From the 'Brutality of the Dervishes' to the 'Diaspora Bedouins': Manufacturing the Enemy and the Memory of War in Sudan

El-Tahir Badreddin Khalid: There is something comforting in the idea of the 'Diaspora Bedouins.' It shifts a large portion of the explanation for the Sudanese war to the outside: fighters who came from Sahelian countries, borders crossed by groups and weapons, and regional and international interventions. It then gathers these facts into a larger story: a historical group moving toward Sudan, a project to settle the land and change its population, and external powers using this group to achieve it. The most complete formulation of this idea came in two articles published by El-Dirdiri Mohamed Ahmed in June 2023, about two months after the war broke out: 'The Diaspora Bedouins and the Project to Resettle Them in Sudan,' followed by 'The Diaspora Bedouins and How We Can Thwart Their Settlement Project.' El-Dirdiri is an intellectual and a leader of the Islamic Movement and the National Congress Party; he held senior political and diplomatic positions and was the last Minister of Foreign Affairs during the Ingaz (Salvation) era. It is worth reflecting on the fact that the narrative he crafted transcended its political environment, and some of its vocabulary and assumptions have become present even among Sudanese who have remained at odds with the Islamic Movement and its regime. To understand this, one must first briefly present the main idea in El-Dirdiri's articles. He does not start with the April war, nor with the founding of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), nor even with the Darfur war; rather, he goes back to the 11th century and the conflict between the Fatimids in Egypt and the Zirids in Ifriqiya. He invokes the narrative that links the migration of the Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym westward to the Fatimids pushing these tribes toward Ifriqiya after the Zirids rebelled against their authority. In the structure he presents, the 'Taghriba' (the westward migration) was not just an migration of nomadic Arab tribes toward the west, but also a political and military deployment of them: an authority swaying the leaders of these tribes and pushing them toward its opponent, thus contributing to weakening it, followed by what is associated in the historical narrative with the ruin of Kairouan, then groups of them settling in the new territory and reshaping its demographic composition. From this precedent, El-Dirdiri builds his analogy for the present. After the 'Taghriba' (westward migration) to the west, he speaks of a 'Tashriqa' (eastward migration) from the Sahel space toward Sudan. He gathers under the name 'Diaspora Bedouins' Arab groups distributed across Chad, Niger, Mali, Central Africa, and others, then connects them to the Janjaweed, the RSF, and the April war. He leaves it to the reader to name the power that pushed these people in their 'Tashriqa,' just as the Fatimids pushed the Hilalians in their 'Taghriba.' Thus, in his interpretation, what is happening becomes a reproduction of an old model: an external power employing transnational nomadic Arab groups in its conflict, then the military movement turns into population settlement and demographic change. Here, specifically, the construction of the narrative begins. A narrative does not necessarily mean fabricating facts; it may consist of true facts, but by selecting some while ignoring others, ordering them, establishing relationships between them, and then giving them a direction and a meaning. The existence of the Banu Hilal is a historical fact, the spread of Arab groups in the Sahel is another fact, and the movement of fighters across borders is a verifiable occurrence. As for making these facts chapters in a single story that begins in Kairouan about a thousand years ago and ends with the 'Diaspora Bedouins' and a settlement project in Sudan today, that is another construct created by the author. And here, too, the enemy is built narratively. Different groups in history and geography are gathered under one name, then the name is granted a common origin, a common history, and a common project, until the contemporary individual becomes a representative of a history that began hundreds of years before them. In my opinion, this construct presents a racist reading of history and the present, not just because it talks about migration or origins, but because it transfers origin, lineage, and culture from subjects of understanding history to tools for interpreting human behavior in the present, then reduces different groups into a single entity assumed to have one origin, one nature, and one project. Closer history disrupts this construct more than debates about genealogy do. Until the end of the 1960s, the relationships of the Rizeigat Abbala with the agricultural communities whose lands they entered in search of water and pasture were not permanent war relationships. In many regions and periods, they were based on mutual benefit; the herders moved along known paths, their animals grazed on field residues and fertilized the land, and the two parties exchanged products and services. The wide involvement of the Abbala in armed conflicts is a relatively recent development. Then the environment that allowed these relationships to continue changed. Drought struck the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s, water