cc In response to Mahmood Mamdani's article

In a response to Issa Shivji’s featured in Pambazuka’s 400th issue English-language edition, Kwesi Kwaa Prah asks what can be achieved with pan-Africanism as a ‘category of intellectual thought’. Problematising the extent to which pan-Africanism could ever represent a politically neutral philosophy, the author suggests that its proponents can be located across the political spectrum and argues that while colour may have provided a useful racially-based organising tool, it should never override the essential inclusivity of the African identity.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/authors/prah.jpgKwesi Kwaa Prah critiques Mahmood Mamdani's writings on Darfur. He posits: 'Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.'

In the aftermath of the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, the singularly heinous crimes of Herr Hitler and his followers were subjected to global and detailed scrutiny.

The genocidal campaign against European Jewry, which he and his hordes flagitiously described as the 'final solution', was brought to the wider notice of humanity as the atrocities in and out of the Nazi death camps (the 'Vernichtungslager' and 'Todeslagers'), under Hitler’s equally mephistophelean disciple Heinrich Himmler, came to light.

It was at this time that the inane excuse by many Germans: 'wir haben nicht gewusst' ('we did not know') caught the world’s attention. Many Germans were claiming that while the devilry was going on, they saw nothing, spoke nothing and heard nothing.

In our pronouncements about the devilry that is going on in Darfur, we need to be careful not to put ourselves in a position where we offer similarly lame explanations. Even more crucial is the need to avoid providing by word and deed comfort and succour to the perpetrators of evil in Darfur.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/305/41564_darfur.jpgWe have seen the genocidal barbarism that Rwanda descended into in 1994, when between 500,000 and 800,000 people were butchered in three months.

This genocide was mostly carried out by two extremist Hutu militia groups, the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi, during a period of about three months from 6 April through mid-July 1994.

Since the 1960s, the brutal carnage of the Angolan war, the Liberian war, the Sierra Leonean killing fields, the Casamance imbroglio, wars in Guinea, Mozambique, Uganda, Guinea Bissao, the incessant slaughter in both the Congos, the Sudanese wars, the Chadian civil wars, the Tuareg wars, the Central African Republic, the Nigerian civil war, the collapse of the Somali state as we knew it, the Eritrean and Ethiopian wars and other internecine conflicts have left Africans benumbed and traumatised, with little and sporadic respite from intermittent but continued blood-letting. With weak democratic institutionalisation, tin-pot dictatorships and warlordism, the immediate future of Africa and Africans look bleak.

We appreciate the fact that in all wars, all the contending parties claim God to be on their side. None invoke the devil’s name in their support. In South Africa, the truth and reconciliation process revealed some atrocities committed by the insurgents.

But, it would be grossly disingenuous to suggest that in either scope or intent, those that were fighting the racist government committed crimes anywhere near equal to the fiendish villainy of the apartheid regime.

As Herr Hitler’s war drew to an ignominious close, the greatest fear of German citizens in the face of Soviet military advances was treatment at the hands of Soviet forces who had suffered about 20,000,000 dead (military and civilian). Through these colossal sacrifices, they had broken the back of the Nazi war machine. In Darfur, we know that the insurgents have also been responsible for atrocities. But the moral standing of the perpetrators and the resistance are worlds apart; and the scale of the atrocities incomparable.

We can debate ad infinitum whether or not the tragedy of Darfur has reached genocidal proportions; or whether it is a counter-insurgency and an insurgency; or whether it is a civil war or not a civil war; or whether it is as brutal as the Iraqi case; or whether the numbers of people that have been killed in Darfur are anywhere near the numbers that have been killed in Iraq. The bottom line is that these two scenarios represent enormous tragedies in our times, and deserve the attention and anger of humanity against who are responsible for them.

The Bush administration started the tragic misadventure in Iraq with lies about weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which were never there. But the grounds for this misadventure had long been in preparation. In February 1998, Bill Clinton argued: 'What if Saddam fails to comply [with UN sanctions], or we take some ambiguous third route which gives him yet more time to develop this (WMD) programme? He will conclude that the international community has lost its will...[that] he can go right on, and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, I guarantee you, he’ll use this arsenal.'

On 31 October 1998, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which stated: 'it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power'. And, in that same year, 1998, the US Congress authorised President Clinton to '...use US armed forces pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 678 to achieve implementation of UNSCRs 660—667.'

In December 1998, Clinton’s national security council advisor Sandy Berger’s view was that: 'for the last eight years, American policy towards Iraq has been based on the tangible threat that Saddam poses to our security. That threat is clear'. What has so far been little appreciated is the fact that control of oil resources formed an important, but little discussed, reason for the Bush intervention to topple former US protégé Saddam Hussein.

The American public knows better now, and will know more in the future about the Bush administration’s unspoken and hidden war aims. Iraq is everyday on world television. The bombings and gore are unfailingly harrowing.

Darfur has for long been a little known place in Africa. Now, for the past four years, it has been thrust into the forefront of our imagination. People have slowly come to learn about the contradictions and conflicts of the Afro-Arab borderlands. The contestation and conflict between pastoralists and sedentary cultivators runs roughly parallel to Arab and African in Darfur, between an Islamist tradition from the north-east and a tradition from West Africa; between African language-speakers and those who prefer or rely on Arabic and Arabic customs.

Islam found a footing there in the 16th century, and took on the more mystical Sufi forms common to other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The most impoverished are the African groups. These latter also form the social bases of the insurgency. What needs to be categorically stated is that competition over resources does not necessarily lead to war and/or genocide. It is the way such competition and other allied problems are resolved which is ultimately determinant and decisive. If democratic and culturally tolerant policies are advanced, it is possible to avoid conflict.

Mamdani’s Darfur

Over the past three to four years, Mamdani has written two articles which confuse issues and intentionally or unintentionally throw dust in our eyes with regards to what is happening in Darfur, and whether or not we can describe it as genocide. The first article I saw appeared in the collection of the 2004 Editorials from Pambazuka News.[1] The second article has recently been put out in the March 2007 issue of the London Review of Books.[2]

My attention was drawn to the second article by a young colleague who asked in an email: 'I don’t know why Mamdani has been...a denialist of the racist genocide in Darfur. Please direct me to any readings which may enlighten me on this matter.' Mamdani indulges in technicist sophistry, tip-toeing nimbly around the real issues in Darfur and effectively providing solace to the Khartoum regime.

Mamdani’s implicit audience in both papers is the American public. He directs a great deal of his attention to outlining how the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, 'often identified as a lone crusader' on Darfur, has succeeded in spreading a false alarm about genocide. He effectively establishes an eloquent and bruising debate between himself and Kristof about 'naming'. But in all this, he makes controversial assertions, some of which are examined here.

