"Sudan is collapsing...", begins the headline of an article by Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, published by Chatham House, London, on 2 February.

De Waal is author of several major books and papers on Sudan, published over the past 40 years.

"The Sudanese civil war is brutal, devastating and shows no sign of coming to an end", he writes, and has "caused a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented size." 

"According to United Nations figures from January 2024, of Sudan’s 45 million people, 5.9 million are internally displaced and 1.4 million have fled as refugees, with 25 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, with a looming food crisis and risk of famine."

As de Waal explains, this war is now "fought principally between the Sudan Armed Forces, under the command of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, headed by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as ‘Hemedti’."

It involves a crisis for Africa in which the government of the African National Congress in South Africa has played a shameful role.

For me, the most important book that explains the causes of this horror for South Africans is the study, Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (Oneworld Publications, London, 2016), by Professor Jok Madut Jok, issued eight years ago in a revised edition.

In his study Islam's Black Slaves:The Other Black Diaspora (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2001), the South African editor and historian, Ronald Segal, noted that the Dinka people in Bahr el-Ghazal in South Sudan (among whom Jok grew up, and did a great deal of research) in the 1990s were "a primary target of slaving, and the main slavers have been [the Khartoum-based] government militias, drawn from among the cattle-raising, Arabic-speaking Baggara people, who live in the neighbouring regions of Kordofan and Darfur." (p.219).

Race, religion, violence - this combined subject is the focus of Jok's contribution as a historian. It is the subject also of his earlier book, War and Slavery in Sudan, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in the US in 2001. No other writer from Sudan is his equal. And no living writer in South Africa can compare with him.

Jok is a primary voice of Africa, disgracefully neglected in South Africa, to its shame.

In Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence, he notes very specifically: "The military junta presently in power is made up of NIF [National Islamic Front] members but has disingenuously sought to rename itself the National Congress Party and has pursued a policy of Arabization and Islamization since it came to power. It continues to have little respect for other racial groups and faiths. This racist and religious zeal heightens their willingess to fight...." 

Both of these books focus on "the present military regime of General Omar Hassan el Bashir backed by the fundamentalist NIF which came to power through a military coup on June 30, 1989." (p.87)

Jok concludes that "The ruling Islamist movement, the NCP [National Congress Party, "Congress", as camouflaged by el Bashir], has remained in power, reigning for over a quarter of a century and becoming the longest ruling and most authoritarian regime in Sudan's post-colonial history." (p.298)

He notes that "Khartoum is always unwilling to admit that the famines are more man-made than natural. The 1998 Bahr el-Ghazal famine, for example, killed 100,000 people in a course of four months, and the main causes of famine were Murahileen Arab raids....". Their actions included "prohibition of certain ethnic groups from their religious worship and other cultural practices, and suppression of certain linguistic and cultural groupings through the national educational system, the government-sponsored media, and jihadic wars that targeted specific groups for elimination or absorbtion". (p.285)

"This in turn has led to a chronic population drain from the peripheries towards specified locations where they are made more vulnerable to the Arabization and Islamization designs, where they are captive and impoverished, where they function as a reservoir for cheap labor." (pp.285-6)

Concerning the fate of black Africans in Darfur in the west of Sudan, Jok writes: "The north and westward movement of the displaced has created other types of humanitrarian problems such as the risks of being raped by both the police that were supposed to protect them and the Janjaweed militia that were constantly lurking to prevent them from thinking of a return home. ... 

"Flight into refugee camps in Chad has been another alternative, which fulfills the government's plans of de-populating the non-Arab areas for the express purpose of redistributing their land to Arabs and the allied militias." Jok's assessment is that "a modern form of slavery has emerged from this whereby slavers can continue their vice while looking like employers." (pp.286-7)

He is very clear on this subject: "The war in Darfur, which was declared genocide in 2004 by the US and a number of human rights agencies, covers much of Sudan's westernmost region...". (p.119)

In a note at the back of the book, which cites numerous academic studies, including by Alex de Waal, Jok points out: "I have been conducting an inquiry into the lives of my schoolmates who had joined the SPLA [Sudan People's Liberation Army, which resisted Arab Islamist colonisation and dictatorship - PT], and it has turned out that nearly half of the 300 of them who were in my class have perished in the war." (p.333)

No school in South Africa from the apartheid period can claim such a loss.

Referring to "the scale of catastrophe", Jok has no hesitation in referring to "the regime's genocidal wars in other arenas, such as the far western province of Darfur." He is blunt about "Darfur's genocide", writing: "The death and destruction in Darfur are fulfilling the reasoning behind genocide, which is to destroy cultures and re-induct the survivors into the image of the conqueror...". (pp.149/150)

All this was written years before the recent onslaught against black Africans in West Darfur by Sudan's Janjaweed Muslim Arab militias, organised in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) headed by General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, nicknamed Hemedti ("little Mohamed"), with a mass flight of black Africans to neighbouring Chad, in destitution.

Jok's writings have immediate and direct importance in South Africa for three reasons. Above all, they indicate betrayal by ANC government of the fundamental principles of the struggle against apartheid and the supposed principles of the Constitution.

First, as The Guardian (London) reported on 15 June 2015 in an article "Omar al-Bashir case suggests South African foreign policy is going rogue", al-Bashir as then president of Sudan had "flown home, leaving South Africa in defiance of a court order that he must remain to face an international arrest warrant."

The president's abrupt departure had come "amid urgent calls from the UN general secretary, Ban Ki-moon, the EU and the US for the 71-year-old Sudanese leader to be detained.