and pastures receded, large numbers of livestock died, and competition for land and resources intensified. The impact of this was more severe on societies whose economy is based on seasonal movement and whose lifestyle continuity does not depend on owning a fixed plot of land, but on access to water, pasture, and the routes that connect them. At the same time, weapons proliferated, and the wars in Chad and the Libyan-Chadian conflict were among their most important channels. Thus, resource disputes gradually began to turn into more dangerous conflicts, and issues of water, pasture, routes, and land became, for some of these groups, linked to protection and the possibility of the continuity of their lifestyle itself. The state entered this turbulent environment, not a vacuum. Militarization was not a predestined fate carried in the origin of these societies. The Ingaz (Salvation) regime found groups weakened by environmental shifts, with scarce resources, and increasing fears under a state that did not provide them with security and services and did not settle land and rights disputes. However, when it needed fighters for its war, it found in this fragility a resource that could be exploited. It fueled existing fears and contradictions, armed local groups, linked the interests of some of their leaders to the war, and then employed them within its strategy to confront the rebellion in Darfur. Instead of addressing the fragility, it was armed. The gun reached places where schools, water, healthcare, land rights settlements, and equal protection did not. The impact of this did not stop at providing fighters for the state; years of militarization reshaped the societies themselves, produced new leaders, interests, and economic and military networks, and made weapons part of the power balances and access to resources and protection. Here is a paradox that almost sums up the story: those who are defined today as 'coming from beyond the borders,' some of them were placed yesterday by the state into formations it called 'Border Guards' when the authority needed their guns. They were border guards; and when the force that helped build them became a threat to it, their extension across the borders became evidence of their foreignness. This history also reveals the weakness of interpreting violence as an extension of a fixed nature within the group. What changed during these decades was not the origin of people or their lineages, but the environment, resources, the proliferation of weapons, and their relationship with the state. If the relationships themselves moved from long periods of cooperation and mutual benefit to conflict and militarization, then the more valid question becomes: what has changed in the conditions of people's lives and in their relationship with the state? Here, recent history offers a stronger explanation than a lineage dating back a thousand years. However, El-Dirdiri's narrative moves in the other direction when it shifts from origin and history to the marks he says the 'Diaspora Bedouins' can be distinguished by from the Arabs of Sudan: dialect, clothing, food, lifestyle, religiosity, and even personal hygiene. Here, what is called essentialization is completed: the group is no longer defined only by a presumed origin and history, but comes to have fixed cultural and social traits that are assumed to reveal its individuals and explain their difference. At this point, the classification moves from history to the human being himself. The question is no longer just where these groups came from, but how we identify the 'stranger' when we see him. From here, the road becomes short from lineage to dialect and clothing, and from culture to appearance and face. During the war, what became popular as the 'law of strange faces' appeared, not as a codified law, but in suspicion and sorting based on features, color, dialect, and supposed regional affiliation. Thus, the process of alienation begins with a story about origin and history, then moves to culture and lifestyle, to end with the possibility of suspecting a contemporary human being because his face or tongue does not match the preconceived image of who is 'from here.' And here lies, in my opinion, one of the most dangerous results of this reading: it is not content with reinterpreting the history of specific groups, but it also grants itself the tools to determine who looks Sudanese and who looks foreign to it. If this reading has found acceptance outside the political and ideological environment that produced it, part of the explanation lies in the difference in the Sudanese experience with the state and its wars. Khartoum is not only the center of the state, media, universities, and political and professional elites; it is also a city large segments of which lived for a long time with the army as one of the state's institutions more than they knew it as a war army. They knew its camps, leadership, coups, administrative and political roles, and its repression, but they did not know by direct experience the face that societies in Southern Sudan previously, Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, and Blue Nile knew: the Antonovs, aerial bombardment, villages turning into theaters of operations, prolonged displacement, and war becoming part of daily life. Sudanese entered the April war, in this sense, with different memories of the same institution. What was for large