People Have Multiple Identities, and Countries Do Too

Another heated debate was whether Sudan qualified to be in this survey when — as many pointed out — it was actually an East African country. There was mention of Sudanese people not knowing where they belong and having “Stockholm Syndrome” to their Arab colonizers.

What also becomes clear in debates of this nature is that some are often eager to position themselves as one or the other — opting for one identity (Arab, Amazigh, North African, East African) only. And then use that stance to inform their communications with others; in some ways insinuating that anyone who chooses a different identity that they are wrong.

The region is connected by, amongst other things, a shared language: Arabic. Darija, the Moroccan dialect, is influenced by Amazigh, Spanish and French, but it is still an Arabic dialect.

Similarly, the phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary of Masri, Egyptian Arabic, are strongly influenced by the Coptic language, a descendant of the languages of Ancient Egypt, as well as Turkish, French, Italian, Greek and English.

Sudan is home to several Arab tribes as well as non-Arab tribes. Culturally, a lot of Arabic Sudanese music and literature is aligned with other North African countries. As a result, there is a significant Sudanese population that consider their cultural identity somehow impacted by their use of the Arabic language, while there are others that do not.

Geographically, Sudan is located in the northeast of Africa; do all Sudanese, spread out across 1,886,000 square kilometers, collectively have to decide whether they are North or East African?

All people that speak Arabic are: Arabic speakers. Not necessarily Arabs. They can be Moroccan Africans that are indigenous Amazigh and speak Arabic. They can be Egyptian Copts and speak Arabic. Pointing that out does not strip them of their Moroccanness, Africanness, Amazigh or Coptic identity. A person can be from North Africa and choose not to speak Arabic, which still doesn’t exclude them from being Libyan, Algerian or Egyptian. We shouldn't be so adamant to claim or refuse identities on behalf of a whole group, preferring to be boxed into one clean story.

When formal colonialism was nearing its end, colonies needed to emerge as nation states that could participate in the international world order. Unlike Europe, where nation states more or less took shape organically, in Africa, an extraordinarily diverse amount of peoples had to be convinced that they now wanted to belong to a specific country.

In North Africa, post-colonial countries were largely built on the identity of being Arab and Muslim. As Lilia Abdelmoula told OkayAfrica, “Tunisian national identity is intentionally color-blind and vague, because it was created to establish a post-colonial state. Identities like Amazigh, or being Jewish, or being Black, are subsumed under ‘Tunisian, Arab and Muslim.’”

Interestingly, the project of forging Arab nationalisms was closely tied to music and pan-Arab culture. Unsurprisingly, it failed, because nationalism is not a natural or sustainable way for people to negotiate their belonging.

As the historian Terence Ranger writes in The Invention of Tradition, “Almost all recent studies of 19-century pre-colonial Africa have emphasized that far from there being a single ‘tribal’ identity, most Africans moved in and out of multiple identities, defining themselves at one moment subject to this chief, at another moment as a member of that cult, at another moment as part of this clan, and at yet another moment as an initiate in that professional guild… the boundaries of the ‘tribal’ polity and the hierarchies of authority within them did not define conceptual horizons of Africans.”

Replace “chief” with political ideology, “cult” with religion, “clan” with nation, “professional guild” with class and it becomes clear that the conceptual horizon of (North) Africans has always and should continue to go further than just one rigid identity. Sudan can be North and East Africa.

All of this to say: identity crises are a natural consequence of the violence of colonialism, and the fact that people are debating who they are, where they come from, and how they express themselves is hopeful. In a constructive debate, however, we shouldn’t decide the identities of others and instead hear them out.

Regardless of whether they consider Sudan to be in North Africa or not, North Africans can certainly learn from the ongoing search for what it means to be Sudanese. While Sudanese people may not yet know how to clearly identify themselves, recent histories have taught us the most important lesson: we (people, groups, countries) are never just one thing. Especially not in North Africa, a place where Africans, Europeans and West Asians co-exist and co-create culture.