"Dressed in traditional white robes, Bashir – who is wanted by the international criminal court (ICC) for alleged genocide and war crimes in Darfur – emerged from his plane in Khartoum on Monday afternoon to be greeted by cheering supporters.

"His flight is a serious challenge to the authority of the ICC, which has issued two international warrants for his arrest."

Genocide - and contempt by then ANC president Jacob Zuma and his deputy president, Cyril Ramaphosa, for the charge of genocide against black Africans conducted by al-Bashir, who Jok describes as the "devout and ruthless" commander (p.133) of the "longest ruling and most authoritarian regime in Sudan's post-colonial history", as master of a "theocratic state." (p.163)

As Jok writes, "The failures of the international community to bring those accused of crimes against humanity to book indicate Khartoum's genocidal victory." (p.273). South Africa under ANC government carries the worst stigma. 

Secondly, ANC government is guilty of upholding a regime in Africa which has given succour to practitioners of Islamic jihad internationally.

Jok reports that "many Sudanese seem to believe that Omar al-Bashir was made president at the time of the 1989 military coup by the NIF leaders to be a figurehead while real power lay in the hands of Hassan al-Turabi ... and many others." (p.135-6) Briefly detained by the military after its coup, the Islamic and legal scholar al-Turabi "went straight from jail to a position of power in the new government: proof for many Sudanese that he had been behind the putsch all along and had sought to cover up this fact." As speaker of the national assembly in Khartoum, he was "a dominant force in Sudanese politics from about 1990 until 1999 ... brutally prosecuting the war against the south and making Sudan a base for extremists from all over the Islamic world."  (p.136)

Al-Bashir's regime had been "masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi", according to Jok, "dominated by an Arabized elite originating in the Nile Valley, with strong links to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood." (pp.139-40)

After returning to Sudan in 1965 following university study in London and Paris, al-Turabi began "uniting  the Sudan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood with the country's other like-minded groups."  When he became Sudan's attorney general in 1977, "members of the NIF and Muslim Brotherhood began to gain power within the civil service, intelligence and institutions of government ...." (p.74)

Jok writes that al-Turabi was "among the most powerful men behind Sudan's military regime and the mastermind of the Islamist regime that invited Osama bin Laden [subsequently the leader of al-Qaeda - PT] to set up training camps for Hammas and other terrorist groups in eastern Sudan." The government in Khartoum "hosted Osama bin Laden between 1991 and 1996" (p.255), although al Bashir hastened to distance himself and his government from al-Qaeda after its attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001, with the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York.

Jok describes the Muslim Brothers as being part of the "ideological atmosphere" of "the al-Bashir Islamist regime." (p.221)  He notes that "Sudan's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood later became the National Islamic Front (NIF)" (p.327), and thus a direct presence in government.

One notes here that Hamas - an abbreviation for Islamic Resistance Movement - defined itself in its Covenant of 1988 as "one of the wings of Moslem Brotherhood in Palestine. Moslem Brotherhood Movement is a universal organization which constitutes the largest Islamic movement in modern times."

The Hamas Covenant continues: "The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews'." 

This is the language of genocide. There is a political and ideological relation here between al-Bashir's government and global Islamic jihad, which al-Bashir tried to cover up after the downing of the Twin Towers. ANC government under Zuma and Ramaphosa blocked this issue of genocide from investigation by the International Criminal Court.

My third point looks directly to the meeting with Ramaphosa in Pretoria on 4 January this year between the principal director of the current disastrous civil war in Sudan, General Dagalo, known as Hemedti.

As Jesse Copelyn accurately asked in the title of an article in Mail&Guardian (5 February), "Why did Cyril Ramaposa gladhand a genocidal general?"

She appropriately quotes the Sudanese political analyst, Kholood Khair, as stating that Ramaphosa's smiling handshake "showed that Hemedti 'is not only meeting despots'", but also "that presidents 'consider Hemedti to be presidential material, if not president in actual fact'."

"She [Khair] pointed to the quickly-deleted tweet by South Africa’s government that referred to Hemedti as Sudan’s president. These steps also serve to weaken al- Burhan’s position."

In an article in The Guardian, London, on 17 April 2023, Peter Beaumoint  wrote that Dagalo rose "through the ranks of the Janjaweed during the 2003-05 war in southern Darfur, in which an estimated 300,000 people died", and "caught the eye of the then dictator Omar al-Bashir, for whom he would act as an enforcer.

"Always an opportunist, he briefly led a rebellion against Bashir and Khartoum in 2007-08, withdrawing his forces into the bush and fighting the army before cutting a deal with the government that promoted him to general. ...

"His rise under Bashir came with other rewards. Allowed to operate with autonomy and a large degree of impunity, he seized goldmines from a rival tribal leader in Darfur – the source of his considerable wealth.

" 'I’m not the first man to have goldmines,' Hemedti told the BBC. 'It’s true, we have goldmines and there’s nothing preventing us from working in gold.'" 

There is the hypocrisy of ANC government - refusal to uphold the International Criminal Court in its attempt to indict al-Bashir for genocide against black Africans, eagerly followed with its application to the International Court for Justice for a genocide ruling against Israel in its war against Hamas, following the massacre of Jews by Hamas on October 7 last year.

People in South Africa can listen to Jok Madut Jok being interviewed on SABC in a programme on YouTube from two years ago. He is currently professor of anthropology at Syracuse University in New York.