Tribe or nationality? The Sudanese diaspora and the Kenyan Nubis

Abstract

The settlement of Sudanese soldier colonists throughout British East Africa was a legacy of colonial expansion and pacification. These settlements were developed from the institution of military slavery, which was marked by a close association of slave soldiers with the state and the isolation of military slave communities from the general populace. But once pacification was complete new policies representing new interests made the presence of these non-indigenous Africans redundant. Terms of settlement altered after World War One, and the right of Sudanese, or Nubis, to remain in their original settlements came under attack. The largest, and most problematic, Sudanese colony in Kenya was the former military encampment of Kibera, on the edge of Nairobi. Sudanese claimed that land had been granted to them as a community ‘in perpetuity’ in lieu of a pension, and in recognition for their services to the Crown. The resulting struggle to retain land ownership in Kibera drew on ideas inherent in the old institution of military slavery and was presented in terms of a reciprocal loyalty between the Sudanese and the British Crown and Empire, rather than the specific legal jurisdiction of the Kenya Colony government. These arguments for a special status within the Empire have since been turned against the Nubis to deprive them of citizenship and land rights in post-independence Kenya.

Keywords:

• Sudanese
• Nubi
• Nairobi
• colonial history

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the SOAS African History Seminar, the ‘Ideologies of Race, Origins and Descent in the History of the Nile Valley and North East Africa’ conference at St Antony's College, Oxford, and the 5th International Sudan Studies Conference in Washington, DC. My thanks to participants in those meetings for their comments, and more particularly to two anonymous readers and Holger Hansen and Wendy James for specific comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Mbaria, “Meet the Nubians”; Adam, “The Nubians and Statelessness”; Open Society Justice Initiative, ‘‘Activities Roundup.” May–July 2006; Open Society Institute, “Nubians in Kenya Appeal.”

2. Wanji, “The Nubi in East Africa”; Southall, “General Amin and the Coup”; Soghayroun, The Sudanese Muslim Factor in Uganda; Pain, “Acholi and Nubians”; Hansen, “Pre-colonial Immigrants.”

3. For general discussions of the institution of military slavery see Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam; and Johnson, “Muslim Military Slavery.” For details of military slavery in the Sudan in the nineteenth century see Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery,’’ ‘‘The Structure of a Legacy,” and “Recruitment and Entrapment”; Ewald, Soldiers, Traders and Slaves; and Hill and Hogg, A Black Corps d’Élite.

4. There is some debate over the legal status of military slaves in the nineteenth-century Egyptian army. Hill and Hogg (A Black Corps d’Élite, 5, 90) claim that slaves were formally manumitted before being conscripted into the army, but I do not consider that the evidence for this as a common practice is strong. Whether slave soldiers were considered legally free or legally slave, and whether or not they considered themselves actually slaves, their status remained ambiguous.

5. See especially: Wanji, “The Nubi in East Africa”; Hansen, Ethnicity and Military Rule and ‘‘Precolonial Immigrants”; Woodward, “Uganda and Southern Sudan.” Leopold more accurately characterises Nubi identity as “an elective, strategic, potential alternative ethnicity …” (Leopold, Inside West Nile, 15).

6. James, “The Funj Mystique” and “Lifelines,” 119; Donham, “Old Abyssinia,” 12.

7. James, “The Funj Mystique,” 128–29.

8. Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery.”

9. Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery.”, 151–52.

10. Anon. “Table Showing Approximate Population,” 5. Wingate, “Report on the Arrival,” 10, where the soldiers Saadein Sudan, Farag Sudan, Abdu Sudan and Khamis Aswad are each unnecessarily identified as “a black.”

11. Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery,” “The Structure of a Legacy,” and “Recruitment and Entrapment.”

12. Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery,” 145–46.

13. Lugard, Rise, 205.

14. Lugard, Rise, 210.

15. Lugard, Rise, 210–11.

16. Lugard, Rise, 219.

17. Lugard, Rise, 214.

18. Lugard, Rise, 219.

19. IBEAC, “Report of Captain Lugard No. 4,” Sudan Archive, University of Durham [SAD] 255/1/514–94. F. R. Wingate, “Sudan Refugees in Uganda &c.,” 26 October 1892, SAD 253/12/20–21. This is not the place to go into the details of Sudanese involvement in the Muslim rebellion of 1893, except to repeat Thruston's point that it happened after the company's authority had been withdrawn, but before Britain had finally decided to take control of Uganda. Thruston, African Incidents, 90–91.