In the first paper, by the same title, Mamdani asks: 'How Can We Name the Darfur Crisis?' In the second paper, the title becomes: 'The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency.' The two papers cover almost the same ground, but in the recent paper, Mamdani attempts, ineffectually, to beef up his evidence. He also discusses Iraq more fully. However, with the introduction of the Iraq tragedy into the discussion, he tries to shift and dilute the argument and focus of his whole discourse from what he wants to say about Darfur: that genocide is not taking place; taking to pyhrric semantics about genocide. It is a position, an argument, stated in the passive mood.

The question could be asked more actively: 'what is happening in Darfur?' This is more direct and avoids much of his obfuscation and intellectual ducking and diving. Mamdani assembles a wealth of facts; but he does not see his way successfully out with a synthesis. In my estimation, this is partly the result of his methodological drift towards postmodernism. One cannot quarrel with many of Mamdani’s facts and some of the historically attestable substance of his argument. It is in his judgment and the way he draws inferences between these facts that his selection of saliency fails him.

It is an ironic lesson that Gen. Bashir and his dictatorship will find comfort reading Mamdani. They have committed no genocide; although about a third of the population of groups such as the Fur, Messalit, Zaghawa, Birgid, Daju, Berti, Tama, Tunjur and others have been forcibly been dislocated from their homes and villages and forced to flee across the border to the miserable safety of cross-border refugee camps in Chad through a deliberate combination of torture, rape, gunfire and aerial bombardment, by aircraft and helicopter gunships.

The murderous Janjaweed are now also operating in Chad. There are 200,000 refugees in the cross-border Chadian refugee camps. Estimates are that between 220,000 and 300,000 people have lost their lives since early 2003 through this campaign of state-sponsored terror. 2,000,000 of a former Darfur population of about 6,000,000 are now in surrealistically overcrowded refugee camps. The Sudanese government is using ethnic cleansing and forced displacement as a counter-insurgency strategy. It is useful to recall that, 'ethnic cleansing' as a descriptive phrase was a euphemism used by Slobodan Milosevic to describe the mass killings in the former Yugoslavia.

The phenomenon is hardly new. Goody reminds us that this is how the Anglo-Saxons emptied most of England of Celts, pushing them to the western extremities of the island. That was also how the Latins moved north into once German lands. From the sixteenth century onwards, European expansion involved the constant transfer, confinement or destruction of so-called 'primitive' peoples throughout the Americas, in Australia, South Africa and the Antilles. Again and again, indigenous populations were reduced to 'ethnic minorities'. Since the second world war, three devastating operations of ethnic cleansing have historically been registered in the Mediterranean, Middle East and the Indian subcontinent: the partition of India, the creation of Israel in the late 1940s and the division of Cyprus in 1974.[3]

Both the sustained brutal carnage of Iraq and the slaughter in Darfur are horrific realities of our times. There is strong similarity with respect to the main protagonists in the cycle of violence. Much of what Mamdani says about the similarities is acceptable.

In Iraq, since the American invasion and the end of the conventional war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an insurgency against the coalition of invasion forces and the current Iraqi US-backed government has emerged and is growing by the day. The main butchers in Iraq now are the vigilantes, sectarian militia and paramilitaries pitching Shia against Sunni, and vice versa.

In Darfur, the vigilantes, sectarian militia, and paramilitaries are Arabised or Arab groups. The Sudanese government is supporting these groups with weapons and aerial bombardment to effect scorched earth policies of ethnic cleansing. In a recent article in the Al Ahram Weekly, Gamal Nkrumah quoting Sudanese First Vice-President Salva Kiir, a Southern Sudanese, writes that: 'Khartoum’s proxy militia, the ethnic Arab Janjaweed are wreaking havoc on the hapless indigenous non-Arab population of Darfur. Furthermore, the Sudanese President’s failure to hold his cronies accountable for trashing his country’s international reputation by defying the international community’s wish to deploy UN troops has exacerbated the situation.'[4]

Understanding Darfur

In order to understand what is going on in Darfur and much of the Afro-Arab borderlands we need to take a broad historical view of the situation.

It must be remembered that Arabs first entered the African continent almost 1,400 years ago. The first Arabs to enter Africa were early followers of the Prophet Mohammed who sought refuge in Christian Ethiopia in what is often called 'the first hejra' in 615 A.D.

A quarter of a century later, the Arabs, under the military command of Amr ibn al-As, by fire and sword, pushed their way into Egypt during the great movement of expansion of the lands of the Caliphate. This was during the caliphate of Umar b. al-Khattab. By the end of the 7th century, the territory of the Caliphate in Africa had expanded westwards to the Atlantic, covering what are now the countries of the Mahgreb: Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.

By fair or foul means, today, Arabs and Arabised Africans occupy about a third of the African continent, and the processes of the Arabization of Africans continue. Darfur and much of the Sudan are squarely located in the frontline and vortex of this process. It is an expansionist process, which Africans must address. Is this acceptable? My view is that it must be halted. Africans are happy to be as they are. Arabisation is unacceptable.

Mamdani asks: 'Is Darfur genocide that has happened and must be punished? Or, is it genocide that could happen and must be prevented?' He argues the latter. The basic weakness in this thinking is that an ahistorical and undialectical assumption has been made in the understanding of genocide.

The point is that, genocide is not only an event; indeed it is rarely simply so. It is, more significantly, a process. by that, I mean we are not going to wake up one day and find that overnight, we have moved from a pre-genocidal to a genocidal reality. Genocide is almost always a consequence of an approach to warfare. Once the foundations and direction of a genocidal route have been put in place, baring seriously mitigating circumstances or major reverses on the war-front, genocide is fairly consequential. The question we must ask therefore: is there a genocidal process underway in Darfur? What are the politics and ideology of the insurgency and counter-insurgency with respect to the phenomenology of genocide? When we understand the ideology of the counter-insurgency we can ascertain if the intention and process is genocidal or not.

In an article, which appeared in the Washington Post on 30 June 2004, Emily Wax writing from El Geneina tells the story of three young women who walked into a scrubby field just outside their refugee camp in West Darfur:

'They had gone out to collect straw. They recalled thinking that the Arab militiamen who were attacking African tribes at night would still be asleep. But six men grabbed them, yelling Arabic slurs such as "zurga" and "abid", meaning "black" and "slave". Then the men raped them, beat them and left them on the ground, they said. They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, "Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby", said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from where a whip had struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. They said, "you get out of this area and leave the child when it’s made".'

It is important to note that this was not an isolated incident. The mind and thinking behind such cruel and barbaric acts are telling. Years ago, Joseph Oduho, one of the founders of the Sudan African National Union in the south, drew my attention to the fact that the military principle of 'ibid yektul abid' ('killing a slave with a slave'), has a history in the Sudan and was frequently heard during the First Civil War, 1956–1972.

