This book shows how the modern-day Sudan has been haunted by the distant past and presents the voices of two hundred peoples of South Sudan, a region which according to some "has no history." Many societies, worldwide, particularly those that have been non-literate, possess oral histories reaching back many centuries. They possess long memories, especially about wars and events of great trauma. Labeled "blood memories" in this book, the author presents a pre-colonial history of Southern Sudan. Beginning in the fourteenth century, the book follows the region's largest ethnic group today, the Dinka, from their original homelands in the central Sudanese Gezira between the Blue and White Niles, into their more recently adopted homelands in Southern Sudan. The book demonstrates how fierce wars, ethnic struggles, and expansion shaped the "inner" history of the south today. External slave trades by Muslim cattle nomads from West Africa, the Baggara, further shaped the socio-political and military culture of the region. The book ends at the dawning of the Egyptian colonial era in 1821. Then, by way of an epilogue, it demonstrates how these earlier pre-colonial stresses have come to play a critical role in modern-day South Sudan, in what has since become the world's longest civil war, presently fought externally against the fundamentalist Islamic Northern Sudanese government as well as internally within the south itself.
Stephanie Beswick is professor of history at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She was born in Khartoum, Sudan.