Sudan: Coming to Terms With Sudan's Legacy of Slavery

Among northern Sudanese families, slavery continues to be a taboo subject, even though this history has shaped the Sudans for centuries.

In the 1940s, my grandfather wrote a poem about his mother. She was from what was then southern Sudan. She was brought to Khartoum as a slave, where she was eventually married off to her Upper Egyptian master, a wealthy landowner who had settled in the city. She gave birth to several children, one of whom was my grandfather.

In the poem, my grandfather re-imagines the moment of his mother's capture in a slave raid in southern Sudan. Though he himself had been born in Khartoum - inheriting his father's name and elite status as well as his religion (Islam) and his language (Arabic) - he was open about acknowledging his mother's slave ancestry. This was quite unusual. Among northern Sudanese families, especially around Khartoum, slavery was and continues to be a taboo subject, because to acknowledge slave descent in one's bloodline is to acknowledge one's lineage is "tainted".

But slavery, of course, is a defining feature of the region's history, dating back thousands of years. Under Turco-Egyptian rule of Sudan beginning in the 1820s, the practice was entrenched along a north-south axis, with slave raids taking place in southern Sudan and slaves transported to Egypt and the Ottoman empire. Under Mahdi rule between 1885-1898, the trade flourished. Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities (who ruled Sudan between 1898 and 1956 under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium) officially abolished the practice in 1924, though it continued, unofficially, for decades after.

I am intrigued by this history not only because it has shaped my own family heritage, but also because it sheds light on some of the inequalities that have characterised the relationship between the two Sudans. In the north, to this day, the derogatory term for a South Sudanese is 'abid - literally, "slave".

This not only points to the kind of discrimination that South Sudanese have had to suffer at the hands of northerners, it also indicates the extent to which the legacy of slavery continued to inform structures of economic, political and social inequality long after the official abolishment of the practice in 1924, and the country's independence in 1956. It provides a context for why most South Sudanese felt that there was no place for them in a larger Sudan in which they would always be looked upon as worse than second-class citizens.

Indeed, there were claims that the practice was revived during the north-south civil war, though whether the practice constituted a directed policy of "enslavement" overseen by the Khartoum government against southern Sudanese, or whether it constituted war-related hostage taking, has been a subject of controversy.

On one side, groups (primarily of a Christian bent), publicised the plight of the southern Sudanese they said were taken as slaves, particularly during the peak of the war in the 1980s-1990s. They organised slave redemption drives targeted at freeing slaves through monetary compensation.