SUDAN

Area: 967,493 square miles

Population: 42,292,929 (2007 estimate)

Capital: Khartoum

Ethnic Groups: Sudanese-Arab (40%), Dinka

(12%), 600 other ethnic groups

Religions: Sunni Muslim (70%), indigenous beliefs (25%), Christian (5%)

Languages: Arabic (official), Nubian, 400 other languages and dialects

Literacy: 61% (2003 estimate)

Life Expectancy: 58.5 years

Industry: Cotton ginning, textiles, cement, edible

oils, sugar, soap distilling, shoes, petroleum refining

Agriculture: Cotton, groundnuts (peanuts), sorghum, millet, wheat, gum arabic, sesame; sheep

Exports: Cotton, sesame, livestock/meat, gum arabic

The Republic of the Sudan, in northeast Africa, is the largest country on the African continent, measuring almost one-third the size of the United States. The Nile, the world’s longest river (4,000 miles), traverses the country from north to south, and all of its great tributaries are partly or entirely within the country’s borders. The largest swampland in the world, called the Sudd, is located in southern Sudan in the area of the Upper Nile.

Archaeological evidence indicates that people inhabited the area known as present-day Sudan for at least 30,000 years. Recent archaeological exploration has revealed that Sudanese Neolithic cultures predate by 3000 years their prehistoric counterparts in Egypt and appear to provide part of the latter’s formative roots. Ancient Sudan also spread its influence deep into the African continent. In present-day Sudan, 223 pyramids, more than in Egypt, stand in testament to the achievement of the people of ancient Sudan. Nubia, not Egypt, may have been the first true African civilization.

Ancient Nubia, one of the oldest civilizations in the world, had its early beginnings in 6000 B.C.E. It encompassed an area that began near the modern town of Aswan in Egypt on its northern border and ended near Khartoum in the Sudan on its southern border. Nubia today is located in approximately the same region as ancient Nubia. Culturally distinct yet historically intertwined with the ancient Egyptian kingdoms of the Nile to the north, ancient Nubia served as an important trade route and cultural meeting place for travelers from the interior of Africa as well as from the Mediterranean world. The Egyptians called Nubia Ta Sety, the “Land of the Bow,” in reference to the famed Nubian archers. During the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (2060-1785 B.C.E.), the Egyptian pharaohs conquered Nubia and ruled it as a colony. Trade with Nubia in gold, ivory, animal skins, ebony and other exotic woods became necessary to maintaining the wealth of Egypt. From 2000-1500 B.C.E., peaceful coexistence returned between Nubia and Egypt. By about 1700 B.C.E., while Egypt’s power was declining, the Nubian kingdom of Kush rose to power. The Kerma kingdom of Kush became one of the most powerful states in the history of Nubia. In 1550 B.C.E., the Egyptian kings from Thebes began a war against Kush, which lasted for 50 years. Once they destroyed Kerma, the capital city of Kush, the rest of the kingdom fell, and the Egyptians gained control over all of Nubia as far south as the Fourth Cataract. Beyond that boundary, however, Nubia remained independent of Egypt and continued to thrive.

By 800 B.C.E., Egypt’s strength waned again while Nubia’s grew. In 724 B.C.E., the Kushite king Piye conquered Egypt and declared himself pharaoh of all of Egypt and Nubia. This began the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, the time when the kings of Kush ruled Egypt and the Sudan. Kush became a world-renowned power with two major capitals, Napata (800-300 B.C.E.) and Meroë (300 B.C.E.-300 C.E.). The renowned wealth and physical beauty of the Kushites inspired the ancient Greeks to write that the Kushites were “the tallest and handsomest” people in the whole world. A writing script in the Meroitic language developed in the second century B.C.E., which modern historians and linguists to date have not been able to translate. Meroë declined slowly in the third century C.E., perhaps due to the effects of deforestation from extensive iron making as well as competition for trade from its neighbors. In the sixth century C.E., missionaries from Egypt and Byzantium converted the various Nubian peoples to Christianity. This remained their dominant religion until the 14th century C.E., when Islam came to Nubia.

Amara Dunqas founded the Funj kingdom in the Gezira, the area between the White and Blue Niles, where he ruled from 1504 until 1534 C.E. He converted to Islam during his reign and promoted Islam throughout present-day central Sudan. At its peak in the 17th century, the Funj kindom incorporated most of Nubia and extended to the Ethiopian border in the southeast and the Kordofan in the west. The kingdom’s prosperity continued into the 18th century through its control of important trade routes from West Africa and Ethiopia to Egypt. In the early 19th century, the Pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, sent Turkish-Egyptian forces (called the Turkiyya in Sudan) to conquer the Funj kingdom and Darfur, areas valued for their high potential for slave raiding. In the 1820s the Turkiyya established a colonial administration in northern and central Sudan. Northern Sudan increasingly raided southern Sudan for slaves. According to historians, two million southerners were taken north as slaves during the 19th century alone.