Emily Wax’s testimony continues with the revelation that interviews with two dozen women at camps, schools and health centers in two provincial capitals in Darfur yielded consistent reports that the Arab Janjaweed militias were carrying out waves of attacks targeting African women. 'The victims and others said the rapes seemed to be a systematic campaign to humiliate the women, their husbands and fathers, and to weaken tribal ethnic lines. The pattern is so clear because they are doing it in such a massive way and always saying the same thing', said an international aid worker who is involved in health care. She and other international aid officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals or delays of permits that might hamper their operations.

She showed a list of victims from Rokero, a town outside of Jebel Marra in central Darfur where 400 women said they were raped by the Janjaweed. 'It's systematic,' the aid worker said. 'Everyone knows how the father carries the lineage in the culture. They want more Arab babies to take the land. The scary thing is that I don't think we realise the extent of how widespread this is yet.' Another high-ranking international aid worker said: 'These rapes are built on tribal tensions and orchestrated to create a dynamic where the African tribal groups are destroyed. It’s hard to believe that they tell them they want to make Arab babies, but it’s true. It’s systematic, and these cases are what made me believe that it is part of ethnic cleansing and that they are doing it in a massive way.'

In El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, about 200 miles east of El Geneina, 'Aisha Arzak Mohammad Adam, 22, described a rape by militiamen. They said: 'Dog, you have sex with me.' Adam, who was receiving medical treatment at the Abu Shouk camp, said through a female interpreter that she was raped ten days ago and has been suffering from stomach cramps and bleeding. They said, 'the government gave me permission to rape you. This is not your land anymore, abid, go'.[5]

In another report, we are informed: 'When describing attacks, refugees often referred to Government of Sudan (GOS) soldiers and Janjaweed militias as a unified group; as one refugee stated, "the soldiers and Janjaweed, always they are together". The primary victims have been non-Arab residents of Darfur. Numerous credible reports corroborate the use of racial and ethnic epithets by both the Janjaweed and GOS military personnel; "Kill the slaves; Kill the slaves!" and "We have orders to kill all the blacks" are common. One refugee reported a militia member stating, "We kill all blacks and even kill our cattle when they have black calves". Numerous refugee accounts point to mass abductions, including persons driven away in GOS vehicles, but respondents usually do not know the abductees’ fate. A few respondents indicated personal knowledge of mass executions and gravesites.'[6]

Several observers and concerned parties have indicated that the tenets of the counter-insurgency include the view that the Islam of the insurgents is inferior or ideologically deficient at the mass base of society. Islam in Darfur, for the majority, is more of West African inspiration than of immediately easterly derivation. Daoud Ibrahim Salih, a refugee from Darfur and a founding board member and president of the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, a group that developed from exiled Darfurian refugees in Cairo expresses himself thus: 'We, the Darfurians, did not commit any crimes, just that we are African...we are very ordinary people, as you can see from the pictures. Today, genocide is happening, right now while we are speaking, for my people in Darfur...we did not take Islam in the full package, which means assimilation and Arabisation...second, they want to take the land, because Darfur is a huge area...that’s why all of the Arabic countries are supporting Sudan’s government.'[7]

Apophthegmatically, Daoud Ibrahim Salih summarises the position thus: 'To stop genocide means to stop Arabization, to stop genocide means to stop assimilations, to stop genocide in Darfur means to stop the dividing of Africa.'[8] The then United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan, in characteristic understatement, in guarded and diplomatic style, has described the Darfur situation as 'bordering on genocide'.

Mamdani successfully calls into question Kristof’s extravagant and fabulous numbers. He also summons to witness Obasanjo and Ntsebeza. Obasanjo’s utterances feature in both the 2004 and 2007 articles. Obasanjo in 2004, at a time he was chair of the African Union (AU) and involved in delicate negotiations between the Khartoum regime and the Fur insurgents said that:

'Before you can say that this is genocide or ethnic cleansing, we will have to have a definite decision and plan and programme of a government to wipe out a particular group of people, then we will be talking about genocide, ethnic cleansing. What we know is not that. What we know is that there was an uprising, rebellion, and the government armed another group of people to stop that rebellion. That's what we know. That does not amount to genocide from our own reckoning. It amounts to of course conflict. It amounts to violence.'

What Mamdani fails to add is that, in an address at the headquarters of the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on 10 October 2006, Obasanjo, then president of the largest contributing country to the AU's protection force in Darfur - set out the need for the AU to hand over to the UN there, while retaining its African composition: 'It is not in the interest of Sudan, nor in the interest of Africa, nor indeed in the interest of the world, for us all to stand by, fold our hands and see genocide in Darfur.'

Soon after the Darfur crisis exploded on the world scene, Ntsebeza, the well-known South African jurist, in work commissioned by the UN Security Council, had not at that stage found explicit grounds for declaring genocidal acts or intent in Darfur.

In his, 'Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide', Gerard Prunier informs us that the real logic of the war is related to a word which Nazism, the demise of colonialism and the development of scientific anthropology have marginalised into intellectual exile and political opprobrium: 'race'.

'In the 1980s Colonel Gaddafi and Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi gave an answer: Darfur was poor and backward because it was insufficiently Arabized. It had missed out in the great adhesion to the Muslim umma because its Islam was primitive and insufficiently Arabic. The situation was pregnant with the potential for enormous destruction because it fitted only too well within the broader context of racial prejudice in the Sudan.'[9]

Prunier points out that, during the 1980s, Gaddafi as self-appointed leader and modern prophet of the Arab world distributed vast quantities of arms in Darfur. His plan was to get rid of Africans and replace them with Arabs. It is the same Gaddafi who said at a press conference in Amman at an Arab League summit meeting in October 2000 that 'two-thirds of Arabs live in Africa and the remaining third must join the other two in Africa'. Mamdani is worried that an important contention of the international campaign against the Sudanese government and its proxy militias is that 'the ongoing genocide is racial: "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans"'. But his objections cannot stand up against such evidence as produced here.

Arabisation and the assimilation of Africans

Arabisation has been the historical instrument for the expansion of the Arab culture and the Arab political world on the African continent. From the earliest times, the acculturation of conquered peoples, trading partners and the spread of Islam, became the motor for Arab expansion in Africa. In many parts of the world, Islam has not led to Arabisation. This is the case with Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the countries of Central Asia, Turkey, and parts of China, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and some other areas of the world. Local cultural traditions have prevailed in spite of the penetrative influences of Islam.

For many Messalit, Fur, Birgit and Zaghawa, the Islamic religion sits astride an older African religious system. There have therefore often been combinations of indigenous pre-Islamic traits, and, at other times, Africanised and nativised Islam.

The popularity of these is what the Janjaweed see as a stumbling block to greater Arabisation. Like the Yezidi Kurds, the Fur practise, in effect, a religion, which is an eclectic mix of indigenous African pre-Islamic traditions and usages, and Islamic ones. But the injunction that 'Arabic is the language of the God' has historically seduced many to bend to the sweep of Arabisation and Arabism.

