All About Darfur

Director Taghreed Elsanhouri says that she made this film "out of a passionate belief that I was uniquely qualified to tell a story of race because as a northerner in Sudan I know what it is to belong to a dominant group and as a Black woman in Britain living with racism I know what it must be like to live marginalized as a minority in Sudan. It is this double consciousness that informs my story." She returns to Sudan, having emigrated to Britain as a child, to see how the seemingly racially harmonious country of her memories could have become the scene of not one but two of the worst instances of ethnic cleansing in recent African history.

When the film was made, the perilous situation in Sudan had predominantly been viewed from outside the country. All About Darfur offered an opportunity to hear it explained by eloquent, diverse, and even contradictory voices from within Sudan. The director talked to ordinary Sudanese in outdoor tea shops, markets, refugee camps, and living rooms about how deeply rooted prejudices could suddenly burst into a wildfire of ethnic violence. She asks how only two months after peace accords were signed ending a twenty year long civil war between the Christian and animist South and an aggressive Islamic regime in the North, war broke out between the ethnic groups in the West, or Darfur, and the government in Khartoum.

At an elementary school, the director heard repeated the lessons she learned about Sudan's creation as a nation-state. It was originally a collection of small warring fiefdoms or tribes which were only unified in 1825 by the invasion of the Ottoman Turks eager for a new source of slaves and gold. Elsanhouri’s family in fact were North African merchants who emigrated with the Turks and intermarried into the Arab Danagla tribe. Sudan assumed its boundaries as the largest country in Africa when the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium took possession of it towards the end of the century. As a consequence, a unified Sudanese cultural and political identity never had a chance to emerge. One professor interviewed suggested that the Sudanese might form a multicultural state like Switzerland, though deep historical distrust complicated such a confederation.

All About Darfur demonstrates how race functions as a floating signifier, changing its meaning from context to context. For example, people from northern Sudan are often regarded as Arabs in Sudan; in Egypt they would be seen as Africans; in Tanzania as Arabs. "Race" effects status in Sudanese society. In media representation almost exclusively Arab stars and Arab story lines; government jobs are channeled primarily to Arabs who also form the officer corps in the army.

When Elsanhouri reaches El faser, the hub of the Dafur region, she realizes that race alone was too crude a concept for understanding the genocide there. The Western tribes had long rebelled over decades of cultural exclusion not only race or religion. The government's decision to fight a war by proxy by arming the Janjaweed militias, nomadic bandits hungry for the land of farmers in Darfur, is universally deplored. This tipped the delicate balance and started the ethnic cleansing of Darfur. The Janjaweed raided and drove hundreds of thousands of once prosperous farmers into arid refugee camps like the mammoth one at Abu Shoak which becomes the final destination of the director’s journey back to Sudan. Most of the displaced people she speaks with there were looking beyond Sudan for their final rescue. They wished the world cared enough to send multilateral peace keeping forces to stop the war so they could return to their villages. Many supported a Pan-African force while some would of welcomed U.S. intervention even while acknowledging that the U.S. would only act out of its own self-interest.

In the final sequence, the director meets a man building a new mud-brick house in Abu Shoak; it will take only two or three days he says. On the side of the house, the man had written the word "book", because among all this inhumanity and violence his favorite activity remains reading.

Postscript: Two decades after its release, All About Darfur stands as a hauntingly prescient document. The systemic grievances, proxy militias, and unresolved structural fractures captured in the film erupted decades later into a catastrophic nationwide civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the successor forces to the historical Janjaweed. With widespread conflict, severe displacement, and acute food insecurity plunging the region into one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, Elsanhouri's documentary remains an essential window into the historical roots of the ongoing struggle for peace, justice, and human dignity in Sudan.