Darfur: More than meets the eye?

The question mark in my title should make it clear that I have only just begun to understand what the Sudanese tragedy, encapsulated under the single word `Darfur' could really mean for Africa.

For a long time I have viewed Darfur mostly through television as a desert hosting refugees, where indescribable human suffering goes on unabated and nobody, not even the AU, can do anything about it. And that, it seemed, was that; nothing much about the underlying motives of the Sudanese government in the north except its apparent determination to wipe out black Africans in the south. Since Arabs predominate in the north you would think it was racism and Africans in recent history have experienced incalculable doses of racism - more than any other race I can think of except the Jews - at the hands of other races. But when I read Charles Moore's piece, This is why there is slaughter in Darfur in the Daily Telegraph of September 26 a bright light seemed to shine in a previously very dark place in my mind. I didn't know (and how many people do?) that the CPA (Comprehensive Peace Agreement) between the north and south Sudan has a key provision for the settling of the borders. The north "knows that if the borders are agreed, this will show clearly that most of the oilfields which earn the country large amounts of hard currency are in the south". The oil revenues are controlled by the north and the south believes it is "being. short-changed. This suits China which is in the country helping itself to to Sudanese oil at good prices" according to Moore. And there is more (sorry) I can do no better than to quote his key points in full: "Southern Sudan is all but unique in the modern world in having recently overthrown sharia rule. After yearsof officially imposed Islam ... Christians no longer have to live in daily fear... mosques and churches now co-exist peacefully. Yet one Anglican prelate ...said that he survived 20 years of persecution ... he told me that the Arab Muslim is not a giving up sort of person'. The blow to Arab pride if the south became independent would be tremendous. The threat to the south is therefore, huge. `We are the wall to the penetration of the Islamic religion to the whole of Africa,' Bishop Micah said. What occurs in Darfur concerns not only the fate of its refugee, raped, hungry, dispossessed people. The outcome will also tell the north whether it can get away with what it wants. If it discovers that it can, it will start on the much bigger prize of the south". Is everybody out there listening?

Its a long, long journey, far further south to the Sub-Saharan Africa that I know. I was born on African soil and lived there for seven decades. That continent has a great pull on my imagination even though there is not a drop of blood in my veins that is not English. Willie Musararwa, a Shona sage and a valued friend in Zimbabwe (formerly Christianized Southern Rhodesia) used to call me mwana wevhu (child of the soil). That, in his language, was a gentle compliment. He knew that the soil which nurtured me had made Africa a part of me. Darfur is in Africa so it is also a part of me.

Copyright © 2004 Diana Mitchell