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 لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم
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في عددها الصادر يوم 3 اكتوبر 2004 نشر في صحيفة New York Times مقالا صحفيا بقلم "Somini Sengupta" , اعجبني المقال لما طرحه من مواضيع هامة و حساسة و بالفعل تستحق النقاش الهادئ العقلاني وقد قمت بترجمته بتصرف نوعا ما و ارجو ان لااكون قد اخليت بموضوعاته و او يسطته لدرجة الاخلال , فالي المقال :
عنوان المقال ""In Sudan , No Clear Difference Between Arab and African و يتحدث المقال عن شخص اسمه عبدالله ادم خاطر يبلغ من العمر 50 عاما من اقليم دارفور بالسودان .
يقول خاطر عن نفسه ان جدته من جهة و الدته كانت عربية و جدها ينتمي لقبيلة افريقية و لكنه يقول عن نفسه بانه افريقي .. و عندما كان عبدالله ادم خاطر صبيا في منطقة كبكابية في قلب دارفور سافر لمدة 3 ايام بلياليها بقافلة من الجمال يقودها عربي , سافر الي اقرب مدينة تتوفر فيها مدرسة متوسطة ثم واصل خاطر دراسته في العاصمة في الستينات من القرن الماصي وكان من المتحمسين لشعار الوحدة العربية الافريقية الذي كان ينادي به الزعيم الراحل جمال عبدالناصر في تلك الايام و لكنه اليوم يجد نفسه يصارع الحقيقة التي تقول انه وفي خلال العامين الماضيين فقد 102 من اهله و اقاربه فقد قتلوا في دارفور بواسطة المليشيات العربية . السيد خاطر هو كاتب و عضو في اتحاد كتاب و صحفيي دارفور و يقول انه لاينظر الي الحرب الدائرة رحاها في دارفور علي انها حرب بين العرب و الافارقة . انه يلقي باللوم و المسئولية علي حكومة الخرطوم و قادتها الذين يحملهم مسئولية اثارة النعرات القبلية و العرقية بغرض المحافظة علي سلطتهم و البقاء فيها لاطول زمن لقد بدأت الحرب في غرب السودان في بدايات 2003 عندما قال الثوار ان حكومة الخرطوم تهمش اقليم دارفور و طالبوا بالاصلاح السياسي و الاقتصادي و في المقابل قامت حكومة الخرطوم بتأليب المليشيات العربية في الاقليم ضدهم و بدأت دورة من العنف حصدت ارواح اكثر من عشرات الالاف شخص و نزوح مايقارب من المليون و نصف عن ديارهم و قراهم و علي امنداد اقليم دارفور و باستثناء القليل فان معسكرات اللاجئيين التي انتظمت الحدود مع تشاد كان جلها من الافارقة و قد اتهمت الامم المنحدة و اخرون , اتهموا المليشيات المهاجمة بارتكاب مجاذر و تنفيذ التطهير العرقي بصورة منظمة .و يقول Juan Mendez مسنشار في الامم المتحدة انه من المحتمل ان تكون جرائم الحرب و التصفية العرقية هي الاعمق و الاشمل في عصرنا الحديث.
والسؤال هو : كيف دخل العنصر العرقي في هذا الصراع اذ انه و لاجيال و اجيال لم يكن العنصر بشيء ذي اهمية في مجتمع دارفور فالناس في ذلك الاقليم يعرفون انفسهم بقبائلهم و ليس علي انهم عرب او افارقة .
لقد جاء العرب الي الاقليم منذ ما يقارب الالف عام و قد كان تعريف " العربي" ذلك الشخص الذي يتحدث اللغة العربية مقابل عشرات اللغات المحلية او يطلقون كلمة " عربي" علي هولاء " الرحل" و الذين ليس لديهم حياة زراعية مستقرة . يقول "Mohamed Mamdani " ان ماينطوي عليه هذا التقسيم العرقي لمجموعة مستفرة و الاخري غير ذلك لجد خطير " .
