left: Captain Percival’s Sketch Map from his 1904 journey through Abyei. Percival was a British officer whose sketch maps were used to make the provincial maps of Bahr el Ghazal province. In December 1904, he proceeded south via Keilak and crossed what he thought was the Bahr el Arab, before fording another river, which he reported to be the Kiir, some fifty miles south. Because the court case this essay deals with was mandated to rule on whether the Abyei Boundaries Commission had exceeded its mandate (to determine the area of the nine Ngok Chiefdoms transferred to Kordofan in 1905), maps of the period became a crucial source of evidence. The maps, however, are problematic.Take Percival’s. He reports crossing the Bahr el Arab, and then the Kiir. But the Bahr el Arab is the Arabic name for a river that is known in Dinka (the language of the people of Abyei) as, you guessed it, the Kiir: leaving us no way of knowing which rivers he actually crossed (an error he later acknowledged in 1907). We can assume, as the Abyei Boundaries Commission did, that the references to the Bahr el Arab are actually to the Ragaba ez-Zarga (or the Ngol, as it is known in Dinka),a river to the north of the Kiir, but there are so many tributaries, it is hard to be sure.
below: an extract from Percival’s sketch map
right: a photograph of the accessions register of the Sudan Survey Department from 1905-6. It gives a sense of the slow accumulation of details (and errors) in the colonial record. This, and Percival’s sketch map above, were used by the Abyei Boundaries Commission in their report on Abyei’s borders.
for a group: the Ngok Dinka, a group that—being transhumant— didn’t even inhabit a strictly delimited area, but rather moved around between camps, alternating between rainy season and dry season grazing sites. So on the basis of a colonial transfer of responsibility for a transhumant group, a new international border was to be determined. The ABC attempted to forrmalise the grazing areas of the Ngok Dinka, transforming flexible paths into firm territorial lines. The ABC’s report, when it came out, was immediately refused by the Sudanese government, and by the Misseriya, who rightfully feared that if the area of Abyei included their dry season grazing, and was controlled by the Ngok Dinka that they had raided during the second civil war, they would lose access to vital land. Following an outbreak of violence in the territory in 2008, and with continuing deadlock over the ABC’s report, the dispute over the borders of the area was referred to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which was mandated to determine whether the ABC had exceeded its mandate, and if it had, to suitably amend the borders of Abyei.
But there is no mention of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms in the historical record for 1905. No mention at all. There is talk of the territory of Sultan Rob, as the colonial officers called him (otherwise known as Arop Biong, Chief of the Ngok Dinka), but one must either assume his territory is equivalent to the area of the nine chiefdoms—and, even worse, there is no map of the territory of Sultan Rob—or one must assume that the area that was transferred was not that of the nine Ngok Dinka chiefdoms. There are no maps of the transferred territory. The colonial officers responsible for Abyei made only occasional trips to the area, and when they did visit, they came during the dry season— the period of Misseriya migration—which meant that their view of the area’s habitation was partial at best. The maps are also full of errors. Captain Percival’s 1904 sketch map, on the previous page, details him crossing a river he calls the Bahr el Arab (the river of the Arabs, literally translated), before fording another river, which he calls the Kiir (or ‘river’ in the Dinka language), some forty miles further south. The Bahr el Arab and the Kiir are the Dinka and Arabic names for the same river, leading to no little uncertainty as to Percival’s actual journey. Confounding the mandate of the ABC, it is quite likely that an ‘area’ of land was not transferred at all, but colonial responsibility
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