Black America and African Liberation

In order to understand the full context of African American approaches to the First Sudanese Civil War, it is necessary to appreciate the context of Black America’s relationship to Africa as it transitioned from colonialism to independence. From the late 1930s to the mid-1970s, several African American groups worked to support African causes. Such organizations included the Council on African Affairs, the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA), and the Congressional Black Caucus. Several prominent African American individuals demonstrated interest in and commitment to Africa, including Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Height, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and A. Philip Randolph. Notwithstanding such organizational leaders, identification with Africa could be found among people through dress, adoption of African names, and contribution to African causes. Perhaps no contemporary African issue stoked the Black American imagination more than South African apartheid. Rising Black Nationalism and televised scenes of violence against Black South African protests encouraged a sense of shared oppression. When anti-apartheid activists joined anti-Jim Crow demonstrators, the African American foreign policy lobby shifted its gears from assisting Africans outside of the US to removing white racist regimes the world over.⁶

The specific focus on white oppression was best evinced through two of the more prominent organizations of the era: the American Committee on Africa (ACOA) and the ANLCA. Founded in 1953, the ACOA was a multiracial, anticommunist, and Pan-Africanist organization birthed from a partnership of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality. In its first twenty years, the ACOA focused on anti-apartheid struggles and Gold Coast decolonization.⁷ George Houser, who began his tenure as the ACOA’s executive director in 1955, two decades later acknowledged that the organization had long been related primarily to “the struggle for freedom” and had never tried to serve as an international civil liberties organization to protest breaches of citizens’ rights in independent Africa. While he noted that there had been issues that had “tempted the organization to shift focus” and that some ACOA supporters had “pressed for such change,” Houser stated that the organization had not developed a program related to the southern Sudanese conflict against the Sudanese government. “If ACOA had wanted to pursue a policy in support of economic development projects, or of refugee aid, or scholarship assistance,” Houser wrote, “It would have had to seek large foundation grants and government subsidies. It would have had to de-emphasize policies and actions critical of government positions supportive of white minority regimes and continued Portuguese colonial domination in southern Africa.”⁸ However consciously or unwittingly, such prioritization of white-ruled states in Southern Africa over Sudan ranked one kind of kind of racial oppression over another.

The ACOA was not alone in taking this position. In the early 1960s, Black American leaders created the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa to bring African problems into mainstream America’s awareness. The ANCLA was sponsored by entities that included the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference.⁹ Regarding the ANCLA conference in November 1962 at Columbia University, executive director Theodore Brown said years later, “We passed many resolutions on vital issues in Africa like the Congo problem and the problem of Southern Africa in terms of [apartheid] in the Union of South Africa, and the Rhodesian situation… . Back in 1962, there were still many territories that were not sovereign[,] and the question of the colonial holding powers was still widely prevalent in that area.”¹⁰ The organization did not meet again until 1964, when it recommitted itself to pressuring the US government to act in support of African independence.¹¹ Yet, like the ACOA, the ANCLA ignored the Sudanese civil war and the suffering of southern Sudanese.

What might explain the uneven African American attention to different parts of Africa at the time? James Meriwether has noted that imaginings of singular Africa were undermined by the reality of leftist revolutionaries, authoritarian leaders, democratic hopefuls, coups, and civil wars. As a result, African Americans focused more on those countries struggling for national liberation than on those that had already become independent. This prioritization allowed Black Americans to continue forging transatlantic links and sustain broader internal unity in the United States as the civil rights movement splintered in the 1960s. In this paradigm, those who disagreed on the American struggle or problems in independent Africa could still unite against injustices that continued with white minority rule on the continent.¹²

It is against the backdrop of Black American focus on those parts of Africa still struggling under white-minority rule that African American newspaper coverage of Sudan can be more fully understood. While the ACOA and ANCLA may have neglected to address the Sudan crisis, periodicals like the Chicago Defender and New York Amsterdam News did. Black press coverage overwhelmingly approached the events unfolding in Sudan using a racial framework that was not Black and white as in South Africa but instead Black and Arab. This showed the governing influence of race on Black America’s gaze on Africa but also the fact that the gaze saw something other than white and Black spaces. In no small way, Arabs came to occupy the role of racial oppressor in African American reporting and commentary on Sudan, and this mirrored the way white Portuguese and Afrikaners were framed in Southern Africa. Recognition of this dynamic is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the bounds of Afro-Arab solidarity.

Blacks, Arabs, and Slavery

During the early years of Sudanese independence, African American newspapers recognized Sudan’s Black and Arab identities in non-conflictual ways. On January 7, 1956—six days after Sudan became sovereign—the Pittsburgh Courier described the country as having “nine million black people spiritually and politically aligned by RELIGION and color with the Moslem world of Asia and North Africa.”¹³ “Sudan means black,” wrote the Chicago Defender. “Here black people are rising again after several thousand years and they are building a new civilization, where they helped light the torch of history in the ancient past.”¹⁴ Such recognition of Sudan’s blackness was coupled by similar acknowledgments of its Arab composition. “In its one million square miles,” said Norfolk’s New Journal and Guide, “are between six and eight million Arabs living in the northern areas, and about four million native black tribes in the south.”¹⁵ In an enormous testament to its Arab heritage, Sudan joined the Arab League in 1956 and, in doing so, became that organization’s third African member (after Egypt and Libya).¹⁶ “As may have been expected,” wrote Marguerite Cartwright in the Pittsburgh Courier, “[Sudan] joined the originally British-conceived Arab League… . Previou[s]ly, the Sudanese were quite insulated from Arab politics, but they are Arabs, and when they joined the Arab League, they were doing what comes naturally.”¹⁷ Despite such recognition of Sudan’s Black and Arab heritage, African American newspapers increasingly framed Sudan in racial and religious opposition in the years following General Abboud’s 1958 coup. Importantly, this was often conveyed through references to Sudan’s history of slavery.