لقد كشفت ازمة دارفور عن المستور من خفايا الصراع الافريقي العربي و الذي له ملامح في الحزام الذي يمتد في افريقيا من موريتانيا في الغرب الي السودان في الشرق وفي واقع الامر فان " الوعي العرقي" مطمور و مدفون في تأريخ افريقيا الوسطي فعلي سبيل المثال كان السودان مركزا لتجارة الرقيق التي قام بها العرب وفي موريتانيا كان الافارقة في يوم من الايام هم تجار الرقيق و اليوم ارتبط اسمهم بالعبودية ويقول الكاتب "Breyten Breytenbach " من جنوب افريقيا ان التقسيم العرقي هو اكثر المشاكل الملتبسة و الشيطان الاكبر في القارة الافريقية .
ولكن الامر الذي ادهش السودانيين هو انه و بمجرد بدء التمرد المسلح فان خطوط التقسيم العرقي قد رسمت و قد هرولت القبائل العربية ناحية الحكومة " و يقول البعض انها صفقة مقابل الارض و السلطة" بينما رفع بعض من المعارضين السياسيين للحكومة شعار " الافريقية" و اعلنوا تحالفهم مع المتمردين. وهذه الخطوط ينتظر ان تتصلب اكثر فاكثر .
ان الجانب العنصري الذي اضيف علي الحرب في دارفور بواسطة الحكومة و المتمردين قد وجد له اذانا صاغية وارتفاع صوت النداء بضرورة التضامن العرقي الامر الذي قد يمتد الي تشاد و النيجر و مالي حيث من المحتمل ان يتحول التنافس بين المزارعين و الرعاة الرحل الي مواجهات عنيفة . يقول احد الناشطين في احدي المنظمات الافريقية في اميركا : لقد كانت هنالك جهود منذ زمن طويل لكبح جماح التوتر العرقي وعلي القارة الافريقية ان تصارع ذلك بقوة . ان التعصب العنصري اذا تركناه يفلت من عقاله في المجتمع فانه من الصعوبة السيطرة علي عواقبه و سيقود حتما الي جرائم القتل و التصفية .
يقول السيد خاطر " انه لمن الحماقة ان يقول اي سوداني عن نفسه بانه عربي " . " نحن لسنا بعرب و لاسودانيين و لاحتي اولئك الذين يعتبرون انفسهم عرب "
ويضيف السيد خاطر " انا افريقي تشرب بالثقافة العربية الاسلامية و اري شعبي السوداني بقبائله العربية و الافريقية هم ضحايا لسياسات الحكومة السودانية و كلنا ضحايا .
انتهي المقال
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Re: لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم (Re: Khalid Eltayeb)
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واحنا قبيل شن قلنا؟
ماقلنا الطير بياكلنا!
بعد عمر مديد ياما اطفالنا الجايين، حيضحكو ويبكوا، بل يتخجو من الحرقة، علي بلاهة ابائيهم واجدادهم، الماتوا بالملايين كما الصراير، من اجل وهم بل سراب، اسمه العروبة!
كراهيتنا لي ذنجي "قوبيني" منظر النازية، فينا، فعلا وقولا، هو بحجم جبال الظلم وشلالات الدم، وانهار الدموع السايلة في بلدنا!
نتمني في اخر المطاف، ده يكون كافي، لغسل عار كراهيتنا لذاتيتنا الافريقية!
عجيب امر ثمن فادح كهذا، لاثبات بديهة كهذه!
امنت بالله!
او فعلا لله في خلقه شئون!
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Re: لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم (Re: Deng)
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Dear Khalid Eltayb and others
Let me share the following interview with you:
Afrabia: Interview with Ali A. Mazrui
Ali A. Mazrui
Source : http://arabworld.nitle.org/audiovisual.php?module_id=6
Date : 2004/9
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Mazrui assesses the difficulty in determining where “Arabness” begins and “Africanity” ends, illustrating his point with several contemporary examples.