20. E.g. “Colvile's report on Unyoro expedition,” June 1894, SAD 257/1.

21. Lugard Rise, 217.

22. Lugard Rise, 217.

23. Colvile, Land of the Nile Springs, 286.

24. Wanji, “The Nubi in East Africa,” 20, 46, 49–50, where he says the officers came from Northern Sudan and Egypt; Pain, “Acholi and Nubians,” 41, who asserts that captive Southern Sudanese associated themselves with the dominant Nubian group; Hansen, “Pre-colonial Immigrants,” 562; Collins, Land Beyond the Rivers, 177.

25. Wingate, “Report on the Arrival,” 4. F. R.Wingate, “Sudan Refugees in Uganda &c.,” SAD 253/12/14.

26. Meldon, “Sudanese in Uganda,” 145.

27. Johnson, “Recruitment and Entrapment,” 167.

28. Meldon, “Sudanese in Uganda,” 137–38.

29. Meldon, “English–Arabic Dictionary,’’ 147, 166. See also Sudanese soldiers calling the peoples of the Sudan–Uganda border abid (Blake, Imperial Boundary Making, 26, 78). British observers were often shocked by the way the Sudanese treated their own slaves (Thruston, African Incidents, 182).

30. Meldon “Sudanese in Uganda,” 128–29.

31. Meldon “Sudanese in Uganda,” 133–35.

32. F. R. W. to Hunter, Cairo, 10 July 1892, SAD 253/9/6–7.

33. And sometimes vice versa. Captain Said Abderrahman, DCM, a Shilluk veteran of the KAR, returned to the Sudan in the 1920s and served in the civil administration of Upper Nile Province. Willis, Upper Nile Province Handbook, 373, 428.

34. Moyse-Bartlett, The King's African Rifles, 134–36, 139–47, 463–64; Hansen, “Pre-colonial Immigrants,” 567.

35. Hansen, “Pre-colonial Immigrants,” 567–69.

36. Meldon, “English–Arabic Dictionary,” 88. “Kibra” was derived from the Arabic ghabra, but was also similar to kibira (“forest”) in Lunyoro, from which the Banyoro village Kibiro derived its name (Doyle, Crisis and Decline, 18). The change of pronunciation might have been due to the Sudanese's long service in Bunyoro.

37. Kenya Land Commission, paras 598–608; Evidence, 1137–39, 1153–55.

38. Kenya Land Commission, Evidence, 1160, 1168–69.

39. Johnson, “Conquest and Colonisation”; Matson and Sutton, “The Role of Forts.”

40. Minute by G. A. S. Northcote (Chief Secretary) to the Governor on transfer of KAR Shambas, 24 November 1926, Kenya National Archives [KNA] PC/Coast 1/11/68, “Settlement of Detribalized Africans Wounded or Otherwise Incapacitated while Serving in East Africa (1915–27).”

41. Political Record Book, Asst District Commissioner in Charge – Kyambu, 21 October 1912 and Political Record Book. Fort Smith Swahilis, 29 November 1912, KNA PC/CP 1/4/2, “Kikuyu District Political Record Book, Part II (1912).”

42. J. Ainsworth to Chief Secretary, Nairobi, 21 February 1916, KNA PC/Coast 1/11/68. “Detribalized” Africans in this context was “intended to refer entirely to such natives as Coast Natives, ex-slaves, Sudanese, and other miscellanous people and their descendants who do not belong to any of the known tribes of this Protectorate,” John Ainsworth, PC Nyanza Province, Kisumu, 29 Sept 1916, to [F. W. Isaac], PC Lamu, KNA PC/JUB 1/8/3, “Settlement of Detribalized Africans Wounded or Otherwise Incapacitated while Serving in East Africa (1915–16).”

43. Chief Native Commissioner to Commissioner of Lands, 20 April 1922, KNA PC/Coast 1/11/53, “Sudanese Colony at Yonte.” Tel, Nairobi to Province Mombasa, 20 May 1925; Sr British Commissioner Jubaland Commission to Resident Commissioner, Mombasa, 18 June 1925; H.B.M. Consul, Kismayu, “List of Sudanese Pensioners Proceeding to Mombassa by the SS “Garibaldi” sailing this Date,” 5 August 1926, all in KNA PC/Coast 1/7/28 “Jubaland (1926–28).”

