South Sudan and the problem of Arab racism in Black Africa-- an introduction
By Chinweizu
A presentation to the Nigeria-South Sudan Friendship Association (NISSFA), in Lagos, 26MAR 2008


Sudan is the microcosm of Black Africa’s unacknowledged Arab problem, a problem of racism, colonialism, enslavement and an Arab agenda of cultural, political and territorial expansion at the expense of Black Africa. It would take a fat book to adequately explain these matters; however, the brief answers to the 11 questions below attempt to throw preliminary light on the situation of the Afro-Sudanese.

Q1: What is the basic problem in Sudan?

In Sudan, Black Africans (The Afro-Sudanese in South Sudan, Darfur, Nubia, etc) are fighting against an Arab settler minority regime, ruling from Khartoum. They are fighting against a racist, Arab supremacist rule that is worse, much worse, than Apartheid. The Sudan situation has many of the features of Apartheid and, to make things worse, the raiding of black African villages by Arabs who sell black captives into slavery in Northern Sudan and other parts of the Arab world, is still going on there today in the 21st century. Slave raiding was not even part of the loathsome evils of Apartheid.
The South Sudanese, after a 50years war of liberation (1955-2005)—the longest war in Africa-- finally got Khartoum to sign the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA, in 2005. The CPA has the backing of the International Community. It grants the South Sudanese limited autonomy through the Government of South Sudan, and provides for a Self-Determination referendum in 2011. The referendum will give the people of South Sudan the chance to decide whether South Sudan will remain within Sudan or secede and become independent.
In a replay of how Khartoum unilaterally abrogated the 1972 Addis Ababa peace accord that ended the Anya-Anya phase of the Afro-Arab race war in Sudan, [an accord that, like the CPA, also granted regional autonomy to South Sudan], Khartoum is determined to kill the CPA, and is maneuvering to resume war on South Sudan and prevent the referendum.
South Sudan urgently needs brotherly Pan African help to ensure full enforcement of the CPA by the international community as the way to a lasting and just peace.

Q2: What kinds of war has Khartoum been waging, since 1955, on the Afro-Sudanese peoples of South Sudan, Darfur, etc.?

Khartoum claims that its war on the Afro-Darfurians is just a counter-insurgency operation, and that its war on South Sudan is a jihad, a religious war to Islamize the Christians and polytheists of South Sudan.
Vice-President Taha has recently (2007) called on the Muslims in the South to take up arms as he ‘was ready to put the oil revenue in Sudan to support the war in South Sudan to liberate the South from the infidels backed by the Israelites’.
He declared that time had come for the people of Sudan to unite against the ‘infidels’. He remarked that the war in South Sudan took 21 years but that the new crusade to liberate the South would only take 21 days.

Q3: What are Khartoum’s real war aims?

Khartoum’s real objectives, under cover of Jihad against the ‘infidels’ in South Sudan and of counter-insurgency in Darfur, is Arab expansionism, with Arab colonialism, enslavement and Arabization for the conquered black Africans. As we shall see, when Khartoum wants to conquer and take land from the non-Muslim Africans, it claims its war is jihad; and when it wants to conquer and take land from Muslim Africans, it claims its war is a counterinsurgency.
Sudan, it has been noted is “a front of a fresh wave of Arab conquest and Arabization of Black Africa”— [Nyaba, Peter Adwok “The Afro-Arab conflict in the 21st century”, Tinabantu, May 2002, p. 28]
This is borne out by such statements as the following by Sudan’s Arab leaders:

“Sudan is the basis of the Arab thrust into the heart of black Africa, the Arab civilizing mission” –President Nimeiry, 1969 [quoted in Agyeman, Opoku “Pan Africanism vs. Pan Arabism”, Black Renaissance, 1994, p.39]

In 1994, when his troops seemed about to defeat the SPLA, President Omer el-Bashir declared he was going to say his evening prayers in a Kampala Mosque twenty-four hours after his troops captured Nimule from the SPLA.—[Nyaba, Peter Adwok “The Afro-Arab conflict in the 21st century”, Tinabantu, May 2002, p. 31]
Thus even before conquering South Sudan, Khartoum, in its Arab expansionist thrust into the heart of black Africa, has had its greedy eyes on Uganda and beyond!!

Q4: Is the Khartoum regime Arab? But they look black?

They are Arabs, black Arabs! They are culturally Arabized blacks and, however pitch black they may be, they consider themselves Arab and their allegiance is to white Arabia not to black Africa.
As Sudanese Prime Minister, Mahgoub, proclaimed in 1968:

Sudan is geographically in Africa but is Arab in its aspirations and destiny. We consider ourselves the Arab spearhead in Africa, linking the Arab world to the African continent”—[quoted in Agyeman, Opoku “Pan Africanism vs. Pan Arabism”, Black Renaissance, 1994, p.38]

Q5: But who are these strange “Arabs” in Sudan, located so deep inside black Africa?

They are the Jellaba Arabs, the part-African descendants of Arab slave procurers of earlier centuries. This handful of three riverine tribes-- the Shaigiya, the Jallayeen and the Danagala-- inherited state power from the British at independence in 1956 and have monopolized it ever since and used it to oppress and literally enslave the Afro-Sudanese. In Arab society, the half-Arab hybrid is called hajin and ranks lower than the full Arab. And the part-black hajins (to whom “blackness had passed from their mothers”) rank lowest in social status in Arab society. In Sudan one is classified as an Arab if one is Muslim and speaks Arabic, and especially if one has the light (red) skin of the part-black hajin. Most of these Sudanese Arabs are actually Nubian-Arab mixed breeds (hajins) who are culturally Arabized. For being part-African, these hajins from Sudan are held in contempt by the true Arabs. These despised black wannabe Arabs are so desperate to earn acceptance by the white and true Arabs that they have become fanatical agents for Arab expansionism into black Africa. The white Arabs, for their part, though despising these wannabe Arabs, gladly use them as monkey’s paw to advance Arab expansionism. Arab minority rule in Sudan is as if the Cape Coloreds of South Africa had inherited power in 1948, proclaimed themselves Europeans, and then proceeded to inflict apartheid, racism, war and genocide on the black South Africans as the first stage in a racist mission to repopulate all of black Africa with Europeans.