The history of Sudanese slavery stretched to ancient times, when enslaved persons were sacrificed or used by Sudanese kings when exchanging goods. In the eighteenth century, the Islamic Baggara people capitalized on the rise of the Darfur sultanate and supplied it with enslaved people. While the trade was mainly local until the nineteenth century, it was at that point that the Muslim world’s growing demand for enslaved persons increased the trade. When Muhammed Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, conquered Sudan in the early 1820s, one of his motives for doing so was to conscript enslaved persons into his army and for use as inexpensive labor in his modernization project. Following the conquest, his Turco-Egyptian government conducted slave raids in Nubia, the Upper Blue Nile, and southern Sudan. When the Upper Nile basin was opened, southern Sudanese were vulnerable to diverse private Turk, Arab, European, and Sudanese entrepreneurs. One slave route percolated from Bahr el Ghazal (in modern northwestern South Sudan) to El Obeid (in Kordofan, in northern Sudan) and Khartoum north along the Nile to Egypt. Some historians have reported that 20–30 percent of the population was enslaved at the time of the British reconquest of Sudan (1898).¹⁸

In the late nineteenth century, several African American newspapers painted the Mahdi and his movement as harbingers of slavery and enemies of Christianity. In 1883 the New York Globe reprinted from the London News: “The presence of English officers … in the distant provinces of the Sudan will undoubtedly aid the extinction of the curse [slavery]. Let the Mahdi be disposed of … a new moral teaching firmly and sternly inculcated will shed a new light through these dark lands.”¹⁹ Reporting weeks before the fall of Khartoum, the African Repository stated that a lamentable element of the Mahdi’s progress was “the impetus [that would] be given to the atrocious slave trade.” “His minions will bring down their slave caravans of boys and girls to be sold in Mecca to the Mohammedan pilgrims who religiously believe in the divine origin of slavery.”²⁰ Black newspapers continued to deprecate the Mahdiya in the early twentieth century. Weeks after the Battle of Omdurman, the Colored American reported, “A fanatical religious power that threatened to overrun Africa is crushed forever. Mahdism is dead… . For thirteen years the power [the Mahdi] founded ruled the Soudan despotically and cruelly.”²¹ Two years later the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate reprinted a piece from the New York News that included a scathing critique of the Mahdi: “He lacked many of the essential qualifications of a great leader, for, in addition to being a hopeless voluptuary, he was devoid of a possible policy, and was, in addition, the creature of the most degraded slave dealers.”²²

When General Herbert Kitchener was appointed the first governor-general of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1899, he instructed his provincial governors to proceed with caution when it came to slavery. “Slavery is not recognized in the Sudan,” he wrote, “but as long as service is willingly rendered by servants to masters it is unnecessary to interfere in the conditions existing between them.” He added that he would leave it to their discretion to employ the best means of gradually eliminating the propensity to rely on enslaved labor.²³ However, Steven Serels has noted that Anglo-Egyptian officials were complicit in maintaining slavery and the slave trade following the Mahdist War. In the early twentieth century, policies established by top Anglo-Egyptian officials allowed Sudanese cultivators to increase the number of enslaved workers in northern Nilotic Sudan by an estimated eighty thousand men. However, the Condominium government faced slavery scandals in 1924 that drew the ire of the Anti-Slavery Society and questions from the British Parliament and the League of Nations. Even though the Sudanese government decreed the complete right to freedom for all Sudanese in May 1925, some incidents of the trade appeared thereafter.²⁴

J. A. Rogers’s “Rambling Ruminations: Slavery Still Exists” appeared in the New York Amsterdam News in July 1930. Rogers cited information provided by Joseph Kessel, a French aviator and explorer that French newspaper Le Matin had dispatched to examine the slave trade in Sudan and Abyssinia. “The great slave-port,” wrote Kessel (quoted by Rogers), “is Port Sudan, which flies the British flag… . Thus the fine zeal that England shows on this subject and the reproaches that she makes against her neighbors (France and Italy) concerning the slave trade can also be applied to her even more, since slavery still exists in the Sudan.”²⁵ Two years later, in an editorial that appeared in the Philadelphia Tribune, Rogers forwarded information on a report that “Abyssinian bandits” had been raiding Sudan for slaves. The report found that one attack had resulted in the deaths of twenty-seven men and the kidnapping of twenty-seven women and fifty-five children. Rogers wrote that the enslaved Sudanese were “for the Arabian trade and … bootlegged across the Red Sea.”²⁶ Rogers was not the only figure to draw attention to modern Sudanese slavery. In January 1930, the Pittsburgh Courier published a piece on African slave trafficking more broadly. “Slave traffic is still rampant in many places like the Sudan, Abyssinia and Arabia,” it noted. “In the White Nile Province, in the Sudan, the British authorities recently learned that a woman named Sitt Anna … was one of the principal parties engaged in the slave traffic with Abyssinia. She was … imprisoned. An inquiry made in the same province resulted in the liberation of 500 slaves.”²⁷

While slavery in Sudan never completely disappeared during the colonial period, the British successfully eliminated the domestic trade. But, while the supply and demand for free labor following the conclusion of World War II “had reduced the most egregious abuses of slavery,” the historian Robert O. Collins notes, the continued shortage of labor revived domestic slavery.²⁸ Matters of scale notwithstanding, the African American press was clearly privy to and condemned the injurious practice of slavery in Sudan. Whether reading Black newspapers during the late nineteenth century Mahdiya or the Depression-era Condominium, readers would have been exposed to the idea that Sudan was a place where Black people were being enslaved. One might imagine the sense of pain and horror wrought in some readers who had a particularly intimate connection with slavery less than a century removed from American emancipation. Such reportage and commentary concerning Sudanese slavery provide a backdrop for the ways that writers in the Black press injected the history of slavery into reports of conflict in contemporary postcolonial Sudan.

In August 1955, southern Sudanese rebels mutinied against northern Sudanese soldiers at Torit. Though order was eventually restored, the event commonly marks the beginning of the seventeen-year war between the Sudanese government and southern rebels. A month after the Torit mutiny, the Atlanta Daily World published an article that invoked the history of Sudanese slavery. The writer framed the conflict as one between southern Sudanese “pagan blacks” and northern Muslim Arabs (“who will probably be rulers when the territory achieves its independence”). While the antebellum United States was divided between a free North and enslaving South, the writer noted, “Unlike the American situation, it is the Northerners in Sudan who are guilty of a slave trading. Recently South Sudan explained that it sent three aged men to a conference in the North because ‘if we sent our young men those Arab northerners would kidnap them and sell them into slavery.’” “This feeling,” the writer explained, “is what led to the bloody revolt several weeks ago.”²⁹ In 1959 George Schuyler added a racial binary that the Atlanta Daily World had not. “There is another complex situation in the Sudan where the dominant people are the Moslems who regard the southern Sudanese … as inferior, and always have,” Schuyler wrote. “They regularly roamed southern Sudan for slaves until the Anglo-Egyptian condominium stopped it. The uprising of the Mahdi in the Sudan in [1882] was due largely to the interference with the Negro slave trade which enriched the coffers of the Sudanese slavers.”³⁰ By portraying Sudanese Muslims as dominant people who formerly roamed the South for slaves and still regarded southerners as inferior, Schuyler injected race into the picture by asserting that interference in a particularly “Negro” slave trade sparked the famous Mahdi rebellion. In this reading, the dominance of contemporary Muslims in Sudan was not only rooted in past slavery; it was also—in his words—racial slavery perpetrated by a religious group.

