left: This 1961 map indicates the way transhumant movements are not simply lost wanderings, but something more like the path of a boomerang., dictated by the changing seasons. below: This map was made by the last assistant district commissioner for West Kordofan, then the homeland for the Misseriya.
Tibbs, M. & Tibbs, A., A Sudan Sunset (privately published, Welkin, 1999) p50 (SM Annex 47) p 50
Barbour’s The Republic of South Sudan: A Regional Geography (1961), p150
V The PCA was handed a mandate every bit as impossible as the ABC’s. In the end, in what was widely interpreted as a decision intended to placate the Sudanese government, it reduced the area of Abyei, and placed Heglig, the area’s largest oil field, outside the territory. That was four years ago. I remember listening to the decision in France, having followed the oral pleadings in the Netherlands. Since that day, I have spent most of my life studying and thinking about Abyei. Since then, the territory has endured raids, bombings, and endless political negotiations. The Ngok Dinka remain largely displaced, and the territory’s status is still contested. The ramifications of the PCA case, though, are more iniquitous than simply the situation in Abyei. All along the Sudan-South Sudan border, communities have begun maximising their claims to territory, transforming claims to areas of shared rights into claims of exclusive ownership: as if each transhumant group was its own little state. People make arguments on the basis of geology. This is our soil, I often hear, meaning not simply that it is owned by us, but that we are the only ones who have a right to it, and that our way of life is consonant with the soil. Up on the Unity State-South Kordofan border, in Pariang County, there are herds that betray a different history: a history of co- existence that takes place on top of the soil, and isn’t limited by it.
IV In The Hague, corpulent lawyers from Cambridge, representing a Sudanese government that decried the hand of imperialism, insisted that the ABC had exceeded its mandate by considering oral histories. The colonial record, the lawyers of the anti- imperialists argued, was perfectly adequate for understanding the extent of Abyei. The Cambridge legal team did legal battle with Gary Born, a fiery Yale lawyer, representing the SPLM, who claimed – with some justification – that one can’t determine very much by looking at the patchy colonial archival record and that other sources should be consulted. The cows, so to speak, took the stand. The territory of the Ngok Dinka, the SPLM lawyers argued, could be determined by reference to geology. Misseriya cattle, they claimed, were shaped by different environmental conditions: their short legs, like those of the Baggara cows, could not handle the muddy southern rainy season and its difficult black soil. Ian Cunnison, a veteran ethnographer who could hardly have imagined that his fieldwork – carried out in the 1950s – would be used as evidence in a twenty- first century court case, took the stand. Dinka cattle, he observes in his work, can “stand mud better” than those of the Misseriya. It might seem that the SPLM lawyers are the good guys here, arguing for a more encompassing understanding of transhumant habitation, and fighting for a people who have been repeatedly forced off their land by Misseriya militias backed by the Sudanese government. But, as with everything else when it comes to Abyei, things are not so simple. The SPLM lawyers were arguing for a type of geological determinism, in which soil is not simply fertile ground for agriculture, but the rigid grid from which one can determine which people live where. Under the soil, the people. Though I never thought I would write this, I agreed with the Sudanese government during the arbitration, when it said that soil types, rivers, and mountains, never determine actual boundaries between people.
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