Ghana’s Golden jubilee year has provided a good chance for flag-waving and anthem-singing in celebration of the post-colonial or neo-colonial entity. For various reasons, it has also afforded the opportunity for some introspection by the broad citizenry who want to regard it as a convenient milestone in a journey forward from the end of colonialism. They want to assess the merits and demerits of the journey and what future prospects look like. For others, it is an occasion for chest-thumping and collective affirmation in the face of the realities of mass impoverishment and entrenched underdevelopment in the country. During most of these fifty years, Ghanaians have been ruled by soldiers and ex-soldiers who first came into power through “the barrel of a gun.” In the words of the cineaste Nii Kwate Owoo, it has been largely a tradition of “soldier come, soldier go”. The last of these military rulers, J. J. Rawlings, after a few years changed his military fatigues for civilian gear and ruled altogether for almost twenty years.

The opening leadership of the independence era was the Nkrumah administration. In retrospect, it was the most dynamic and credible leadership the country has seen in the fifty years of its existence. The Nkrumah regime was particularly notable and significant for its Pan-Africanist stance and programme. It carried out very feverishly, firstly, an agenda for colonial independence in Africa and secondly a push for African unity. With respect to the first, “the decade of African independence” (1960 – 1970) was a partial testimony of the correctness and success of this vision and programme. With respect to the second, apart from some initial moves towards a Ghana-Guinea-Mali union, Nkrumah’s regime achieved little in his lifetime. Needless to say, the agenda for African unity remains an outstanding cause for Africans.

The fact that Ghana was the first country in colonial Africa which came under the independent rule of non-Arab indigenous elites made it historically incumbent on Ghana to advance the project of African freedom and independence in Africa proper. It could hardly have been otherwise. Therefore, in a sense, even Nkrumah should be seen in this light. He was a product of historical forces, far beyond his single personality and it is not possible to explain the role of Nkrumah and the regime he headed without placing it in the wider historical context of Africa and the world. The role Nkrumah played in the African liberation movement was subsequently taken up by Nyerere, Kaunda, Machel and Mugabe as the liberation process steadily rolled southwards. At each historical turn, the next country took up the role. Today, that role is being played largely by Mbeki in South Africa. The question is whether there is to be unity including the Arab countries of the North or excluding them. The Arab countries of the North need and want unity of the Arab world which lies outside the African continent. In my view, so long as the unity of the Arab world is pursued democratically it must be supported by all democratic-thinking peoples, but so also is the African view for unity. Of course since the Arab and African peoples are neighbours, this would have border implications.

After Nkrumah a revolving door of military rulers featured in Ghana. The two civilian regimes that emerged after the first round of military leadership, i.e. the Busia regime and the Limann regime, lasted together not more than four years. As I suggested during a recent address in Ghana, by the end of the Kuffour regime, between this regime and the previous Rawlings government, we would have seen almost three decades of inept, directionless, uninspired, stolid and kleptocratic government. True enough, the Rawlings administration was more cruel and blood-thirsty, but the debate about whether the Rawlings regime was more corrupt than the Kuffour administration is ultimately a profitless exercise. The impression I have is that there is widespread disillusionment with both the present government and the previous one. In the minds of many, in the coming election, if it is a contest between the two parties, then the offering is like a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. The options are frustrating and many say they will not vote. Under these circumstances of voter apathy, disillusionment and suspicion of politicians, the slightest disturbance can rapidly escalate into a crisis, which would be difficult to roll back. Another soldier or soldiers could take advantage of the situation and stage a coup. The hordes of urban unemployed we see at the roadsides, selling dog-chains, loaves of bread and boxes of matches are ready-made social material for the chaos and violence that can be triggered. It is therefore, in my view, incumbent upon responsible minds to offer the wider populace another option, a third option outside the clutches of the devil and the deep blue sea.¹

Over twenty years ago, in an article I wrote which appeared in the Lesotho Law Journal, I had argued that;

It is therefore not counted with the African countries of this continent, but rather with the Arab countries of the north.

This is most unfortunate. Indeed, in my view, the present struggles in the Sudan are precisely about whether the Sudan will continue to be the country dominated by an Arab and Arabised minority, or the overwhelming majority of the people of the Sudan who are not Arab or Arabised will bring various types of pressures to bear on the centre to assert the African bona fides of the country.

As Gerard Prunier has pointed out in his book, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide “The ‘Arabs’ in the Sudan are unsure about the purity of their Arab credentials, which tends to make them all the more touchy about these being respected.” This problem that Prunier refers to has a long history in the psychology of the ruling groups of the Sudan. During the colonial period, in August 1943, a senior British colonial administrator, Sir Douglas Newbold, made a revealing observation on this issue.³ In a letter to the Sudan Agent in Cairo, Newbold candidly observed,

It is to this class of “educated Sudanese”, a small group of Arab or Arabised Sudanese that the British handed over power at independence, and it is the same class which has ruled the Sudan since that time.