The discussion of northern Sudanese as slavers—while including some historical truth—is also problematic in its tendency to exoticize and essentialize an entire group of people. Unlike Schuyler’s portrayal, the Mahdi rebellion had different causes and was conducted in a particular Islamic register. In showcasing the suffering of one group, another group is categorically pathologized in the absence of nuanced inspection that accounts for heterogeneity of attitudes toward and participation in the slave trade. This dynamic, while not altogether identical to the more modern context, nevertheless mirrors Western portrayals of Arabs and Muslims during the War on Terror in the early twenty-first century, with its depictions of violent, deranged, bloodthirsty extremists eager to inflict fear and terror on peaceful, civilized, non-Arab and non-Muslim peoples. As Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie once offered, “The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”³¹ If the history of Sudanese slavery is told—and it must be shared—then those northern Sudanese experiences untethered to or opposed to slavery (or both) must be told as well. An oversimplified depiction of northern Sudanese as slavers and southerners as enslaved does a disservice to members of each group. It is morally imperative to discover and disseminate the diversity of peoples’ truths.

Riots in Sudan in 1964 provided an opportunity for another newspaper to invoke historical slavery in its reporting of contemporary developments. That year, student disturbances at the University of Khartoum led to the ouster of General Ibrahim Abboud’s regime. These protests were followed by mass demonstrations led by the nation’s professional elite against the government, demonstrations supported by trade unions and Communist and Umma Parties. This popular uprising became known as the October Revolution.³² Two months later, a crowd of southern residents in Khartoum gathered to welcome Clement Mboro back from his visit to the South. Mboro was the minister of the interior and the first southerner ever appointed to a senior cabinet position. When his return flight was delayed, rumors spread that he had been assassinated. Southerners were enraged and violently tore through the city, killing Arabs. Southerners seeking shelter from vengeful northerners took refuge in buildings run by the American Presbyterian Mission. While the military was called to restore the peace, one hundred people ultimately died. Minister Mboro was very much alive and died of natural causes forty-two years later.³³

That month, December 1964, the Chicago Defender published several portrayals of Arab-Black clashes in Sudan. One was a UPI report that was published on December 8. “Negroes and Arabs battled through the streets of Khartoum in new outbreaks of racial rioting,” it said. Invoking the familiar refrain of historical slavery, the report stated, “[The fighting underlined the traditional racial hatred between Arabs and Negroes stemming from the days of slavery when Arab traders raided Africa for slaves. Despite the modern-day claims of fraternity and brotherhood between Arab and African nations, racism remains.” It regionalized the racial division by noting that “Negroes” mainly populated the South while the North was “dominated by Arab Moslems who … [had] controlled the government.”³⁴ The following day, December 9, the Defender published another UPI report that detailed the rioting that began when Mboro returned to Khartoum. Arab-Black antagonism was again put on full display through the lens of slavery. Noting “a century of smouldering hatred between Negroes and Arabs,” the article stated, “Steel-helmeted police arrested Negroes and set up barriers to separate them from stone-throwing Arabs… . The seeds of the trouble were sewn [sic] 100 years ago in the Arab slave trade among the Negro peoples of the Southern Sudan.”³⁵ The next day, December 10, an article in the Defender posited that the rioting in Khartoum was “symptomatic of a trend throughout black Africa to curb the power of the Arab constituents in politics”: “Africans with retentive memory do not nurture too good a feeling toward the Arabs who are remembered for their perfidious traffic in black slaves.”³⁶

Black readers of African American newspapers from the late 1950s to mid-1960s were presented with antagonistic, oppositional framings of Sudanese Arabs and Blacks. Importantly, this racial divide was often expressed through the language of slavery, a relatable, accessible dynamic inviting Black readers to understand the Sudanese situation and have compassion for southern Sudanese more fully. While this chapter will later show that such portrayals would continue through the end of the 1960s, some African Americans with direct experience in Sudan refused such divisive characterizations. Instead, they noted the ambiguous nature of race in Sudan and the physical resemblance that those in northern Sudan had with Blacks in America. Their statements illustrated the gap between the politicized and polarizing way race in Sudan was depicted in African American newspapers and what Black Americans perceived firsthand.

Recognizing Racial Ambiguity

The Chicago Defender printed two pieces in December 1964 challenging the Sudanese Arab-Black binary that had been disseminated. One was a Negro Press International report that cited newspaper headlines that read “Negroes and Arabs Clash in Sudan,” “10 Dead, Scores Hurt in Arab-Negro Race Riots,” “Negroes Attacking Arabs,” and “Arabs Counter-Attacking the Negro Area in Khartoum.” The article recognized that friction existed between Northern and southern Sudanese but argued that the recent violence in Khartoum was rooted in nonracial social factors like politics and religion. Furthermore, it contended, many Sudanese remembered that the British had created an artificial disdain between North and South in its divide-and-rule strategy. “[Given Sudan’s pervasive racial mixing], it would be an anthropological monstrosity to attempt to speak of Arab-Negro race riots in Khartoum. It would be closer to the truth … to speak of friction and clashes between Arab-speaking and Moslem northern Sudanese and Sudanic-speaking and non Moslem southern Sudanese.” While the article acknowledged that foreign correspondents were qualified to do their jobs, it continued that some of their dispatches from Sudan betrayed their weak anthropological and historical knowledge. Noting that “Sudan” literally means “Land of the Blacks,” it stated, “All present-day Sudanese are not wholly black any more than most American Negroes are not black. The Sudanese … are a fusion of Arab, Negro, Nubian and Egyptian blood… . Centuries of this miscegenation left their mark heavier in the northern than in the southern part of the Sudan.”³⁷

Two days later the Defender published an editorial by Chatwood Hall that doubled down on the danger of placing Sudanese into Black and Arab binaries. “Chatwood Hall” was a pen name used by Homer Smith, a syndicated columnist and author. As “Chatwood Hall” he served as Russian foreign correspondent for the Associated Negro Press, and he later moved to Ethiopia, where he served as senior editor for Ethiopia’s Ministry of Information. Smith returned to the United States in 1962, and the Johnson Publishing Company published his memoir Black Man in Red Russia two years later.³⁸ In his December 1964 Defender piece, “Hall” expressed befuddlement at an American correspondent—one he presumed to be white—who wrote of “the festering squabble between the Arab north and the Negroid south,” “Negroid Southerners,” and “Arab Northerners.” The Black journalist, who had thrice visited Sudan, wrote that anyone who had been there should have known that modern northern Sudan was part of ancient Nubia. “The indigenous people of this region, the Nubians, are among the blackest people in all Africa and in the world. The President … Ibrahim Abboud, is a very dark brown man who would be just another Negro anywhere in America. And he is a Sudanese ‘Northerner.’” While “Hall” acknowledged that there had long been an infusion of Arab blood in some of the region’s people, anyone who tried to equate one’s language and faith to race had to be “a shallow thinker indeed: all American Negroes speak English, but they are not Anglo-Saxons.” In what may have been his effort to disentangle his audience’s understanding of Sudanese as Arabs, “Hall” echoed some of his precedents by likening Sudanese to African Americans: “If most of the Sudanese, with their rivers of Negro blood, were dumped into America, they would be but an addition to America’s Negro population.”³⁹

