South Kordofan

The recently published HRW World Report 2010 features a particular chapter on Sudan whereby the monstrous Pan-Arabist tyranny´s practices and policies are summarily exposed and utterly denounced as far as the tyrannized land of Darfur and the persecuted local Furis are concerned. Some importance is given to the growing insecurity in South Sudan.

Unfortunately, the Report does not extend the focus, as the world´s leading Human Rights NGO should have, on Kordofan, the persecuted Hausa speaking minority, and the tyrannized Nuba of Jebel Marra.

Quite regrettably, the Report does not mention the atrociously oppressed Bejas of Eastern Sudan, who stretch in the land between the Egyptian and the Eritrean borders, and from the coastlands to the Red Sea cordillera and the desert up to Atbarah and Kessala. The geo-strategic importance of the Beja country is critical for the future of the colonial fabrication "Sudan". With the ancient nation of Blemmyes – Bejas seceding from "Sudan", the Khartoum tyranny will be landlocked and therefore asphyxiated.

One has to assume that HRW tries to keep a balance in their relations with the major countries involved, China, USA, England and France, and therefore the focus is adjusted in a way not to threaten the colonial countries´ interests in the area. Human Rights become thus ancillary to political motives and tactics.

Similarly, and very deplorably, the vast territory of occupied Nubia in today´s Northern Sudan is totally forgotten within this Report. The socio-behavioural, cultural, linguistic, and political oppression of the Nubians has recently taken a new, socio-economic, dimension with the forceful relocation of dozens of Nubian villages and thousands of populations due to the erection of an otherwise useless Nile dam that will be beneficial to the monstrous, Pan-Arabist gangsters of Khartoum, and detrimental to the indigenous Nubians.
First published in the American Chronicle, Buzzle and AfroArticles on 30 January 2010

The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant
language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the
northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan).
The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the
main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics)
are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes
the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical
system.

Koalib is one of the aboriginal languages of the Nuba Mountains. It belongs to the Heiban branch of the Kordofanian family.
The Koalib ethnic group is made up of approximately 200,000 people (estimate for 2011), the majority of whom speak Koalib. However, a large proportion of the Koalib now no longer live in their homeland which was ravaged by fighting between the government and SPLA supporters during the second Sudanese civil war, which lasted from 1983 (Prunier 1989: 414-426) to 2002 in the South Kordofan area (when a local cease-fire was agreed between the SPLA and government troops). Indeed, during the war, tens of thousands of Koalib found refuge in Sudanese cities, particularly in Khartoum, where I began studying Koalib in 2000 during my first field-trip, before visiting Koalib-speaking villages in the Nuba Mountains from 2001 onwards. Since the formal signing of a peace agreement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA (on 9 January 2005), there has been a reverse flow of Koalib, who are now leaving the Sudanese cities and
relocating back in the Koalib homeland. However, the Koalib diaspora continues to represent a considerable proportion (probably over 50%) of individuals who consider themselves to be ethnically Koalib. All linguistic data presented in this article are derived from the Rere (ŋèrɛ́ɛɽɛ̀) dialect, spoken in the centre of the Koalib area (in the localities of Dere and Abri, see Quint 2009: 20-23, 2006b: 23-25). It has a written tradition dating back 80 years, linked to the arrival in 1923 of the first Protestant missionaries in Abri (Spartalis 1981: 58-59; Stevenson 1984: 72).

This article discusses the spatial organization of agri-and horticulture in Heiban (South Kordofan) through five case studies, which cover various scales and kinds of cultivation. The discussion aims at highlighting the interconnections and gradual differences between these cases, in order to stress the shortcomings of conventional exclusionary classifications of farmers and their practices, e.g. traditional/subsistence/conservative vs. modern/commercial/innovative. On the basis of ongoing global and national debates on 'appropriate' agricultural development, the article contributes to the critical analysis of influential classifications in this field and of the policies that are informed by them. In conclusion, the article argues that without verification of conventional assumptions, e.g. subsistence farmers' low productivity and little readiness to experiment and innovate, agricultural policies will be based on fictional rather than actual farmers' practices. Given the political economy prevailing in Sudan, with dominant top-down approaches to land distribution and modernization, such policies will feed into existing conflicts and hamper the search for sustainable solutions to food production and distribution problems in the country.

"Le Sud-Kordofan est une région montagneuse située au centre du Soudan et peuplée de 1,5 à 2 millions d ’ individus, en majorité des populations autochtones sédentaires, appelées collectivement Noubas. La diversité linguistique des monts Noubas (autre nom du Sud-Kordofan) est exceptionnelle, même au niveau africain :
sur une superficie de 80 000 km 2, on trouve au moins 50 langues vernaculaires (essentiellement parlées par les Noubas), plus l ’ arabe soudanais (principale langue véhiculaire de la région) et plusieurs autres idiomes d ’ origine ouest-africaine (haoussa, peul…). Les nombreuses langues vernaculaires utilisées par les Noubas appartiennent à deux grands phylums linguistiques : – le Nilo-saharien, auquel se rattachent la plupart des langues de l ’ Ouest des monts Nouba ; – le Niger-Congo, représenté exclusivement dans les monts Nouba par l' embranchement kordofanien, lequel compte au moins quatre familles, attestées essentiellement dans l’Est des monts Noubas.
Le koalib est une langue kordofanienne (de la famille heibanienne) parlée de nos jours par environ 100.000 personnes. L ’ aire d ’ origine du koalib se situe au Nord-Est des monts Nouba. Elle comprend notamment les localités d ’ Abri, Délami, El-Khadra, Umm Berembeita, Umm Heitan, ainsi que les massifs montagneux de Gnougour, d ’ Oumbri et de Turum.
Dans le présent article, je compte faire une première présentation de la littérature orale (en me limitant aux contes traditionnels 6 ) en koalib. Le développement qui suit se fonde sur les données que j ’ ai recueillies au cours de cinq missions de terrain effectuées au Soudan entre 2000 et 2008, à Khartoum et dans les monts Noubas."

