In-Betweenness in Greater Khartoum by Alice Franck Barbara Casciarri Idris El-Hassan

Author:Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri, Idris El-Hassan [Alice Franck, Barbara Casciarri, Idris El-Hassan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Sociology, Urban, History, Africa
ISBN: 9781800730595
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2021-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Constructions of Sudanese Nationhood

Singularities and Moments from the Experiences of Southern/South Sudanese

AZZA AHMED ABDEL AZIZ

Introduction

This chapter seeks to explore how the nature of nation building in Sudan was malleable to the endeavors of divergent interests through time: colonial states, postcolonial states, citizens of different persuasions. This notion of constructing the Sudanese nation was fraught. Eventually, Sudan was to fracture, becoming Sudan and South Sudan. I attempt to shed light on a time frame that predates this fate and illustrate how it was presaged by an influx of Southern Sudanese1 into the capital city of a once united Sudan. Ethnographic testimonies demonstrate how the nature of nation building has impacted the fate of heterogeneous groups of everyday non-elite Southern Sudanese hailing from different social, ethnic and religious persuasions and living in Khartoum as internally displaced people under circumstances of economic precarity and at a certain distance from the polis.2

This chapter underscores the nuances between the construction of nation states and those of nationhood. I postulate that the concern with nationhood is a process that is wedded to emotions and processes of forging belonging that emerge through the unfurling of history: processes and presences that are maintained in the present, through memories of them and having a connecting narrative past be it positive or bitter.3 My focus lies on elucidating how this process is in conversation with the jargon of nation states formulating the parameters and definitions of citizenship, nationality, official residency, official statuses (refugees, internally displaced . . .) that regulate the lives of the aforementioned populations in specific ways to exclude or include certain people to varying degrees. I thus aim to illustrate how belonging to a certain place and a specific nation shifts according to time, place and circumstances, which are unstable and subject to how diverse social actors interpret and act upon structural parameters that govern their lives.

The specificity of this reading underscores the efforts of forced migrants from Southern Sudan to contribute a sliver to the complex story of Sudanese nationhood. This parenthesis is firmly imbricated with their presence within the city of Khartoum while – despite many grievances – they were still Sudanese citizens. The internal displacement of the Southerners presented here pertains to the root causes associated with the conflict between the central government and the SPLM/A armed opposition led by Garang – that were the primary driver of this pattern of mobility, and are firmly entrenched in the polemics of the construction of the Sudanese nation, which should have ideally placed all its citizens on an equal footing.

The reality of Sudan as a nation state defeated such efforts, as evidenced by the eventual split and the fact that the rump state of Sudan continues to be ravaged by strife over a unified vision as reflected in conflicts in Darfur (Prunier 2005; Mamdani 2009; Salih 2013), Blue Nile and the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan (Komey 2013). The enduring reverberations of this struggle have affected the fates of a large swathe of Southern Sudanese, who were until 2011 a fundamental component and citizens of a united Sudan.

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