Transcript: I do believe that the African People and the Arab People are, at the moment, two people in the process of becoming one. So the process has been underway for centuries and they will, one day, be virtually indistinguishable, but at the moment it is a continuum, rather than a dichotomy. So there is no line somewhere which say this is where Arabness ends and Africanity begins; rather there is a kind of slope that enters into another identity as you go along. And part of the process has resulted in the following situation: There are, in fact, more Arabs in Africa than there are in the Arab World, so that the majority of the Arab people are in the African continent. Secondly, the bulk of the Arab lands or lands under Arab sovereignty, the bulk of that is in Africa more than in West Asia. And thirdly there is a situation where there are more Muslims in Nigeria than in any Arab country, so that part of Nigeria which is Muslim is larger than the Muslim population of Egypt. So you have this situation of sometime paradoxes between the interaction of the two sub-regions, between the Arab World and the African World. And then historically there has been a debate into where the Semitic peoples began. Not just the Arabs, but the Semitic people more generally. Did they begin on the western side of the Red Sea on the African continent, or did they begin on the Eastern side of the Red Sea on the Arabian Peninsula, and what not. The Semitic peoples are more than just Arabs and Jews; they do include the Amhara and other sub-groups in Ethiopia. These are Black Semites whose languages have the same rules as Arabic and Hebrew or rules that are derived in part from a common linguistic ancestor. This linguistic association is much older than Islam, so the religious link between Africa and the Arab World is much more recent than the linguistic link between Africa and the Arab World because the Semitic link antedates much of the evolution of the Arab language and the Amharic language, etc. And finally at this stage it is also worth remembering that with the Arab Conquest in the seventh century a whole process started in which this linguistic link became deepened with the spread of the Arabic language in Africa, and the religious link attained new levels of relevance with the spread of Islam in both “Arab Africa” and “Black Africa”.
In the second part of the interview Mazrui is asked about scholarship which tends to look at sub-Saharan Africa as radically different from the North Africa, and asked if he considers this a valid viewpoint.
Transcript: Definitely not. You see there is this strange situation where the name “Africa” itself began in North Africa in the part which we now call Tunisia, and it was probably derived from the “Berber” language of North Africa, one of the languages of North Africa -- the pre-Arabic section of the linguistic scene in North Africa. The word itself, for a while (the word Africa, that is) was limited to North Africa. So it is very curious that originally it was much more relevant for looking at North Africa than at Black Africa. But over time the relevance of the vocabulary -- the vocabulary of “Africanity,” of African identity, began to move. So that what was regarded as Africa moved beyond its original Tunisian and its North African confines, and over time it became “continentalized”. And the use of the term Africa for the continent as a whole is only a few centuries old -- three or four centuries at the most that it has become common to use that term for Africa as a whole. And one of the ironies of the situation is that a name which was originally from North Africa became, in the eyes of some observers, more relevant for sub-Saharan Africa than for North Africa, so that when you say “Africans”, very often people think of Africans from south of the Sahara rather than from north of the Sahara. Which is historically paradoxical that this should be so when the name itself originated with North Africans in the first place. But whatever the historical circumstance, the identity itself has spread so that you can no longer identify Arabs in terms of color, because there are “White” Arabs, “Black” Arabs, “Brown” Arabs, etc. You have considerable intermixture in the African continent. And you can no longer identify “Arabness” strictly within the North African confines, either. Because you’ve had Arab populations in the part of Africa where I was born in East Africa. There even used to be a “Sultanate” – the Sultanate of Zanzibar – which was Arab-led and which existed until 