In Koalib (Niger-Congo, Kordofanian branch, Heiban family), a basic verb can give rise to several verb extensions (VE), among which a benefactive and a malefactive. Section one deals with the main derivational characteristics (affixation, tonology, productivity, valency) of both VE. Section two proposes a more in-depth scrutiny of the morphology of those extensions in Koalib, examining various particular cases (lack of basic verb, double derivation, irregularities). Section three focuses on the semantics of Koalib bene-/malefactive VE, putting special emphasis on the semantic roles encoded by each extension, and on the diverse nuances of meaning they can convey. The conclusion lays the stress on the interest of Koalib (and more generally Kordofanian languages) data for typological studies of the notions of benefaction and malefaction in human language.

In the very center of the Republic of the Sudan, the province of South-Kordofan is home to several tens of diverse indigenous communities, each of which speaks (alongside with Arabic, the main vehicular of that region) a tongue of their own. The aim of this communication is twofold :
- 1. to give a short introduction to the Kordofanian phylum, which regroups more than one half of the languages spoken today in the Nuba mountains.
- 2. to illustrate the most sailent features of Kordofanian languages through a selection of data taken from a case-study, namely Koalib, a Kordofanian language spoken in and around the cities of Delami, Umm Berembeita and Abri, in the Eastern Jebels of South Kordofan.

Unity and fragmentation are two edges of modern political spectrum of Sudan since it emerged in the 19th century as a result of annexations and diplomacy. As ethnic and religious identity politics have created deep ethnic and religious divisions in the country, several regions in the periphery of Sudan have remained marginalized and disintegrated. On the other hand, there have been always peace initiatives addressing partially or wholly root causes of regional conflicts in order to integrate and unite the country. It seems that Sudan's peace processes might be considered as integration processes addressing political, economic and social issues either on national or regional levels. The Addis Ababa Peace Agreement in 1972 and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 were major attempts in order to save Southern parts of the country and unite Sudan territorially. Today, once again, we witness that transitional government body, which came to power after ouster of former President Omar al-Bashir, designates ending regional conflicts and disputes throughout 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, signed between Khartoum and regional elites in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, Northern, Eastern, Central parts and the Third Front-Tamazuj. This paper aims exploring Sudan's regional disputes and the Juba peace deal from the angle of national integration approach in order to understand whether this time construction of a new Sudan based upon civic values is possible or not.

Unity and fragmentation are two edges of modern political spectrum of Sudan since it emerged in the 19th century as a result of annexations and diplomacy. As ethnic and religious identity politics have created deep ethnic and religious divisions in the country, several regions in the periphery of Sudan have remained marginalized and disintegrated. On the other hand, there have been always peace initiatives addressing partially or wholly root causes of regional conflicts in order to integrate and unite the country. It seems that Sudan's peace processes might be considered as integration processes addressing political, economic and social issues either on national or regional levels. The Addis Ababa Peace Agreement in 1972 and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005 were major attempts in order to save Southern parts of the country and unite Sudan territorially. Today, once again, we witness that transitional government body, which came to power after ouster of former President Omar al-Bashir, designates ending regional conflicts and disputes throughout 2020 Juba Peace Agreement, signed between Khartoum and regional elites in Darfur, South Kordofan, Blue Nile, Northern, Eastern, Central parts and the Third Front-Tamazuj. This paper aims exploring Sudan's regional disputes and the Juba peace deal from the angle of national integration approach in order to understand whether this time construction of a new Sudan based upon civic values is possible or not.

Eclipsados por las guerras en Darfur y Sudán del Sur, los conflictos en los estados fronterizos de Kordofán del Sur y Nilo Azul, que ahondan sus raíces en décadas anteriores pero han resurgido con fuerza en 2011, no han logrado tener suficiente presencia en los medios. La marginalización cultural y el expolio de sus ricos recursos naturales por parte de la élite del norte, de los que se están beneficiando determinados actores internacionales, son las claves de unos enfrentamientos con consecuencias humanitarias de enorme gravedad.

Today, the Kordofanian family of the Niger-Congo phylum remains one of the most poorly researched language families in Africa and worldwide. This book makes two descriptive grammars available to the scientific community, respectively Tira and Otoro (both of which belonging to the Heibanian branch of Kordofanian) and is therefore a most welcome publication.
The author of those grammars, Roland C. Stevenson (1915‒1991), is a member of the Church Missionary Society, who first arrived in Sudan in 1937 and soon got involved in the study of various Sudanese tongues. He devoted his PhD (Stevenson 1956-57) to the languages spoken in the Nuba Mountains, a region which is the home area of all attested Kordofanian languages. As “descriptive and comparative work on Kordofanian languages is still in its infancy”  (Schadeberg 1989: 79), Stevenson’s abundant linguistic production remains one of the main sources (and in some cases the only one) available for many Kordofanian languages.
The editor of these grammars, Thilo Schadeberg, is one of the very few linguists to have regularly worked and published on Kordofanian languages (e.g. Schadeberg 1981a/b, 1989) since the second half of the XXth century. As explained in the preface of the book, Stevenson wrote his Tira (TI) and Otoro (OT) grammars in 1942 and 1943 respectively. However, these existed only as typescripts and it is thanks to Schadeberg’s efforts that “the data and analyses” they contain are “presented here [i.e. in this book] for the first time in print” (p. viii).