Slavery and Jihad in the Sudan is not only a riveting narrative about the struggle against the slave trade and martyrdom of Charles Gordon at the hands of the Mahdi, but also an account of conditions during a period of great trauma. Fred Thomas holds a PhD in social anthropology and has studied and worked in Sudan. He relies on his vast knowledge and personal experience to bring attention to a place and time in a unique part of the world where grass roots conditions in a tribal society have changed little over time, particularly in the vast expanses of rural Sudan. Thomas highlights the extraordinary personalities of the time by sharing anecdotes from explorers, Muslim holy men, Christian missionaries, foreign mercenaries, and slave traders. As Thomas recounts the legacy of Mahdism, he also includes haunting vestiges of earlier times within the atrocities currently occurring in Darfur, as well as an interesting correlation between ancient tribal and religious differences to their practical relevance in today's world. Compiled with fragments of conversations, captivating descriptions, and personal stories, Slavery and Jihad in the Sudan allows a glimpse into a fascinating period.

This groundbreaking study offers a rare window into the history of slavery in the Sudan, with particular attention to the relationships between slaves and masters. Thoroughly documented, it provides valuable context to current issues of global concern and combats persistent myths about African slavery.

Slavery has been endemic in Sudan for thousands of years. Today the Sudanese slave trade persists as a complex network of buyers, sellers, and middlemen that operates most actively when times are favorable to the practice. As Jok Madut Jok argues, the present day is one such time, as the Sudanese civil war that resumed in 1983 rages on between the Arab north and the black south. Permitted and even encouraged by the Arab-dominated Khartoum government, the state military has captured countless women and children from the south and sold them into slavery in the north to become concubines, domestic servants, farm laborers, or even soldiers trained to fight against their own people. Also instigated by the Khartoum government, Arab herding groups routinely take and sell the Nilotic peoples of Dinka and Nuer. Jok emphasizes that the contemporary practice of slavery in Sudan is not the result of two decades of civil war, as conventional wisdom in the media would have one believe. Instead he revisits the historic hostilities between the Islamic world to the north and, to the south, the Black African peoples, many of whom are Christian converts. For Arab traders "the nation of the blacks," or Bilad Al-Sudan, has traditionally been the source of slaves. When the slave trade developed into corporate enterprise in the nineteenth century, the slave-takers articulated distinctions based on race, ethnicity, and religion that marked the black, infidel southerners as indisputably inferior and therefore "natural" slaves. Such distinctions have survived for decades and have fueled various forms of oppression of the black south, even during those periods when slavery has not been authorized by the government. When it is authorized, as it is today, slavery then becomes the extreme form of this systemic oppression. War and Slavery in Sudan exposes the enslavement of black peoples in Sudan which has been exacerbated, if not caused, by the circumstance of war. As a black southerner and a member of the Dinka, a group targeted by Arab slave traders, Jok brings an insider's perspective to this highly volatile subject matter. He describes the various methods of capture, explores the heinous experience of captivity, and examines the efforts of slaves to escape. Jok also assesses the efforts of Dinka communities to locate and redeem, or buy back, slaves through middlemen, a strategy that has been supported by Western antislavery groups and church-based humanitarian agencies but has also been the subject of great moral debate. Throughout the book, Jok stresses that the search for settlement of the north-south conflict must be made in conjunction with a campaign to end slavery. He challenges the international community to move beyond diplomatic measures to take more coordinated action against the slave trade and bring liberation to the people of Sudan.

Unlike African slavery in Europe and the Americas, slavery in the Sudan and other parts of Africa persisted well into the twentieth century. Sudanese slaves served Sudanese masters until the region was conquered by the Turks, who practiced slavery on a larger, institutional scale. When the British took over the Sudan in 1898, they officially emancipated the slaves, yet found it impossible to replace their labor in the country’s economy. This pathfinding study explores the process of emancipation and the development of wage labor in the Sudan under British colonial rule. Ahmad Sikainga focuses on the fate of ex-slaves in Khartoum and on the efforts of the colonial government to transform them into wage laborers. He probes into what colonial rule and city life meant for slaves and ex-slaves and what the city and its people meant for colonial officials. This investigation sheds new light on the legacy of slavery and the status of former slaves and their descendants. It also reveals how the legacy of slavery underlies the current ethnic and regional conflicts in the Sudan. It will be vital reading for students of race relations and slavery, colonialism and postcolonialism, urbanization, and labor history in Africa and the Middle East.

The African Diaspora was a consequence of the enslavement in the interior of West Africa. This work examines the conditions of slavery facing Muslims and converts to Islam both in the central Sudan and in the broader diaspora of Africans. It considers the consequences of European colonization.

The critics of Charles George Gordon accused him of vacillation and of instability of character. His supporters refused to admit that he was inconstant; they took the position that it was the Gladstone Cabinet which manifested a spirit of indecision that was fraught with terrible consequences. General Gordon was a prolific letter-writer, and he also kept a journal. Many official notes and dispatches deal with his final mission to Khartoum. This book, first published in 1933, attempts to get at the truth of Gordon’s character and his time in the Sudan through these letters, this journal, these notes and despatches.

Group and Individual Cases

A panoramic, provocative account of the clash between British imperialism and Arab jihadism in Africa between 1870 and 1920 The Ottoman Sultan called for a "Great Jihad" against the Entente powers at the start of the First World War. He was building on half a century of conflict between British colonialism and the people of the Middle East and North Africa. Resistance to Western violence increasingly took the form of radical Islamic insurgency. Ranging from the forests of Central Africa to the deserts of Egypt, Sudan, and Somaliland, Neil Faulkner explores a fatal collision between two forms of oppression, one rooted in the ancient slave trade, the other in modern "coolie" capitalism. He reveals the complex interactions between anti-slavery humanitarianism, British hostility to embryonic Arab nationalism, "war on terror" moral panics, and Islamist revolt. Far from being an enduring remnant of the medieval past, or an essential expression of Muslim identity, Faulkner argues that "Holy War" was a reactionary response to the violence of modern imperialism.