Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
Because I knew my Sudan piece would be controversial, I sent it to a friend of mine who works for a large international news agency for her comments before publication.
She wrote back: “It is a heart-breaking situation and you, too, will come in for abuse, of course. Off the top of my head, my main question would be: could you talk to some of the victims yourself, if any are in Europe or America? I think you need more than [Christian Solidarity International’s] word.”
I answered her as follows: “CSI won’t be going to Southern Sudan – a war zone – for some time; its trips have to be organised a long time ahead. But I have seen videos and talked to the people who interviewed the freed slaves … As for abuse, who cares? If this article gets even 10 more people freed, that’s OK by me.
“My dear, if your child, or sister, or mother was enslaved in Southern Sudan, would you refuse to let her be freed until a Muslim or some other politically correct African diaspora organisation came into being – of itself – to free her?”
Another lady, a practising Muslim, who saw the article wrote: “I read your story through very well. I must say it is a sad story, very fluid and thorough. I think highly of it and I can say it provokes anguish and a certain compelling force to react, even in the face of helplessness. It is a pathetic account of our inhumanity and your chronicle of it is apt.”
This, from a practising Muslim, reinforces my belief that there can be humane, as well as brutal, adherents to any religion or doctrine and that one should, therefore, not generalise in these matters. For all I know, there are Sudanese Muslims languishing in the prisons of General Omar Hassan Al-Bashir because they have seen how Islam has been perverted to serve his political ambitions.
One of the articles about Southern Sudan that alerted me to the slavery scandal was a piece in the May 3 1999 edition of Newsweek, by Marcus Mabry (an African- American). Mabry was so incensed by what he had witnessed in Southern Sudan that he also wrote a follow-up article in The Source, a magazine published by black Americans for black Americans. It was entitled “Hell up in Sudan”.
In his Newsweek article, Mabry reported: “Beneath a solitary tree in the sun- scorched village of Malual Baai, more than 400 Dinka women and children sit passively in the 110 [Fahrenheit] heat. Their clothes are filthy and tattered, and only a few wear shoes. Swarms of green flies cluster around their nostrils and eyes, but they are too exhausted to swat them away. They have just walked hundreds of miles, returning to their home region in southern Sudan to escape their Muslim slave masters up north. Their Muslim ‘retriever’, Ahmed Bashi, has led them to this desolate place to sell them into freedom.
“As they rest in the shade, John Eibner of the human rights group Christian Solidarity International (CSI) counts out the cash for their release: $50 a head, paid in stacks of Sudanese pounds. Bashi, wearing sunglasses and flip-flops, gathers the bundles of bills in the lap of his white robe; they total $20 250, more than he can cram into his knapsack. Then Eibner walks over to the slaves and declares: ‘You are all free.’
“Once nearly wiped out, slavery in Sudan has sprung back to life in the 1990s amid the chaos of an intractable civil war. The victims are black Christians and animists; the slave traders who raid southern villages are Muslim Arabs, whose racial and religious kin control the central government in Khartoum. Journalists and human rights groups have documented the resurgence of slavery in Sudan, but that has done nothing to reverse the trend. Now a new humanitarian movement is attacking the problem frontally – by buying the slaves’ freedom.”
Recounting the criticism which the purchase of slaves has aroused in some circles, Mabry wrote: “The new redeemers say money is the only thing that talks in Sudan. ‘What is intolerable is to leave these women and children in the hands of brutal captors,’ says Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group in Boston, which raises funds for CSI. ‘If Unicef thinks it is wrong to free slaves with cash, then what is their alternative?’ “
Mabry’s article concluded: “Whatever human rights experts may say, Dinkas don’t quibble about how lost family members are being returned. For the victims’ families, getting them back becomes an obsession.
“After the stack of money changed hands in Malual Baai, Alung Lual Gerang found her two boys, nine and 11, in the crowd and fell on them with kisses. She had never heard any criticism of CSI until that day. ‘How is it bad that my children are here under my arms?’ she said through her tears. ‘When they were gone, I was always sad. Now I am happy. Somebody has bought back my children. How is that bad?’ Who could argue with her?”
In his article for The Source, Mabry allowed his emotions to come through: he commented that it was “an ironic scene at the end of the 20th century: a white ‘liberator’, a latter-day abolitionist, buying back African slaves – not from white masters, but from their own Sudanese brothers who had enslaved them”.
Mabry added, “I shuttled between trees, taking notes on the obvious brutality of the slaves’ lives. At one point, while sitting on the ground among the Dinka, I couldn’t help but identify deeply with their plight. Even though I covered that story for Newsweek first, the perspective of the black man in me who witnessed this is a different, unique story in itself. I can now admit that as a descendant of Africans, I found it difficult to maintain any pretence of journalistic objectivity.”
But Mabry’s account was not the only one I read. Other news organisations that have reported on the slave trade in Southern Sudan include CBS TV (in a programme anchored by its top newscaster, Dan Rather) the Boston Globe, NBC and CNN. It is simply not worth the while of any of these organisations to lie about any subject, let alone a filthy human drama going on in remote Southern Sudan, on an African continent known for its brutality.
From time immemorial immoral people have sought to “kill the messenger” while ignoring the message. If the government of Al-Bashir in Sudan – his naive supporters abroad – want to stop Sudan getting bad publicity, they can do so easily. Al-Bashir should ban the trade and prosecute those involved in it.
As far as I am concerned, I have absolutely no prejudice against Muslims or Arabs. But I have a lot of prejudice against man’s inhumanity to man. Oh yes – and wherever I see it, I shall expose it. I am also not the type who can be blackmailed with charges of being “anti-Arab” or “anti- Islamic”. Because I know I am not.