Perspectives on the Blue Nile

In recent years, reports of rebellion and counterinsurgency in the Nuba Mountains have sometimes suggested that the world was facing “another Darfur,” but of course the patterns of exploitation, resistance and repression notoriously now linked with Darfur had earlier expression in the Nuba area. ¹ Today, the case of the Blue Nile region is usually treated as a supplementary and smaller scale example of the conflict in the Nuba area itself, but as I will indicate in this chapter, the historical roots of strategic conflict there go deeper. ² This is primarily because of the way that the upper Blue Nile region has always been closely involved with comings and goings of every kind across its border on the east with Ethiopia. The river valley itself has helped lay out highly strategic trade routes into the Ethiopian highlands, making it a priority for Sudan’s predecessors at least from the time of the Funj Kingdom of Sennar (founded in 1504 to maintain good “foreign” relations with kingdoms and states based upstream). The Nuba Mountains region, although peripheral to the heartland of the old Sudan, has never previously adjoined another major state with which Sudan has had to find accommodation. The differences between the recent war experiences of the Nuba Mountains and the southern Blue Nile are directly related to this strategic contrast, as are the somewhat different approaches taken by Khartoum toward the insurgencies there. The post-2005 boundaries of the new Blue Nile State now leave it closely contained on three sides. Still bounded by the Ethiopian frontier on the east, it is newly defined to the south and along the whole of its western side by the 2011 South Sudan frontier. The challenges of achieving peace for the Blue Nile people within the Sudan as presently defined are thus even more politically complicated than in the Nuba case.