Beginnings of Sudanese conflict – Berlin, 1884

Islam’s southward march [in Africa] was halted by the arrival of European colonists, who established
beachheads along the West and East African coast and moved inland, taking control not only of peoples
who practiced traditional African religions but also those who had adopted Islam…

When the colonial powers gathered in Berlin in 1884 to finalize their partition of Africa, they paid little
heed to the religious divide that stretched across the continent from Guinea in West Africa to Kenya in East
Africa. Not only Nigeria but other West African states, as well as Chad, Sudan, and Ethiopia to the east,
found themselves with regional-cultural contrasts fraught with problems. In the process, the colonial
powers created a regional problem whose consequences they could not foresee. The Islamic Front has
become a zone of conflict that threatens the cohesion of countries and facilitates the actions of terrorists and
insurgents.

Undoubtedly the costliest impact of the divisive Islamic Front has been in Sudan, whose Muslim
government waged a decades-long, bitter war against the three southern provinces where African Christian
and animist communities are in the majority. The cost in terms of casualties and dislocations will never be
known; estimates of the death toll over more than three decades of conflict are in the hundreds of
thousands. The fundamentalist-dominated Sudan regime wanted to impose Islamic (Sharia) law in the
South; Southerners wanted independence or, failing that, protection and guarantees against Khartoum’s
cultural domination. Finally, in 2005, a settlement of sorts was reached, but almost simultaneously another
deadly conflict broke out elsewhere near the Islamic Front, this time in Sudan’s Darfur Province along the
border with Chad, costing tens of thousands of lives even as the United Nations deliberated over the
question of whether what was happening there could be technically construed as genocide.

– Excerpted from Why Geography Matters: Three Challenges Facing America, Climate Change, The Rise of China, and Global Terrorism by Harm de Blij.