Today the Nubians are about 3,000,000 in Egypt, a country of 70 million people. In the Sudan, the Nubians are very many more. Large sections of the Nubians, in both Egypt and the Sudan, have over centuries been Arabised. But in recent years a strong Africanist recollective tradition is affirming itself societally in Egypt in tandem with similar processes in the Sudan as a whole. Among the Beja around Kasalla, the Blue Nile region, the South Sudan, Nuba and Darfur. The noose is closing around what the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement (SPLA) in its early years described as 'the Khartoum clique'.

From the onset of the postcolonial era in the Sudan, Arabisation has been an avowed political offering of the political elite. Both the military and civilian regimes in Sudan over the past half-century have upheld the policy of Arabisation. It is inherently a racist policy. Mamdani bemoans those he describes as 'demonizing Arabs'. It would have been useful to be explicit and explain this. If he is suggesting that those who are fighting Arabisation and the international campaign against genocide in Darfur are Arab demonisers, then he has clearly nailed his flag to his mast: The ideology of the war on the side of the counter-insurgency is Arabist.

There are many Africans on the continent and in the diaspora who reject Arabisation; who have no sympathy with the idea of changing Africans into Arabs; who are happy to be Africans and nothing else. They have that right. Other minorities in the Arab world continue to speak in increasing volume about the non-Arab character and otherness of their communities. They include Syriac, Moronites, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Kurds, Turkomen and Berber communities.

Many African intellectuals also took note of Osama bin Laden’s threats about Darfur. In 2006, He called for Islamist militants to prepare for a 'long war against the Crusader plunderers in western Sudan'. What such thinking cannot truly face up to is that both sides in the Darfur war are made up of Muslims, Arab Muslims and African Muslims. But, the African Muslims are regarded by their Arab fellow-inhabitants as heretics.

Most of us cannot support big-power intervention in the area, in whatever shape or form. But the AU in combination with the UN is, if well coordinated, acceptable. Many Africans are still waiting to hear, loud and clearly, Arab criticism of Sudanese government policy in Darfur. It is remarkable that the silence of members of the League of Arab States is so resounding.

The idea of assimilation and Arabisation of Africans comes to us in many guises. Ali Mazrui’s rendition of in September 2004 in an interview with an Arab media house, reads: 'I do believe that the African People and the Arab People are, at the moment, two people in the process of becoming one. So the process has been underway for centuries and they will, one day, be virtually indistinguishable, but at the moment it is a continuum, rather than a dichotomy.'[10]

An ethnic group is a group with a sense of common identity based on history, cultural affinities and solidarities of identification. Members of an ethnic group tend to identify with one another, or are so identified by others, on the basis of a boundary that distinguishes them from other groups. This boundary may take any of a number of forms - racial, cultural, linguistic, economic, religious, political - or differing combinations of these factors. Ethnic boundaries are frequently more or less permeable. Of all the factors which define an ethnic group, the racial factor is the least significant. Race is in anthropological usage, an ascribed/biological category; all the other factors are achieved categories. These latter are cultural. It is the cultural factor - understood to include language, traits and customary usages - which is the most important. It is nurture not nature which defines ethnicity. Ethnicity therefore largely overlaps with the notion of a cultural group.

Mamdani is mistaken when he writes: 'The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Messalit and Zaghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim).'

This is factually simply not correct. Arab ethnicities here include, the Baggara or Shuwa Arabs, Taisha, Rezeigat, Habbaniya, Beni Halba and others. In multilingual Africa, most people speak several languages. The fact that I speak English does not make me an Englishman. Arabic in the Sudan is a hegemonic language. In places like Darfur most people would know Arabic, but that does not make them Arabs. The Janjaweed are ethnically Arab militias armed and supported by the Sudanese government. Yes, they embrace the same religion, but the Arabs of the Sudan regard the Islam of Africans as inferior.

Mamdani writes that: 'the dynamic of civil war in Sudan has fed on multiple sources: first, the post-independence monopoly of power enjoyed by a tiny “Arabized” elite from the riverine north of Khartoum, a monopoly that has bred growing resistance among the majority, marginalized populations in the south, east and west of the country; second, the rebel movements which have in their turn bred ambitious leaders unwilling to enter into power-sharing arrangements as a prelude to peace; and, finally, external forces that continue to encourage those who are interested in retaining or obtaining a monopoly of power.'

He is correct in identifying the root cause of the conflict as the monopoly of power by what Garang often described as the 'Khartoum clique'. But why is Mamdani saying that this clique has monopolised and marginalised the populations of the south, east and west; then going on to say that the insurgents, the overwhelming majority in the east, south and west, should share power with what - in his own words - are 'a tiny Arabized elite from the riverine north of Khartoum'? In democracies, power rests with the majority. The English say, 'you cannot have your cake and eat it'.

He then goes on: 'The dynamic of peace, by contrast, has fed on a series of power-sharing arrangements, first in the south and then in the east. This process has been intermittent in Darfur. African Union-organized negotiations have been successful in forging a power-sharing arrangement, but only for that arrangement to fall apart time and again. A large part of the explanation, as I suggested earlier, lies in the international context of the War on Terror, which favours parties who are averse to taking risks for peace. To reinforce the peace process must be the first commitment of all those interested in Darfur.'

To reinforce the peace process is the democratic rights of the majorities which need to be acknowledged and respected. The simple reason why African Union organised arrangements have time and again fallen apart is, as Abel Alier years ago wrote about the post-colonial ruling class in Sudan, because they have made an easy habit of dishonouring agreements.[11] They fear the implications of democracy in the Sudan.

In Mamdani’s view, apparently one of the most irksome facts about the Darfur international campaign is that 'the conflict in Darfur is highly politicized, and so is the international campaign. One of the campaign's constant refrains has been that the ongoing genocide is racial: "Arabs" are trying to eliminate "Africans". But both "Arab" and "African" have several meanings in Sudan. There have been at least three meanings of "Arab". Locally, "Arab" was a pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad as uncouth; regionally, it referred to someone whose primary language was Arabic. In this sense, a group could become "Arab" over time. This process, known as Arabization, was not an anomaly in the region: there was Amharization in Ethiopia and Swahilization on the East African coast. The third meaning of "Arab" was "privileged and exclusive"; it was the claim of the riverine political aristocracy who had ruled Sudan since independence, and who equated Arabization with the spread of civilisation and being Arab with descent'.

Is the definition of an Arab a question of taking your pick from among these different meanings Mamdani offers? The 'pejorative reference to the lifestyle of the nomad' is literally and metaphorically a joke in much of the Arab world. Arabs know too well that the historic civilisation that is Arab, came from the Arabian peninsula. It is a culture and civilisation of which they are proud. Arabisation does not result from merely speaking Arabic as a primary language. It involves the acceptance and adoption of Arab culture as a package. Yes, the Arab identity in the Sudan has been characterised by privilege and exclusivity. That is why the marginalised majority of the Sudanese are putting up resistance to its domination.

