Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and theWar on Terror, Mahmood Mamdani (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 398 pp., $27 cloth.
Darfur has a unique resonance in the Western imagination, considered both the literal site of genocide—the greatest, most deplorable international crime—and the figurative site of ablution, where the ghosts of Rwanda are excised, and where the international community transforms its collective lamentation of “Never Again!” from a dirge to a battle hymn. In the West the crisis in Darfur has been transformed by the idea that Darfur is a humanitarian matter properly viewed only in moral, and not political, terms. Thus, Darfur is stripped of its political and social context. It is this ignorance of politics and history, in concert with a subtle imperialism that employs the language of humanitarian intervention, that threatens to derail a lasting political settlement in the region.
Such is Mahmood Mamdani's central contention in Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror, an erudite, exhaustive, and thoroughly unsettling examination of the conflict in Darfur. Mamdani, a professor of government at Columbia University, examines the conflict vis- à-vis the history of the region and the discourse of the war on terror. With an impressive account of the linkages among Sudanese history, the legacy of colonialism, cold war geopolitics, and the contemporary war on terror, Saviors and Survivors explodes the received wisdom about Darfur.
Far from a senseless, ahistorical conflict, the current crisis, according to Mamdani, has its roots in the legacy of British imperialism, which introduced the dichotomy of “native” Africans versus “settler” Arabs to the region and created homelands for some tribes while leaving others landless; in the prolonged drought and desertification of the Sahel, which has caused landless tribes' encroachment on landed tribes' territories in an already resource-poor region; and in the continued legacy of the cold war, where a proxy war in Chad between Libya and Western powers (namely, France and the United States) helped militarize the nomadic Arab tribes that populate northern Chad and Darfur, and whose members now constitute much of the Janjaweed.