Responding to pressure from Britain to end the slave trade in the Sudan, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire of which it was a part, appointed the British general, Charles Gordon, as governor-general of the Sudan in 1877 and assigned him the task of suppressing the slave trade. Gordon lost control of the jallaba, Sudanese-Arabic for “petty trader,” the main agents of the slave trade, as the southwest and other provinces revolted. In the meantime, a rebellion among local Muslims, who objected to the corruption of Ottoman rule, was led by Muhammad Ahmad, who claimed to be the Mahdi, “the guided one,” sent by Allah to cleanse the Islamic community of corruption and to establish a truly Islamic state. He called for a jihad or holy war against the Turkiyya. He and thousands of his followers stormed Khartoum, beheading General Charles Gordon in 1885 and extending Mahdist rule at its peak to most of present-day Sudan. After the British reconquered the region in 1898, the colonial boundaries hardened largely where centuries of slavers had established them. In 1899 the British and Egyptian governments signed the Condominium Agreement, providing joint rule over Sudan. The British administration treated northern and southern Sudan as if they were separate countries, developing infrastructure in the North, while “Christianizing” and underdeveloping the South. Christian missionaries undertook the educational development of the South and encouraged the use of English, while the use of the Arabic language and the practice of Islam were discouraged. Arab traders were expelled, and northern Sudanese and non-Sudanese were refused entry without visas.

Anticolonial organizations and nationalist sentiment grew from the 1920s onward. Northern nationalists were determined the country should be unified; southern Sudan, lacking an economic base, infrastructure, and a basis for political unity, preferred to delay unification with the north until they could enter as equal partners. Nevertheless, in 1953 Egypt and Britain granted the Sudan self-government, and on January 1, 1956, the Republic of the Sudan became a unified, independent nation with Ismail al-Azhari as its first prime minister. Civil war immediately broke out, lasting for 17 years and taking half a million lives. It finally ended in 1972 with an agreement that gave the south a degree of self-government and control over its natural resources, which were soon discovered to include oil.

In 1983, Major General Gaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, who had come to power in a 1969 military coup, renounced the agreement with the south and instituted fundamentalist Islamic law throughout the country, exacerbating the differences between the Muslim north and the traditionalist and Christian south. Civil war between the government forces, strongly influenced by the National Islamic Front (NIF), and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the most influential group of freedom fighters in the south, broke out and continued for 20 years. An estimated 2 million people died in battle or from famines and disease resulting from the war. Four million people were driven from their homes into neighboring countries and vast camps in the desert around Khartoum and Omdurman in the north.

The current president of Sudan, Lt. General Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, came to power in 1989 as the leader of a military coup backed by radical Islamists. On August 20, 1998, the United States launched cruise missiles that destroyed the Al-Shifa pharmaceuticals plant in Khartoum that allegedly manufactured chemical weapons. The U.S. contended that the Islamic militant, Osama bin Laden, financed the Sudanese factory. In 1999 international attention focused on evidence that slavery was widespread throughout Sudan, that Arab raiders from the north of the country enslaved thousands of southerners. Since the 1990s several international human rights organizations – including a classroom of elementary school children in the United States - engaged in the controversial practice of buying back slaves from the traders.

A cease-fire was declared between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in July 2002. On January 9, 2005, after three years of negotiations, the peace deal between Southern Sudan, led by John Garang of the SPLA, and the Khartoum government to end the two-decades-long civil war was signed, giving roughly half of Sudan’s oil wealth to the South, as well as nearly complete autonomy and the right to secede after six years. Two weeks after Garang was sworn in as first vice president as part of the power-sharing agreement, he was killed in a helicopter crash during bad weather. Rioting erupted in Khartoum, killing nearly 100 people. Garang’s deputy, Salva Kiir, was quickly sworn in as the new vice president, and both North and South vowed that the peace agreement would hold.

In February 2003, just as Sudan’s civil war showed signs of resolution, another war in Western Sudan flared up between the people of Darfur and the government in Khartoum over land, long a source of conflict between farmers and nomads, both herders in competition for land and water in a parched region. The people of Darfur accused the government of allowing armed militias called the janjaweed (meaning bandits or ruffians; it combines “devil” [jinn] with “horse” [jawad], literally “devils on horseback”) to carry out massacres against villagers and rebel groups in the region, a charge the government denied. Despite the international community’s outcry and calls to stop what the U.S. government and the European Parliament have condemned as genocide, the Sudanese government has been unable or unwilling to rein in the janjaweed. Peace talks between the government of Sudan and the two main rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement, failed. Over 200,000 civilians have been killed and more than two and a half million people have been driven from their homes across the border into Chad. The violence in Darfur has spilled into Chad and is spreading throughout the entire region. In July 2007 the United Nations committed 26,000 peacekeepers from the African Union and the United Nations forces to help end the violence in Darfur. As of January 2008, only a tenth of those additional forces were in place and much of the needed equipment had not yet arrived.

SOURCES:

“African Union Admits Slow Pace of Darfur Peace Talks,” Sudan Page@Sudan.net, October 7, 2005.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. Encarta Africana: Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture. Microsoft Corporation, 1993-1999.

Curtin, Philip, et al. African History. New York: Longman, 1984.

Goucher, Candice. African History Lecture Notes (BST 205), Portland State University, Fall Term 1988.

Haynes, Joyce L. Nubia: Ancient Kingdoms of Africa. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1992.

Sengupa, Somini, “War in Western Sudan Overshadows Peace in the South,” The New York Times, January 17, 2004.

“Sudan,” http://infoplease.lycos.com/ipa/A0107996.html. Lycos, Inc., Carnegie Mellon University, 2008.

“Unkept Promises in Darfur,” New York Times editorial, January 17, 2008.

Wildung, Dietrich. Sudan: Ancient Kingdoms of the Nile. New York: Flammarion, 1997.

Compiled by Mary Holmström and updated in February 2008.

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