**
The Jalläba are against racism in principle, and most of all, racism against them. The real reason why they are against racism is because they fear being its victims, from the Arabians and those who fancy themselves Arabians. Lebanese racism against the “Sudanese” is the worst of all, it crushes them in one go and makes them actually depressed for an extended period of time. Saudi and Emirati and Egyptian racism does not affect them as much. When the Lebanese call the ‘Sudanese’ “animals” or “slaves” or “coal”, it reminds them of the painful reality of their Africanness, which does not resolve their lack of identity because, still, they have to be more specific.
Whenever an instance of racism against them occurs, the Jallaba are quick to point out that it’s a minority of the Arabians who are racist, and they reject racism in all its forms etc. etc. Then they run to Arabian journalists or intelligentsia, who “lawyer” on their behalf and castigate the perpetrator with a word of rebuke on a newspaper column aka a slap on the wrist. All is forgiven, and the past is the past. They fear racism so much that they twist a Hadith well beyond its original meaning, to insinuate that Muhammad claimed that ‘racism’ is rotten. (Muhammad used another word besides ‘racism’, and was referring to something completely different.)
But the Jalläba do not acknowledge the racism they mete out to Africans, especially towards Southerners. Those who ought to do so are silent, either suffering yet another episode of cognitive dissonance, or are stewing in rage against all Southerners but too afraid to say out loud where their sympathies lie. If they were not so resentful of everyone and so humiliated, they would see more clearly and not give in to racism so easily.
**
The Jallaba are the biggest victims of inferiority complex. They belittle everybody from West Africans and Southerners to Saudis and Egyptians, because they are little in themselves. Every once in a while, a casual ridicule by a degenerate Arabian on television provokes a national outrage, which is insignificant because the Jalläba are laughably lacking in influence. The verbal protest that ensues, which is so polite as to invite pity, dies out in minutes if not seconds. A few Saudi journalists and vloggers take up their causes - in pity - and use their influence to give a good word on behalf of the “Sudanese” in front of the whole Arab world. Racial belittling is real, but not every scorn or word of criticism is racism, and that is addressed to the tender-hearted Jalläba.
The Jalläba are constantly humiliated by outsiders, and this has made them wary of themselves. They are fully aware of how any country can strong-arm their government and bomb any site they like on their lands – and that is not an exaggeration. Egypt took Haläyib, Ethiopia took Fashaqa, and the IDF bombed Khartoum twice. All this is a thorn in their hearts, and the blame they lay on the Islamist and terrorism-supporting government of Omar al-Bashir. It induces in them feelings of helplessness and inferiority, that they manage by: belittling Ethiopians, calling their own women chaste and pure-hearted and deeming Ethiopian girls to be cunning prostitutes; belittling Saudis by out-of-the-blue calling them primitive Bedouins to their faces; belittling Sri Lankans (as I’ve seen in one instance) by calling them maids and servants.
The Jalläba avoid the most essential and most pressing issues, and run off to more insignificant and shorter-lasting trivialities, where the temporary comfort buys more time to avoid the painful reality: that they are cowards, that they are not upright people but depraved and wicked people; that anyone can push them around, torture their loved ones and beat their women while they watch in indifference!
The Jalläba are quickly given to doubt, and in making tough decisions, they hesitate and stall and frustrate the process of getting any productive work done. The doubt comes from uncertainty, which comes from having cut themselves off from their ancestors and their past and not knowing where they're going.
**
The Jalläba worship Saudi: they are impressed by Riyadh and Jeddah, and they wish the Saudi lifestyle for themselves. They envy the material comfort that the glorious Islamic Republic of Sudan has deprived them of. They dress their hair and bodies like the Saudis do, and they struggle to live their lives like Saudis do, despite the sheer scarcity of every essential need of life.
