Sudan’s Ottoman Connection

Sudan’s wars formed my understanding of the world. I grew up in Kenya and Sudan. My parents work as linguists in Southern Sudanese Languages. At twelve years old, we left the continent for the US. With the transition, I was haunted by the gross difference between the levels of stochastic bloodshed in Sudan versus America. As a result, I have spent my life floundering to the realization that the unjust might of Khartoum, which has cost millions of lives, will continue until a framework exists that allows the international community to intervene. The international community emerged in the early modern period. Thus in order to understand the trajectory of the current state, I need to isolate the emergence of the nation state in Sudan, which begins in the Ottoman Early-Modern era.

In the summer of 2006, I returned to East Africa for the first time in five years. I went to record Sudanese refugees’ songs. The Sudanese community composed these songs to stabilize the community during the North-South war. The authors had lost their lands, friends, fortunes, families, and therefore their positions in life. In the ensuing confusion, the music provided a social rallying point. In two weeks, we recorded five hundred Dinka
songs to serve as a digital record.

After recording, I took a charter plane a thousand kilometers into Sudan to the Nuba Mountains. I took the plane for two reasons: first, in Kenya, a Nubian Islamic scholar told me about wrecked Iraqi tanks, which had fought for the North at the battle of Tulushi Mountain in the Nubian Mountains in 1992. So I went to take pictures. Second, to speak with Nubians about the progress of the 2005 peace treaty.

Though unsure the scholar’s report was true, I had to check on the tanks. Photographs of Iraqi weapons in Sudan would evince the link between President Hussein’s Iraq and Bashir’s Sudan. Unfortunately, when I arrived all the roads from the airport in Qauda to Tulushi were impassible due to rain.

So while I was waiting the three weeks for the next plane out of Sudan, I undertook my second objective. I talked to Southern administrators about the South’s political position since the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed. It became clear that Khartoum state continued to block all access to reconstruction materials. In other words, hoarding oil revenue and deploying troops, they continued to dominate the South. Because the Khartoum state maintained participating in national politics required all other groups to submit to Islam as purported by Khartoum, Sudan continued to fracture. It was nauseating to see a religion used to destroy the social fabric of the largest nation in Africa. My disgust with this misuse of Islam made me swear to recontextualize this history, to show Khartoum’s dearth of credibility and ensure the injunction its activities demand. This oath drove my research in my Junior and Senior years at Bard College, and pushed me to organize my theory in order to confront my life-long confusion at how to reframe these conflicts and end Sudan’s atrocious wars.

The cessation of Sudan’s genocidal politics, I knew from earlier Africana studies, had to be undertaken by a legitimate authority. Western powers cannot impinge on the sovereignty of African states. This caveat means that my research could not only focus on the fact of Khartoum’s atrocities, but must also encourage the positive creation of an African authority responsible for the punishment of the misdeeds of an African government.

As a result of these two directives, when I returned to Bard I undertook to investigate the colonial actions of a non-western state, the Ottoman Empire, in Africa. The empire built the foundation of Egyptian state, which – under British dominion –positioned Khartoum as nationally prominent. So, I sought to investigate the Ottoman Empire in Africa as one of Khartoum’s historical antecedents. As can happen with research, the topic became too vast. I found the need to explain the Ottoman Empire, before I could begin to write about its role in colonizing Africa. When I undertook to understand the Ottoman Empire, I ran into a language barrier. The English secondary sources focused on Ottoman administration in Anatolia and Eastern Europe, and Arabic primary sources were not accessible at Bard. This left me with a limited subject – and the need to more fully understand it – before I could speak about the Ottoman African expansion.

This compromise in my research objectives was driven by my need for further study. I found that the Ottoman Empire was a centralized state, controlling a federation of provinces with differing degrees of autonomy. The state exploited this periphery, on account of its economic and military advantage. It legitimized exploitation by divine authority under God and tradition. Similarly, in Sudan, Khartoum extends its economic advantage to extract slaves and resources from a much larger provincial zone. This exploitative aristocracy, however, fashions itself the sovereign of the Sudanese Nation. Sovereign states were designed after Westphalia to separate ideologically opposed groups. Whereas, Sudan uses sovereignty as means to maintain its suzerainty. As a result of the guise of a nation state, Khartoum enjoys the privileges of sovereignty – lack of interference – without exercising the responsibilities to the citizenry of the entire claimed Nation. The blending of the privileges of nation states with autocratic power results in a heinous hybrid. Untangling the motivating substratum of the Republic of Sudan could provide the solution to Khartoum’s exploitative expansion. To discover this link, I need access to Ottoman archives provided through Turkish historiography and language study.

