diop - Blogs - TheBlackList Pub2024-03-28T16:05:47Zhttps://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/feed/tag/diopInternational Dialogue on State-building and National Development in South Sudanhttps://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/south-sudan-international-dialogue-on-state-building-and-national2011-09-26T22:00:00.000Z2011-09-26T22:00:00.000ZTheBlackListhttps://www.theblacklist.net/members/TheBlackList<div><p> </p>
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<div style="text-align:center;"><i>International Dialogue on State-building and National Development in South Sudan</i></div>
<div style="text-align:center;"><i>Convened by the African Research and Resources Forum (ARRF) and the Centre for Peace and Development Studies (CPDS) at the University of Juba, Juba, South Sudan<br /><b><br /></b> September 23- 23, 2011</i></div>
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<div><b>Foreign policy options for the Government of South Sudan post self-government.</b></div>
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<div align="center"><b>ABSTRACT</b></div>
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<div>There is a tendency in Sudan studies especially in the South, to see issues exclusively from the internal perspective, which is understandable, given the history of South Sudan and its geo-political location.</div>
<div>The paper finds it’s rational in the existence of the new state of Southern Sudan since 9 July 2011. Going back into the history, it was noted that the report of African Union (AU) High Level Panel for Darfur, set up in 2009, was the first report of the continentalist body to acknowledge the Sudan as an African issue, declaring Sudan a ‘bridge between north Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa’. Southern Sudan joins the global African community as a state entity.</div>
<div>Apparently Article 2.9 of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement CPA) should explain the fact that to date the South under GoSS has yet to articulate a firm position as to where it fits in Africa and the global African community. This we note from the absence of policy pronouncements, as regards the past history of the area occupied by South Sudan and Sudan in north east Africa. The Kush Institution established in 2008 in Juba was to handle this lacuna.</div>
<div>For informed Africans located elsewhere than in north east Africa this lack of clarity creates a vacuum of expectations. Perceptions based on field studies and analysis would indicate that the centre of gravity in the unity movement of the Africans globally, is shifting away from continental to sub-Saharan considerations. The Founding Fathers of the OAU did not incorporate the fractious relations in the Afro-Arab borderlands in the Sahel in their calculations, in their composition of their African nation. Rather they based their calculations on geographic identity. This amounted to a denial of history, as the experience of South Sudan, Darfur , Southern Kordofan, Blue Nile and Nubia attest.</div>
<div>Apparently it will take time for Africans to come to terms with what happened in South Sudan. Silence on the issue will delay this process. It will not stop it. The consequent impact of the South Sudan experience on the unity movement will have profound implications/applications for Africans in general and this will be a two way process, affecting also the South. History to date has made it such that the majority of Africans are ignorant of the realities of events in north east Africa. The paper considers for how long such a policy can be sustained and the various ramifications.</div>
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<div><span><b><span>Background considerations</span></b></span></div>
<div>The institution of slavery is a matter on which information is either suppressed or not available. Both Arabs and Africans are reluctant, unwilling or unable to bring the facts to the common knowledge of the two peoples, either by way of curriculum reform or academic research. The approach has been (Laya 2005) to not raise questions of legitimacy of the state, and in the name of ‘national unity’ reference to slavery is prohibited . Laya affirms that in the spirit of the African Renaissance it would be best to not ignore the unhappy period of slavery. In his view, historically, there was a close relationship between the trans-Atlantic and the trans-Saharan slave trades.</div>