1964. And when I was a child I used to go there from time to time, either for my school holidays or when my old man first went to Mecca on pilgrimage. He sent me to his friend in Zanzibar. And Zanzibar was a place that was very “Afrabian” in my sense. It was a combination of these two themes, the Arab theme and the African theme. And you had asked me earlier about “Afrabia” and who are these “Afrabians”. Well they are, the following. First there are genetic Afrabians or genealogical Afrabians. That is people whose ancestry is both Arab and “Black African”. They can be Moroccan, they can be Sudanese, they can be Egyptian, and some of them can be in Saudi Arabia, for example. It has been suggested, for example, that the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan in ancestry was Afrabian genealogically because his ancestors included both African and Arab blood. Similarly, President Anwar Sadat in Egypt was Afrabian in this genealogical sense. His ancestors included Black African and Arab Ancestors. So that’s the genealogical sense of Afrabian. Secondly is the cultural sense of Afrabian. That is people whose culture is a mix of Arab customs and African customs. Those could include the Hausa and the Hausa-Fulani of Nigeria or the Wolof of Senegal or Somali or the Swahili of Eastern Africa. All these are Afrabians, not in the genealogical sense--in other words, they are not necessarily descended from ancestors who are both African and Arab—They are culturally descended from civilizations which are both African and Arab. And the third category is ideological Afrabians, that is people who believe in the oneness of the African and Arab peoples, not because their ancestors where African and Arab and not because their own cultures are mixtures of African and Arab, but because they themselves believe, as a doctrine, that is it a good and sensible historical destiny for the African and Arab peoples become one. So I would describe both Kwame Nkrumah on the African side and Gamel Abdel-Nasser on the Arab side as ideological Afrabians because both of them believed in the oneness of the African and Arab peoples and pursued policies in that direction.
In the third part of the interview, Mazrui is asked to provide specific examples of the connections between the Arabs and Africans, which he divides into religious, linguistic, and cultural links.
Transcript: Well, the cultural and civilization links are sort of diverse. The most widely discussed, of course are the religious links in the sense that Islam is a major force in Africa, and Africa might well be the first continent to have a Muslim majority, so that the majority of the population is Muslim. So (it is) the first continent to fit that status the way Europe became a Christian continent centuries ago. So the religious links are obvious, important, extensive and very influential. Then there are the linguistic links. Firstly there is, of course, the Arabic language to which we have already referred, that has spread extensively and turned a part of Africa, North Africa, into an extension of the Arab World, which it was not before the seventh century of the Christian era. So North Africa became Arab. It wasn’t Arab before the birth of Islam. So it was a post-Islam Arabization whereas, of course, the Arabian Peninsula was a pre-Islamic Arabization. So, and then the spread of the Arabic language in the rest of the continent, sometimes as a language of a lingua franca-communication between groups that otherwise don’t have a common language, as in southern Sudan. Because southern Sudanese need Arabic not just to communicate with the Arabs of the north, they very often need Arabic to communicate with each other in the south, because southern Sudanese are multilingual internally. So they use Arabic for communication among themselves. Also with Arabic you also have the role of Arabic as the language of ritual and prayer in Islam. And that, of course, covers millions of other Arabs for whom Arabic is not a language of conversation, but it’s a language of confession, it’s a language of religion, it’s a language of worship, etc. So Islam does not have a doctrine of a chosen people, but it does have a doctrine of a chosen language. The chosen language is, in fact the Arabic language, the language of the Qur’an. And millions of both Arabs and Africans recite or quote the Qur’an, almost in every conversation in their daily lives as well as in situations of worship. The second linguistic category is the impact of Islam and Arabic on new languages, other