The Arab Man Ruined Sudan

One ethnic group ruled over the rest. It was the ethnic group that denied the existence of all the other ethnic groups (about a dozen or so main ethnic groups and dozens of tribes). It was the ethnic group that called itself Arab, while all others assumed they were pure African, and so, declared its own personal playground an Arab country.

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Were the Dinka Arab?

Were the Nuer Arab?

Were the Shilluk Arab?

Were the Azande Arab?

Were the Murle Arab?

Were the Fertit Arab?

Were the Berta Arab?

Were the Jul Chol Arab?

Were the Bongo Arab?

Were the Moru Arab?

Were the Mundar Arab?

Were the Bari Arab?

Were the Lokoya Arab?

Were the Avokoya Arab?

Were the Mundu Arab?

Were the Kakwa Arab?

Were the Pajulu Arab?

Were the Lugwara Arab?

Were the Madi Arab?

Were the Acholi Arab?

Were the Lulobo Arab?

Were the Didinga Arab?

Were the Olubo Arab?

Were the Burun Arab?

Were the Anuak Arab?

Were the Ngalam Arab?

Were the Nyangatum Arab?

Were the Pori Arab?

Were the Jie Arab?

Were the Lopit Arab?

Were the Kuku Arab?

Were the Nyangwara Arab?

Were the Baka Arab?

Were the Chad Arab?

Were the Jur Bel Arab?

Were the Lango Arab?

How many of the Nuer were Arab?

The Alor, Bul, Panaron, Jikany, Jegai, Adok, Nyong, and the Ador tribes,

or the Gawaar and Lou tribes?

How many of the Dinka were Arab?

The Malwal, Twic, Rek and the Agar tribes,

or the Padeng, Hol, Nyarweng, Aliab, Atwot, Ciec and the Ngok tribes?

Are the Zaghawa Arab?  

Are the Fur Arab?

Are the Masalit Arab?

Are the Dago Arab?

Are the Tamma Arab?

Are the Moru Mangbetu Arab?

Are the Bande Arab?

Are the Bagirmi Arab?

Are the Gummuz Arab?

Are the Kunama Arab?

Are the Kuma Arab?

Are the Hill Nubians Arab?

Are the Koalib Tagoi Arab?

Are the Nubians of Makuria Arab?

The Dongolawi, the Mahasi, the Halfawi?

Are the Nubians of Darfur – the Midob – Arab?

Are the Bejas Arab?

The Bani Amir, the Ababda, the Hadariba, the Bishariyyeen?

Are the Coptic Egyptians Arab?

Are the Hausa Arab?

They will all tell you – no! They are African, and proud of their ethnicity!*

*Some are not really proud but acknowledging of.

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Who are the Arabs of the Sudan?

Those who speak Arabic.

But what dialect to be exact?

Mostly a pidgin form of Yemeni Arabic, or as one could say, the Ebonics of the Arabic language.

But why do they claim Arab descent?

Because they curse their ancestors who were Christian or pagan, and they revere the ones who destroyed their civilization and subjugated them by force. They hate themselves and loved their destroyer more than anything else. They were not genocided but rendered pariahs. They live in hell, and they bring every upright nation on its knees, and ruin the strong and healthy. They fail, and all must fail with them too.

Who are they?

Arabized people – people who were conquered and destroyed.

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The Nubians and Sennarians of Alodia, who speak a pidgin blend of Yemeni Arabic and extinct Nubian dialects, and call it Sudanese Arabic; who were destroyed in 1504 when Soba the capitol was sacked by the Arab fugitives that the Christian kingdom welcomed and gave refuge and tried to expel too little too late, and who set up an Islamic and Arabist state of their own – the Sultanate of Funj – over the Nubians.

A certain Shayq ruled over the Meroe stretch of the Nile, the Meroites deem themselves the tribe of Shayqiyya.

A certain Rubat ruled over the sharp bend of the Nile to the east of the Meroe stretch, and the locals in the town of Abu Hamad and nearby villages deem themselves the Rubat-äb.

A certain Hassän ruled from Abu Hamad to Atbara, the locals deem themselves the Hassäniyya tribe.

A certain Ja3al ruled from Atbara to Khartoum North, the locals deem themselves the Ja3aliyya tribe.

The Ja3aliyya are many clans, each in its own village. The Likaylik village has the Likaylik clan, the Tikayna village hosts the Tikayna clan, and the Suwaykit clan live in their own village, and so on.

The idea of tribes and clans came with the Arabs and did not exist before their hegemony.