In the history of the relations between Arabs and Africans, from time immemorial, Arabs have been masters, and Africans slaves. Indeed, 'black' in much of the Arab world is equated with slave. Until today in Egypt, the so-called bawab (doorman, gate-keeper) is invariably a dark-skinned Nubian from Egypt or the Sudan. We are reminded that 'the bawab class is the lowest of the low.'[12]

Amharization in Ethiopia and Swahilization on the East African coast has not gone on unchecked and unquestioned. In our lifetimes, we know that in Ethiopia, Amhara cultural dominance has been one of the factors underlying some of the conflict we have seen in the area. Swahilization remains largely a linguistic affair. It includes in its mould Christians, Moslems, African religionists and a whole variety of African language-speakers. Swahilis in East Africa do not control the state anywhere. They are Africans. Arabization is a different kettle of fish. Effectively and eventually, it totally effaces the cultural characteristics of Africans. This is why Africans in the region, who historically were Christians before they became Muslims, today regard themselves as Arabs and are prepared to embark on genocidal wars in the service of Arabism and Arabisation.

In search of Africans

When he comes to the issue of who is an African, Mamdani shifts into postmodernist over-drive and writes that:

'"African", in this context, was a subaltern identity that also had the potential of being either exclusive or inclusive. The two meanings were not only contradictory but came from the experience of two different insurgencies. The inclusive meaning was more political than racial or even cultural (linguistic), in the sense that an "African" was anyone determined to make a future within Africa. It was pioneered by John Garang, the leader of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in the south, as a way of holding together the New Sudan he hoped to see. In contrast, its exclusive meaning came in two versions, one hard (racial) and the other soft (linguistic) – "African" as Bantu and "African" as the identity of anyone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. The Save Darfur campaign's characterisation of the violence as "Arab" against "African" obscured both the fact that the violence was not one-sided and the contest over the meaning of "Arab" and "African": a contest that was critical precisely because it was ultimately about who belonged and who did not in the political community called Sudan. The depoliticization, naturalization and, ultimately, demonization of the notion "Arab", as against "African", has been the deadliest effect, whether intended or not, of the Save Darfur campaign.'

Mamdani must not underestimate the power and relevance of language as an identification reference point. Language is a central feature of most cultures. Arguably, it is the most crucial feature. At the same time, it is one of the principal distinguishing features of homo sapiens as a culture creating animal. It is through language that we relate societally, through language that we transact our social lives.

I personally knew John Garang, for many years. Indeed, I spoke to him on the phone, long-distance, about a month before his very strange death. Nowhere does he define an African in the political terms Mamdani writes about. Garang was always a proud Dinka from Bor. Mamdani’s so-called inclusive definition of an African as 'anyone determined to make a future within Africa' is most perplexing.

When I read this definition to an intern in the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS), Cape Town, Nana Kofi Appiah, his immediate and hilarious response was that this is an invitation to the pillagers of Africa. Does this sort of idea apply to other people in other parts of the world? Does a similar formulation apply to Chinese, Indians, Arabs or Europeans? If I arrived in China or India with a wish to make a future in these places, do I, on the basis of my wishes, become Chinese or Indian?

Cecil Rhodes, Verwoerd, Ian Smith were all people who were 'determined to make a future within Africa'. Were they Africans? I dare say they never even wished to be so regarded. Mamdani’s understanding of the so-called inclusive definition of an African makes Africaness very cheap. I say, 'if everybody is an African, then nobody is an African'.

We all know that, by appearance and looks, you cannot tell a Sunni from a Shia, a Northern Irish Protestant from a Catholic, a Palestinian from an Israeli, a Pakistani from an Indian. There are numerous other such examples. Black, in Darfur, does not really help us to identify an Arab from an African. The difference is more subtle and decisive. Africans are attached to more eclectic varieties of Islam than Arabs. They are more likely to be cultivators than pastoralists. They identify themselves as Africans and speak more African languages. They form the overwhelming majority of the population. For an American audience, black as understood in African-American parlance does not help us understand the nationality dynamics of Darfur. Africans are first and foremost a historical and cultural group. They identify themselves as such. Most are black, but there are blacks who are not African. From South India through Sri Lanka to Melanesia many such groups are to be found.

Years ago, I argued elsewhere that 'the racial definition of an African is flawed. It is unscientific and hence untenable. No serious mind today would use the race concept in any way except as an instrument for poetic imagery. What I am saying is that no group of people has been "pure" from time immemorial. Notions of purity belong to the language of fascists and the rubbish-bin of science. But before my observations are misunderstood let me take the argument into another direction. Most Africans are black, but not all Africans are black, and not all blacks have African cultural and historical roots.'[13]

Additionally, one must not forget that Arabism in Africa came largely through conquest and cultural domination. Therefore, even today, Arabisation and Arabism for Africans represent instruments of thralldom in a tradition, which precedes Western colonialism by a millennium.

1 Mahmood Mamdani. How Can We Name the Darfur Crisis? Preliminary Thoughts on Darfur. In, African Voices on Development and Social Justice. Editorials from Pambazuka News, 2004. Mkuki Na Nyota Publishers, 2005, pp. 256–262.
See also, K.K. Prah. Darfur Beyond the Crossroads: Struggles of African Nationalism in, African Voices on Development and Social Justice, ibid, pp. 249-256.
2 See, the London Review of Books. Vol.29. No.5. March 2007.
3 Jack Goody. How ethnic is ethnic cleansing? New Left Review. 7 January– February 2001.
4 See, Gamal Nkrumah. Masters at holding on. Al-Ahram Weekly. 5-11 April. p.9.
5 Emily Wax. 'We Want to Make a Light Baby'; Arab Militiamen in Sudan Said to Use Rape as Weapon of Ethnic Cleansing. Washington Post Foreign Service. Wednesday 30 June 30 2004.
6 See, Documenting Atrocities in Darfur. US State Publication 11182. Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, September 2004.
7 See, .
8 Ibid.
9 Quoted here from, Harakati Shaka Lumumba. Darfur: A Wake-up Call for Africa. (Mimeo), Nairobi, Kenya. 12 November 2006. Appearing in Tinabantu, Vol.3, No.1, 2007.
10 Harakati Shaka Lumumba. Ibid.
11 Abel Alier. Southern Sudan. Too Many Agreements Dishonoured. Exeter: Ithaca Press, 1990.
12 See, Amina Abdul Salam. A doorman’s lot is not a happy one. The Egyptian Gazette, 29 March 2007, p.6.
13 Kwesi Kwaa Prah. Beyond the Color Line: Pan-Africanist Disputations. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998, p.36.

* Kwesi Kwaa Prah is director of The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) http://www.casas.org.za/, Cape Town.

