Conclusion
Black Lives Matter in Sudan
I got t-shirts printed that said “South Sudan” in the front to educate and create dialogue… . In the next coming months I am adding “Black Lives Matter” at the back… . South Sudan is seen as so far away and distant by many who live in America. But what’s happening in South Sudan, with unarmed black people being killed by authority figures, is actually very much the same issue as what we’ve seen happen in America.
—Nykhor Paul, BBC interview
Nykhor Paul was born in 1989 in Akobo, Sudan (now South Sudan). In an interview posted by the BBC in July 2016, Paul described her childhood as “magical” and said that Akobo was a wonderful place to grow up. However, when the Second Sudanese Civil War inched closer to where she lived, she and her family fled in 1996 and moved “around the border of Ethiopia.” Eventually settling in a refugee camp, Paul’s parents sent her with her uncle to the United States in hopes that she would have a better life. Arriving in Nebraska, she was placed in foster care and was—as she frames it—“discovered” by a modeling agency. Paul embarked on a distinguished career, becoming the face of Louis Vuitton and participating in global fashion shows for the likes of Vivienne Westwood. “My life now is a whole world away from where I was born and where I come from,” she said in 2016. Yet, despite the geographical, economic, and social chasms that might separate Paul from her family and other fellow South Sudanese, she has not forgotten where she came from. She obtained US citizenship so that she could more easily travel, and in 2014 she went back to the refugee camp where her family still resided and visited them for the first time since her arrival in the States eighteen years earlier. During the civil war that enveloped South Sudan shortly after its independence, Paul’s social media posts concerning unrest generated thousands of likes.1
As a Black South Sudanese American, Nykhor Paul also followed the racial tension taking place in the United States. In 2013 activists Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi launched Black Lives Matter (BLM) after George Zimmerman was acquitted on second-degree murder charges in his killing of an unarmed seventeen-year-old African American boy, Trayvon Martin. After the police shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the following year, BLM grew into a nationwide protest movement.2 When Paul’s BBC interview was posted, the country was embroiled in a divisive presidential election in which one of the two major candidates—Republican Donald Trump—ran a campaign imbued with racist, nativist rhetoric. While the United States was not engaged in the type of literal civil war occurring in South Sudan, social cleavages were apparent, fierce, and polarizing. Against this backdrop, Paul said that she had “of course been following the recent racial tension here [in the United States closely.” She credited that for including “Black Lives Matter” tags on her posts when she decided to increase social media awareness about South Sudan. After noting that the killing of unarmed Black people by authorities was an issue that linked the United States and South Sudan, Paul argued, “The way to help is to create a healthy peaceful dialogue between each other through education and care for our collective wellbeing. It is the 21st century. To reduce problems in Africa as being tribal is short-sighted but it’s up to the African Diaspora to bring change.”3
Bounds of Blackness provides an important foundation for those wishing to more deeply understand the historical relationship between African Americans and Sudan. While Sudanese-born figures like Nykhor Paul entered this history from the African perspective—and that history, to be sure, warrants its own book-length study—this book has focused on the African American side of the equation and the ways that Black Americans since the early twentieth century engaged Sudan through literary, cultural, and diplomatic endeavors. African Americans contributed to the constructions of newly independent Sudan and South Sudan, but Sudan also figured into Black American understandings of racial pride and consciousness through a sense of shared struggle not entirely dissimilar from what Nykhor Paul expressed (from a South Sudanese perspective) in 2016. As such, the modern connections that she has called for are rooted in over a century of Black American interactions with Sudan. Understanding this reality and Sudan’s historical role in African American race consciousness is necessary for more properly placing into proper historical perspective African American engagement with (or, arguably, inattention to) Sudan and South Sudan during this Black Lives Matter moment. For Black Americans, Sudan is more than simply the land where the ancient civilizations of Nubia and Kush provided a counter-narrative to Black degradation and inferiority. Black Americans engaged with colonial and postcolonial Sudan in ways that should complicate our understandings of race and racial solidarity in the African Diaspora.
