Saviors and Survivors; Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror, by Mahmood Mamdani, London: Verso, 2009; pp. xi+398, £17.99. ISBN 978-1-84467-341-4.
Since the appearance of Citizen and Subject, Mahmood Mamdani has taken on the unique part of a public intellectual and critical observer of the African scene at the highest level with a foot in New York surveying Western perceptions and another grounded on the African continent. He has intervened in debates on South Africa, Rwanda and now Sudan, apart from writing about Muslims and the West in the contemporary conjuncture. There is no doubt more to come on Zimbabwe from shorter writings that have already evoked substantial controversy elsewhere but, at the level of the full-length book, it is now his thoughts on Sudan that are reaching the spotlight.
There are essentially three related parts to this study. First, Mamdani looks at the Save Darfur Movement and explores the significance of enthusiasm for Western military invasion of this region in the very heart of Africa, based on making a case that the violence in Darfur was (is?) genocidal. Second, he devotes time and attention to Sudanese history in order to explore the actual roots of conflict in Darfur. Finally, he returns to the international context and the current prospects raised by the ICC demand for the arrest of the President of Sudan on the ground of war crimes in Darfur.
Let us start with the middle. Not that serious historians of Sudan need to be told this, but Mamdani underscores the key point that Furs and Arabs in Darfur do not belong to different ‘races’, that Arabs in Sudan generally are not migrants from Arabia and that Arab identity which he calls essentially ‘political’ (p. 108) has many facets that have shifted over time and has existed for many centuries in this part of Africa. Racial antagonism can be dismissed as having anything to do with this conflict.
Instead, Mamdani finds a variety of causes jointly responsible. First is the colonial heritage, and here predictably he harks back to the Citizen and Subject binary. Under British rule, legitimate identity in Darfur revolved around ethnicity. Of course, in that time, light-skinned Arabs were defined as better than Africans and deserving of more consideration. However, in Darfur it was the sedentary Fur who had collectively access to a dar – to land, unlike many of the nomadic, often Arabic speaking, pastoral peoples. The second stimulus to conflict lay in the long drought which virtually forced Sahelian camel nomads to abandon their usual territorial haunts and made access to more fertile and southern portions of Darfur compelling. Third came the evolution of regional entanglements, in particular long-term instability in neighbouring Chad, another huge and yet much less well-known country afflicted by drought, where close links exist between some of the Darfuri rebels and the Chad regime and from where many refugees came to live with closely aligned communities in Darfur. The possibility of assistance and refuge across the border stimulated the possibility for rebellion. Here as elsewhere in Africa, regional rivalries and alliances fed into Cold War plots and proxy wars. Some nomadic groups were thus obviously available for mayhem to forces both in N'Djamena and Khartoum.
Finally, there is the question of the narrow, undemocratic nature of the Sudanese state itself where power has overwhelmingly always rested on cliques with ‘tribal’ ties from the middle Nile valley. This has been challenged to some extent if unsuccessfully on an Islamist basis, but this of course cannot speak to the country's large Christian minority. The conflict between north and south in the Sudan has unhinged the whole country, inevitably influencing other contradictions into breaking out in open rebellion. It is a central contention in Mamdani's argument that the extreme violence that climaxed in 2003/04 in Darfur came out of earlier strife that had its roots in conflict within Darfur itself; the apparently Machiavellian role played by the Bashir government in Khartoum has been more opportunistic than causative by this line of argument.
All these factors are convincingly real, although it is not quite clear to me why camel nomads would choose to re-establish themselves in agricultural areas without proposing to change their way of life, but then I am a sceptic in general towards environmentally determinist explanations in history and politics. However, the greatest problem with this assessment analytically is that Mamdani makes so little of the reality that ethnic and racial determinism, based on a poor assessment of real historical processes, while undoubtedly typical of colonial analysis, has (as in Rwanda) been internalised and seized on with alacrity by strong local forces for quite some time. It is the academic ‘doyen’ of historical studies in the Sudan, Yusuf Fadl Hasan, who lives most easily with the Harold MacMichael version of Sudanese history as Mamdani mentions, but then he represents the dominant intelligentsia of Khartoum. Arabic speaking nomads in Darfur have never claimed to be fighting a racial crusade or religious jihad; it was Fur spokesmen in the late 1980s who painted their conflict with cattle and camel nomads in starkly racial terms to suit their own position (and no doubt court influential foreign friends) as they became more and more alienated from central authority in Khartoum. Herein lies the problem of ethnic interpretation, not in its imperial origins as an argument. It is the Sudanese themselves who have yet to face the world convincingly as citizens.
Sudanese history is multi-faceted and complex and Mamdani at most gives us an aperçu of a great many events and issues; he is not really at odds with current scholarship on which his analysis largely depends. Much of the power of this book comes rather from Mamdani's very justifiable frustration at the wilful and truly stupid ignorance of Westerners as they seek to define crises in Africa in liberal ‘humanitarian’ terms that can be applied anywhere and which exist in defiance of politics and history where racial thinking, however condemned, is still the intellectual comfort zone.
For Americans, Darfur is a place without history and without politics-simply a place where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’ (p. 60).
The demand for a crusade against evil Arab genocide, however unlikely to be put into practice in the Sudan, has now tended to give way to the equally stupid notion of arresting Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, for Darfur war crimes through the misuse of the International Criminal Court. Indeed, it is al-Bashir who is now blamed for racialising the situation! This in a world where Americans think they have a right to democratically vote into office transparently much greater war criminals such as Bush or Cheney who are then permitted to retreat to their luxury lairs once out of office or where a Tony Blair, after invading a country posing not the slightest danger to his own on supposedly mistaken information, instead of being locked away for the rest of his days, is passed on from high political office in Britain to become the man to negotiate peace between Israelis and Palestinians! Al-Bashir is hardly an innocent party but, as Mamdani says, the only way to a better outcome is ‘not to shun justice but to explore forms of justice that will help end rather than prolong conflicts’ (p. 286). Detaching ‘war crimes’ from ‘underlying political reality’ is not the way to go.
He is also a very sympathetic observer of the AU efforts in Darfur which he feels demonstrate far more instinct for what kind of negotiations could bring about peace and who need far more support but of course this intervention rests, as he knows, on a very weak financial foundation. For the moment, Darfur is quieter due in good part to a large outsider troop presence. Mamdani suggests that the Darfur war has become one with direct implications for the remaking of the Sudan and probably cannot be resolved short of engaging with that larger process, itself linked especially to what happens between north and south. At one level, this is convincing; Sudan is a country which cannot go forward without a reconstruction of the colonial inheritance, but this remains a rather abstract assessment. How then do we deal with the Khartoum regime as it really is? Can one really bring together into a new citizenship the fighting fragments of Darfur which have imploded since 2004? Can one see the Sudanese emancipating themselves from the grooves into which imperial categories once gathered them? Perhaps the most depressing thing in the book is his admission in places that Sudanese themselves are inclined to fall for the humanitarian trope and pray for Western intervention in desperation as an African way out seems remote or unattainable. Mamdani's insistence on a negotiated solution, an African solution that lays all legitimate grievances on the table, is nonetheless certainly a very useful starting position for reopening the discussion.