Two other African American visitors to Sudan echoed Homer Smith in his comparison of Sudanese to Black Americans: Christine Wilson and Elton C. Fax. Wilson, a pre-engineering major at Eastern Michigan University, received a scholarship from the Sudanese government to study at the University of Khartoum. “I believe that it was here,” Wilson later said, “among these warm and very generous people that I secretly began to accept Islam.” After spending nearly two years in Khartoum, Wilson joined the Nation of Islam in 1967 and received her Muslim name, Bayyinah Sharrieff, that December. Her experiences and observations in Sudan were reproduced in Muhammad Speaks, the Nation of Islam newspaper that boasted a weekly circulation that may have exceeded over one hundred thousand.⁴⁰

Sharrieff opined that the Sudanese she encountered resembled Blacks in the States and said that this perception was generated soon after she arrived at the university. She recounted that one of the assistant registrars drove her from the airport to the university’s girls’ hostel when she came to Khartoum. They arrived at the hostel at about 8:30 p.m., and the assistant registrar carried her luggage inside the gate.⁴¹ Sharrieff described entering the dorm for the first time “among her own people” and finding, much to her chagrin, that the housemother was a white English woman. The housemother called for an elderly Black woman named Sit-Ruth, who introduced Sharrieff to some of the women. “I was so happy when I saw them,” she said, “for many of them looked like the black girls one would see here in America. Their hair varied in degrees of curliness as does [that of] the so-called American Negroes… . I told them that there were millions in America who looked like them. They were fascinated.”⁴² On another other occasion she remarked that “the Sudanese range in color from very dark to very light, as do the so-called American Negro.”⁴³

Notwithstanding the observations provided by the likes of Brimmer, Sharrieff, and Hall, no African American visitor to Sudan provided more extensive observations concerning Sudanese racial identity that Elton Fax. Born in Baltimore in 1909, Fax had begun his career as an artist in 1931 after graduating from Syracuse University’s College of Fine Arts. A world traveler, Fax lived in Mexico in the 1950s, traveled to South America and the Caribbean for the US State Department’s Educational Exchange Program, and visited Africa several times. The State Department’s Educational and Cultural Division arranged his trips to Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and northern Sudan. In his 1974 book Through Black Eyes: Journeys of a Black Artist to East Africa and Russia, Fax provides a detailed summary of his experiences in Sudan.⁴⁴

In March 1964 the Sudanese Morning News published word of Fax’s then-forthcoming African tour. Under the headline “Negro Amarican [sic] Artist to Visit Sudan,” the article noted that Fax would visit several cities and “give ‘chalk talks’[—]a combination of drawing, story-telling and teaching in schools and community centers.”⁴⁵ In Through Black Eyes Fax remembered that he hadn’t been in the country twenty-hours before having an encounter with a public affairs officer (PAO) that brought understandings of race in Sudan to the fore. The PAO informed Fax, “[Sudanese Arabs] hate the Negroes who live in the southern part of this country. The Arabs are determined to dominate the Negroes, who are rather backward.” “Of course,” the officer continued, “it must be admitted that the Arabs are far more intelligent and therefore more ambitious. Still, things are in a bad state inasmuch as Arab cruelty to Negroes is colossal. So with this racial trouble here we have made no arrangements for you to travel south.” The PAO informed Fax that they had arranged for him to visit the Technical Institute’s Art Department and then the Sudanese Cultural Center’s women’s bazaar.⁴⁶ Fax remembered that while he had to respect the PAO’s position, he could not completely believe what he had told him.

I had been looking intently at the people of Khartoum from the moment I had arrived. Most of them were black. There were varying shades of brown among them and hair textures ranged from straight to kinky… . Few resembled my artist’s concept of Arabs, “swarthy skin, fairly sharp features, piercing grey or brown eyes, and straight or curly hair.” … The vast majority I had seen so far, at the airport, on the streets, in the hotel, looked more like blood relatives of mine. To the best of my knowledge, few of them are likely to be mistaken by any well-traveled white American for Arabs.⁴⁷

Fax’s account of how the PAO distinguished between Arabs and Blacks is supported by documentary evidence illustrating the US government’s understanding of Sudan. In a 1957 national security report concerning US policy regarding sub-Saharan Africa, Sudan was listed along with Ethiopia and the Somalilands as having “sizeable Negro minorities.” However, the report continued, “[Those countries] tend in their political, cultural and economic outlooks to be oriented much more towards North Africa and the Middle East … than they are toward tropical Africa. Thus the Moslem populations of Sudan and the Somali area look primarily towards their coreligionists in the other Arab states.” For the purposes of US doctrine, Sudan was officially recognized as being part of the Middle East.⁴⁸ From an American foreign policy perspective, Sudan was a constituent member of the Arab and Middle Eastern world. But what, then, of those Sudanese who identified neither as Arab nor Middle Eastern?

US State Department officials’ understandings of Sudan included thoughts regarding religion. A year after the aforementioned national security report was sent, Julius C. Holmes, the special assistant to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, wrote to him and shared that Sudan was Muslim “excepting the pagan South.”⁴⁹ However conscious or unwittingly, by his use of the term “pagan” to describe southern Sudan, Holmes harkened to Western, timeworn, colonial-era missionary lingo to describe people in that region.⁵⁰ It appears that the term continued to be deployed in official US foreign policy documentation describing southern Sudanese, as over a decade later—when Fax was in Sudan—he went through material that Washington had issued him and found the briefing sheet on the country. He read and reread one paragraph stating that the country was composed of nine million mostly Arab-speaking Muslims in the North and three and a half million “largely pagan” people in the South. “So that was it,” Fax wrote later in his memoirs. “They were a mixture of Arab and black African and they were loosely referred to as ‘Arabs’ because of their ethnic mixture and Arabic tongue. There was no reference whatever in the official memo to ‘Negroes.’” He concluded that the officer’s use of “Negro” “obviously stemmed from his [the PAO’s] personal interpretation of what it implied to him [italics Fax’s].”⁵¹