<div>Ancient Kush, located in present day northern Sudan was strongly influenced by Egypt for some 1000 years beginning in 2700 BC. Subsequently Egypt’s power in Sudan waned. In the sixteenth century Muslim religious brotherhoods spread through northern Nubia. These plus the Ottoman Empire, ruled the area through military leaders for some three centuries. In 1820 Muhammad Ali, who ruled Egypt on behalf of the Ottomans, sent 4000 troops to Sudan. This invasion resulted in the Ottoman-Egyptian rule of Sudan from 1821 to 1885. Slavery in the Sudan took hold during this priod,when it was made state policy. Slavery became a cash commodity when the Europeans started making incursions into the continent to procure slaves. In the western reference and Sudanese context, mulatto means white, Jallaba, means of mixed race from the North of the Sudan. The Jallaba were the procurers of slaves who led raiding squads backed by formidable armies. As Egyptian rule faltered, the Jallaba hoped to inherit governance of the Sudan. The late Dr John Garang de Mabior (2008) refers to the Jallaba as <i>Afrabians</i>, a hybrid of different races and nationalities, including black Africans, immigrant Arabs, Turks, Greeks and Armenians, that first evolved during the 15<sup>th</sup> century and have since always chosen to identify themselves as Arabs, even though many are black. Hashim states that the political Right, descendants of the Jallaba, has ruled the Sudan since self-government in 1955. While the Sudan might have been expected to join Africa, it chose to join Arabia as a second-class member. When the northern elite was installed in power in Khartoum by the departing Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, they considered the Sudan as consisting of their fellow noble Arabs of the centre North area; the Muslim Africans of the periphery (with possible Arab blood) undergoing rapid Arabisation; and the slaves, being blacks with no authority to rule.</div>
<div>Looking at the socio-cultural structure of Sudanese society, Hashim (unpublished paper) refers to the development of a new ideological consciousness of race labelled ‘Arabised Sudanese’. Skin colour came to distinguish racial differentiation. So that in the Sudanese context a light-brown person was an Arab and a black African was seen as a slave. The stigma of slavery and blackness meant marginalisation and the prestigma represented the non-blacks, the Arabs who were at the centre. This type of alienation has been in place in the Sudan for over five centuries and continues until today. In the Middle-East the Sudanese Arab is considered too dark and is treated as a second class Arab. The blacks of the Sudan, who have completely assimilated Islamo–Arab culture and religion (such as the Darfuri) are discriminated against by the Arabised mulattos of the centre of the Sudan, and are seen as slaves, too African and thus worthy of being dehumanised by genocide.</div>
<div>In a paper on the impasse of post-colonial relations, Simone (2005) refers to the legacy of Afro-Arab slavery as having distorted the relations between two major nationalities in our world, the African and the Arab. This, he explains, is because the descendants of the slavers have never publicly condemned or even admitted the abuses of the past to the descendants of those who were abducted and whose lands were raided. This is a major factor in explaining why slavery continues today. Despite the adoption of the Arab Charter on Human Rights by the Arab League in September 1994, slavery abides. In December 2005, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) adopted a Ten-Year Program of Action, promoting issues such as tolerance, moderation and human rights. This has not affected the lives of the people living in Islamic states such as the Sudan and Mauritania. The issue of slavery cannot be divorced from that of reparations and restitution, as stated in the Declaration of the Conference on Arab-Led slavery of Africans, held Johannesburg on 22 February 2003 (CASAS Book Series No. 35, Cape Town). </div>
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<p><span style="color:#ff0000;" class="font-size-4"><strong><a target="_blank" href="http://theblacklistconcerns.blogspot.com/2011/09/international-dialogue-on-state.html">Continues:</a></strong></span></p>
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<p> </p></div>Diop Olugbala: Social Justice Movements Throughout The World Won a Critical Victoryhttps://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/diop-olugbala-social-justice2010-10-15T14:06:57.000Z2010-10-15T14:06:57.000ZTheBlackListhttps://www.theblacklist.net/members/TheBlackList<div><span style="font-style:italic;">At 8:02am on October 15, 2010, <a href="http://theblacklistpub.ning.com/xn/detail/u_156ceoa00cs7p">Agnes Johnson</a> said…