languages. So there are many languages in Africa that show the kind of influence in them that English shows with regard to Latin. So Latin has an enormous impact on the English language. Similarly, Arabic has an enormous impact on Kiswahili, Hausa, on Wolof, on a variety of languages in sub-Saharan Africa. And the third area of the impact of Islam and Arabic is not in the languages like Kiswahili and Hausa which are saturated with Arabic words, but they, in turn -- those African languages in turn influence other African languages. So they have been influenced by Arabic, and they in turn influence other African languages. Like English has been influenced by Latin and English, itself, has influenced a lot of other languages. So, for example, in many Ugandan languages the word for religion is “dinni” which is clearly from al-din (The Arabic word meaning religion) and they got it, not directly from the Arabs, but through Kiswahili. So you get it through intermediate influences that occur. That’s the linguistic cluster, which is considerable. A third cluster of Arabic and Islam in Africa as a whole is with regard to orthography, alphabet, the method of writing. This is different from language, because you can have African languages written in Latin -- the Roman alphabet -- or you can have them written in the Arabic alphabet. When I was a child the Arabic alphabet was much more influential than it is now. So that is one area where there has been a definite decline. The impact of Arabic language in terms of words has continued. African languages are still borrowing words from the Arab language, but the use of the Arabic Alphabet for writing African languages has definitely declined. My first written exercise myself in my tongue, which is Kiswahili, was using the Arabic alphabet. And I was writing, as a small child, to my mother who was in Tanzania. It was a very childish letter, but using the Arabic alphabet to communicate with her, not in Arabic, but in Kiswahili. Now that is unlikely to happen today. A small child is unlikely, in Kenya, to be writing to his or her mother in Kiswahili using the Arabic alphabet. They may write in Kiswahili and have the words derived form Arabic, but they would be writing them in the Roman or Latin alphabet. So that’s an area of decline, that’s quite clear. And even Somalia, which actually agonized whether to adopt more permanently the Arabic alphabet or have the Roman alphabet or have a special alphabet for the Somali language, in the end some military junta made the decision. They decided in favor of the Roman alphabet. So they went for the alphabet you and I use at the State University of New York. So that’s a definite area of decline. There’s been some discussion as to whether English should be written in the Arabic alphabet for those people for whom the Arabic alphabet is more familiar already, they want to learn (English), but it’s much harder work learning a new alphabet. Now this would apply much more to North Africans and to people in the Arab world. So there has been some discussion of whether there should be some kind of reversal of roles by reducing the challenge of the intervening Roman alphabet and enabling people whose “Mother Alphabet” is the Arabic alphabet to learn Arabic through it. But you’d have to create a special formulation to represent English sounds. Some work is being done in that sphere and I am sure it will happen, if not shortly in good time it will happen. So, so much for the orthography and alphabet with regard to the impact. Then we have architecture -- architecture of the Arabs and of Islam. And that has included, not just the dome and minaret, but courtyards in special types of buildings, special types of roofs on tops of homes in certain parts of Africa. So there has been an influence of Arab and Islamic styles of construction in parts of Africa. Then, another cultural area, dress -- dress culture. This is very important because it spread to many parts of sub-Saharan Africa. It’s true as in many parts of the world, sometimes these traditional forms of dress are honored much more by women than by men, because the attire for men in most countries at the beginning of the 21st century has become westernized. Perhaps extensively westernized, not just for those who live in the West. So women have become almost the major protectors of traditional dress within these societies, and long may they continue in their roles of authenticity.
Professor Mazrui describes the process of “Arabization” and compares it to the process of “Islamization”.