The Sennarians occupy the Sennar Peninsula (Gezira), and call themselves Geziran Arabs. They have many tribes and many clans, many with distinctly Arabic names and many still having significant Arab blood. Though they seem to be heavily mixed with everyone, from Dinka to Berta to Nubian to Kahili to Yemeni Arabs.

Bani Juhayn and Bani Abbas were the Arab tribes to have lived generously in southern Nubian kingdom of Alodia. They blended into the locals, marrying the pretty Nubian girls who sons married the pretty Nubian girls, and in turn, blended into the Nubian ethnicity. The father is always Arab, and the mother can never be Arab, but was Nubian. The children considered themselves Arabs after their father. And these were the royalty. To approach royalty, one had to be of Arab descent. And so the Alodian Nubians and Sennarians were destroyed, becoming self-hating and confused Arabophiles and Islamofanatics, and named Jallab by the Southerners. With time, they “found” their Arab lineage, picked up Yemeni Arabic and were fanatical Muslims.

There are the Baggara of Darfur and South Kordofan. However, the Baggara have little mixture with Arabs, and their dialect is lacking in much of the Arab elements. Even to the untrained ear, they sound more African than Arabic. Though their quick-wittedness and eloquence in speech is distinctly Arabic.

There are the descendants of Egyptian officers and Levantine businessmen, fourth to fifth generation, who have assimilated into the language and culture, but keep a far distance from the Jallab and other races, though some have married into the Jallab, and have created the phenomenon of the light-skinned Jallab. They are called “Halab” (sing. Halabi).

And still there are arrivals from Libya, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia dating 1 to 2 centuries before. The Rashayda from the Hejaz of Western Saudi Arabia is the best-known example.

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Why should a small group of ethnicities centered in a fraction of Sudan’s land mass make decisions as to the country’s ethnic make-up and identity without everyone else? And why call themselves Arabs when they clearly are not? And why add such a country to the Arab League?

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Sudanese culture was Jallabi culture. Every other ethnicity’s culture was summed up as “the different cultures of the regions” or “the different cultures of the different lands”. What was promoted as Sudanese culture was simply the Jallab culture, which is an austere and bleak Nubian culture, being Nubian at its core, but linguistically Arab and smothered by Arabian neurosis and Islamic-inspired rules.

The Egyptian man’s or the Saudi man’s idea of a Sudanese is a Jallabi, and his perception of Sudanese culture is the Jallabi’s culture. To understand Sudan, he reads novels written by Jallabis depicting the Jallabi heartland with its villages, its Nile River and its extended families.

(Psst! The Egyptian knows that the Jallab are Nubians, the Nubians of Nobatia live on his side of the border, he knows what the Nobatians look like and knows how they behave, which is, just like the Jallab!)

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With so many ethnicities and languages, how could the official language ever be Arabic? Is this not insane? How could all of the presidents been Jallab exclusively, whether of the elected parties, or the leaders of coups?

The Ummah party was the front party of the Ansar Islamic sect, a project spearheaded by the Mahdi’s grandson to revive the lost Caliphate of 1885 – 1898, with the aid of the “helpers”, the Ansar. The Democratic Union Party was the front party of the Khatmiyya Sufi sect. Both sects were spearheaded by sheikhs and imams, but the parties were occupied by well-dressed and eloquent secularists who took orders from their sheikhs and imams. Since 1956, with every elected government, the Khatmiyya and the Ansar vie for seats in parliament, the one with the most number of seats having its leader made Prime Minister. Both were opposed to one another, but both allowed strictly for Jallab.

Three democracies, two brought by people’s revolutions, were toppled by 3 military coups. After a coup, each of the two parties was made irrelevant, and its leading members thrown in prison and sometimes tortured. The coup councils were themselves Jallab-dominated, with a few token “minorities” to make the council look inclusive and serious. The “minorities” still had to correspond with their colleagues in Arabic, who communicated between one another in the local Arabic dialect, and not the formal Standard Arabic, as should have been done in formal settings.

It was the Jallabi’s playground all along.

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What the Jallab inherited, lands and peoples and cultures and resources, he took and made everyone else irrelevant. It was his country, his rules and his culture. Everyone else was to disappear into oblivion as the Jallabi tried to please his Arab masters and make them let him have a few crumbs of the pie. As he got the crumbs of the Arab pie, so did the “minorities” get the crumbs of national development. Most of the development went to Khartoum and the port city of Port Sudan, then the rest went to Jallab cities, and then trickles to everyone else.

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From 1956, Sudan was destined to become an Islamic state, and destined to languish in civil wars here and there. From 1956, it was destined to become backward, as any truthful man worth his salt would have pointed out.

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It was the Jallab all along!

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Written by a former Jallabi – now a Nubian of Meroe.