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org

It is hypocritical of Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa given their history of exploitative relations with Africa, says Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah in this interview with Pambazuka News. Kwaa Prah also argues that its futile for Africans to be pointing fingers at the West or at China. “Africans have to organise their side of the story as best as they can in their own interests,” he says.

Pambazuka News: One of the articles in your forthcoming book deals with the earliest contact between China and Africa. Many people may not be familiar with that history. Could you explain it briefly?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: It goes back to the early 15th century when the famous Chinese admiral Zheng He made seven epic journeys to various parts of the world including Asia and Africa between 1405 and 1433. During the course of these journeys he visited Africa. This was about 80 years before Columbus so it goes very far back. It is even suggested that some of the maps that Columbus used he borrowed or had antecedence in Chinese global maps of that period.

Pambazuka News: And how did that history progress into China’s relationship with Africa in terms of its engagement with newly independent African states of the 50s and 60s?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, there is a hiatus, an enormous hiatus, because of the distance and difficulty of communication and the colonial interlude which both China and Africa encountered. China went through a cycle which is not too different from the African cycle in terms of its encounter with the West and colonialism, from the period of the opium wars and the boxer rebellion, the period of about a half century which ended in 1902-03. And then there was the period before China become a republic in 1912; and the era of the warlords post 1912 to the beginnings of the Chinese revolution in the early 20s and then on from the early 20s to 1948 when China, in the words of Mao Tse Tsung, “stood up” in 1949.

Now after that China’s contact with the rest of the world especially Africa and Asia started in earnest. By the time of the Bandung conference in 1955 China’s beginnings of real contact with Africa was in the making and I’m talking about Africa proper, I’m talking about sub-saharan Africa, non-Arab Africa and that is because China’s relations with the Arab world were different and of an earlier period and so and so forth, but contact with Africa proper, black Africa or sub-Saharan Africa, starts in the late 50s in earnest and the rest is history.

Pambazuka News: So that’s a period spanning several hundred years and the question then arises in terms of how that influenced China’s current approach to Africa and policy as outlined in the January policy paper released by the Chinese government.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Yes, well, you’ll recall that there was a stage when Zhou Enlai arrived soon after or in the decade of African independence in the 1960s and visited East Africa and made the statement that Africa is “ripe for revolution”. China supported the African liberation movements but also in sharp rivalry with the Soviet Union and so the position China took often was not beyond consideration of its own tussles with the Soviet Union.

By and large China has been consistent in the sense that it has tried to help African states with infrastructure and at fairly low rates. This was particularly the case in the first two decades of independence before the cultural revolution in China itself. China did a lot to build roads and railways, to support African infrastructure and industrial plans, at a point in history when China itself was economically fairly weak.

Pambazuka News: Many have argued that the engagement with Africa in the 1950s and 1960s was more of an ideological outlook towards Africa, but that the current realities in an era of globalisation mean that China’s interest in Africa is solely commercially driven.

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: I wouldn’t put it in such polarised terms that at one pole it is ideological and at the other end of the scale its all economic. I think what one can say is that it was more preponderantly articulated and expressed in ideological terms in the earlier period. It had also economic dimensions but this was hardly pronounced. Now it is distinctly more pronounced as China tries to search for markets and also to search for raw materials, in this period that is.

Pambazuka News: So do you see that as a negative and positive engagement?

Well, I don’t see it in positive or negative terms in the way that lots of people want to discuss the issues at this present time. China wants to pursue policies that are in its best interests and what we have to do in Africa is also to trade and pursue polices that are in our own interests. It’s as simple as that – all states do that.

What I find a bit reprehensible is the tendency of certain Western voices to start making obstructionist [statements] or start raising concerns about China’s attempt to get into the African market because it is a bit hypocritical for Western states to be concerned about how China is approaching Africa when they have had centuries of relations with Africa starting with slavery for centuries and continuing to the present day with exploitation and cheating with subsidies which help the European economic community to ridiculous extents that a cow in the European community gets a subsidy of $2 a day and 60 percent of Africa doesn’t get that. So we ask ourselves what is this concern: It is not real concern, it is jealousy and rivalry about Chinese inroads into Africa.

That is not to excuse the way China is also approaching Africa. China is obviously also approaching Africa from its own interests or as it perceives its interests and some of this interest is not necessary in the interests of Africa. This is something that Africa has to work out. It is futile for Africans to be pointing fingers wether at the West or at China. Africans have to organise their side of the story as best as they can in their own interests.

Pambazuka News: How should Africa go about doing that? What are some of the policy responses that are needed on the African continent?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, for a start I don’t think Africa really has any chance of doing anything in this present world without unity. That is the bottom line. Africans have to unite. Africans divided as they are have no platform for bargaining with anybody. If Africa was united today it would be a world power, poor as it is, and it would be capable of dealing with China on its own terms or with the West on its own terms. Unity is the basic pre-requisite for African advancement and for Africa to be able to bargain with China or anybody else.

Pambazuka News: One of the articles in your book, authored by yourself, is entitled ‘Nationalism, Revolution and Economic Transformation in China: Any Lessons for Africa?’ What does China’s example offer for Africa?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, you have to read my book first, that is for a start.

Pambazuka News: Give us a taster?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, I think one of the things we have to learn is that advancement in our time must be home grown. Africans have to learn to pull themselves up by themselves, one. Two, this process has to be based on their own cultural pre-requisites. It is not possible to develop Africa grounded in languages like English, French or Portuguese or Arabic for that matter. Africans have to realise that the cultural base for development has to be their own. That is not to say they should not learn other languages, no, but they must make their languages the centre of all the development efforts that they make.

Pambazuka News: China has cultural agreements with 42 African countries and 65 cultural exchange programmes in Africa. It has offered scholarships to 10 000 students and seconded more than 400 Chinese professors to African universities. Much of your work has been in the field of language and culture so what would you say are some of the issues raised by China’s cultural involvement in Africa?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: We still have to see a lot of this you know. These are projected plans, this is what they would want to do and it is very fresh. I don’t think it has left the drawing board yet and I don’t think the implementation is with us as of now. We will have to see. I would see we will have to just wait and see how it pans out and how it is implemented. It is to early day to make announcements about these plans.

Pambazuka News: When is the book due out and where can people get it from?

Kwesi Kwaa Prah: Well, I expect that the book should be out early next year, that is 2007. It should be available through the African Books Collective and bookshops in South Africa and also through the web. If you enter Casas you should be able to get the details.

• Interview conducted by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu

• Prof. Kwesi Kwaa Prah is director of The Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (Casas), which is based in Cape Town. Casas was established in 1997 as a Pan-African centre for creating research networks in Africa and its Diaspora. Professor Kwa Parah is the editor of a forthcoming book Afro-Chinese Relations: Past, Present and the Future. Visit for more information.