Transcript: As I said, in the seventh century of the Christian era, Muslims arrived in North Africa as conquerors. Muslims arrived in Ethiopia just a little before as people seeking asylum. This was at a time when Arabia was still not yet Islamized and Muslims in Arabia were being persecuted. And this is during the Prophet Muhammad’s own lifetime, so that some Muslims sought asylum in Christian Ethiopia, when Ethiopia was already, at that time, Christianized. But Arabs as conquerors came in the North rather than in Ethiopia. And in the North they started these two processes of Islamization-the spread of the Islamic religion, and Arabization, the spread of the Arabic language. The Arabic language carried more of the Arab identity than the spread of the Islamic identity. Now that process of Islamization was completed earlier in North Africa than the process of Arabization. So that people acquired a new religion much sooner than they acquired a new language. And then you have very interesting tendencies which emerge so that in Egypt the most important minority was a religious minority rather than a linguistic minority, whereas in places like Algeria and Morocco the most interesting minorities are linguistic minorities connected with the so-called “Berber” languages rather than religious minorities. So in Egypt you have the Copts, members of the Coptic church. So you had the Arabic language, although it was slower than the religious assimilation of Egyptian to Islam, nevertheless the conquest of Egypt by the Arabic language was more complete than the conquest of Egypt by the Islamic religion. So its another paradox. So that you have the most important minority in the most of Egypt was the religious minority of the Copts rather than a linguistic minority. Of course if you look at borders of Egypt that arose much more recently in relation to conquest that would include people from Nubia and what not, that would create different minorities altogether, but if you take sort of “classical” Egypt what remained were religious minorities rather than a linguistic minority. But in much of the rest of North Africa you had the survival of linguistic minorities instead of religious minorities, on the whole. I mean both of them are generalizations, but I think that [they are] probably correct generalizations. So the conquest of North Africans by both the Islamic religion and the Arabic language was one of the major factors which gradually made North Africa different than sub-Saharan Africa where, in sub-Saharan Africa the conquest of Islam was more extensive than he conquest of the Arabic language. So there is a clear demarcation where the world of the Arabic language ended and the world of the Islamic religion began in sub-Saharan Africa. On the other hand, other aspects of Arab culture that I mentioned earlier like language -- other languages, architecture, and dress and orthography, those spread to other parts of Africa although the alphabet has had to sustain a decline as a result of Europeanization.
In this portion of the interview Mazrui assesses the argument that is technology that has led to the triumph of a Latin-based system of orthography over the Arabic script system.
Transcript: I think that in Africa European Imperialism was much more causal than European technology, although technology later reinforced the changes the imperialism had inaugurated. Because European Imperialism created European style schools, state schools under the colonial order, or mission schools under Christian churches, etc. And none of them were likely to promote the Arabic orthography, even when they were respecting indigenous African languages. And in the case of British Imperial rule, which did take an interest in African languages much more than French Imperialism, British Imperialism developed many African languages and developed writing in those languages but insisted that the writing should be in the Roman alphabet.
Professor Mazrui is asked if cultural influence flowed from Africa to the Arab World.
Transcript: That’s a very important question which ties into the issue of should we be thinking of the relationship between Africa in the Arab world as being, in any case, one continent so that the Red Sea is not regarded as a divide. After all, the only reason that there is a sea there is because of some massive earthquake a couple of million years previously which dislocated the Arabian Peninsula and also created the Rift Valley. Whereas in fact, geologically, the composition of the Arabian Peninsula and the composition of the Arabian continent is substantially the same, but what is different is what goes beyond the Arabian Peninsula into the areas of the Gulf that enter into Iran. I am talking about geology now, rather than culture. And secondly, cultural things intermingled quite early. The intermingling of Africa with the people of the Arabian Peninsula was partially tied in with one of the less happy aspects of the relationship. Some of the less happy aspects of the relationship were issues of conquest and the Arab slave trade. From fairly early there were problems of conquest and subordination which were disproportionately in the disfavor of groups of tribes and ethnic groups of the African continent whose weakness was sometimes exploited from groups from outside Africa and certainly including groups from the Arabian Penninsula. So one of the shadows on the whole concept of “Afrabia” and of building good relations, especially in Eastern Africa, has been the shadow of the Arab slave trade. And this continues to be a problem that is sometimes exploited by those who are opposed to the unification of Africans and Arabs. The remind Black Africans that, look, these people previously enslaved you. And secondly there is the related shadow of caste differences, some of which are indistinguishable from race, or perceived racially between Arabs and non-Arab Africans. Now, then given this nature of this relationship, one of the impacts of the Africans has been precisely in their role as subordinated people, just as many of the areas of influence of African Americans in the United States have been in their role as subordinated people. And the African Americans have influenced major changes in production and in values and in style, not by being at the top, but by being intermingled with the population, you see, and maintaining a certain dynamism. And similarly many of the Africans who entered the Arab World became part of the Arab reality and became, in their case, indistinguishable in fact. Because the nature of Arab assimilation was much greater than Anglo-Saxon assimilation. So non-Arabs became Arabs more easily than non-Whites became Whites by intermarriage, etc. So that the influence, therefore, was indirect, in this manner. So you have a lot of people who in other societies would be called “Black” who in the Arab World would not, you see, because they became part of genealogical upward mobility. Through genealogical upward mobility they become princes, they become kings… You even had a tradition of Mamlukes, of people who had been previously owned became a new dynasty who ruled. This type of influence extended to the present day. I mentioned the example of Egypt, that Egypt has had four Presidents since the Revolution of 1952 and two of them would have been regarded as Black in the United States: Mohammed Naguib and Anwar Sadat would have been regarded as in the United States because both of them had Black ancestors and, in the case of Sadat, had a Black parent. They would have become Black under this system in the US, but under the genealogical system of the Arab World became subject to upward genealogical mobility. They were co-opted upward. So it is much harder, therefore, to say what is the influence of African people because they are much harder to distinguish from the other people in the Arab World, whereas they are easier to distinguish form the other people here in the United States.
