legitimacy | maps by joshua craze
Under the soil the people
I In June 2012, I saw resplendent herds of cattle along the Sudan- South Sudan border. We toiled together along muddy roads as cloudbursts announced the definitive end of the dry season. The rain seemed to erupt from the very air around me, as if it had grown tired of its liquid burden. It was difficult to see more than five metres ahead. What I could see were those cows. In Pariang County, on the southern side of the border, one particularly proud herder drove his cows ahead of him, as we slipped and stumbled in the mud. The small brown cows of the Baggara Arabs, out of place in South Sudan and struggling in the rain, mixed with the large black bulls of the Mbororo, their skin slick and glistening, and jostled with the prized cattle of the Nuer, their horns decorated with tassels, and with whom the young cattle-guards stole whispered conversations, as if with illicit lovers. The history of the border region can be found in a herd’s make- up. Those small brown cows leading the herd were a testament to decades of raiding between border communities, whilst the tasselled cattle told tales of marriage between the Dinka and the Nuer, the two largest groups in South Sudan, both of which use cows for bridewealth. Cows continually cross lines, both political and geological. II The contested border region between Sudan and South Sudan marks the edge of two distinct ecological zones. North of this region, the desert begins. Below, there is the ironstone plateau and lush greenery, fed by South Sudan’s rains. The rainy season lasts four months each year and is often catastrophic, creating floods that sweep away fields and huts. On one side of the border, there is too much rain. On the other, not enough. The border region itself contains open grasslands nourished by a network of rivers that flow longitudinally though the north of South Sudan, and provides vital grazing for the herds of transhumant people in both countries. For many groups now on the northern side of the disputed border—such as the Mbororo and the Baggara—South Sudan’s independence in 2011 has meant being cut off from crucial grazing land, as state institutions and military check-points replace the complex inter-community grazing agreements that dictated movement in the border region long before there was talk of an international frontier cutting across it. Sudan achieved independence in 1956. Since then, there has been forty years of war. After a peace agreement was signed in 2005, a fragile calm has prevailed in the border region,
continually interrupted by raids and military clashes. Now, as South Sudan struggles into existence, one of the major challenges both countries face is how to deal with pastoralists groups whose movements in the past have paid scant regard to political borders. Nowhere are these challenges more pressing than in Abyei. III Two groups inhabit Abyei, an area the size of Lebanon whose sovereignty is contested by the two countries. Until May 2011, when the Sudanese army invaded the area, Abyei’s principal inhabitants were the Ngok Dinka, a transhumant group that is part of the larger Dinka people of South Sudan. Every dry season, the Misseriya—a nomadic Arab group that primarily live north of Abyei itself—migrate into the area in search of pasture for their cattle. Meetings between the elders of the two groups would traditionally determine the flexible path of these migrations according to a delicate calculus of ecological conditions and historical ties. The second civil war changed all that. The Sudanese government tried to defeat the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the principally southern group fighting for the overthrow of the government. It sponsored groups of Misseriya militias that razed Ngok Dinka villages, and consolidated Sudanese control of Abyei’s main oil fields. In 2005, at the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement that brought Sudan’s twenty-year-long second civil war to an end, Abyei was such a controversial issue that the protocol determining its future was written by the American team at the negotiations, in an effort to break the deadlock. According to the Abyei Protocol, the extent of the area was to be determined by a committee of international experts (the Abyei Boundaries Commission, or ABC), which was ordered to “determine the area of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905”. An international dispute, made even more complicated by changing patterns of pastoralist movement in the twenty-first century, was to be resolved in reference to a colonial decision made at the turn of the twentieth. If only things were so simple. It is important to look carefully at mandate of the ABC. It assumes that there was an area that was transferred, and that this area is equivalent to the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms. If both these contentions were correct, then the commission’s work would merely be a question of searching the historical archive relating to 1905 for the elusive Ngok Dinka.
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