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Philadelphia—On October 13 the movement for social justice throughout the world won a critical victory for the democratic rights of African people, oppressed and freedom loving people everywhere when Diop Olugbala, International President of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM), walked out of his sentencing hearing in a Philadelphia courtroom with two years probation. He could have been sentenced to up to ten years in prison.<br /><br />
Diop’s co-defendant Shabaka Mnombatha was sentenced to 12 months of unsupervised probation.<br /><br />
In a courtroom packed with about 50 supporters, neocolonial judge Roxanne Covington handed down the sentences despite the prosecutor’s insistence that Diop do prison or jail time.<br /><br />
Today’s victory followed months of demonstrations, letters, call-ins, mailings, and emails to the judge from hundreds of supporters from throughout the US and as far away as Sierra Leone, Peru and Spain.<br /><br />
A militant demonstration in support of Diop was also held in front of the US embassy in London today, to coincide with the militant demonstration that was held at the Philadelphia courthouse.<br /><br />
This worldwide outpouring of support for Diop’s case from a broad base of African people and our allies played a key role in forcing the judge to back down on the State’s plan to imprison Diop for his courageous stance against police violence and murder, homelessness, and for economic development in the oppressed and exploited African working class community.<br /><br />
During today’s sentencing, Diop gave an eloquent statement in his own defense, in which he refused to apologize for his actions protesting the conditions facing African people in this country.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">(From a comment by Agnes Johnson to Kwasi Akyeampong posted on TheBlackList Pub)</span><br /><br /><a href="http://theblacklistpub.ning.com/profile/AgnesJohnson#add_comment">Comment Back</a><br /></div>The Curious Case of Cheikh Anta Diop, and other Afro-Anxietieshttps://www.theblacklist.net/profiles/blogs/the-curious-case-of-cheikh2009-04-01T03:00:00.000Z2009-04-01T03:00:00.000ZRayfield A. Wallerhttps://www.theblacklist.net/members/RayfieldAWaller<div><p style="text-align:left;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507732,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="293" height="320" /></p><p style="text-align:left;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507747,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="423" height="275" /></p><b>Zahi Hawass</b> <i>courtesy, nationalgeographic.com</i><p style="text-align:left;"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507813,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="101" height="132" /></p><b>Cheikh Anta Diop</b> courtesy, <i>L'Evenement</i><a href="http://www.evenement-bf.net/pages/culture_86.htm">www.evenement-bf.net/pages/culture_86.htm</a><b>We get so anxious</b> as Black people, Negroes, Coloreds, <i>Nekkros</i>, African Americans, "African-Descended Peoples", Diasporic Tribes, "Children of the Diaspora" or whatever you wish to call us. We as a diasporic people are all of that, and more, are we not? About identity, we are so easily spun off into Cartesian circles of confusion, conflict, doubt, anger, recrimination, and shame.Take the curious case of <i>Baba</i>, Cheikh Anta Diop.No sooner had I mentioned Diop's name in passing in a blog posting of mine than a brief but insistent string of comments on said blog post began, focusing upon Diop, as if my post had been about <i>Baba</i> Diop in the first place. It hadn't. It is a sure thing that if one mentions Diop, like mentioning certain other hot-button Children of the Diaspora such as Francis Cress Welsing, President Idi Amin, Nat Turner, Condoleeza Rice, Papa Doc Duvalier, or Michael Jackson, one will get a response; and that response will very often be very tendentious, as if your mention in passing of these people were the point of your discourse, for, indeed, these figures draw to themselves an <i>animus</i> that will make them be the point. This is so, because Black identity, like Black life itself, is mercurial, fragile, precious, and always under duress. We have very passionate and definite convictions, all of us, about who and what we are. This is as it should be. Diop, whether you honor him or distrust him, believe in his work or decline to so believe, Diop draws our energies to himself--Diop the man, as well as Diop the symbol of ingenious African Manhood. He even bears a resemblance to our fallen Prince, Patrice Lamumba.As I wrote of Diop in a brief 'add a comment' post a while ago:<i>"...it cannot be denied that Diop's work on the African basis of civilization, though perhaps pushed a bit too far by him (the Leaky family projects, and other anthropological and geological evidence of late seem to suggest the possibility that Asia, not Afrika, was the cradle of the hominid homo habilis/homo erectus--of humanity) is brilliant and is valid. He exposed, through his sheer intellectuaism, the biases in previous research on Afrika...."