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Development and Cultural Genocide in the Sudan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

John W. Burton
John W. Burton
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Connecticut College, New London1
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Extract

Genocide is easily defined: ‘the deliberate extermination of a people’. It appears to occur in human history primarily in association with the emergence of the state, or in the effort of an established régime to maintain or expand its domination, and is virtually unrecorded for ‘traditional’ or pre-state societies. Although the concept of ‘development’ is by contrast exceedingly ambiguous (other than as an ideal process or social form in an evolutionary typology), the meaning conveyed would be antithetical to the definition of genocide, being some form of material or moral improvement in social existence, rather than a means towards the rapid extinction of a cultural tradition.

Type
Africana
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , September 1991 , pp. 511 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 This is a revised version of the paper presented to the annual meeting of the African Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland, November 1990.

2 See, especially, Wolf, Eric, Europe and the People Without History (New York, 1982), chs. 1–2.Google Scholar

3 See Burton, John W., ‘The Pastoral Nilotes and British Colonialism’, in Ethnohistory (Tucson, AZ), 28, 1981, pp. 125–33,Google Scholar ‘Christians, Colonists, and Conversion: a view from the Nilotic Sudan’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 23, 2, 06 1985, pp. 349–69,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘When North Winds Blow: a note on small towns and social transformation in the Nilotic Sudan’, in African Studies Review (Los Angeles), 31, 1988, pp. 49–60.Google Scholar

4 See Burton, , ‘Christians, Colonists, and Conversion’.Google Scholar

5 Johnson, Douglas, The Southern Sudan (London, The Minority Rights Group, 1988), Report No. 78.Google Scholar

6 See Jonglei, Investigation Team, The Equatorial Nile Project and its Effects in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Vols. I–IV (Khartoum, 1954).Google Scholar

7 Paul, Howell, Michael, Lock, and Stephen, Cobb (eds.), The Jonglei Canal: impact and opportunity (Cambridge, 1988), p. 56.Google Scholar

8 Ibid. p. 464.

9 Johnson, , op. cit. p. 8.Google Scholar

10 Bonner, Raymond, ‘A Reporter at Large: famine’, in The New Yorker, 13 March 1989, p. 85.Google Scholar

11 Johnson, , op. cit. p. 10.Google Scholar

12 Bonner, , loc. cit. p. 87.Google Scholar

13 Ibid. p. 89.

14 Ryle, John, ‘The Road to Abyei’, in Granta (Cambridge), 26, 1989, p. 43.Google Scholar

15 Ibid. p. 92.

16 Africa Report (New York), 06 1991.Google Scholar See also Kinnock, Glenys, ‘Nation on a Knife Edge’, in The Times (London), 20 07 1991, who is reported as saying that ‘the world must maintain a sense of outrage at the ravages affecting’ the Sudanese.Google Scholar

17 Johnson, , op. cit. p. 9.Google Scholar

18 The New York Times, 4 November 1990.