Family Secrets
When I was 21, I was let in on a family secret: my maternal great-grandmother had been enslaved. My great-grandfather had been a slave merchant. My mother revealed these details to me in the car one afternoon, as we were parked outside of my grandfather’s house in Khartoum. It was the mid-2000s. Even though we were alone, I remember that her voice dropped as she spoke. What she was sharing was taboo. I had never heard this family history before.
But that day, my mother told me the story as it had come down to her: my great-grandmother had been abducted either in southern Sudan or the borderlands of southern Sudan, sometime in the 1910s. Even though the British had colonized Sudan more than a decade earlier on the pretext of ending the slave trade, Sudan was still an active slave catchment zone at the time, the main supply source for the trans-Saharan slave trade, especially the south and its border areas.
My great-grandmother was a child when she was abducted. That day, an alarm went up in her home village when a slave raiding party was spotted approaching. Her mother—my great-great-grandmother—collected the children and hid with them in caves. The raiders fired shots. The shots were so loud that my great-grandmother thought they were coming from inside the hiding place. She panicked and bolted out before her mother could stop her. Outside, slave raiders were waiting. She was abducted and transported several hundred kilometers north to Khartoum, where she was eventually ‘married to’ (and likely raped by) the man who owned her, my great-grandfather. She would never see her mother, siblings or any of her family again. No one in our family knows her indigenous name; we only know the Arabic name that was given to her by my great-grandfather: Karima. The Generous One.
My great-grandfather, the slave merchant, was an Upper Egyptian man who had settled in Khartoum around the turn of the 20th century and made a fortune there through the slave trade and the acquisition of valuable agricultural land along the Nile. He had several wives (up to four at a time, in accordance with Islamic prescript), whom he regularly divorced to replace with new ones. He also had concubines. He was known to have a ‘taste’ for enslaved women—known in Sudanese Arabic as ‘siriyaat,’ from the root word ‘sir,’ meaning secret. My great-grandmother was one of his longer-lasting, public, ‘secrets.’ He married her officially and had eight children by her. Unusually for him, he never divorced her.
It’s not certain whether my great-grandmother was from South Sudan proper or from the Nuba Mountains, the area bordering it to the north. My grandfather, her son, was very dark-skinned and could easily pass for South Sudanese. He had the features, the immense height and the narrowness of bones that specifically distinguish the Dinka people of that region. But the detail of the caves in my great-grandmother’s story also suggests that it might have been the Nuba Mountains, the hilly border territory between North and South Sudan whose caves the Nuba people shelter in to this day to escape the bombs and guns of the post-independence wars that have ravaged that region, including the war currently devastating the country.
Sexual Violence in Sudan’s Counter-Revolutionary War
My great-grandmother’s story has been on my mind in the context of the war unfolding in Sudan. In April 2023, two generals—Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and Mohamed Hamdan (‘Hemedti’) Dagalo, head of the Rapid Support Forces militia (RSF)—fell out. Both men were elements of the old dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who had ruled Sudan between 1989 and 2019. Bashir’s reign came to an end with the December Revolution of 2018-2019, which saw massive popular protest against his regime. The two generals helped remove him from power in 2019, and then allied to stage a coup in October 2021, forcibly seizing power from civilians who were part of the transitional power-sharing government.
Having derailed the revolution, they then turned on one another. For almost two years now, they have been destroying the country in their fight for power. According to UN estimates, by October 2024 14 million people had been displaced in this war. 25 million—half the country’s population—are facing hunger. At least 150,000 have been killed. There is no food, no clean water, no shelter, no medicine or healthcare in large swathes of the country. Horrific massacres have become almost a daily occurrence especially in western Sudan (Darfur), southern Sudan (South Kordofan and most recently White Nile State), and central Sudan (Khartoum and al-Jazirah states).