Anthropology and History

Zande folklore is particularly rich in tales of animal and bird life, which unlike most African animal myths, are a combination of accurate observation and ingenious fabrication.

This guide is a compilation of some of the forms of descriptive analysis that WFP and partners have undertaken since 1994.

This article explores the links between African artefacts in European museum collections and the slave and ivory trade in Sudan in the nineteenth century. It examines how ‘ethnographic’ collections were acquired from southern Sudan and how this process was entangled with the expansion of predatory commerce. Presenting evidence from contemporary travel accounts, museum archives and from the examination of objects themselves, the author argues that the nineteenth-century trade in artefacts from South Sudan was inseparable from a history of enslavement and extraction. This evidence from Sudan illuminates the relationship between collecting artefacts in Africa and other markets. It shows how collecting interests intersected with Ottoman and European imperial networks in Sudan and helps to better understand the history of African collections in European museums.

This report is an account of the Wunlit meeting in the words of the original participants, conducted in the light of the continuing state of conflict in South Sudan and the relevance of the history of peace-making to the current political situation.

The sustained movement of people, goods and ideas across the African Red Sea Region has been and continues to be so intense that it binds together communities throughout the region in a unified multifaceted socio-economic system that transcends ethnic, linguistic and political divides.

Where people went, viruses, bacteria and parasites followed. As a result, this region—comprised of present-day Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Djibouti and Somaliland—should be treated as a single disease environment.

This report examines the history of epidemic disease in this region in order to shed light on the current COVID-19 pandemic and its likely course. Rather than attempt to be comprehensive, this study focuses on three diseases that have caused at least one serious regional epidemic over the past two hundred years: Cholera, smallpox and syphilis.

The courses of these epidemics have been shaped by political violence and structural poverty. These two forces combined have led to an intensification of human migration across the region and to the growth of cities, creating new patterns of disease transmission and potential nodes of infection.

Over the last two centuries, the regional disease burden has shifted. Previously, risk was shared across various segments of society. At present, however, there are new social classes that are uniquely exposed to contagious infectious diseases, including refugees and internally displaced people living in camps and settlements, and the urban poor.

This uneven disease exposure will likely structure the course of the current COVID-19 pandemic. High-risk groups also tend to suffer from malnutrition or undernutrition and other previously under-control diseases rendering them even more vulnerable as COVID-19 spreads through the region.

I think that the history of the capital of the Bahr el Ghazal province, formally called colloquially Bog, deserves to be told, if the memory of its past is not to perish with the death of the last elders.
I have called it a “popular history” for two reasons. First, it is concerned almost exclusively with people. Secondly, it lacks of the whole, the backing of official statistics and documentation. This is not meant to imply disdain for such evidence; rather it is an invitation to someone else to fill the gap. Such information would provide enough material for another History of Wau, to complement, and where necessary, to correct this popular version.
It might be asked how the author can call what follows a “popular history”, living, as he does far from Wau. Why not leave the task to other people on the spot, or to those who can go and live there for a sufficient period of time?
The answer is that only one who actually lived in Wau, in daily contact with his heterogeneous population, is in a position to paint a living picture of the place.
In addition, a stranger will be unable to find the elders or representatives of the various tribal groups from whom he could collect the necessary information, for they have nearly all died.
I apologise for the ‘poor’ English of the text, and at the same time I thank most warmly those friends who helped me to improve it. Realising, however, that in history facts weigh more than words, I decided to release the work as it stands.

When South Sudan became a separate state in 2011, its northern boundary with the Republic of Sudan became an international border, the longest and most contentious in the region. At the westernmost extremity of Sudan, Kafia Kingi is a key meeting point between the two countries. This mineral-rich area is currently under the administration of South Darfur state, in Sudan, but is due to be returned to Raga County, in South Sudan, under the terms of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
The Kafia Kingi Enclave was first published in 2010, in the run-up to the January 2011 referendum on self-determination for South Sudan. Based on extensive archival research and hundreds of interviews in Sudan, it tells the story of the people of Kafia Kingi and Raga, and describes the choices they face today. The Kafia Kingi Enclave is available from the RVI website as a free-to-download digital edition. Print edition in English and Arabic available from Amazon.

This paper explores the history and ongoing transformation of the South Sudanese Sudd marshlands as a buffer zone in a variety of subsequent projects of domination and their sub-version. Its argument will be that the contemporary geopolitics of the Sudd cannot be understood properly without unwinding the historical layers of contestation and conflict around these projects of control and their reversal, projects which have sought to shape and have been shaped crucially by the area’s specific ecology. For more than a century, different external ventures – colonial, nationalist, secessionist – encountered in the southern Sudanese marshlands a formidable buffer to the realization of their various projects of control. Ambitions of making the Nile water flow, establishing effective state author-ity, or building lines of communication, get stuck in the Sudd’s difficult terrain. Building on the political ecology and wider social theory on terrain, resistance and warfare, The authors conceptualize the Sudd as a lively political ecology – one characterized by constant struggles and accommodations between the centripetal logics of state-making and the centrifugal propensities of vernacular political culture.

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities.
Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation. Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.

The Sudan Handbook, based on the Rift Valley Institute's successful Sudan Field Course, is an authoritative and accessible introduction to Sudan, written and edited by outstanding Sudanese and South Sudanese scholars and recognized international experts.

The Handbook covers Sudan, South Sudan and the North-South borderlands though a set of essays by leading specialists, including Abdelrahman Ali Mohammed, Peter Woodward, Gerard Prunier, Jerome Tubiana, Derek Welsby, and Ahmad Sikainga. It offers an authoritative introduction to both countries, rooted in a historical account of the development of the state.

The book is not limited to history and politics. It includes chapters on Sudanese popular music, the oil industry, and the archaeology of the early states on the Nile. The text is accompanied by purpose-drawn maps, a glossary, capsule biographies, a chronology. and a bibliography.

The Sudan Handbook grew out of the RVI’s annual Sudan and South Sudan Course. According to Randall Fegley, writing in African Affairs, it is one of ‘a tiny minority of rare reference works that can be pulled off the shelf as a compendium of facts or read cover to cover as a collection of well-written narratives’. He notes the Rift Valley Institute's ‘tremendous influence on academics, policy makers, activists, and field workers’. Tom Porteous of Human Rights Watch, writing on the Lawfare website, welcomes the RVI’s efforts ‘to collect, preserve, and transmit knowledge and understanding of Sudan’s ground-truth’. A reviewer from South Sudan, Peter Run, writing in the Australasian Review of African Studies, comments on what he describes as a 'succinct and comprehensive text'. He highlights the ‘insightful analysis’ of oil and its influence on the Sudanese political economy and notes the timeliness of the discussion of ‘the clash between the traditional mechanism of conflict resolution and the state’s judicial system’.