I have had a chance to look at Farid Omar's article ‘Darfur at the Crossroads: Caught Between Western Hypocrisy and Muslim Complicity’. (Read it online at My impression is that while I can agree to some of the arguments he makes I am also in disagreement about some factual and interpretative errors in his discussion. I am going through his piece almost paragraph by paragraph in order to lay bare the discrepancies and factual inadequacies.

For a start, the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) have not been altogether silent about the genocide in Darfur, which is instigated, aided and abetted by the Khartoum government. In a recent report made by the BBC, 9th August 2004, entitled ‘Arab League backs Sudan on Darfur’, the reporter indicated that "Arab Foreign Ministers at an emergency session in Cairo backed Khartoum's measures to disarm Arab militias and punish human rights violators. They called on the UN to give Sudan more time to resolve the conflict. And Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha said he thought the UN's end of August deadline was impractical." In effect the report indicated that, "the Arab League has rejected any sanctions or international military intervention as a response to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region." The Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha had indicated that, "We are really committed to disarm whoever is acting outside the law". But who armed the Janjaweed? He added that, "comprehensive stability was only possible if both the Arab Janjaweed militia and rebel groups disarmed."

It is possible to read into this, firstly, the indecisive and guarded complicity of the Arab League position on the tragedy of Darfur. Genocide is not something which can be given time to be reversed. The slaughter and butchery of 30 000 Furs (not Darfuris) is a matter which needs to be brought to a close immediately. In any part of the world today any extension beyond immediacy in terminating genocide would hardly be countenanced. In the present Sudanese conflict in Darfur with the Sudanese army plus the Janjaweed on one side and African nationalist rebels on the other, who are oppressors and oppressed?

Secondly, if you compare the stance of the Arab League to that of the United Nations you will notice an enormous gap in perception of the magnitude, dimensions and perceptions of the crisis. While some of us recognize in the crisis genocide and ethnic cleansing others see a question of disarming armed bandits and rebels as the heart of the matter. I am not aware of what the OIC has or has not said, but I would agree with Farid Omar that they appear to be "strangely silent". If that is the case, then that certainly amounts to implicit complicity.

I share Peter Takirambudde, Chief of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch's view that Sudan is "trying to manipulate opinion in the Arab world to hide the massive crimes it has committed against Sudanese citizens."

Magdi Abdelhadi of the BBC has observed, with regards to the Arab League's statement that "there were no surprises in the Arab League statement and Khartoum got what it wanted. The statement welcomed measures already taken by the Sudanese government to disarm the Janjaweed and bring those responsible for human rights violations in Darfur to justice. The Arab foreign ministers also pledged to assist Sudan and the international community in resolving the conflict peacefully. The statement was very much in line with a report by an Arab League's fact-finding mission to Darfur earlier this year, which largely exonerated the Sudanese government from responsibility and laid the blame on a combination of factors, including protracted drought, tribal conflict and under-development in western Sudan." Of course human rights violators should be brought to book. Human rights violations are unacceptable in the modern world, whether such violators are Americans in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Arab authorities in the Sudan, or human rights criminals in the Great Lakes area.

True enough, "While western hypocrisy on the situation in Darfur is really problematic, Muslim complicity in the Darfur mayhem is equally disturbing. The Muslim people and their allies around the world should stand up for Darfuris, denounce and expose western double standards and condemn the AL and the OIC for their inaction and failure to put pressure on Sudan to contain the crisis in Darfur." There I have no problems with Farid Omar's views. But then he goes on to say that, "The western media has presented the political and humanitarian crisis in Darfur and broader conflict in Sudan as a race or religious war. This is a false paradigm. The conflict in Sudan is not one pitting the so-called Muslim-Arab North and the so-called Christian/animist South, or between the Arab Janjaweed militia working in collusion with the Sudanese government and the Black Africans in Darfur. The people of Sudan are all Africans, be they Black-Africans or Arab-Africans." Here I have a bone to pick with Omar. Certainly the various conflicts or the various fronts of war in the Sudan are not simply racial or religious. That is the crude and distorted simplification of the issue. But, we must not forget that the Fur are Muslims just like the Arabs in the Sudan. Therefore the conflict cannot be put down to religious differences. Then, what is it?

For years the Khartoum regime of Muslim fundamentalists have also been pursuing ethnic cleansing in the Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan with genocidal overtones against the Nuba who are also mostly Muslims. A similar tactic has been in place there, that is, using local Arab militias working hand in glove with Sudanese army units against the Nuba. In the South of the country the conflict is of much longer standing and can be said to have commenced in August 1955, with a period of low intensity conflict between1972 and 1983. Since 1983 over two million southern Sudanese have died as a result of the war.

In the case of the war in southern Sudan the international media has too often simplified the struggle as a conflict between a Christian and animist South against a Muslim North. The real fact of the matter is that it is a struggle between Arabs and Arabized Nubians and the Africans of the Sudan whether they are Fur, Zaghawa, Messalit and other similar groups in the west or the Ingessana in the east or the Beja/Hadendowa in the Kassala area adjacent to Eritrea. Some Nubians are now rejecting Arabism. The struggle in the Sudan is an age-old struggle between the forces for the Arabization of Africans and African nationalism, which rejects Arabization.

It is not simply a question of Islam against Christians and animists. I have in the past on many occasions indicated to friends in the Southern Sudan that they have for too long allowed their position to be sold short by playing to the international media and other interests which simply defined the struggle as one between Christians and animists in confrontation with Muslims. The explosion of media attention in the wake of the emergence of the Darfur crisis has underscored the falsity of the religious explanation of the conflict. If the Fur, Messalit, Zaghawa, Ingessana and Beja are Muslims certainly the struggle of the Sudan is not a religious conflict of Muslims and non-Muslims.

The history of the Arabs in the Sudan has been part of the history of the Arabs in Africa. Arabs entered Africa in the middle of the 7th century AD and have been steadily Arabizing Africans starting with the Berbers of northern Africa who till today have to a degree been resisting Arabization.

The Sudan and Mauritania are possibly the most decisive flash points in this process. Will Africans steadily accept to be culturally Arabized or will they resist Arabization and remain culturally rooted in their histories?

This is the real question of the Sudan and Africa. I say that I believe Africans prefer to remain African and not to become Arabs. I say this without prejudice to Arabs or those Africans who have become Arabized and wish to remain so. Just as much as Arabs have the right to protect their identity, history and culture, Africans also have a similar right. Just as much as Arabs wish to see the realization of Arab unity (el watani el arabi), Africans also most fervently wish to see the unity of Africans. The Arab League with all its weaknesses represents contemporary aspirations of Arabs for Arab unity.

As I have often argued, for as long as the pursuit of this ideal is conducted democratically for the freedom of Arab peoples, the ideal deserves the support of all progressive and well meaning people. But this must not be allowed to proceed geographically, politically, economically and culturally at the expense of Africans. Where does the border of the Arab world end and who are the people beyond the borders of the Arab world? Africans need to answer this question for themselves.