Indeed, the guiding question undergirding this book is how modern Sudan informed African American understandings of Black definition, Black consciousness, and Black solidarity. Black America’s interactions with Sudan show how Black racial solidarity can evolve within a single African diasporic relationship over the course of time. During Sudan’s Anglo-Egyptian colonial period, African American newspapers framed Sudanese as Black racial kin under race-based state oppression. After independence and the eruption of civil wars between the Arab-run northern Sudanese government and non-Arab southern Sudanese rebels, Black Americans positioned northern Sudanese Arabs and southern Sudanese Blacks in an oppressor-oppressed binary. Some, however, resisted this polarizing framework. Against the backdrop of the Arab-Israeli conflict, some Black Americans—notably Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam—deployed anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist language to express their support for Arab-run Sudanese governments even as Black Sudanese suffered under these governments. Simply put, the sociopolitical realities of colonialism and independence racialized different heroes and villains for Black Americans engaging Sudan. This evolving dynamic is not only important for understanding the paradoxical relationship African Americans have had with Sudan but should also invite us to interrogate Black America’s broader relationship with Africa during the colonial and postcolonial eras. Racial solidarity is not bound to ancestral geography or physical appearance but is, instead, a fluid and capricious construction. What, then, are the bounds of Blackness? What circumstances determine who is included or excluded? What are the consequences of a racial solidarity that allows one to be racial kin in one moment and an antagonist in another?
Nowhere in this study have such questions been so evident than in the discursive approaches that Black Americans took when describing Arabs. While the Black-white dynamics of slavery and colonialism led to Black diasporic solidarities in narratives of Black oppressed and white oppressors, African Americans in this book showed their capacity to find, construct, and articulate racial solidarity in an oppressor-oppressed paradigm along Arab-Black lines. Thus, Black America’s relationship with Sudan is not simply one piece in the larger puzzle of Black America’s relationship with Africa. Rather, it is also fundamentally about its connection with the Arab world and, by extension, Pan-Africanism’s relationship to Arabism. It is impossible to understand Black diasporic consciousness and politics without interrogating the African world’s kaleidoscopic approach to Arabs. What sociopolitical factors determined when African Americans framed Sudanese as Black and/or Arab, and with what practical influence on solidarity practices? In what moments does Black racial solidarity partner with—or diminish—support for Arabs?
The significance of anti-Muslim sentiment in mainstream American politics necessitates an explicit mention of the interreligious auspices of such racially defined questions. According to the University of California’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, over 190 anti-Islamic bills were introduced between 2010 and 2016, with eighteen bills signed into law in twelve states. In addition to such legislative efforts, Sudanese trying to enter the United States were confronted with new barriers to entry. In 2015, in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and in San Bernardino, California, Congress modified the Visa Waiver Program that had previously allowed citizens of participating countries to travel to the United States without obtaining a visa. The modified program bars those who have visited Sudan, Iran, Iraq, or Syria since March 1, 2011, from entering the country (with few exceptions). The American Civil Liberties Union castigated the spending bill that includes the modified program, calling it discriminatory. Two years later, President Trump’s infamous Executive Order 13769 barred foreigners from seven Muslim-majority countries—including Sudan—from entering the United States.4 At this fraught moment in US history and amid such recent examples of state-sponsored Islamophobia, Black America’s winding engagements with Sudan provide unique perspectives to offer conjecture on the current and future state of African American internationalism.
Implications for Black America and Beyond
To begin, Bounds of Blackness shows the impact that historically Black colleges and universities can have in African American relations with Africa moving forward. It is impossible to overstate the impacts that HBCUs and their graduates had in the historical narrative presented here, in a book that focused on Black interactions with just a single African country. Tuskegee’s involvement in Leigh Hunt’s cotton-cultivation scheme; William Leo Hansberry’s pioneering courses on ancient African history at Howard; the editorial fervor of Hampton graduate Percival Prattis; the official foreign service work of Morehouse graduate Robert Kitchen—each of these examples illustrates the historical impact HBCUs had on African American consciousness, diplomacy, and activism concerning Sudan.5 Due to state-sponsored Jim Crow and the legal (and extralegal) devices that white people employed to keep education segregated, it is on one hand not surprising that many of the actors in this history leading up to the 1970s had HBCU connections. However, with Brown v. Board and integration of university undergraduate and graduate education, those men and women who might have earlier matriculated at HBCUs and gone into some type of Africa-centered work have increasingly passed through the halls of predominantly white institutions.