Thus, I work to increase my theoretical framework in order to confront the conflict in Sudan with rigorous knowledge. I am confident that the research materials that I need: journal subscriptions, Arabic and Ottoman primary sources, and, most importantly, people specializing in my fields of interest can be found. These resources contain a possible solution to my life long question. For resolution, I am impelled to continue researching.

Gallop Poll Taken by Moses before Leaving Egypt? What’s the SE of that?

Information given by those in power to an electorate is not neutral. Instead, the groups that are able to create information get an unfair advantage in setting the truth. Veracity is a big word, but at the core is understanding. Understanding, in my opinion, has to be based on the ability to disagree. In other words, the ability to say no is crucuial. To challenge a number, one must understand how it was reached. The ability to question a poll, which as this semester has shown me, takes a great deal of training as well as framing. Consequently, a solution that is easily offered, in fact demanded by the American founding documents, is to create a more educated electorate. In Crossen’s example an electorate able to, for instance, derive the SE of a poll taken before Moses leaves Egypt.  The question is, will understanding the accuracy of a prophecy, be enough to get us to go to the right, and forget the wrong?

A poll is taken at one time and place and then used to project the future. This can lead to flawed understanding, especially as Eberstadt points, in our rapidly changing modern era. When you have a population who cannot question the numbers being derived, and the fact that those numbers are going out of date faster, you have a recipe for deceptive statistics being delivered for partisan reasons. Eberstadt calls this “a cottage industry… for manufacturing nonsense numbers to satisfy anticipated inquiries.” That it exists is indeed unsurprising when the power of numbers to persuade is coupled with rapidity of the world to adapt. Though we may need more numerate populations, a world of statisticians is a truly scary solution. With the level of intentional creation of misconceptions at a historic high, generating more number generators seems more prone to perpetuate the already dangerous situation, rather than provide a clear solution. When I told my ten-year old nephew about these issues, he simply asked “should I stop learning Algebra, cause it seems to be bad.” And he may have a point.

I believe the answer, though not easy, is the same as the one we have reached in other situations of information abundance. For instance, for information about news and science we have widely read, renowned sources. As Paulos describes in his piece about Benchmark Figures, statistics needs more baselines. As other information sources have shown, we can never know everything. But we can strive to. When we can rely on reputable sources, we can make better guesses. It should be noted, the origin of a source is always as important as what a source says. In other words, character matters. Character is based on values. When values differ drastically, as Paulos points out, agreement on the common ground is all the more important, but perhaps even more difficult: “I think such figures assume a greater importance in multicultural societies where common culture, stories, and myths are not as widely shared as they are in more homogeneous societies.” Though we can never truly know the underlying parameters and no population can hope to be made up primarily of statisticians, the misuse of specialized information should be mitigated. If we can provide credible benchmarks, which put the numbers in perspective, then an imperfect population can exercise the primary aspect of understanding. People can say, “No. I do not think that is how it is. I may not have the right answer, but I can see given all the information that I know, that this explanation doesn’t sit right.”

This ability to disagree, and the mandate it requires is the basis of a democracy. A democracy does not require complete information. It requires a set of people willing to argue about uncertainties. People that do not accept answers from on high, but quarrel over them every single day. Because underlying parameters always change is why framing – the derivation of our boxes we sort the world into – is so important, and so transient.

These box models are not neutral. As the aide in Crossen’s exposition of the diaper industry posits, “Who says it has to be neutral?” They attempt to explain and predict the crazy world we live in. I am thinking, following researchers tendency to pose leading questions, maybe we should throw our hands up, know that most people will not understand experts’ statistics, and use them for what they are best at: creating a facsimile of truth. Given the value of the situations explained by big numbers, there are egregious incentives to do just that. So long as no one is checking the numbers before they are used, we should not expect this misuse to change anytime soon. As Crossen goes on to point out, however, number crunching is rarely fraud. Instead it is well intentioned prophesizing. As Hobbes long ago pointed out[1], “The best prophet naturally is the best guesser, and the best guesser, he that is the most versed and studied in the matter he guesses at, for he hath the most Signes to guess by.” These censored understandings direct and guide people to possible solutions. But, these guesses are likely to be fallacious, given over to the errors of the sample that they are made from. Thus, though models are always partially inaccurate, they have power to persuade. Because they have the power to convince, they will be employed. Because they are employed, as with prophets, we will have ample examples of their failure to predict. But, before they are found inaccurate number crunching can guide people toward a reasonable policy[2].

Kit Martin

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[1] The third chapter of the Leviathan

[2] Caveat: reasonable as defined after measuring the plausibility of the claim given the evidence and holding all else constant.