The history of the Sudan throughout most of the 19^th century had provided scope for the entrenchment of Arabism in the country. However, under the Turco-Egyptian regime (1820 – 1881), large parts of the present day Sudan was free of Khedivial control. The Fur in the west were subjugated only in 1874. Sections of the Beja remained free until the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1898 – 1956). Under both the Turco-Egyptian regime and the Mahdist Administration (1881 – 1898) most of the South was unconquered. Garrisons and military posts were established during and after the mid-century, but de facto control over the African nationalities in the South became a reality only after the Nuer Settlement in the early 1930s. Barricading themselves in stockades called Zereebas, marauding Arab traders and slave runners invaded the hostile African countryside. For much of the 19^th century and before, Arabs had been raiding the southern and eastern borderlands for slaves and ivory. The volume and rapacity of this ruthless pursuit for blackskins was such that the population of the South at the turn of this century was only a fraction of what it had been a half-century before.⁵

It should be borne in mind that generally the Arabised nationalities enjoy superiority primarily in a class perspective which is emphasized on national lines. As a result socio-economic contradictions and class struggles are mirrored along national and regional dimensions. Banking trade, the civil bureaucracy, politics, and officer corps of the armed forces are all dominated by Arabised Sudanese.

Distribution of Main Ethnic Groups in Sudan (According to the 1956 Census)

In the first and only census conducted in the Sudan, 39% of the population claimed to be Arabs. In a country where being Arab represents privilege and exclusivity, many make claims to Arabness, whose validity is debatable. Arab identities, like all other social identities, are difficult to pin down and may mean different things in different contexts.

To the above were also included 156,009 West Africans with non-Sudanese status, 37,697 Sudanese of West African and Congolese origin, and 648 Belgian Congolese. Indeed the tragedy of the Sudan is that many of those who claim to be Arabs are actually mainly Nubians; African who have been culturally Arabised.⁶ Today, they lead the charge of Arabism in the Sudan.

While this orientation and Arabism has grown steadily in some of the Arabised areas of the Sudan, the picture in the culturally African southern areas has for long remained eminently different. In a letter, dated 30^th August 1883 and addressed to Manfredo Camperio, the editor of Esploratore concerning the condition of Africans in the Egyptian provinces of the Sudan, with uninhibited frankness criticized the persistence of the slave trade in spite of the “pompous, declamatory circulars, written for the only objective of hiding the evil by denying its existence or diminishing its extent”.⁷ But more interestingly, the writer advanced an argument which has since then been often repeated by many who know the Sudan:

Most Northern Sudanese who claim Arab antecedents fall into two broad groupings. The first of these are the Arabised Nubians made up of the Barabra and Jaali. They are in the main sedentary cultivators huddled along the Nile. The second group are the Juhayna, who are nomadic and semi-nomadic nationalities. Among the Jaali in particular, Nubian dialects still persist here and there but this language is dying out in favour of Arabic. Modern linguistic studies show that Nubian or Nobiin, belongs to the Eastern Sudanic cluster of language which includes languages as apparently diverse as the Hill Nubian languages, Dair, Dilling, Midob, Birgid, Didinga-Murle, Barea, Ingessana, Nyimang, Temein, Tama, Daju and Liguri. By and large, the Arabised Sudanese under-rate their African roots. Most of the so-called Arabs of the Sudan are an admixture of local Africans, Arab settlers, and imported slaves. As MacMichael rightly indicates, “the importation of slave women from the South, which has proceeded uninterruptedly for centuries, has lent a further measure of spurious homogeneity to all these Nubian people.”⁹

It is among the Nubians that the denial of African nationality is more prevalent. The other more authentically African groups in the North of the country are principally the Funj in the East, the Fur, Messalit and Zagahwa in the West and the Beja in the North-East who, in spite of Arabisation, steadfastly hold on to their non-Arabic cultural characteristics.

The Darfur crisis and the bloodletting that we are seeing in the country is the latest instalment in the struggle for power in the Sudan. The South and, to a lesser extent, the Nuba area have been able to assert themselves sufficiently to obtain relative autonomy from Khartoum. The Beja in the north-east have also recently been given a new dispensation which creates local power in the area. The struggle in the east has not been resolved and Darfur has caught the imagination of the world. The Nubians are retrieving their collective African memory and asserting that they are not Arabs. The emancipation process of Africans in the Sudan and the struggles to remove power from the hands of the small elite of Arabised and Arab Sudanese will continue as it has in an unbroken fashion since the Torit mutiny of August 1955. In the end, without doubt, power will come to rest in the hands of the majority. Until that day, we may have possibly to contend with, unfortunately, more suffering. The sooner the suffering of the Sudanese people can be brought to an end, the better for us all.

The fact that questions are being asked now, “why is Ghana being celebrated and not the Sudan?”, is testimony of the fact that the crisis of identity in the Sudan persists. In the long run, whether people like it or not, the Sudan’s African identity will reassert itself.