Notwithstanding the demographic shifts that have occurred in American higher education in the last fifty years, it would be a mistake to presume that HBCUs no longer have a vital role to play in the centuries-old relationship linking African Americans with Africans. One need not look further than the ways Howard University has engaged with Sudan and Sudanese issues in recent years. Diane Ijoma, who as a Howard junior was named a 2019 David L. Boren Scholar, worked with US diplomats in Juba as an intern for the State Department. And, most prominently, Sudan’s Makur Maker made headlines in 2020 when he became the first five-star basketball recruit to choose to play for an HBCU (Howard).6 With these and a host of other examples, Howard University has had links with the Sudan long after desegregation in higher education. Apart from Howard, the historical connections between HBCUs and Africa are well-known and documented. HBCU alumni and officials attended independence celebrations of several African countries; three African presidents were educated at HBCUs (Nigeria’s Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda); and in the 1980s and early 1990s HBCU students participated in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.7 Notwithstanding awareness of such important information, it would be worthwhile for scholarship to consider the role that HBCUs have more recently played in African American internationalism generally and with respect to Africa specifically in the twenty-first century. How have HBCUs, their students, and alumni responded to developments on the continent like the Arab Spring, the terrorist operations of Boko Haram and al-Shabab, and the migrant flight to Europe that has cost so many lives? While Bounds of Blackness and other books may offer insight into HBCU-Africa relations during the twentieth century, such studies should also compel us to consider that this history is not limited to the past but may continue in ways that reinforce and challenge established understandings.
The historical interactions that African Americans have had with Sudan should also lead us to consider the history, form, and implications of largely unexplored engagements that Black Americans have had with other African countries. While important books have been published concerning African American engagement with countries like South Africa, Liberia, Ghana, and the Congo, far fewer studies have been attempted that concentrate on North Africa or the Horn of Africa.8 Because Black American decisions to liken themselves to or distinguish themselves from Sudanese allow us to further understand how we have made sense of their blackness, it stands to reason that our knowledge of Africa’s importance to Black Americans’ self-conceptions will be more complete when our historical relationships with more African countries are considered. This is not to say that research should no longer be done on how West, Central, and Southern Africa have figured in Black internationalism. The realities of the transatlantic slave trade and other violent systems of white structural state-based oppression in those regions have engendered particular relationships with those regions that should never be severed. But expanding our gaze beyond those regions and acknowledging that Black Americans have important—and perhaps hitherto unresearched—histories with other African regions will serve to diversify and deepen our understanding. We must not reinforce the Hegelian notion that “true” or “Black” Africa is bound to the areas south of the Sahara. To do so is to risk marginalizing—however unconsciously—the lives of certain Black peoples who are facing the same systemic oppression that compelled Cullors, Garza, and Tometi to launch Black Lives Matter.
