Challenging Narratives in Sudan’s Revolution

Image source: @SudaneseCulture

When we look back at our pasts, we construct a narrative about it. In this manner, narrative becomes a process of making sense of the unfolding of our lives. When we look back, we tell a story that provides an answer; when we wonder what happened, we tell a story of how things came to be; and when we wonder who we are, we tell a story which locates us in the context of past, present and future. When we make sense of ourselves, we do so with the help of narrative. What we ‘are’ is not a question of how we should be defined, but instead a question of how we are seen and a question of which stories are told about us.

In 1989, Sudan witnessed another coup, one heralded as the Salvation (Inqaz) revolution. Three years later, a 10-year Comprehensive National Strategy (CNS) 1992-2002 for socio-economic and religious development established the Inqazregime’s framework for Sudan’s global interests. Although the 200-page document comprehensively unrolls the Inqaz regime’s global interests, it also proposes a conflicted view on the regime’s own understanding of national identity. It insists that the Sudanese are ‘one people, united in citizenship; and religion constitutes a basic element of their being’. But it also suggests Sudan’s people are ‘the result of an Afro-Arab symbiosis that has been going on through the centuries’. For a long time, Sudan’s elites have relied on such reductionist language to paper over the variety of ethnic and religious groups enclosed within their borders. To understand the issue of diversity and culture in Sudan, and how they’re acknowledged by those in power, is to understand the forces at play in its people’s calls for change.  

CNS 1992-2002 demonstrated the tension in expressing what constitutes a Sudanese people. Nestled between the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, Sudan is home to various shades of black and white, and derivatives of Muslim and Christian faiths. So, who may call it home? Is it a people of peoples? A constellation of tribes? Multiple identities? All of the above? Where Africa meets Arabia, the confluence of the two Niles meet, Sudan is a hotbed of diversity and a country of contrasts. Its main conflict today is a fight for supremacy over who will have control of its narrative of identity. Will diversity continue to be framed as a problem? Will internalised prejudices remain? Or will a new Sudan reflect the acceptance its various sub-cultures?

African or Arab?

Image source: Kurious/PixaBay

Sudanese regimes have constantly widened the cleavages within society for political gain. By feeding narratives of social, spatial, ethnic and religious differences through policies such as documenting tribal affiliation in Sudanese ID cards in the 1980s, the gentrification of the centre of Sudan in the early 90s under Sudan’s former President Omar Al Bashir’s Tamkin (a policy of patronage and patrimonialism by way of appointing Arabs in the regime) policies, or consolidating networks of patronage founded upon ethnic differences, regimes have dominated the Sudanese political landscape through tribal and ethnic clientelism. Those who have ruled Sudan are entirely of Arab origin: from Ibrahim Abboud to Gaafar Nimeiry to Al Bashir, Sudan has always been governed by Arabs.

As a result, a continuous theme of Sudanese politics has been the Arabisation of the country from its outset as part of a conscious political move to pivot towards the Middle East, subsequently conflating Sudanese identity with being Arab for political gain. The romanticisation of Sudan’s Islamic past, the rise of Al Mahdi – although only fleetingly mentioned in school curricula – and the realignment with Arab states were a significant departure from Sudan’s African identity, especially after the change of Sudan’s flag in 1970 under Nimeiry. The symbiosis of Afro-Arab Sudanese identity translated into an Arab/Afro binary, as the previously broader understanding of being Sudanese slowly bifurcated into three competing versions of the same story. 

Overtime, this turned into a spatial form of difference between Arab North/Centre and African South/Periphery. In light of this, scholars and practitioners alike have continued to identify a central-northern Arab-Muslim power bloc that exploits Sudan’s peripheries through the imposition of its own exclusive understanding of Arabic and Islamic (or Islamist) identity on these same peripheries for the centre’s gain. Since the outbreak of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005), a war which hinged on the internalisation of Sudan’s Arab/Afro binary, the insurgencies in Darfur, Kordofan, Blue Nile and Nuba mountains have all occurred along the peripheries of Sudan, informed by the same narratives of difference. The genocide in Darfur, the massacres in the Nuba Mountains, South Kordofan and Blue Nile, and the secession of the South Sudan are illustrative of how the centralisation of Sudanese politics by an
Arab-majority enabled the alienation of the rest of Sudan from the centre, hinging upon the hierarchisation of the Arab-Afro narrative.

While framed as a natural result of cultural disparity, the notion of difference between Arab and African Sudanese was a foreign construct. The binarism rife in this framing of Sudanese self-conceptualisations of being Afro-Arab derives from years of colonial rule under the British from 1899 to 1956. The difficulty the British encountered in determining the origins of people led to the creation of various ideal-types to establish more concrete labels over who is who, and where they are from. Similar measures were done by the British in eastern Nigeria with the Igbo people, and in Kenya with the Luo. Those in the periphery, who were historically ruled by ‘native administration’ under British rule, argue such a binary lived solely in the imaginations of various elite groups, acting as a tool for the Arab bloc for political gain.

Elements of the ‘civilising mission’ of the British were retained since independence. Be it through the inflaming of civil war through jihad, the appointment of ethnically Arab people at the higher echelons of the military and government, or through the Arabisation of Sudanese school curricula, residue of colonial rule still pervades Sudanese society today.

A new Sudan

The difficulty the Sudanese now face is to remain conscious of falling back on these age-old tropes. Despite this historical backdrop, the revolution has helped cultivate an artistic space for the Sudanese to refashion and (re)discover who they are: either through emotional expressions of who they want to be, or through the creation of a new ‘Sudan’ in social circles. The resistance towards this being appropriated by Arab Spring/Uprising discourse, the defiance against the West labelling this as a form of Islam coming out of the Dark Ages and the disregard towards the mentioning of the revolution in the same breadth of ‘African rising’ narratives, retain the idea that the revolution is opening up a new space to redefine what it means to be Sudanese and simultaneously detach itself from years of discriminatory language.

As the Sudanese revolution has gained traction across all forms of social media, extending to the likes of Rihanna and Cardi B, the visibility of the Sudanese has been like never before. With the internet blackout in Sudan, the currently ruling Transitional Military Council (TMC) has taken steps to distort the narrative of the revolution when it has become most accessible to the global media panopticon. In an age of misinformation and fake news, the Sudanese, remaining conscious of these age-old techniques, are fighting hard to keep the story straight and keep old tropes about Sudanese difference from infiltrating the discussion.

With identity-based fault lines shadowing the current movement, hinging on racist undertones dependent on the tone of one’s skin, to whether one’s tribe has African or Arab heritage, via the spatial differences between centre, near periphery and periphery, and the rancor created by sectarian and religious violence, what was once the largest country in Africa has faced the brunt of the diversity of the Sudanese self.

The current revolution is a fight for the framing of Sudan’s identity and a resistance to years of internalising discourses which inferiorise difference for political gain. It is arguable that the biggest success of the revolution is how it has already begun to change the terms in which conversations about Sudanese identity take place.

Hafiz Ibrahim is a 25-year-old researcher on MENA politics in Florence, Italy.