6 - Sedentary-Nomadic Relations in a Shared Territory: Post-Conflict Dynamics in the Nuba Mountains, Sudan

Summary

Sudan’s civil war (1983–2005) is the longest and bloodiest conflict in postcolonial Africa. Though land was not a prime factor of the war in southern Sudan, it was one of the key causes of its extension into northern Sudan (see Komey 2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010c). As detailed elsewhere (Komey 2010b) the extension of the war from the south to the Nuba Mountains region from the mid-1980s was the greatest event in the region’s recent history. It reshaped its entire public space and brought about new dynamics with significant repercussions on the historical, political, economic and territorial relationships between the state and society and equally between the various communal groups in the region. Most destructive was the collapse of the coexistence of the sedentary Nuba and the nomadic Baggara, where the failure of the symbiotic relationship that had always existed between them in a shared territory led to a near complete breakdown of their market and economic complementarities, social interactions and ties. The question of communal land rights’ claims and counter claims in the region was and still is a bone of contention between these two co-existing groups, particularly after the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) was signed on January 9, 2005.

After peace was achieved, the commonly held conviction was that the underlying root causes of Sudan’s civil war, including the land question, had been diagnosed, negotiated and finally transformed into sustainable resolutions. Thus, two closely related questions have arisen. First, to what extent has the CPA been successful in addressing the land question as one of the root causes of the civil wars, particularly in the Nuba Mountains region? Second, how will the conflict between the nomadic Baggara and the sedentary Nuba people of Southern Kordofan/ Nuba Mountains and the contradictions between traditional land rights and modern civil land rights be resolved in practice? The issue of land rights involves aspects of governance, state legality, social legitimacy, territoriality, ethnic identities and conflicts, together with their political, economic, cultural and ecological dimensions.

In view of these core questions, the main objective of this chapter is to examine some post-war dynamics – which since the region’s return to war in 2011 also figure as pre-war dynamics – in the relation between the nomadic Arabs of the Baggara and the sedentary Nuba of the region.