A report from Algiers in July 2020 noted that the global wave of antiracism protests generated by the police killing of George Floyd had barely touched North Africa despite routine anti-Black discrimination in that region with a deep history of slavery. Indeed, observers agree that the Black Lives Matter movement has not spurred a major debate on racism or police violence against Black Africans in the Maghreb. Modern slave markets have been reported in Libya, where migrants are abused by human traffickers. Algeria and Tunisia bar foreign Africans from getting residency papers unless they are students.9 Issues like residency or citizenship status, police surveillance and violence, and slavery would all be the types of issues BLM activists would openly denounce as oppressive. If Black Americans have always linked their struggle for rights to liberation movements in the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, why should North Africa now be an exception?10
Bounds of Blackness has shown the foundational role that the creative and collective colossus that is the Black press played in the history of Black America’s relationship with the Sudan. African American newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and the Final Call have been rich arenas to explore Black opinion on the region. It was in the diversity of the Black press that African American writers on Sudan provided a particular definition of what it meant to be Black in the diaspora and, with it, a broader story about Black struggle, pride, and consciousness. The internet—with its news and culture sites, blogs, and social media platforms—could easily serve as the primary space for Black Americans to engage Sudan, other African countries, and the diaspora in the spirit of Black consciousness and solidarity. Reporting for the Pew Research Center, Brooke Auxier notes that Black Americans have long used such sites for political engagement and social activism, dating from years before the 2020 George Floyd protests demonstrated social media platforms’ scope and power. According to Pew surveys, Black social media users are particularly likely to find such sites important for getting involved in issues they care about or locating like-minded people. African Americans are also likely to express positive views about the impact these platforms have for holding powerful people accountable and amplifying the voices of underrepresented groups. “The online community known as Black Twitter,” writes Auxier, “has long been using these platforms to collectively organize, offer support and increase visibility online for Black people and issues that matter to them.”11
While Nykhor Paul’s online activism provides one template for the form such online activism can take, there are other examples testifying to the way people throughout the African diaspora have used the internet to publicize problems facing their communities. The hashtag #aboriginallivesmatter trended in Australia, where protests focused on the treatment of an indigenous population subjected to injustices from eviction to mass killings since the dawn of white settlement there. The phrase #AllPapuanLivesMatter went viral in Indonesia and called attention to the long secessionist movement in West Papua (which has created tension between minority Papuans and ethnic-majority Javanese). Finally, Black Lives Matter activists have used social media to create transnational alliances.12 After Israeli settlers forced Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in May 2021, Israelis and Palestinian witnessed some of the worst violence in a long time. BLM came out in support of the Palestinian fight for liberation and sent out the following tweet: “Black Lives Matter stands in solidarity with Palestinians. We are a movement committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms and will continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation. (always have. And always will be). #freepalestine.”13
As provocative as that statement may be, it is a fact of history that African American support for Arabs or Israel has never been universal. For much of the twentieth century, African American writers invoked the history of slavery when describing Arabs in Sudan. This was done during Sudan’s colonial period (when Egypt operated as a colonial master) and during the First Sudanese Civil War, as Black southerners warred against the Arab-ruled Sudanese government. However, as Arab-Israeli intrigue operated in the background of that conflict, some writers critiqued Israel’s involvement in the Sudan and, in the process, added a layer to the issue of African American racial solidarity with Sudanese. What did it mean for an African American to support Black people (southern Sudanese) fighting Arabs (northern Sudanese) if other Arabs in the Middle East were struggling for liberation from a white Israeli state? The Arab-Israeli conflict’s relationship to African American approaches to Sudan continued during the Second Sudanese Civil War, when Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam accused Zionists of spreading misinformation about Omar al-Bashir’s regime and slavery in Sudan. As Blacks suffered in western and southern Sudan, the Nation of Islam supported the government responsible for the violence using anti-Zionist rhetoric.
At the very least, the history and shifting solidarities presented in this book should spark reconsideration of Afro-Arab relations in their complexity and Black America’s relationship with Israel and the Arab world. There are multiple ways one can make sense of BLM’s expressed support for Palestinians. Given how Black and other nonwhite peoples the world over have been decimated by settler and extractive colonialism since the late fifteenth century, it is no wonder that BLM is “committed to ending settler colonialism in all forms.” Its pledge to “continue to advocate for Palestinian liberation” makes sense, since liberation from slavery, colonialism, and all forms of oppression has long been an ideal of African Americans and others in the African diaspora. Finally, there is a white-brown racial dimension undergirding Palestinian-Israeli relations that may connect with BLM’s support for Palestinians. However, complications arise if and when African American support for Palestine is conflated with Afro-Arab solidarity broadly. What made Farrakhan’s accusations of Zionist conspiracy in his defense of Bashir’s genocidal regime so troubling—among other reasons—is the fact that he indirectly pointed attention to the suffering of nonwhite people facing oppression from a white government (Palestinians and Israel) to support an African (northern Sudanese) government responsible for the oppression of Black people (southern Sudanese). What is to be gained from that posture?