Fax was introduced to Ahmed Omar, a local assistant and liaison attached to the US Information Service (USIS) in Khartoum. Omar’s work included the transportation of visitors like Fax to locations in town.⁵² One morning Omar was scheduled to pick Fax up and take him to Khartoum’s women’s bazaar. As he waited to be picked up, Fax saw men in clean, white robes and women in long, white attire passing along in the streets. “I continued to look carefully into the faces of the men,” he would recall. “Most of them were black and subtler shades of dark brown, with features ranging from rounded and flat [to] near aquiline. The same people walking in Harlem or Watts or along Chicago’s southside would, except for their gleaming white clothing, attract little attention.”⁵³ After meeting with a Black US embassy officer and some other African Americans stationed in Khartoum, Fax and the others laughed over the PAO’s Arab-Negro explanation. After marveling in his autobiography about the State Department briefing sheet, Fax stated that in hindsight he sensed something in white officials’ mindsets and actions that reflected US interests as much as their own biases. He felt that the US government did not think highly of the Sudanese government when it came to the interests it represented to the United States on the continent.⁵⁴ “Therefore,” Fax opined, “the questions of who and what was good and bad—of who was a ‘cruel Arab’ and who a ‘downtrodden Negro,’ were not wholly … tied to the admittedly twisted American concepts of race and color.”⁵⁵

Notwithstanding US statecraft and its problematic interpretations of Sudan’s diverse racial demographics, Fax had entered the country at a time when Sudanese were presenting themselves to the world in calculated ways. In April 1955, newly independent African and African states participated in the historic the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Aimed at promoting cultural and economic cooperation and standing together in the face of imperialism, the Bandung summit was attended by delegates from twenty-nine countries. Sudan—mere months from becoming independent—joined Ghana, Libya, Liberia, Ethiopia, and Egypt as the African representatives. By implicitly condemning Western and Soviet interventionism as the Cold War raged, the conference helped establish the Non-Aligned Movement and is seen as having been the vanguard of South-South cooperation.⁵⁶ Sudan’s participation in this multiracial gathering was coupled by internal reckoning with its own cultural diversity. With independence the following year, Sudan’s multiculturalism was brought to the fore with election campaigns featuring non-Arab ethnic groups and a parliamentary influx of non-Arabized intellectuals (“especially those,” according to writer M. Jalāl Hāshim, “of jet-black colour who were very aware that they could only be accommodated in a multi-cultural, not mono-cultural, Sudan”). This helped to fuel the emergence of Afro-Arabist cultural and political discourse.⁵⁷ National scholars spurred pioneering studies examining Sudan’s African identity (particularly in the middle part of the country), and, as the 1960s dawned, intellectuals realized that Arabism alone would be an insufficient descriptor for Sudanese identity.⁵⁸

Yet such recognition was countered by Sudanese government efforts to fashion itself as an Arab state. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, the champion of Pan-Arabism, visited Sudan in November 1960 to commemorate the second anniversary of Abboud’s 1958 coup. Nasser’s trip included a journey south to Juba and Nimule.⁵⁹ Sudan’s pro-Arab stance was reciprocated by several nations that offered military support to Khartoum to aid its war effort against the southern rebels. In August 1965 Kuwaiti finance minister Jabir al-Ahmad al-Jabir described the southern Sudanese independence movement as “imperialist and Zionist” while announcing a Kuwaiti loan of approximately £5 million to help its “sisterly Arab country” preserve “the unity of its territory.”⁶⁰ The Arab League Summit of August 1967, held in Khartoum, represented the height of Sudanese Arabism during the civil war. The summit addressed several matters but is known chiefly for its resolution on future Arab-Israeli relations. Arab countries would unite to force Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, insist on Palestinian rights, and declare that no negotiations with Israel would be made. Sudan’s choice for the summit’s setting was considered a victory for Prime Minister Muhammad Mahgoub, who desired a role in settling Arab disputes.⁶¹ Egypt, Libya, and Syria talked with Sudan about the possibility of forming a federation, and the fruits of the agreement included Egyptian and Libyan support in the form of troops on the ground. Such pledges of Arab support illustrated that Sudan’s membership in the Arab League and other efforts to ally itself with the Arab world were yielding tangible results. More importantly, Jabir’s quote showed one way the war was viewed not just domestically but also regionally as one with important ramifications for all Arabs. In May 1969, Col. Jafaar Nimeiri took power in a coup modeled after Egypt’s 1952 revolution that had brought Nasser to power (Nimeiri termed his coalition the Committee of Free Officers, the term used by Nasser). The new Sudanese leader embraced the same pan-Arab ideology, and in 1970 Nimeiri and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi presented themselves as Nasser’s heirs.⁶²

An obvious dissonance existed between Sudan’s cultural diversity on the ground and the way the Sudanese government aligned itself with Arab politics. Still, while US foreign policy portrayals of Sudan and Sudanese as “Arab” existed in the same ecosystem as the Sudanese government’s own Arab-aligned efforts, it cannot justify the dichotomous stereotyping that Elton Fax perceived concerning Sudanese (that they were “good, downtrodden Negroes” or “cruel Arabs”). While in Sudan, this Black American artist found himself at the nexus of dueling forces. His travels were funded by an American state still emerging from its racially divisive civil rights movement, and he was navigating a culturally diverse Sudan whose government had done much in the previous decade to align itself with Arabness in symbolic and violent ways. It was, as in other instances of African American engagements with Sudan, an often bizarre situation to behold. Back home, this strange dynamic also played out in African American newspapers. Despite testimonies by Fax and other Black Americans in Sudan concerning the physical similitude of Sudanese to African Americans, Black newspapers continued to cast the civil war in racialized terms.

African American newspapers disseminated a decidedly pro-Black, pro-southern position. In July 1966 the Pittsburgh Courier reported that the American Friends Service Committee was sending clothes and other supplies to Sudanese refugees in Congo. “Fleeing from alleged persecution by the Arab majority … [southern] Sudanese have arrived in neighboring countries in large numbers… . The condition of the refugees, according to reports received at the Service Committee, is grave.”⁶³ The New York Amsterdam News published an anonymous op-ed that asserted, “Arabs are engaged in a silent war against black Africans while we remain silent. Newspapers all over the world have reported massacres of black[s] in Sudan, secret slavery in Arabia, and Egyptian pilots bombing Biafra. The New York Times reported that blacks are reported to be in concentration camps in Sudan. I hope that the Amsterdam News will alert the Afro-American community as to the true conditions of our brothers.”⁶⁴ Familial solidarity, for this writer, was apparently limited to a particular group of Sudanese—those who were Black.

