authentically. If that had happened, then perhaps today, we may not have to contend with the unhelpful framing of Sudanese politics as ‘Arab versus African’.

This blog is linked to a full research article in the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Photo credit: Nina R used with permission CC BY 2.0