The Cause
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| Figure 5 |
“Semantics are important here: it isn't Arabs versus Africans, but the Arab north versus the African south” (January). This is all began in 2003 with the African farmers as the victims as the nomadic Arab militia was coming into the farmers’ lands. "The idea of Arabness was already in place but the British continued to promote it. The British saw the northern Sudanese around Khartoum as better than the black Sudanese. The colonial ideology fit, in the long run, with the Sudanese habit of looking down on people in the west" (January) so this isn’t necessarily about the religion or the racial differences between the two groups, but more about the people in one region being more superior than the other. "When the British came, they were so impressed with indirect rule that they made the Masalit a laboratory of indirect rule. But it was not a favoring of the nomads over the settled farmers, more the reverse” (January). Obviously time has changed this. Now it is not really about a third party thinking that one group is more superior than the other, but more about the nomads thinking they are more superior than the farmers.
