'God Will Crown Us': The Construction of Religious Nationalism in Southern Sudan, 1898-2011.

Abstract

My study examines the ways in which Biblical themes and idioms have historically been adopted to enhance arguments for Southern Sudanese self-determination and sovereignty. Beginning with the conclusion of the Mahdist War and continuing through the attainment of national sovereignty, I argue that the Bible not only provided a critical lexicon of resistance and communal identity-formation but also served as a source with which to levy spiritual critiques against the Arab racial Other. ‘Blackness’ became an identity-marker adopted by Southerners of various ethnicities and—within a framework of Arab ‘oppression’—a physical trait marking Southerners as God’s spiritually oppressed people destined for liberation. In this vein I illustrate that Southern Sudan is an important example of the ways in which religious thought can combine with racial politics to fuel revolutionary political action in the modern world. It is also a unique case in African Christianity whereby a liberatory religious thought was aimed against non-white, non-Christian co-citizens.

The diversity of thinkers that contributed to this theology illustrates that the sociology of theological knowledge production was not the exclusive preserve of clergy but involved a tapestry of thinkers. Rather than focusing on a specific subset of people or communities in the vein of Sudanese anthropology, I show that a wide range of ‘oppressed’ actors have used theology to interpret their circumstances, define enemies, script action, and define the future—one that conflated spiritual liberation with material political reformation and revolution. This theology has developed along an historical trajectory since at least the early twentieth century. By placing vagarious situations into a familiar script of liberation, actors and circumstances have been placed into Biblical archetypes that render understandable action. Less than four years into independence, however, ethnic factionalism threatens the nation that nationalism envisioned. This explosion, I suggest, did not occur spontaneously but reflects longer tensions between missionary, colonial, and African efforts to define ethnicities as distinct social groups and the emergence of ‘Southern’ as both a subject racial category and nationality. My study shows strengths and limits of racial and religious thoughts as instruments for nation-making in a particular African national context.