And that is because they’d rather eat and drink and sleep without trouble than do something meaningful. Believe me when I say that they fear death more than anything else, and because of that they never took up arms in rebellion against the June 30 regime, who never had to ravage the Center and Center-North of the Republic of Sudan like they did to Darfur and South Sudan.
Many Arabs who come to study or work in Khartoum are quickly disgusted with what they see. The filthy roads, the decrepit buildings, the lack of order and infrastructure maintenance, drives them into a bitter and cynical state of mind, as I’ve seen with Syrian and Palestinian university students. They see how the Jalläba are not serious about anything and hate working and activities. They remain silent, either out of politeness or fear, but I thirst for their critique of Khartoum and its people.
**
The Jalläba are pariahs, unlike the Für and Zaghäwa and Masälït in Darfur and the South Nubian tribes in the Nuba mountains and the Makurian Nubians in the north of the Republic of Sudan. The Jalläba are Sudanese by citizenship, Muslim by faith, and nothing more. What was Sudanese to the world was once purely Jallabi, to the exclusion of the dozen or so ethnic groups, who know who they are and take pride in their own way of life. Now the world knows better.
And now, for (non-)issues of identity, the tactics have changed: the Jalläba reject the concept of race (while tribes mostly untouched by modernism, from the Baggära to the Dinka, make it the center of their lives), and as ancestry wanes, religion takes it place. They are Muslims now, very devout, constantly bringing up fiqh and Sharia issues, and perusing Quranic phrases in trivial conversation so frequently that you know something’s wrong with them. The positive Muslim identity is to compensate for a lacking and more essential component of identity: race and descent.
This is not in their favor, as the East Asians and the Near Easterners and Eastern Europeans are very racially conscious, and the former apostles of colorblindness, the Western Nations and the Muslim world, are becoming more racially aware of themselves and more disillusioned with Africa’s crises, especially after the South Sudan Civil War broke out in 2013, and conclusively with the Ebola outbreak. Soon there won’t be a refuge to run to anywhere, the Sudan and East Africa and Africa in total and Asia and Europe. In fact, they will see how others will mistreat them without mercy, and how they will not listen to their appeals to Islam or humanity, or whatever weapon of choice the Jallabi has in his arsenal.
**
They do not know what the future will bring, nay, they’ve deluded themselves that a great and glorious future awaits them, if only the military nobodies of the June 30 coup go away. The June 30 regime will be going, going, gone with the Republic of Sudan altogether by next year. Either Janjaweed-istan or Egyptian-occupied Sudan or US-occupied Sudan will follow. Things will have become far worse than now, and they’ll pine for the June 30 regime days.
Then the Jallaba will cease to exist in the minds of others. They will become nobodies! They will be obscure, and easy prey for those who take over the new state. They will flee the new state to other countries where they will be further humiliated. Then some will come back, but so many will commit suicide and so many more will resort to violence. The spirit of the Jallaba has been broken about 510 years ago, and the time for them to confront the huge gaping hole of nothing that is their identity, is at hand!
If you know the Jalläba, when they’re supposed to resist and fight back, they either shut down or adapt to the whims of their new oppressor. They will be at the forefront of the new Kush or Sudan or whatever, or they will go hiding into strict and confining habits that remind them of the good old days, or they throw themselves into the Nile, their life-giver handed to them by Almighty God.
**
Darfur and the Blue Nile state will most definitely secede from the Republic of Sudan. If they liberate their lands by arms, they will have a UN mission putting them on a mandate for independence. If they are given a referendum by a more powerful state, they will vote overwhelmingly for secession. South Sudan independence was voted for by 98.7% of the electorate, and a similar pattern of near-consensus is expected from Darfur and the Blue Nile state. South Kordofan might go too, and seizing the opportunity, the Bejas in the east might wage a war of independence as well.
And then everything gained from 1956 will be lost or made insignificant or pathetic. The illusions of the Jallab will be robbed from them, and they will have to face the mountain-heap of repressed horrors and urgent issues that need to be solved from this very minute.
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