To be sure, the question of solidarity politics in this racialized and ever-oppressive geopolitical landscape extends beyond Black American relationships with the Arab world to include such engagement with others around the world. The truth is that solidarity comes with thrilling benefits, weighty consequences, and, at times, serious contradictions. Consider, for example, the figure of longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro. During his lifetime, Castro, who in 2016 died at the age of ninety, sought out Black leaders, met with Malcolm X in Harlem, and had a close relationship with Nelson Mandela. According to Sam Riddle, political director of the National Action Network’s Michigan chapter, “It was Fidel who fought for the human rights for black Cubans.” Noting that many Cubans “are as black as any black who worked the fields of Mississippi or lived in Harlem,” Riddle said that Castro believed in medical care and education for all Cubans.14
Writing the same month as Castro’s death, the Miami Herald’s Armando Salguero—who described himself as having been “born into Cuba’s imprisonment”—painted the Cuban leader in an altogether different light. In an editorial describing Castro as “one of the 20th century’s most enduring oppressors,” he noted that Fidel Castro and his brother had stifled dissent in the country for more than half a century. Salguero vividly recounted a story from his youth when he and his parents were about to board a plane bound for the United States before a bearded guerrilla arbitrarily decided that only two of them could leave (he and his mother made the trip, and it would take another three years before his father could reunite with them). He also included a sobering indictment from Human Rights Watch, which described Cuban citizens as being systematically deprived of fundamental rights to free expression and subject to various tactics to enforce political conformity. These realities notwithstanding, none of them were new developments that warranted “breaking news” status in 2016. What, then, spurred Salguero to write about the Castros at that moment? It was San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who during an NFL postgame news conference donned a T-shirt with photos from a 1960 meeting between Castro and Malcolm X.15
Salguero’s disgust was palpable as he labeled Kaepernick an “unrepentant hypocrite.” Why, he asked, would a man who protests oppression don a Castro shirt? “The tyrant is demonstrably a star on the world’s All Oppressor Team,” he asserted. Kaepernick immediately responded by saying that he had worn a Malcolm X shirt and that he believed in Malcolm X and his ideology. Kaepernick said that, for him, the fact that Malcolm met with Castro spoke to his willingness to hear different points of view. When Salguero asked the quarterback whether it is good to have an open mind about Castro and his oppression, Kaepernick responded, “I’m not talking about Fidel Castro and his oppression. I’m talking about Malcolm X and what he’s done for people.” Salguero was not satisfied and wrote:
I hope Kaepernick is starting to realize how untenable his position is relative to the Castros. Even Malcolm X, who met with Castro in New York, for years afterward declined invitations to visit him in Cuba. I’m hoping Kaepernick understands one should not make broad statements about standing up for people’s rights, then slip into a Fidel Castro shirt, suggesting approval for a man who has spent his days on the planet stifling people’s rights.16
In a circuitous way, the hubbub concerning Kaepernick’s T-shirt leads me back to BLM’s tweet that it would always support Palestinian liberation. Rather than refer specifically to the Palestinian case, I am particularly concerned with the idea that any solidarity—racial, religious, or otherwise—be expressed as a permanent pledge of support irrespective of context or circumstance. Whether one finds oneself more in alignment with Salguero or Kaepernick, Salguero’s question to Kaepernick is a fair one. In a world where one group’s liberation hero is often another’s oppressor, it is imperative that solidarities in the African diaspora be informed, nuanced, and malleable. It would behoove Africana scholarship to explore the possible tensions and contradictions that may arise when Black communities across national lines convey support for one another. But at a time when Black people the world over are still suffering from systemic racism, solidarity and activist efforts should be chiefly considered in light of whether or not they are effectual in advancing Black liberation.