segments of the center's population 'the army,' as a national institution of the state, was for other Sudanese also the force they knew through decades of war. And when the war reached Khartoum, the RSF was the newest and strangest force in the urban social space, and it was the one that entered neighborhoods and homes. Therefore, the narrative of the 'stranger coming from abroad' found a present experience that it could connect with. This difference becomes more important because Khartoum is not just another place the war reached; it is also one of the most important centers for producing the national narrative about it. In it are concentrated the institutions of media, education, and culture, as well as political and professional elites, even if the ability to produce discourse is distributed unevenly within it. Thus, the war this time reached an environment more capable of transforming its own experience into a general narrative about the war, while the experiences of societies that lived Sudan's wars for decades remained less present in the national memory. Conversely, the RSF was able to accumulate weapons, money, and gold, but it did not accumulate to the same extent the ability to produce knowledge about the social environments from which many of its fighters came. The history of the Badiya (nomadic lands), the damar (settlements), the routes, the economy of herding, the transformations that affected land and resources, and the relationship of these communities with the state remained less present in the center's knowledge of Sudan. It was easier to see the fighter when he arrived in Khartoum than to see the history that preceded his arrival. El-Dirdiri did not create this ignorance of one another, but he gave it a story; and what we know little of from Sudan becomes easier to present as something not from Sudan. With the stabilization of this story, the new events of the war began to find their places within it. The National Museum was looted, and cultural institutions, records, and offices related to land were damaged. These are real and grave losses. However, some discourse went beyond documenting the sabotage to explaining it as part of a project to erase Sudan's history, ownership, and memory in preparation for population replacement. Thus, the process of alienation extended from the human to the homeland itself: the 'stranger' does not only come from outside, but comes, according to this construct, to strip Sudan of its history, memory, and its people's ownership; a kind of de-Sudanization. The work of this framework appeared early in the news of the burning of the National Records Office. The news spread in the first weeks of the war accompanied by a ready-made interpretation of the systematic destruction of Sudan's history. But historian Ahmed Ibrahim Abu Shouk verified it at the time with the employees of the office, and it turned out that the news of the fire was incorrect, and the image used to prove it dated back to a fire in Australia. News also circulated about the burning of the Sudanese Library, before it became clear that the fire affected a neighboring building, although the library was indeed later looted and vandalized and lost rare books. the importance of these examples is not to diminish the ruin that has befallen Sudan, but that they reveal another phase of the narrative's life. At the beginning, the narrative selects facts and arranges them to produce an explanation; after the explanation settles, it begins itself to determine the way in which we receive new facts. And if the idea that there is a project to erase Sudan and replace it with other populations takes root, the news of burning the country's archive becomes believable, indeed explainable, before verifying the occurrence of the fire itself. Sudan has an older experience with what war narratives can do when they live after the war. The Mahdist state witnessed real violence and repression, but our later knowledge of that history was also formed through a colonial production that Reginald Wingate, Director of Intelligence in the Egyptian Army, was one of its most prominent creators. Wingate was not just a neutral conduit for the testimonies of others; he played an important role in editing and releasing the accounts of prisoners Joseph Ohrwalder and Rudolf Slatin to the English reader, in a context in which Britain was building its image of the Mahdiyya and its argument for reconquering Sudan. From these writings and others, the image of the 'brutality of the Dervishes' accumulated, in contrast to Gordon, whose image British literature rebuilt as a Christian hero and martyr. What the two cases have in common is not only producing an image of the enemy, but the function this image performs within the war itself. The image of the 'brutality of the Dervishes' contributed to building the political and moral argument for reconquering Sudan. After more than a century, the 'Diaspora Bedouins' narrative performs a similar function in a different context: it redefines the April war from a conflict between two forces formed within the history of the Sudanese state into a war of defense of the homeland in the face of foreign invasion and a settlement project that threatens the land, population, and memory. In this sense, the narrative is not content with explaining the war or defining its enemy; it also grants the continuation of the fighting its own logic. If the war