44. Transfer of KAR Lines to Mbagathi (minutes of a meeting on 4 April 1919), KNA MH 1/3244 “Re- Site for King's African Rifles Lines. Land by Extension of Native Civil Hospital (1919).”

45. Kenya Land Commission, Evidence, 1146, 1149–50, 1157, 1159.

46. Captain Adam el-Hashim on behalf of Sudanese ex-Soldiers to Major-General G.J. Giffard, 24 February 1938, National Archives. Kew [NA] CO 822 106/14.

47. G. J. Giffard, Major-General, Inspector General, King's African Rifles to governor, 2 March 1938, NA CO 822 106/14.

48. Hansen, “Pre-colonial Immigrants,” 573.

49. “The humble petition of the Nubian community, Uganda,” Rhodes House, Oxford [RH] MSS Lugard L85/3, and NA CO 822 106/14. In this and other petitions and correspondence the language was that of English (or Indian) legal advisers, but the ideas, and especially the symbol of the flag, were rooted in historical experience.

50. Hassan Abia, Hon. Secretary, the Union of Sudanese, Kibra, Nairobi to Lugard, 14 January 1941, RH MSS Lugard L8/3 20 and National Records Office, Khartoum [NRO] Equatoria Province [EP] 2/39/137.

51. Angus Gillan, Civil Secretary to Chief Secretary, Uganda Protectorate, 21 May 1939, NRO EP 2/39/137.

52. Cox to Parr, 3 August 1940; Parr to Cox, 22 August 1940; Cox to Parr, 8 September 1940, all in ibid.

53. Interview with Martin Parr, London, 2 August 1978.

54. ‘Note by Captain R.C. Cooke on meetings with Nubis at Kampala 12 and 13 Sept. 1940’, in ibid.

55. Parr to Lugard, 6 November 1940 in ibid and RH MSS Lugard L85/3.

56. Sir P. Mitchell to Lugard, New Delhi, 5 November 1940, RH MSS Lugard L85/3 17.

57. As in Representatives of Sudanese Union to governor, Kenya, 27 May 1940, RH MSS Lugard L85/3 30 and NA CO 822 106/14.

58. Union of Sudanese to His Excellency, the Governor in Council, Nairobi, RH MSS Lugard L85/3 32 and NA CO 822 106/14. Despite the direct comparisons the Sudanese made with the Somalis, as fellow Muslims, their circumstances were fundamentally different, as Sudanese arguments for special status rested primarily on their military service and the loss of their homeland while in British service, and only secondarily on religion. Somali claims to non-native status seem to have rested on a feeling of innate racial superiority (Turton, “Somali Resistance,” 128–35).

59. Officers of the Union of Sudanese to Secretary of State for the Colonies through Governor of Kenya, 14 October 1940, RH MSS Lugard L85/3 25–29.

60. Hassan Abia, Hon. Secretary, the Union of Sudanese, Kibra, Nairobi to Lugard, 14 January 1941, RH MSS Lugard L85/3 20–22 and NRO EP 2/39/137. In fact the Uganda Nubi community has always recruited women from outside its original circle, especially in recent years. Obbo, African Women, 108–10.

61. Minutes by D. C. Watherston, 4.2.41 and A. J. M., 7 March 1941, NA CO 822 106/14.

62. Report of an investigation by Mr S. H. La Fontaine, DSO, OBE, MC into the means for the resettlement of the Soudanese at Kibira, KNA MAA 8/117.

63. Parsons, “Kibera is Our Blood.”

64. G. Kinnear to P. Wyn Harris, 30 April 1948, KNA MAA 8/117.

65. Ramathan Marjan to D.C. Nairobi, 8 May 1948; the Union of Sudanese to D.C. Nairobi, 24 November 1946 [sic], KNA MAA 8/117.

66. S. H. La Fontaine to the Hon. Chief Secretary and the Hon. Chief Native Commissioner, Nairobi, 30 September 1948, KNA MAA 7/458. Prof. Jean La Fontaine, Col. La Fontaine's daughter, told me that he felt deeply that the Sudanese did not get a fair deal from the government.

67. Wanji, “The Nubi in East Africa,” 12, 24; Parsons “Kibera is Our Blood,” 122. But some ambiguity remains, as within the Nubi community people still know and refer to the tribal origins of their ancestors.

68. Open Society Justice Initiative, “Yusuf Ali and Others v. Kenya.”

69. Open Society Justice Initiative, “Activities Roundup. May–July 2006.”