Closing Thoughts: Beyond Nubia
The process of writing this book began over a decade ago, when I traveled to Egypt and England in the summer of 2011. Then a twenty-four-year-old, African American graduate student at the University of Michigan, I was slated to spend a few weeks in Cairo for an introductory Arabic course and proceed to Durham University to conduct preliminary dissertation research at its famed Sudan Archive. I had a mix of emotions as I embarked on the trip. Egypt was less than four months removed from the fall of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak in the Arab Spring. It was my first research trip, and I was desperate to find some valuable documents that I could use to write an exciting thesis.
Yet, despite the archival research and language instruction informing the trip, I—like so many Black Americans before me—found myself enamored with the ancient Egyptian past. When I looked at the Nile, I thought about that ancient river’s role in the Book of Exodus. When I went to Coptic Cairo, I visited the cave commonly believed to have housed Jesus, Mary, and Joseph when they fled to Egypt to avoid Herod’s persecution. I visited the ancient capital of Memphis, where I was blessed to visit the Step Pyramid in Saqqara and gaze upon a massive statue of Ramses the Great. And, of course, no trip to Cairo would have been complete without visiting the pyramid complex in Giza. Because my historically Black fraternity (Alpha Phi Alpha) has long prized Egyptian iconography, I packed a T-shirt emblazoned with “ΑΦΑ.” As I stood in front of the pyramids and the Great Sphinx, I made sure to have my picture taken with the black and gold letters across my chest.
In the late 1990s, long before my graduate research took me to northeastern Africa, Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. visited Sudan as part of his six-hour, three-night televised documentary Wonders of the African World. “When you think of Africa,” Gates said in an interview published in the Baltimore Sun, “what comes to mind for most Americans? Poverty and flies, famine, war and disease. How many of us know anything at all about the truly great ancient civilizations of Africa, which, in their day, were just as glorious and just as splendid as any on the face of the Earth?” He said that the experience of going to Nubia and filming pyramids where forty generations of Black royalty were buried was one of the great trips of his life.17
It is natural for one who is traveling to or otherwise learning about Sudan to venture into the ancient past. While the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Nubia, and Kush can conjure a sense of awe and wonder in any modern mind, they have held an especially strong grip on African Americans like myself, Gates, and so many others. For Black Americans living in a country that has experienced (and continues to perpetuate) all manners of systemic racism, one can derive much solace and pride in the reality that wealthy, sovereign, powerful Black civilizations existed on the Nile for centuries before the transatlantic age. Yet I leave this study of Black America’s relationship to modern Sudan with a conviction that we do a disservice to ourselves as African Americans if our focus on the glorious Nilotic past is not coupled with strident, conscious attention to the realities facing contemporary Africa. While some African American intellectuals in the early twentieth century looked to redeem Africa’s history in the face of pejorative images, they marginalized Africa’s colonial present. Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those Black Americans interested in Africa may have had strong sentiments concerning Africa’s august history but believed that contemporary Africa lacked value and needed to be elevated.18
It is my deep and sincere hope that Bounds of Blackness can be used to discourage a similar ideological phenomenon today. We as Black people must not only look to African locales like Sudan as historical evidence that we are kings and queens because we were kings and queens. We must not confine Africa to our collective imagination, as merely representing the ancestral motherland from which our forebears were taken. While we must never forget the ancient African past, it is equally important that we not restrict our consciousness of Africa to Black history. Sudan and the rest of the continent are integral parts of our Black present.
As Black Americans engage with contemporary Africa, it is paramount that we interrogate the history of US power and imperialism in the continent. If a disservice is done by focusing on the African past at the expense of the present, similar disservice is done if one limits examination of US engagement with Africa to the eras of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and the Cold War. Capitalism, power, and self-interest have governed US diplomacy with Africa in the past, and we must be mindful of the ways this is still true.