In December 1971, southern Sudanese students held a conference at New York City’s International House and appealed “to the Black people of the world to support in whatever way possible the struggle of the Southern Sudanese people for freedom and national cultural identity.” Before the conference, Black African students and African Americans demonstrated in front of Sudan’s mission to the United Nations and in front of the UN. Black groups joining the UN protest included the Federation of Pan-African Nationalist Organizations, the African Nationalist Activist Movements, Our Families Protection Association, and members of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE). The New York Amsterdam News reported that the African American groups joined the conference as they began to formally cooperate with the southern Sudanese “to pursue the ‘liberation’ sought by the non-Muslims in 16 years of war with Arab-dominated Sudan government.” Roy Innis, CORE’s executive director, gave closing remarks at the conference and pledged his organization’s assistance in publicizing the southern plight “under Arab Northern Sudanese rule.” Innis also stated that CORE would include southern Sudan in its support of liberation movements on the continent: “Their demands to be freed from the ‘dehumanizing’ effect of ‘Arab domination’ are legitimate.”⁶⁵

The physical observations made by Chatwood Hall, Bayyinah Sharrieff, and Elton Fax in their recollections of Sudanese appearance was not in accord with the polarizing way Sudanese were often portrayed in African American newspapers. If many of the Sudanese they encountered resembled African Americans who wouldn’t have considered themselves Arab, then why were Sudanese—and particularly those described as violent and oppressive—framed as Arab in Black newspapers? Operating within a broader US media and political context, African American newspapers and their coverage of Sudan not only reflected continued Black American interest in the country but also the increasingly pervasive racial characterizations of Sudanese in the popular US imagination. In its only full-length article published on Sudan in the 1960s, Time magazine divided Sudanese between eight million northerners who were “Arabic and Nubian in origin, and Moslem to a man” and four million southerners who were “black Africans.” Importantly, this description was made in the context of the article’s focus on the caustic treatment facing Christian missionaries in the country.⁶⁶ Lawrence Fellows of the New York Times referred to southern Sudan’s “black, Africa-oriented tribes” fighting “savagely against their Arab-oriented Government in the north”; the Washington Post published C. C. Miniclier’s report that the Sudanese army was “battling Christian and pagan blacks who seek a separate identity from the Islamic, Arabic-speaking, usually lighter-skinned peoples from Northern Sudan”; and the Los Angeles Times referred to the rebels as “small, guerrilla forces of Negroes who demand independence from the Arab north and claim to speak for Sudan’s minority of 6.5 million blacks in the Moslem-dominated nation.”⁶⁷ Thus, it was quite evident that propensity to describe northern and southern Sudanese in racial and religious binaries was not the domain solely of contemporary Black writers.

While Africans Americans may not have been alone in racializing Sudanese as “Arab” or “Black” during this period, the way this behavior related to Black America’s approach to the concurrent Arab-Israel conflict is revealing. By shining a light on how the bounds of blackness were reconciled with one Arab group outside of Africa, this engagement overlapped with African American approaches to the Sudan in remarkable ways.

Sudan and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Following the end of World War II and Germany’s genocide of six million Jews, some within the Jewish community demanded their own country. On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, dividing Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states in May 1948. With this action, Jewish people were given a large area of Palestine: a region they considered their traditional home but that was inhabited by Arabs who already lived there. Neighboring, predominantly Muslim countries believed that the move was unfair and did not accept the new Israeli state. Immediately after the state of Israel’s independence was announced on May 14, 1948, several Arab states invaded land in the former Palestinian mandate. This action sparked the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. In 1948–1949, approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs—more than half their total population—were expelled or fled. Israel and the Arab states did not reach an armistice until February 1949. While Israel gained some territory that Palestinian Arabs had been granted under the UN resolution, Egypt retained the Gaza Strip, while Jordan controlled the West Bank. These armistice lines held until 1967.⁶⁸

In 1956 Israel joined Britain and France in attacking Egypt. The young nation did so in order to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal (and reopen it to Israeli shipping) and end armed Palestinian incursions from Sinai. While US- and Soviet-led international pressure forced Israeli forces to retreat to the armistice lines, the region soon became an area where the Americans and Soviets were competing for influence. In the spring of 1967, the Soviets falsely informed Syria that Israeli forces were massing in northern Israel to attack them (there was no such mobilization). In May 1967, Egyptian troops—responding to Syria’s request for help—entered the Sinai Peninsula and eventually proclaimed a blockade of Israel’s port of Eilat. Israel launched a decisive attack on Egyptian and Syrian forces on June 5, 1967, and attacked Jordan’s military. In the subsequent Six-Day War, Israel established itself as the region’s dominant military power. However, following the war, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 242 calling for Israel’s withdrawal from lands taken in the war. Nevertheless, Israeli troops—who occupied Gaza and the West Bank during the war—remained there for years, and Jewish settlements were set up in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and Sinai with government approval.⁶⁹

In 1954, as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was progressing toward independence, Sudanese leaders initiated ties with Israel through British intermediaries. When the 1958 coup d’état brought Ibrahim Abboud to power, Khartoum’s secret ties with Israel were severed. In 1967 Sudan joined nine other Arab states in cutting diplomatic ties with Germany after it had exchanged ambassadors with Israel, and with the Six-Day War came more showings of Arab support. Sudan cut diplomatic ties with the Britain and the United States (restored in 1968 and 1972, respectively) and sent military personnel to support Egypt’s efforts.⁷⁰

A Sudanese brigade was positioned on the Suez Canal until 1972. It benefited Israel for a significant portion of Sudanese armed forces to be focused on the South, with Mossad head Zvi Zamir believing that Sudan’s threat against Israel at the canal and the Red Sea would be minimized by a more powerful force in the South. It was also believed that the Sudanese army’s distraction by a southern war could necessitate a partial diversion of the Egyptian army to northern Sudan. Israelis under former paratroop officer David Ben-Uziel trained a southern military force, arranged for weapons and supplies to be dropped, and oversaw a goodwill effort in the form of a medical team and field hospital. Israeli assistance extended to propaganda. From 1969 to 1970 Yossi Alpher was in charge of producing and distributing anti-Khartoum propaganda. In Tel Aviv Alpher created pamphlets and a type of bush newspaper.⁷¹

After the 1967 conflict, Israel took center stage in African American newspaper editorials commenting on Sudan. While some referenced Israel when pointing to Arab oppression, others framed Israel as oppressive. In this way, pro-southern and pro-northern Sudanese positions in African American newspapers were expressed through the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Sudan, Israel, and African American Opinion

