Darfur: In Living Color

Department of Full Disclosure : I am all for mobilizations, campaigns and educational programs that truly seek to educate and effect positive change on crisis’s affecting Africa.]

As with any society divided by race, within those divisions are sub-divisions, creating a hierarchy of inferiority. Many countries still follow the colonial blueprint of distinction and this colonial legacy, passed down from generation to generation manifest into conflicts such as Rwanda and Somalia to name a few. Indeed, there is a palpable color consciousness in Sudan as well as other colonized countries- however; this color consciousness is only a small piece of a larger puzzle. Falling out of line with popular opinion, the conflict in Darfur is a multifaceted one and cannot be looked at through a monochromatic lens.

During my experience working for one of the largest mobilizations on behalf of the people of Darfur, the Save Darfur Coalition, I was constantly reminded that in creating awareness about a conflict the history is not always required. It is generally understood that while Africa has been on the world stage for centuries, it has been in a supporting role and it never made the final credits. It is with this in mind that I navigate all the attention that the conflict in Darfur is receiving. While this consciousness is great, I do not advocate the lack of attention paid to the roots (no pun intended) of these problems. Case in point, Rwanda circa 1926, the Belgians introduce a system in which people are required to carry identity cards and the Tutsi minority was favored over the Hutu majority. The Belgians used the Tutsi minority to enforce their rule. Divide and conquer indeed.

Fast forward to 1994. From April to mid July of that year, it is estimated that an almost 800,000 to 1 million Hutu’s were brutally murdered as chronicled in the movie Hotel Rwanda. The same blueprint has played out all over Africa in one way or another. Darfur is no exception. Very little is paid to the fact that hundreds of years of subjugation, slavery, colonization and general oppression just might lead to future tensions. I recognize the past is the past. However, to ignore it and its lessons is to ultimately repeat it.

Now enter Darfur, a region in Southwest Sudan, roughly the size of Texas. The conflict in Darfur began in 2003, with intensified insurgency and counter-insurgency between nomads and settled farmers. It is necessary to note that in Sudan, the labels ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ hold diverse meanings.

Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and a renowned authority on African History elaborates on this fact in his article entitled The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, and Insurgency,”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. 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 Arabisation with the spread of civilization and being Arab with descent.” It is this last definition that has won the favor of activists everywhere. It is a view that is genius in its simplicity and requires neither research nor critical thinking to adopt it.

Moreover the label ‘African’ carried its own set of meanings in Sudan. For one, an ‘African’ was someone who spoke a language indigenous to Africa. For example, members of the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa tribes are considered Bantu, representing a group native to the land and speak languages other than Arabic. The racial meaning came to take a strong hold in both the counter-insurgency and the insurgency in Darfur. Mamdani, for his part, observes that the characterization of the violence as simply ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ is a consequential effect of many campaigns advocating on behalf of Darfur. These conflicts do not materialize overnight; the seeds for conflict in most African societies were sown long ago in the ‘Scramble for Africa” in which colonial powers carved up the continent amongst themselves for the oppression of many and the benefit of a select few. The ‘divide and conquer’ maxim through which colonists maintained their rule is alive and well in Africa. Colonial supremacy could not be maintained without strategic laws and institutions to sustain it. This is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are countless other factors playing out in Darfur. No doubt accountability for those who commit war crimes is a must. All conflict as complex as Darfur is worthy of solutions and discourse just as complex, giving voice to the years that led up to the current.

All that being said, the consequences of race distinction are evident from Liberia to L.A. What next? If we are going to effect change in our own communities, here or abroad, we must be honest about the consequences of oppression and ask ourselves some hard questions. Have the days of self hatred truly disappeared? Have we silently accepted the lies that fueled years of subjugation? Have we become so complacent as to forget that it was less than 50 years ago people were getting hosed down the street? Have we reduced the struggles of millions to a single month and a Mickey Dee’s campaign? Recognizing and studying the roots of conflicts in Africa will help to inform our own experience and hopefully spur action. Let’s pull it together yall. Start Schemin.