Sudan: Africa's largest Country A Sad place to be Black

Sudan: "African homeland"? A Meditation on the ludicrous in Africa

Consider what is happening this very moment in Darfur (possibly also somewhere in Southern Sudan if you don't believe the hype of Khartoum's reformed domestic politics). Combine that with Sudan's primary status in Africa which Sudan itself has dishonoured. To this add centuries of mass enslavement and deportation/exportation; in other words, ethnic cleansing of Africans from many parts of Africa.

Fact is, the removal of Africans from their regions, their Continent, &/or consequently even from their own consciousness of indigenous identity, has never ended. In Sudan today this continues. In Darfur in the West of Sudan it has accelerated. 

What I am saying is not against anyone yet the situation we are in cries out for honesty. What these African stories of extreme exploitation say is that Africans must re-negotiate their relations with Arabs and with everyone else, & that we also must do so with each other.

A corollary is that Arabs with a conscience which seeks to affirm both Africans & Arabs and all of us as human beings must do a similar re-negotiation of their presence in & ties with Africa, as well as with other identity-relation issues of their own.

The destructive and genocidal processes in Sudan, Mauritania and elsewhere do not speak well for a decent future for Black people - even in Africa. These processes also say something eloquently chilling about anyone & every entity responsible for allowing the pillage to go on, along with all who somehow 'benefit' by the physical, sociocultural, economic & political removal & exclusion of Blacks. This includes such things as the opening of "new territories" for "settlement" by others or by Africans who've been "arabized". What does 'arabization' (/arabisation) mean anyway, and especially in Sudan??

From "Confronting Genocide" @ the Aegis Trust website:

" The black people of Sudan are 52% of the population; the Arabs, who dominate the government, 39%.  For centuries it has been an uneasy co-existence of discrimination, often slavery.  In Darfur, Arabs from the north need more land, partly due to drought. That has led to clashes for decades with the black population. 

“This time it is different,” I am told by a Sudanese Arab in neighbouring Chad. “The Government trained and armed militia. I cannot be part of that.  It is dreadful.”    The conflict was convenient for the Government of Sudan’s policy of Arabisation.  Sudan is for the Arabs; black people have to go. It is not about religion.  This time the victims and perpetrators are both Muslim; the underlying problem is about racism and power."

In modern Sudan and elsewhere in the broader northern sections of AFRICA, Blacks have never been allowed to keep or to have anything, not even their own human and social freedom - referring to the practices of slavery and the slave trade which continue today in MAURITANIA and elsewhere. The only "choice" given to AFRICANS in these regions is to become "arabized" - that is, to abandon every positive meaning of being Black and of their own cultures, families & beliefs: religious and otherwise.

It is now obviously that this is a process which does not "finish" in Africa, and seemingly those promoting and doing it have no intention to stop.

Historically the same removal of Blacks & of Blackness seems to have taken place right across Africa's northern regions, from Morocco, Western Sahara, &tc. in the West all the way to Egypt in the East where the Nubian people were first subjugated, then displaced and removed.

In the 20th Century the heart of the Nubians' Southern (also called "Upper") Egypt homeland was seized to be permanently submerged as the site of the well-known Aswan Dam. I remember in grade school in America at the time we were taught the Aswan Dam was a great sign of Egypt's progress. There was not one word about the permanent scattering of Nubian communities or the loss of Nubia's still undocumented ancient culture and history.

Subsequently during the rule of popular anti-colonial leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian government flooded much of Nubia. But even today Upper Egypt's Aswan area holds ancient sites & monuments currently underwater, and still worthy of and still awaiting the long overdue recognition as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

SUDAN has acquired enough territory to rank it as Africa's largest country. The perverse reality is that there can be no joy in this. It may be "Africa's largest country" (while Nigeria is most populous) but more pertinent & more honestly, overtly and covertly, Sudan is violently anti-Black. Despite whatever measure that almost anywhere in the world would be sent and seen as a mark of pride, the fact remains Sudan is one of the worst and saddest places in the world to be an African.