Due to the similarities between anti-Jewish antisemitism and anti-Black racism in the West, Jewish and African diasporic politics have often overlapped. Black American radicals like W. E. B. Du Bois supported the creation of the Jewish state, and Percival Prattis—who had advocated for Sudanese independence—traveled to Israel in 1954 and wrote favorably about the country. Over time, however, some African Americans who had supported Israel’s creation began to link Zionism with colonial discourse. Some Black American leaders and commentators praised political initiatives from the Arab world, like Algeria’s liberation struggle against France, and Nasser’s pan-Arab nationalism. During the summer of 1967, when the Arab-Israeli conflict reached a fever pitch, some Black radicals condemned Israel as a violent, racist, and imperialist Western proxy. Black moderates, including Martin Luther King Jr., rebuked such critics and doubled down on their devotion to the Jewish state. Following the 1967 conflict, Black American commentary followed a pattern wherein some civil rights organizations (like the National Urban League) defended Israel while others (like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) condemned Israel’s position.⁷²

Whitney Young Jr. was not among those African Americans with a particular allegiance to the Arab world. Born in Kentucky in 1921, Young was appointed to lead the National Urban League in 1961 and was one of the principal leaders of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.⁷³ In his 1968 op-ed “To Be Equal,” Young used Sudan to illustrate the Arab oppression of Blacks:

I have never been able to understand the love affair between some Black nationalist spokesmen and the Arab world. Arabs were enslaving Black people long before Americans imported slaves. A UN report said that slavery existed in Arab countries right up until a few years ago… . In the Sudan … Arab northerners are waging civil war against Black southerners. For the past ten years, arms supplied by Arab countries have been used in this war to massacre many thousands of Black Sudanese who want their independence.⁷⁴

Two years later, the Philadelphia Tribune referenced Israeli assistance to southern Sudanese within the context of a racial struggle. Israeli-made weapons, the report said, were “reaching the black rebels in the southern Sudan, who for years have been fighting the Arab regime in Khartoum.”⁷⁵

The New York Amsterdam News published several pieces that articulated pro-Israeli, anti-Arab Sudanese sentiments. In her 1970 editorial titled “Sudan,” New York City’s Veronica Johnson explained that she had recently read an article from a London paper that made her wonder: “Where is the New Left censure of Arabs killing Blacks?” The article Johnson had read concerned “Sudan, host to the Arab War Council against Israel.” She continued that Sudan was responsible for the killing of half a million of its Blacks “without a word of protest from American black militants and their white fellow-travelers of the ‘New Left,’ who have been taking up the Arab cause.” Johnson stated that “Sudanese Negroes” seeking self-determination and independence were fighting their “Arab overlords.” After stating that two million had fled into exile and half a million had been “butchered by the Arab regime,” Johnson asked why these events had not been publicized in the American press and whether the News editor was aware of these developments.⁷⁶ That same day—March 14, 1970—the News published S. Norman Grouse’s editorial “Arabs, Jews, Us.” Grouse began by stating that some Blacks zealously proclaimed support for democracy and socialism. “Some like Eldridge Claever [sic],” wrote the New York City native, “preach the destruction of Israel as an enemy of exploited, oppressed Arabs, linked with the blacks of the world. Ignored is the clear evidence of the murder of tens of thousands of blacks by the Arabs of Sudan.” Grouse later mentioned that Israel had sent thousands of medical and technical experts to help “colored nations in Africa and Asia.”⁷⁷

Additional editorials appeared in the News that pointed to Israel’s assistance in the context of Arabs oppressing Blacks. Stephen Appell of Jackson Heights, New York, wrote, “It is the Arabs who historically engaged in the black slave trade; who have only recently slaughtered Blacks in the Sudan… . Israel, to the contrary, has always lent friendship and assistance to the Black African states.”⁷⁸ Richard Levinson, in his editorial of October 3, 1970, deployed familiar rhetoric by invoking the history of Arab slavery in contrast to Israel’s comparative benevolence (through its aid to southern Sudan). “Arab history shows who the slave traders in East Africa were; they were Arabs. Today, Blacks living in the southern Sudan are fighting for self determination against an Arab regime. Israel … is helping to supply Blacks with guns while the Arabs slaughter these people in village raids, much like those conducted against civilians living in villages in Israel.”⁷⁹

While some writers positioned Israel as a nation fighting to liberate oppressed Black southern Sudanese, others cast Israel in a negative light. James R. Lawson, president of the United African Nationalist Movement, was among this number. Lawson asked, “[How do those] who pretend to be of African extraction advocate war machines to a predominantly white nation (Israel) to destroy their own kind?” He said that many Arabs were Black and African, adding, “It is ironical, and tragic, that a group of ‘Negroes’ would take this course against their own kind. Nine of these Arab countries are in Africa.” He listed Sudan among his examples.⁸⁰ In the Black Scholar, Harold S. Rogers wrote that the British Sunday Times had noted that Israel was arming and training the Anyanya separatist movement in southern Sudan.⁸¹ Rogers explained that Israeli leaders considered Africa as part of the “second ring” of countries around it (after the “first ring” of Arab states). “Israel,” he continued, “tries to bribe and neutralize the attitudes of the ‘second ring’ of countries towards its brutal aggression against the peace loving Arab countries… . Israel’s ideological advance in African countries often takes on the form of exploiting old colonial racist myths, of ‘Black Africans’ vs. ‘White Africans,’ and of Arabs as being great slave traders. Hence the Zionist hope to split African countries on the question of race.” Later in the article, Rogers described Israel’s role in Africa as being one of overthrowing progressive governments and training local armed forces. He framed Israel’s African missions as “centers of subversion and espionage against the African states” and listed examples of its military role on the continent “and the part she plays in subversion.”⁸²

The most pointed indictment of Israel’s participation in the Sudanese war appeared in the newsletter of the Pan-Africanist Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), based in Greensboro, North Carolina, at North Carolina A&T, founded in 1969. SOBU activists—some of whom had been members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—encouraged Black American students to connect politically and cultural with Africa.⁸³ On May 1, 1971, the article “Race War in the Sudan: Big White Lie” appeared in the SOBU newsletter. Produced by the Pacific News Service, the article contended that the Sudanese war mirrored Nigeria’s civil war. This time it was Sudan’s government that faced attempted regional secession (from the Azania Liberation Front, a southern political organization formed in 1965) and genocidal accusations from religious and social organizations.⁸⁴ The article contended that white mercenaries who had fought in the Congolese and Nigerian civil wars were in Sudan and that “the motive for Western support for the [southern Sudanese] secession [was] the same—divide and weaken one of Africa’s largest nations.” There was, however, an “interesting” difference. What was that preeminent difference? “The direct involvement of Israel.”⁸⁵