Today on the maps of the Arab League the Arab world includes about a third of Africa's geographical area. There are some of us who say enough is enough. No further expansion at the expense of Africans is tolerable. The notion Arab-Africans is a term used in the Sudan to hide the realities of Arabization. It is a concept, which has become in some ways a Trojan horse for Arab expansionism in Africa. Culturally and otherwise, people will always mix and adopt new identities, but this must not become a one-way traffic to Arabization and the cultural denationalisation of Africans.

In the broad historical experience of Africans two imperialisms can be pointed to, Arab and Western imperialism. Historically, Arab imperialism in Africa is older than western imperialism by a millennium. The day Africans realize that Arabs are not Africans and Africans are not Arabs but that the two peoples must live together in peace and with humanity towards each other their recognition of the African identity would have moved one step further and would have made a decisive conceptual move towards the ultimate achievement of African unity. The unity of Africa embraces historically, culturally and psychologically more directly the African Diaspora than the Arab north of Africa. In this sense, the African Diaspora is central to Pan-Africanism and African unity.

In a manuscript I am currently writing I have made the point that, if we want to maintain the rigour of the logic of the Diaspora link, we must, as Africans, define our reality on a historical and cultural basis. In this respect, geography is only useful in as far as it helps us to understand the historical and social process. We can therefore hardly define the reality of contemporary Africa as a geographical expression; that is, Africans as all who live on the continent of Africa. The argument has a resounding and irresistible flip-side, which is that, all who do not live on the continent or not born on the continent, are not Africans. This is the distorted logic, which pushes out the African Diaspora. We must not equate citizenship with nationality or cultural identity. A state may have people of different nationalities.

I do not agree that the so-called "race and religious analogy of the conflict is part of the ideological ploy of U.S. imperialism to generate anti-Arab hostility among African-Americans and Black Africans, to win support of African-Americans and Black African Christians for the US neo-Conservatives/Christian right project against Arab and Muslim Africans, and in particular against Sudanese Muslims. It is also aimed at undermining the long standing Afro-Arab solidarity that has historically striven against the forces of western imperialism, colonialism, apartheid and the occupation in Palestine."

Of course western imperialism must be denounced but so also must the Arabization of Africans be fought. It is ridiculous to bracket African-Americans with US neo-conservatives in this way. It is at best disingenuous and at worst mischievous. The point, which the Darfur crisis has forcefully brought home to many Africans in the Diaspora, is the fact that ultimately the definition and identity of Africans cannot be based on colour. In the Sudan it is not possible to differentiate African from Arab on the basis of colour and I am sure that with television available worldwide many Africans in the Diaspora who have for centuries been faced with white racism find it difficult to digest the fact that most Arabs in the Sudan have black faces. The point I have elsewhere made is that amongst Arabs colours range from black to blonde. The same is true for Jews. In years to come this may be more clearly true for Europeans.

Ultimately what defines an African from an Arab are cultural and historical belongings, not nature but nurture, not biology but rather culture. The black colour which is common for most Africans happens to be a miraculous bonus, in the sense that whereas most other major peoples of the world have other attributes they share as groups based on culture, religion, language, history and geography, mixed to different degrees, in the case of Africans in the absence of clearly unifying language and religion, colour has become a most useful blessing which makes most Africans recognizable from a good distance. But, in the future increasingly there will be many Africans who are not necessarily black. This is the way the world is moving and this is the future of humanity.

From my viewpoint, part of the tragedy of Darfur is that African nationalism in the Sudan has been conveniently split between what is going on in the west, south, east and northeast. Africans have so far failed to find sufficient ground to realize that they are all fighting the same war. The Arabist rulers in Khartoum have been clever at creating convenient and tactical truces, and thereby silencing and truncating the Southerner's struggle from the Fur, Ingessana, Nuba and Beja. This amounts to success for the policy of divide and rule, which has been in the past used to such consummation by successive Arabist regimes in Khartoum, who fear and deny the predominant African character of the Sudan. What al Bashir and the Khartoum clique fear most, is that the Arabist minority may lose control of the Sudan; that the African majority may exert its preponderant character.

It is most doubtful if the Arab League, in its present form, would readily accept a thoroughly democratic solution to the national question in the Sudan. But Africans are waking up. Sooner or later the African character of the Sudan as a democratic expression of the society will triumph.

I am happy with Farid Omar's philosophically inclusive sense of humanity. But, I fear the persistence of the confusion of Arab and African on the continent and beyond. This confusion, on this specific matter, appears to be more prevalent among Africans than non-Africans. We still do not seem to know or understand who we are. I hope we do not go into another major Pan-African meeting/congress with this confusion. If this happens, we would not have made any real headway since the last one. Let us not try to foist an African identity on people who do not want to be so regarded and who reject the African identity; who continue to despise and enslave Africans. I agree with Farid Omar when he says that, "the root causes of the Sudanese conflict are primarily political and can be located in totalitarian tendencies that have overtime, suppressed the evolution of popular democracy." While this diagnosis is right the point has to be seen in relationship to the long history of oppression, slavery, war, ethnic cleansing and now genocide.

The suggestion that external forces have fanned the Sudanese conflict is grossly exaggerated and misplaced. Blaming the conflict on American arms and money and right-wing evangelical groups in the US does not do credit to the Africans of the Sudan. The Africans of the Sudan are a group oppressed by the minority Arab elite in the country. As for the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of the Sudan, we must remember that the Sudan as it is geographically represented today is like all African states an artificial creation of European powers. The British were anxious to control the whole of the Nile Basin in order to supply Egypt with its lifeline, the Nile waters.

Omar's contention that "the Sudanese government either has no interest in resolving the crisis or lacks the capacity to do so", is spot on. As for the AU I agree with Farid Omar that the about "300 Peace Monitors it has deployed in Darfur is grossly inadequate." Again Farid Omar's observation is pertinent when he writes that, "Like the Arab League and Organization of Islamic Conference, the Muslim and Arab media have also maintained a strange silence.” In sharp contrast to events in the Middle East, coverage on the horrific Darfuri scene by Al-Jazeera and other leading Arab Satellite Televisions such as the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya is dismally marginal. Failure by Muslim and Arab media to adequately cover the grisly events in Darfur smacks of complicity.

Africans need to read the lessons right in this behaviour and attitude of the Arab media. The simple truth about all the wars in the Afro-Arab borderlands is that, at best we should be able to nationally coexist in peace. But if we cannot live together in peace, then we must go our separate ways without rancour, pain and mutual torment. The members of the global community have fortunately agreed as standing international protocol, since the Treaty of Versailles, that in our times, nations and peoples have the right to self-determination.

This protocol applies equally well to the African people of the Sudan.

* Kwesi Kwaa Prah is Director of the Centre for the Advanced Studies of African Societies. This article has been used with permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected]