Mohaned, you are right. But the question is, what to do about it? The government is spending millions of dollars on public relations firms. All 100% wasted. The best propaganda is the truth which doesn’t need any spin. If this government is serious about having a better image in America it would make it easier for Americans to get visas so they can come and see for themselves. (Forget about this tit-for-tat harassment: just because the U.S. makes it almost impossible for a Sudanese who is not on official business to come to the U.S. doesn’t mean we should be doing the same.) Remember the British teachers who used to teach in our secondary schools? That was the best ever exercise in public diplomacy. They are all lifelong friends and advocates of Sudan. Bring them back! And please please let’s have a system of registering a business that takes longer than building a pyramid. The most effective sanctions on Sudan are the business regulations which are the world’s best deterrent on a modern businessman in a competitive era.

Alex et al,

The image of Sudan, and more particularly the image of the Sudanese Arab, in the Western imagination or public sphere has been greatly damaged over the years. Since the war in the south during the 80s and 90s and now the current catastrophe of Darfur.

Despite what could be said about advocacy groups and media agendas being guided by populist or sensationalist covergae that sees events with binary glasses, the truth of the matter is there is a long tradtion of western depictions of the Sudanese since 1800’s through to today which have always had bearing on policy towards Sudan.

I will actualy contend that it is a question worthy of consideration in the historical context of encounters between Sudan and West in modern times.

If we, for the sake of argument draw parallels within Sudanese history then we will find that the tribesmen of Darfur have shaped how the outside world came to see the Sudanese Arab since the 1870s.

Then the raids and wars of Zubeir Pasha and the attempts by Charles Gordon to curb the “Slave trade” paved way for a different public activism in Britian with anti-slavery groups, thanks to the accounts of Gordon among others came to define the Arab tribesmen as enslavers.

In the aftermath of the conquest of Khartoum by the Mahdi and his Ansar in 1885, Victorian England entertained its public by spectecles and theatre shows which played with the barbarian dervish, the Arab, the Sudanese tribesmen who follwoed the fanatic and zealot Mahdi and his succesor the Khalifa.

The Khalifa was immortalised in writtings by journalists who covered the reconquest in 1898-99, as a tyrannical barbarian who also ruled the Sudanese with an iron fist, but in today’s climate we can see the parallels between hin and Beshir.

As Darfur was engulfed in the fire of war, another name appeared and caught peoples ears in the west, the “Janjaweed” again these were the same tribes men who were called enslavers, barbarians and dervishes. Now they were near mythical evil that attacked from horsebacks.

However before it caught on the imagination of young students in campuses all over the West, it had its resonances on the web when the term was ciculated in enetries on the violence in Darfur in early 2003.

As any Sudanese who grew up in Sudan during the years of the Ingaz, since 1989 we became used to various names that militas go by. But this new name became global, and it was marketed not by advocacy groups or Western propaganda… it was the Sudanese who wrote of Darfur’s war who marketd the negative image about the Arab, at a time when globaly it was ok to go Arab-bashing.

I will end this with ancedote, I was reading for an MA in 2004, when I woke up to the reality that I was all of a sudden being identified in talks about Darfur on campus an “arab that hates Africans”, having always been proud of my Sudanese identity and belonging to a nation for better or worse is fundemntaly African, even in our Arab dimension, that for us who grew up in the urban settings of Khartoum, an “arab was an insult” it meant “ruffians and dwellers of the desert or those who came from the rural areas”.

I think, it is not how American kids will take time to overcome their negative perception of us, but rather how long will it take us as Sudanese to rise beyond the trappings of the ethnification of our identy that have been tarnished by the repetative crisies that our political classes have pushed us in. In this i think Darfur’s war has brought the ugly beast out.

Dear Alex de Waal

Your analysis has truely facinated me particularly when it comes to talk about the Sudanese social values and the future prospects of the country. What you have mentioned are the facts that the Western advocates doing thier best to hide from the public in thier countries because they cotradict thier purposeful propaganda. My own everyday life in Sudan is full of expressible pictures that support your social impressions about Sudanese people. Today afternoon I took my lunch outside home with a group of my neighbours representing different parts of Sudan, among us there is someone from the South, another from Darfur who is Zaghawi, a third one from Nuba Mountain, the fourth from Northern Sudan who is Gaali the tribe of the president Bashir and me from the center of Sudan. We ate together the same food, we enjoyed it, we laughed and then with that feeling of equality and neighbourhood we left. Such pictures of social Sudanese life stand as solid evidence that the image of Sudan is severely distorted by thoes who do not want the country to stabilize and its people to prosper.

How many people here knows Sudan’s GDP growth rate in 2008 is more than 8%, one of the fastest growing country in the world? How many people here knows NGOs buying food from US farmer and ship to Darfur, despite Sudan is a food exporter?

IMF Estimates Sudan’s Real GDP Growth In 2008 At 8.5%
http://www.zawya.com/story.cfm/sidv52n03-3NC19
http://www.economywatch.com/world_economy/sudan/

Sudan capitalises on food exports while receiving aid for starvation in Darfur
http://current.com/items/89188617_sudan-capitalises-on-food-exports-while-receiving-aid-for-starvation-in-darfur.htm

Rwanda and it’s dramatic recovery is a great counter example to this.

“Then the raids and wars of Zubeir Pasha and the attempts by Charles Gordon to curb the “Slave trade” paved way for a different public activism in Britian with anti-slavery groups, thanks to the accounts of Gordon among others came to define the Arab tribesmen as enslavers.”

There are many parallels that can be drawn between what is happening now and what happened in the past. The British invasion of Sudan was characterized in the British media as a project in the interest of Sudan to save Sudanese from the enslaving Mahdi savages, the media did not care to mention that General Gordon had offered the governership of Sudan to Zubair Pasha, Sudan’s most infamous slaver, that Wingate one of the engineers behind the media campaign to pressure the British government in to invading Sudan had referred to Slatin Pasha as a “leader amongst men” clearly the idea of slavery in Sudan was not of major concern to these men. However the architects behind the media campaign, General Horatio Kitchener and Reginald Wingate were intent on avenging Gordon’s death and simply used slavery as a pretext to invade.The media campaign and the public pressure resulting from it was enough to force the British government who had no intention of recolonising Sudan to send an army lead by General Kitchener to supposedly liberate Sudan from the enslaving barbarians.

Today we have architects of another media campaign Save Darfur and other lobby groups pressuring the US government to intervene in Darfur,which is basically a nice way of saying invade and the pretext given this time is to stop the genocidal government of Omar al Bashir of course missing out the important details which would show these accusation to be false.

So when the average Sudanese claims that Darfur is being manipulated as a means to an end that means being regime change,there is significant substance to that argument,sanctions and US meddling in Sudan were there before even most Americans had heard of Darfur. The US government plus the advocacy groups to its right have correctly identify a new pressure point which is Darfur to use against Khartoum and there exploiting it as much as they can.