The writer noted that since the Azania Liberation Front’s creation a decade earlier, the organization had become more dependent on Israel’s political, economic, and military support. “[ALF leaders] are known to be receiving military training in Israel[,] and Israeli agents recently staged a [successful] military coup in Uganda.” Aside from giving Israel control over Nile headwaters that were critical to Egypt, the article stated, Israel viewed the Ugandan coup as essential to ensuring the continuous flow of supplies and advisers to Sudan’s rebels. In addition to acknowledging Israel’s purported role in East African affairs, the writer shined a light on the Western media’s role in framing the Sudanese conflict as one with antagonistic racial and religious elements. The writer argued that Israel had a part to play in this:

The news media in most western countries (particularly in the U.S.), have taken great pains to depict the struggle in the Sudan as one of Black Christian southerners seeking independence from cruel and oppressive Arab-Moslem northerners. The fact that most Sudanese, be they Arab-Moslem or Christian[,] are both Black somehow gets lost in the propaganda. The Israelis, however, using their vast network of Jewish organizations in the U.S. have brainwashed a number of Blacks in this country into being sympathetic to the cause of the Azana [sic] Liberation Front. Foremost among those parroting Israel’s propaganda line are such “traditional negro leaders” [who] have been long time supporters of Jewish causes and head civil rights organizations which are heavily dependent [financially] on … Jewish liberals.

The writer argued that the struggle to divide and weaken Sudan was another example of America and its allies working to stymie African progress. “It is one more reason why African unity is of the utmost importance to African people around the world. Unless Africa unites, the Western powers will continue to pick off African nations one by one until our people are again with complete slavery and degradation.”⁸⁶

With Israel framed in some cases as supporting Black fighters against Arabs and at other times as oppressors, Black American recognition of Israeli assistance to the southern Sudanese became an opportunity to discuss Israel’s role in the world and African America’s relationship to Arabs. Yet, despite dissidence concerning Israel’s role in Sudan specifically, Black American newspapers in the waning years of the war still conveyed a general support for southern Sudan.

Importantly, one editorial from Sudan’s Al Sahafa newspaper illustrated that Sudanese were willing to reference Israel in their expressions of solidarity with Black America. A daily newspaper published in Arabic, the paper was one of several established to promote an agenda that aligned with government needs. Though the August 1970 press law turned all publishing over to a public corporation, the private Al Sahafa was continued and had an estimated circulation of 25,000 by 1972.⁸⁷ In late July 1967 the paper discussed Black America in its editorial, stating that the Sudanese people and its press supported African Americans in their struggle against racial discrimination. As the Sudanese English-language Morning News explained, “Sudanese support was expressed unconditionally before the recent Israeli aggression against the Arab countries and in service of justice and human rights and dignity, [an Al Sahafa] editorial pointed out.” In a revealing statement, the Al Sahafa editorial—according to the Morning News—said that the Sudanese acted despite Dr. King’s “support of Israel for its last hostility against the Arabs.” The editorial purportedly concluded: “The Arab will never fail to support the cause of freedom and justice in any part of the world and at all times for the simple reason that they hate tyranny and hostility.”⁸⁸

In its creative display of discursive solidarity, Al Sahafa devoted space to articulate Sudanese (and Arab) solidarity with African Americans while distancing itself from the pro-Israeli view of the US civil rights movement’s most prominent figure. Furthermore, its reference to apartheid extended the bonds of solidarity beyond the borders of Sudan and the United States to those struggling under the weight of state-sponsored racial oppression in South Africa. Yet, in what could only be described as an elephant in the room, southern Sudanese were waging a struggle for liberation against the Sudanese state that was fraught with racial dimensions and received Israeli assistance. If African American expressions of solidarity with Sudan during this period showed serious contradictions, perhaps the same was true for those Sudanese looking west of the Sahara and Atlantic to contemporary America.

The early years of Sudanese independence were a dynamic period in the history of Black America’s relationship with the country. On one level, it witnessed the most significant presence of African Americans in Sudan in the twentieth century. Individuals like Andrew Brimmer, Madison Broadnax, and Valerie McCaw performed labor that not only laid the foundation for early US-Sudan relations but also contributed to the development of postcolonial Sudan’s economy and agriculture. The early independence period also witnessed a remarkable shift in the racial language Black writers used when describing the tumultuous events unfolding in Sudan at the time.

Before independence (1956), when it was unclear whether Sudan would become sovereign or ruled by Britain or Egypt, some writers in Black American newspapers framed colonizing Egypt and colonized Sudan in a racial binary wherein Arab Egypt ruled Black Sudan. However, after Sudan became independent, the racialized nature of civil war stoked a remarkable shift. As social and political tensions between northern and southern Sudanese increased, portrayals of northerners as “Arab” and southern Sudanese as “Black” or “Negro” swelled. While Sudan had hitherto been framed as Black in contrast to Arab Egypt, writers now transferred this racial binary south and fashioned it to fit an exclusively Sudanese mold. In a moment that highlighted the fickle nature of diasporic solidarity, African American writers now cast northern Sudanese Arabs as oppressors and Black southern Sudanese as the oppressed. In this vein, the beauty reflected in Black America’s capacity to reach out to an oppressed group on the other side of the world was contrasted by its willingness to discursively exclude a formerly included people from the bounds of blackness. From a Black American perspective, it appeared that one (in this case, northern Sudanese) could lose their proverbial Black card if they decided to oppress other Black people (southern Sudanese). African Americans so used to the unjust experience of marginalization and exclusion now showed themselves, in this stage of its history with the Sudan, as racial gatekeepers at a moment when white supremacy still reigned. It was regrettable.

Though Black newspapers generally published material that cast southern Sudanese in a sympathetic light, such sentiment was not always on display. Some infused Israel—then in conflict with Egypt and other Arab states—into their reporting on Sudan. In critiquing Israel’s involvement in Sudan, some writers added another layer to the issue of Black American racial solidarity meant in the context of the Sudanese civil war and drew the Arab-Israeli conflict into this equation. The convergence of these issues and divided African American views concerning Sudanese matters would be expressed decades later during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005).

The following chapter is situated during that conflict, when southern Sudanese rebels once again took up arms against the Sudanese state. Just as African Americans covered, commented on, and traveled to Sudan during the first conflict, Black Americans did the same during the second war. In an interesting twist, one prominent group of African Americans would support the Sudanese government even as millions of Sudanese Blacks suffered under its weight: the Nation of Islam. Sudan became a stage for African American Christians and Muslims to wage a crusade.