</i>Throughout the 1950s, 60s and into the 70s, research on and scholarship about Africa was crippled by White supremacist racialist 'typing' by Europeans such as Carleton S. Coon--whose "The Races of Europe," published in 1939, brainwashed the educators who taught my generation of public school students, into thinking ancient Europeans were a 'refined product' of racial progression while Africans, as he asserts in his "The Origin of Races," published in the 60's just in time for my generation to be besmirched by him, argues that Africans were ne'er do wells and primitives; in "The White Race and the New World" from 1939, he posits that the White races possess 'maximum survival' potential due to--you guessed it, their superiority--manifest destiny for the dscerning anthropologist. Due to an extant ideology of the 'superiority' of White civilization vs. the assumption of intrinsic 'inferiority' of the cultures south of Mother Sahara, Europeans had throughout the 19th and 20th centuries arbitrarily pronounced an arrangement of hierarchy in which most (sub Saharan) Black cultures were declared 'primitive' while so-called 'advanced' cultures were said to coexist soley because of so-called 'Caucasian clusters' presumed to exist within ancient Afrikan contexts (Egypt was assumed, under this ideology and theory, to be a 'White' civilization sprouted like a saving grace, like a beautiful white rose from amidst the dark detritus, choas, and brutality of surrounding African geography and cultures). Due to people like Coon, the assumption was that progress was brought to North Africa by "Hamitic" invaders (thus is explained, presumably, the Alexandrian period of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt who were Greek in origin)--the children of Ham. White people.Egyptian monarchs, under this theory, were Caucasian, and were manifestly dominant over the witless, idle Black races, nations, and tribes of Sub Sahara.Diop's long ago rejection of these European racialists, prefigured in his book, "<i>Nations Negres et Culture</i>" (1954), presaged the later works of liguistic antropologists, geologists, and physical anthropologists of the last thirty years of post-racist research, most of whom have declared the lie that was Coonian dogma.<u>African Archaeological Review</u> published DNA evidence in 2004 which famously verified much of Diop's research and his ideas: European scientists had faked evidence, research, and physical findings in order to buttress their own racist theories about African primitivism.Diop proposed theories about African development in the Pleistocene period which Europeans had tried to theorize was a period of peculiar 'splitting' between two distinct human gene pools and two distinct human races: one 'civilized and developed' and the other 'primitive' and less developed. Diop's work on Nubian civilization specifically is stunning for its implications of very, very ancient Afrikan high civilization predating even Egypt.<a class="noborder" href="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507860,original{{/staticFileLink}}" target="_blank"><img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507860,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="380" height="214" style="float:right;" /></a><b>Right: Nubian pyramids of Meroe</b> courtesy,<u><a href="http://wysinger.homestead.com/nubian105.html">http://wysinger.homestead.com/nubian105.html</a></u>This must be said: the recent spate of books, films, lectures, and radio blather cycling all around us about the phenomenal 'discoveries' of the pyramids of Nubia/Kush/present day Sudan, all of it was prefigured by Baba Diop! He was saying it decades ago! If for no other reason, he is to be honored for being the voice in the vanguard of a criminally delinquent western intellectual development.Finally, I'll say this:The efficacy of Diop's work can perhaps be inferred by the much publicized racism of Zahi Hawass, 'Undesecretary of the State of Egypt overseeing the Giza Monuments and the Antiquities'. Hawass denies the Black identity of ancient Egyptians, specifically objecting to the Afrocentrist assertion that Queen Nefertiti was Black. It has been charged by Afrocentrists, that Hawass bears some personal repsonsibility for the continued racist insensitivity toward the tragic loss of ancient archeological