This portion of the interview addresses the question of why a consideration of the Arab World has to consider the African continent at all.
Transcript: In other words the reality of “Arabness” is wider than the Arab World in its narrow sense because it includes a substantial part of the African continent. There is an Arab presence that is extensive in the African continent, most of the time for the better, some of the time for the worst. That is in the nature of human interaction. And then I think there is enough evidence to suggest that the Black African people and the Arab people have been in the process of merging toward oneness, to becoming one people. In the past the process was very slow. In more recent times it is, in fact, gathering momentum and I would imagine that it would become even speedier in the years ahead. The last portion of the interview provides examples of the issues above. Transcript: Well, I went to Niger to attend the wedding of my nephew Al-Amin Mazrui. He was getting married to a woman from Niger. This was in Niamey. This is a Black African Country. And I went to give a lecture at the university. And before long the discussion was in three languages. It was in English, French and Arabic. There was not a single Arab in the audience. There wasn’t a single Arab in the audience but the discussion was in three languages because some of the people of Niger, which was previously a French colony, are better educated in the Arabic language than they are in the French language. The discourse, which was a discourse of Islam in West Africa and the United States -- that was my agenda, my agenda was on Islam in West African and the United States. I spoke in English, but when the discussion started, I was expecting the discussion to be dominated by the French language. In fact, I was very pleasantly surprised that there was discussion in three languages. And those who spoke Arabic spoke it fluently -- these were not people halting. And some of them had more “authentic” Arab accents than those who spoke French had authentic French accents. An of course in Nigeria you might also come across people who are really, really at home in the Arabic language. So the lines between the world of the Arabs and the world of the Africans are becoming fainter and fainter across history. Its moving southward, so in Niger it is moving southward beyond the Sahara, in the Nile Valley it is moving southward, in Northern Nigeria it is moving southward from North Africa, but it has been happening, and I suspect it will get speedier in the years ahead.
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Re: لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم (Re: Khalid Eltayeb)
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
October 3, 2004
In Sudan, No Clear Difference Between Arab and African
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
KHARTOUM, Sudan -- ABDALLA ADAM KHATIR, 50, is from Darfur, in western Sudan.
His grandmother was an Arab, her grandfather was a member of an African tribe. He calls himself an African.
As a boy in Kabkabiya, deep in the heart of Darfur, he traveled three days by camel caravan to reach the nearest town with an intermediate school. The caravan was led by an Arab, but at no point did he or his family feel unsafe.
As a student here in the capital in the 1960's, he took up the banner of Arab-African unity, led by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
But today, Mr. Khatir finds himself wrestling with the gut-wrenching fact that, in the past two years, 102 of his relatives have been killed in Darfur by those he calls Arabs.
Yet in the end, Mr. Khatir, a writer and a member of the Darfur Writers and Journalists Association, does not view this as a war between Arabs and Africans. He blames it squarely on the government in Khartoum. Its leaders, he says, have deliberately inflamed nascent ethnic divisions in a bid to stay in power.
