Introduction

The conflict between the northern and southern Sudan has usually been misunderstood, because the historical roots of the conflict have been misrepresented. Two opposite explanations are frequently given for the continuing rift: 1) That the division between the North and South is based on centuries of exploitation and slave-raiding by the ‘Arab’ North against the ‘African’ South; or 2) That the Sudan was artificially split by imperialist meddling, since Sudanese Islam, being both ‘African’ and ‘Arab’, imposes no natural or historical division between the two regions. Certainly there is broad agreement that the Sudan has been undergoing a process of Arabization and Islamization since the invasion of the Sudan by Arab tribes from Upper Egypt and across the Red Sea during the Middle Ages. The ‘Arab invasion’ of the Sudan has been accepted as an historical fact both by those who think that Arabization is a natural and inevitable process – interrupted in its final stages by British intervention – and by those who see it as an external threat which should be stopped by the rallying of an indigenous African opposition. A corollary to the above is that the northern Sudan has been united by Islam, and therefore confronts the South with a political and cultural unity which the South itself lacks.

The Sudan is a complex country, with a population of nearly thirty million, inhabiting an area of about one million square miles. One language profile which categorized languages according to the number of speakers, identified Arabic and Dinka as the two major languages, followed by fourteen minor languages, divided into some 100 dialects. Of these nearly half are found within the southern Sudan, representing one third of the country's population, residing within a quarter of its territory; while more than half are found spread throughout the remaining northern three quarters of the country.1 Clearly this diversity makes it difficult to explain the current North–South conflict in simple cultural, ethnic or racial terms. It follows that some of the historical ‘causes’ which have been offered to explain the conflict must be revised. Religion, local perceptions of race and social status, economic exploitation, and colonial and post-colonial interventions are all elements in the Sudan's current civil war, but none, by itself, fully explains it.