materials, artifacts, and evidence of the pre archaic existence of advanced Nubian civilization, through his refusal to acknowledge that the community of scholars he belongs to were instrumental in advocating the flooding of the former Nubian plains by the Aswan Damn project, which created a man-made Lake sinking Nubian architectural and anthropological relics under 200 feet of water reaching from Egypt to Sudan. Egyptian scholars of antiquity like Hawass refused to speak out against the tragedy of the water of that lake obscuring hundreds of Nubian pyrimids--their remains having outnumbered those of Egypt proper. The lake also reportedly led to the forced relocation of thousands native Nubians.Hawass' racism is par for the course. At first glance it may seem to North Americans to be petty on the part of afrocentrists to call him out this way, since he has never lynched anyone, never burned a cross, crescent, or star of david on anyone's lawn, and never called King Tut a 'nigger' (in fact, at an academic conference in Mississippi a few years ago a colleague of mine, a linguist from Georgetown University, a fellow Afrikan American, demanded to know why we "post colonial discourse brothers from Cornell talking all that post modernist and 'Afro-Asian' stuff" were being so hard on Hawass. After all, Hawass is a brother who protects the antiquities of Egypt from the White pillagers with ferocity and great love for the dignity of Egypt's heritage. Yes, he does. True, true, I told him).But there is a subtle nuance to be looked at here, and it relates to all that gets said about, against, and around about Diop: North African forms of oppression are not awlays as overt, as clear-cut as we here in the Anglo western portion of the diaspora are accustomed to. The sheer size and breadth of North America is such that population control is only a crucial issue to the oppressor in the urban centers of the US; for much of the US is rural, is lacking commercial development still, and is marked by vistas (take a road trip across the United States, seaboard to seaboard--north/south or east/west, either will serve--and you will see what I mean). Africa and Asia, Japan, the European centers, and even much of the Caribbean and of Central America are a bit different in this regard: there is less room. Oppression must take population density and population in relation to land mass very seriously. Thus, the management of populations is a special case in places like Egypt, Palestine, South Africa, and even in Great Britain, an entire country that can fit snugly inside Florida, only one of fifty US states.What am I talking about? What has this to do with Diop?Egyptian feminist writer, activist, and psychologist (yes, she is much like Frantz Fanon), Nawal El Saadawi, brilliant author of "God Dies By the Nile" has addressed the nuance I'm driving at. She has denounced the racism and the <i>pacification and nullification</i> that is greatly characteristic of north African forms of authoritarianism, sexism, and racism (as Hanan Ashwari too, has pointed out, and as we see with Israel's peculiar approach to pacification of, removal of, and dehumanization of the humanity of Palestinians in the occupied territories and in Jerusalem). This is exactly why ex PLO member Aida Saad now lives in Dubai and Nawal El Saadawi now lives part of the time in Egypt but part of the time in Brussels, Belgium for 'her own peace of mind,' as she puts it. <img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507830,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="300" height="200" style="float:left;" /><b>Left: Nawal El Saadawi</b>نوال السعداوىThe form that racism often takes for North Africans and for others on the continent is the sort of circumspect, parsimonious racism that Hawass exhibits against Blackness, and that Cheikh Anta Diop fought against through the simple act not of carrying a gun, or smuggling guns, but by challenging the intellectual underpinnings of xenophobia, bigotry, and most of all, CHAUVINISM.<img src="{{#staticFileLink}}3828507874,original{{/staticFileLink}}" alt="" width="400" height="600" style="float:right;" />Diop is an important and early voice that long ago began the current fight to win the legitimacy of Black civilization in a nuanced way: by overturning the entrenched, discursive and procedural bigotry toward the very idea that Africans are descended from greatness, from cultures of epic proportion, and from profoundly complex and developed societies that pre-dated the archaic periods of Europe.<b>Right: Pyramids of Nuri, Nubia</b>courtesy, <u><a href="http://wysinger.homestead.com/nubian105.html">http://wysinger.homestead.com/nubian105.html</a></u></div>