is a confrontation with a project of invasion, population replacement, and erasure of the homeland, then its continuation becomes a defense of the existence of the homeland itself, and ending it before defeating that project becomes harder to conceive. Thus, the war narrative is not just a description of what is happening; it can become one of the resources that fuel its continuation. The problem does not lie in the fact that the violence of the Mahdist state was fabricated. On the contrary, the importance of the example comes precisely from the fact that the violence was real, while there remained an authority in choosing which violence is told, which victims move to the center of the narrative, how facts are linked to one another, and what they become evidence of. The violence of the state of the Khalifa Abdallahi did not befall the groups of the center and the north alone. Campaigns of repression, killing, and displacement also reached groups in western Sudan, including groups that were close to the Khalifa ethnically and culturally, among them the Rizeigat and branches of the Abbala and Mahariya. Nevertheless, when the 'brutality of the Mahdiyya' is invoked in some contemporary Sudanese debates, Metemma and the voices of specific victims emerge, while other victims recede whose presence would complicate the simple picture of a conflict between an 'invading west' and a 'victim center.' The issue is not that the Metemma incident did not happen, nor that its victims are less deserving of memory, but that choosing whom we remember and whom we forget can define the story we extract from the past. Here another paradox appears. A reading that enters history loaded with its contemporary divisions can select from it what returns these divisions to it in the form of history. Perhaps for this reason, some debates that accompanied our current war returned to an archive, a significant part of which was crafted by the pen of colonial intelligence, and summoned from it old images and definitions of Sudan's problems, without always stopping at the question of whether those definitions themselves were part of the legacy that should be criticized. Most importantly, the impact of this type of knowledge production may live much longer than the political moment that produced it. In the introduction to his book 'Imam Al-Mahdi: A Portrait of a Sudanese Revolutionary,' historian Mohamed Said Al-Qaddal mentions that, in the context of celebrating the centenary of the Mahdist Revolution in 1981, he returned to the University of Khartoum library and found more than forty books about Gordon, while he did not find a similar modern biography of the Mahdi. After nearly a century, the power imbalance that surrounded the Mahdiyya was no longer present only on the battlefield or in the propaganda that accompanied the re-occupation; it became present also in the library, in the volume of what was written about each party, and in the material from which a new generation begins to understand its history. This is what makes the 'Diaspora Bedouins' larger than the disagreement over two articles written in the first weeks of the war. What is written during the war can become part of the archive of what comes after it, and what is repeated enough might transition from being a political interpretation to an inherited 'fact' that no one asks how it was made. If the idea that there is a historical group called 'Diaspora Bedouins' that came to Sudan as part of a settlement project settles, its impact will not remain confined to explaining the April war. It will return when Sudanese discuss land, hakuras (traditional land rights), return, citizenship, the national number, compensation, and reconciliation. And then the question could move from a human's responsibility for what they did during the war to a question about the human being himself: is he from here originally? And the fact that this reading found acceptance outside the political and ideological environment that produced it makes the problem broader than El-Dirdiri and the Islamic Movement. It reveals older and broader premises: an unequal perception of Sudan, in which the Sudanese identity of some people seems self-evident and does not need proof, while the Sudanese identity of others remains open to examination whenever power balances change or a new war breaks out. Criticizing this does not require denying foreign intervention or the presence of foreign fighters, nor does it require exonerating any armed force. Rather, it requires that we look at the history of Sudan as we ourselves have also made it. The state did not leave the crises of the peripheries 'without solutions'; it waged extended wars in them, bombed their inhabitants, displaced millions, invested in the contradictions and fears of their societies, armed some against others, and turned fragility and the need for protection into resources for managing the war and sustaining power. Some images that colonial intelligence contributed to producing about the Mahdiyya lasted more than a hundred years, and we are still invoking parts of them in the wars of our present. And there is no guarantee that the 'Diaspora Bedouins' will not do the same if we leave it to turn from a war narrative into an inherited fact. Then, the damage will not be that it was wrong in reading the past only; it is that it will also narrow the space in which Sudanese can imagine a common future.