Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence

This is an exceptional book. Jok Madut Jok gives a detailed account of the politics and passions behind the conflict that has raged in Sudan for decades. I highly recommend this book as an introductory work that will tell you what has been happening there and what is happening now. I found the first several chapters to be entirely readable - and while the latter chapters get a bit "academic" in tone, the book still delivers a powerful array of information in an account that will leave you feeling - well - challenged, learned, and concerned for the people of Sudan.

This book will provide the reader a solid background to the conflicts in Sudan both the civil war in Darfur and the broader civil war between the North and South of Sudan. However, as much as I want to give this book five stars I just can't because Jok has a tendency to be a bit wordy. He uses a forty nine page introduction that could've easily been said in five to ten pages and some of the chapters kinda jump around a little bit to stuff that was covered in previous chapters, but it's nothing that cannot be followed simply enough. Jok does a pretty good job of boiling down a confusing conflict and explaining why any regional or international peace efforts have failed to do anything with the mess that is Sudan.

This is one of the most important books on Sudan to come out in recent years and to highlight many important themes dealing with the genocide in Sudan and the earlier genocide against Christian Africans in Southern Sudan at the hands of the Islamist Arab government in Khartoum. The author dares to skewer even the international Aid organization, which he says have allowed the perpetrators of genocide to get off the hook by providing them with lavish villas. For instance over $380,000 was spent by humanitarian aid missions to renew their visas in Khartoum, money that has gone to support the genocide. One of the great lies of the conflict is that it is due to `global warming' an excuse that lets the genocidaires off the hook by ascribing the conflict to a contest over `scarce resources' ( a similar excuse could be used about the Holocaust, since Hitler said the Germans needed `living space' an equally specious claim). This book dares to tell how the government has mass engineered the genocide. This book begins in the 1950s with the winding down of colonialism and shows how the British betrayed the Sudan by refusing the grant the Black Christian and Animist south its right to break away from the Arab-Muslim north. Instead the British, as was their policy throughout the empire, supported the Muslim half of the country (as they did in Palestine and Pakistan). The boo describes the religious dimension but then moves on talk about the region-ethnic-racial dimension of the conflicts. The author expertly describes rebellions among the Nubians in the North and Eastern tribes, all of whome felt the government in Khartoum did not identify with them or was pushing them off the land. This is a masterful account from an insider who truly understand Sudan and can see both the black and white of the genocide as well as the many nuances that exist in the diverse country. An amazing book. Seth J. Frantzman