War broke out in western Sudan in early 2003, when a rebel insurrection, frustrated by what it called the Sudan government's marginalization of Darfur, demanded economic and political reforms.
The government swiftly struck back, deploying Arab militias across the region.
The violence has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 1.5 million.
Across Darfur, it was largely the villages of Africans that were torched, and with some exceptions, it was largely tribes that call themselves African that crowded into refugee camps or fled across the border to Chad.
The United States and others have accused the attackers of committing "genocide," the systematic destruction of a national or ethnic group.
Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, has said that crimes against humanity and war crimes "probably occurred on a large and systematic scale."
The question is how does race or ethnicity fit in. For generations, race itself has not been all that significant in Darfurian society.
People regularly referred to themselves by their tribe affiliation, and rarely as just "Arab" or "African."
Arabs have been in the region for almost 1,000 years, and the term has been used mostly to describe those who speak Arabic, as opposed to one of the dozens of local languages, or to those who lead nomadic, not agricultural, existences.
"The implication that these are two different races, one indigenous and the other not, is dangerous," said Mahmood Mamdani, director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University.
But the Darfur crisis has laid bare an unspoken Arab-African fault line that runs across this arid belt of Africa - from Mauritania in the west, to Sudan in the east.
Racial consciousness is, in fact, embedded in the history of central Africa.
Sudan, for example, was once a center of the Arab slave trade.
In Mauritania, in West Africa, blackness, which was associated with slavery, is today associated with servitude.
Referring to underlying racial division, Breyten Breytenbach, the South African writer, said, "It is one of the most ambiguous problems and greatest taboos on the continent."
What may have surprised everyone in Sudan was that as soon as the rebellion in Darfur began, divisions were drawn. By and large it was Arab tribes in Darfur that rallied to the government's side (some say in exchange for promises of land and power), while the government's political opponents raised the African banner and declared allegiance with the rebels.
Those lines could harden even more.
The racial character given to the fighting in Darfur by the government and the rebels has found many willing listeners - and the appeal to racial solidarity could extend itself to Chad or further afield to Niger or Mali, where the competition between farmers and nomadic herders could turn even uglier.
"There's been a long-running effort to suppress recognition of racial tension," argued Salih Booker, executive director of Africa Action, a Washington-based advocacy group. "It is something the continent has to grapple with."
But racial chauvinism, once let loose in a society, can be hard to put back in the bottle. And its effects can be murderous.
It is foolish, said Mr. Khatir, for any Sudanese to consider himself an Arab.
"We are not Arabs, not Sudanese - not even those who are telling themselves they are Arabs," he said.
"I am an African," he added, "who has absorbed Arab and Islamic culture. The way I see it, our people, Arab tribes and African tribes, are victims of the national policies of this government. We are all victims."
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Re: لافرق واضح بين العرب و الافارقة في السودان -مقال مترجم (Re: Khalid Eltayeb)
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اعتقد ان المقال فد اشار الي نقاط جوهرية :
1. تهميش المركز للاطراف .
2. تأريخية التعايش السلمي بين العرب و الافارقة في دارفور برغم النزاعات السابقة و التي كانت لاتتعدي النزاع حول المرعي في ازمان الجفاف.
3. ازمة دارفور ازمة سياسية في المقام الاول , عمقتها السلطة الحاكمة باذكاء النعرات القبلية.
4. هوية انسان دارفور الجامعة بين الاصل الافريقي و المتشبع بثقافة عربية اسلامية .
5. مايجمع العرب و الافارقة اكثر مما يفرق بينهم . يجمع بينهم واقعهم المزري و التهميش و الظلم الناتج من اختلال معادلة توزيع الثروة و السلطة . انهم جميعا يعانون من هذه السياسة الجائرة.
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Khalid Eltayeb
عبداللطيف خليل محمد على
Bashasha
Deng
matthew FARIS
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست