13 - Two Sudans, Human Rights, and the Afterlives of St. Josephine Bakhita

Summary

Sudanese national governments have attempted to forge Sudan as an Islamic state for much of its postcolonial history. Southern Sudan, with its long exposure to Christian mission work, rejected this agenda and waged two civil wars against the state. Josephine Bakhita, Sudan’s first Catholic saint, stood at the epicenter of this maelstrom. This chapter investigates Bakhita’s sociopolitical significance in recent Sudanese (and South Sudanese) history. Born in the nineteenth century, Bakhita was enslaved in her youth but, once free, eventually became a Canossian sister. Pope John Paul II injected her life and legacy into calls for human dignity to be respected in a context rife with abuses that included slavery and religious persecution. Her name continued to carry resonance after the war through Radio Bakhita, a station that became linked with attacks on expressive freedom. Bakhita’s afterlife shows how a religious figure can be injected into campaigns against secular social ills and become a symbol linked to different abuses in the same space in different times.