In the last five articles on the issue above I have discussed the roots of the background of the formation of the Sudanese identity with regard to the Middle East and Africa. I hereby come to a conclusion to the historical background of the formation to the Sudanese (multiple) identity:
According to the 1955/6 population census there are 56 separate ethnic groups, further divided into 597 subgroups. About 115 languages are spoken; Arabic is spoken by the majosrity and is at the same time the lingua franca of others. About 70% of the Sudanese are Muslims, 5% are Christians and 25% are of traditional African religions. In both the North and the South individuals and groups have multiple identities: “it is not uncommon to identify oneself in terms of an ethnic group and the wider Arab and African groupings. This multiplicity of identities blended in the Sudan over a long period of time produced an overwhelming ethnic complixities that has put this vast country at crossroads: either positively interwoven through national integration to make a melting pot or otherwise weaken the country and jeopardize its national cohesion.
This ethnic multiplicity may be behind the scholars’ claim that even the North (of the Sudan) is held up together by Islam and Arabic ties because the North is much influenced by the pre-existing tribal cultures to the North. In the South the people “are not pure Negro, Hamitic influences have also been said to exist;) although Southerners are among the darkest in the world. There is a complex admixture between the Brown and the Negro races: “the Nilotics have Hamitic Caucasian elements in their admixture.” (34) Professor Evans-Pritchard has observed that: “It is doubtful whether any peoples in the Sudan can be regarded as true negroes, and their non-negroid characters, their pastoral pursuits and to a certain degree the structure of their langauage, are attributed to Hamitic admixture and influence.”
Ali Mazrui notes that: “One could see Sudan as a bridge between Arabic-speaking Africa and English-speaking Africa; between the Africa of the homogenised mass nation-states of the future and the Africa of the deep ethnic cleavage of the present; and finally between West Afrcia as a cultural unit and Eastern Africa.” So by virtue of such intermediary position the Sduanese constitute the most important point of contact between Arab and negro Africa. It is a crossroad of racial mixture and intermarriage. But some anthropologists maintain that “a large proportion of Arab Sudanese are in fact Arabised Negroes, rather than ethnically Semitic. For many of them Arabness is a cultural acquisition, rather than a racial heriditary.” Moreover, Ibn Khaldoun had already indicated an old settelment of Juhayna in ancient Sudan though the stamp of blackness on Arabism comes pre-eminently from the Sudan. It is not only the racial mixture and general acculturation that makes the Sudan an important point of contact between Arabism and negroism, but also the sharp division between the Northern Sudan and the South. Athough the South has seceded in 2011, the North is still maintain this high multiplicity of identities leaving the question of identity still hanging!
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