Francis Mading Deng

This is a long, exhaustive tale of a young man's journey into adulthood in villages and cities in Sudan. Elias grows up a Dinka tribesman, and his family struggles with not having siblings for Elias and having his twin brothers kidnapped into slavery. Elias moves through witnessing tribal leadership and life, customs, celebrations, family rifts, and an increasing skill at school. His gifts lead him to be brought North to Khartoum and eventually a tiny stint in the US (2 pages out of 350+). Elias joins the military and is exposed to Arabs, Muslims, Dinka, other tribes; he is a member of the military, the Parliament, the Rebels and is exposed to many country issues. In fact, the book could be described as a thinly veiled excuse for the author to expose current Sudanese challenges with racism, effects of black slaves and black slavemasters. The book does not more than touch on colonialism/Europe. The plot does progress, and the ending is a shock. However, the book dwells on politics, philosophies and approaches to racism in the form of different characters' carefully explained positions that the book is as much a political primer as it is a novel.… (altro)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1389269.html?#cutid2

In this 1995 book Deng pulls in evidence from anthropology, cultural studies, and political science in support of his thesis that the Sudan conflict should be understood as a struggle between identities, not all of them Sudanese. I was impressed by his lucidity in explaining the various perspectives; I am more used to the discourse of nationalisms around Europe, and there are rather different nuances in both the Arab world and Africa (which of course intersect in Sudan). Deng, like Alier, was writing long before the 2005 peace agreement but, also like Alier, he expresses doubt that Sudan can be held together.

The most useful section for me was on the district of Abyei, the 'crossroads of the conflict' as Deng puts it, where local dynamics between the Dinka and Arabs (to simplify the identities rather drastically) escalated over the 1970s and 1980s to the point where it became a significant factor in the destabilisation of the whole country. Alier says nothing at all about Abyei, but it is of course subject to a whole separate set of provisions in the 2005 Agreement.

The big mystery remaining for me is why Nimeiri, the Sudanese leader from 1969 to 1985, first allowed the Addis Ababa agreement to happen in 1972 and then reneged on his commitments in 1983. Alier and Deng have very different views on this. Alier sees Nimeiri as guided by popular dissatisfaction with the long war and taking his (Alier's) advice on how to end it; and then later undergoing a personal religious re-commitment to Islamism from which it followed that the powers of the non-Muslim south must be removed. Deng believes that the Addis Ababa agreement was never more than a tactical ploy by Nimeiri, who shared the general northern prejudice against southerners but spotted a way of using the south as a supportive factor in northern politics. On this interpretation, when Nimeiri found that he could cut a deal with the northern Islamists, the southern settlement, to which he was never really committed, became dispensable. Both writers knew Nimeiri well and worked with him at the time; Deng also cites private conversations with him after his overthrow. No doubt the truth lies somewhere in between; Alier of course naturally believes in the importance of his own earlier work, but Deng could perhaps have been more sceptical of Nimeiri's retrospective imagining of his earlier actions.

Anyway, both strongly recommended for Sudanists, and Alier I think is of more general interest for its case-study of peace-making with a popular insurgency.… (altro)