Preface (2021)

My Discovery of the Anuak

My request was a simple one. I wanted to find a culture to study while I was still living in Ethiopia. Don McClure suggested the Anuak people as a good choice. They were accessible, had been little studied, and had a good body of music. Little did I know that I would become acquainted with a people of a long and noble history, yet destined for hardship and disastrous circumstances. As for me, I continued my study of listening, asking questions and taking photos, then spending a year translating what I had gathered with helpful and qualified informants. All of this resulted in writing and successfully submitting the results for my Doctorate of Education in Music Education from the University of Illinois in 1978.

I proceeded with a career in teaching but filed my audio tapes, cassette tapes, and field notes away on shelves and in boxes. My thesis was safely stored in university libraries all filed away and dormant until my son Robert introduced me to Anuak tribal members in Minneapolis several years ago. I met with an Anuak congregation and was invited to play my recordings of their music for them as a part of one of their Sunday services. I was gratified to find that the congregation showed strong interest in what I had recorded. I returned home to South Carolina and considered this only a passing event.

Upon moving back to the Twin Cities in 2018, I again found members of the Anuak tribe, this time meeting and worshiping at Calvary Baptist in St. Paul. I met them there as well as in several other locations for services and celebrations. I was given opportunity to share slides and sounds that I originally had put together for the courses I taught in Ethnomusicology at the University of Northwestern, Biola University, and Columbia International University. Much interest was expressed, so I decided to post my entire collection onto a website (https://www.anuaklegacy.com), which I completed in 2020. Upon completion, and reacting to interest shown by the Anuak leaders, I made the decision to retype my thesis of 1978 and, with the encouragement of the University of Northwestern, have it published. I have made only slight revisions and corrections to the original thesis. With the Anuak tribe in mind, this is an effort to share what I had gathered with those who have resettled in the United States as well as those living in Ethiopia and South Sudan.  This is my contribution to the long, impressive, and ongoing Anuak legacy.

The Anuak Legacy in Ancient History

When we first landed in Gambela and set our eyes on the villages lining the Baro (Openo) River, then arrived in Pokwo, saw mud and thatched houses in small communities, women pounding grain, children playing, and men talking, walking, and sitting, there was nothing to show the heritage of a people going back hundreds of years.

In her recent book, Okoth Owity Opap writes:

The Anuak people are a Luo speaking group who live in South Sudan and Ethiopia. … The Anuak oral tradition confirmed that they came from Dongola in Northern Sudan.^[1] …

According to Onyala, the Luo people built the first civilization in Ancient Egypt that spread to Europe and Asia. Furthermore, Diop stated that Anu people brought civilization to the new world through writing, geometry, religion, Kingship, law, and science.^[2] …

[D]uring 7000 BC the desert dried up and Luo people migrated to where life was suitable for farming and green pastures for their cattle. … [I]t was the Anu people who built the first civilized nation on earth. Anu people are the Anuak people, but their names were spelt in various ways: Anu, Anuak, Anywaa.^[3] …

The British colonial forces attacked the Anuak kingdom in 1912…. The Anuak kingdom was established four hundred years before the British arrival in Sudan! It developed policies and regulations that governed the Anuak nation for centuries. According to King Akway Cham, British colonization which aimed to impose its own rules on the Anuak people was unacceptable. The Anuaks believed that their kingdom was equal to any kingdom in Europe.^[4]

The Anuak are an oral society. No libraries exist except in the minds of the people, the memories found in folk tales, the memories generated by the hearing of Agwagas and Oberos. But historians such as Opap have been able to trace words, names, and places quite convincingly.

The Anuak Legacy in Current History

On April 15, 2021, I asked Ethiopian human rights activist, Obang Metho,^[5] “What has happened to the Anuak tribe since 1972?”

He responded with the knowledge of a historian in a steady stream that needed no further prodding. Metho noted that “If I return to Pokwo I would find it changed. I would not recognize anything but concrete foundations. The homes, church, guest house, clinic, bead shop… are all gone. Just the foundations remain… and the eternal mango trees.”^[6]

During the last forty years a lot of changes have taken place in social fabric and values. The impact of war is evident. In the late 1970s the Haile Selassie monarchy was overthrown and a communist government came in. The Sudan (the South Sudan as of 2011) was affected differently but in Ethiopia, President Mengistu had the idea of changing what he saw as tribal and primitive and so intentionally tried to destroy the lifestyle of the Anuak. The government-imposed rules over the traditional way of doing things–the ways of living, marriage, dealing with justice, death, the musical styles—all of these folkways came under the imposition of the government and those who resisted were killed.

Ethiopia and Eritrea went to war and demanded the Anuak young men to fight. The Anuaks were big and tall, ideal soldiers, and many of that generation were lost. People—highlanders and notably, Tigrinians—were left without means and the Anuaks helped them and so resettled among the Anuaks. The Anuaks lived up to their name, “The people who share,” by creating space for the refugees in a nonhostile environment. In traditional Anuak areas, during these unsettled times trees were cut down, villages were leveled, the land was cleared, and wars continued especially between 1984 and 1987. The Anuak land was used to hold thousands of refugees. Highlanders from Ethiopia pushed from one side, and refugees pushed from the South Sudan side. The Anuak found themselves to be a minority, not resisting but squeezed from both directions.

The Anuaks were left out of decision and policy making and the local people found themselves without any rights. The refugees got food for free as did the Anuak which resulted in complacency especially among the young people. Why farm and plant and harvest when food could be gotten for free? The land began to be used for other purposes as the people got handouts instead of working the land, and many ways of Anuak traditional life changed. Things were not like they used to be, and the culture was seriously affected. Obang said, “The Anuak never recovered.”^[7]

In 2012, Cultural Survival Quarterly stated:

For more than 400 years the Anuak… people have lived along the banks of wide rivers that flow through Ethiopia’s Gambella region and join with the White Nile. … Now they are being driven out. Ethiopian soldiers are forcing all the Anuak families to leave their lands behind and move into new villages. The government promises them jobs, schools, and health clinics, but most of the new villages have none of these. Some don’t even have water. Without land, Anuak parents can’t feed their children, and they can’t return to their homelands because the government has given their lands over to foreign companies. Right now, those companies’ bulldozers are destroying the Anuak people’s forests and farms.^[8]

In the 1990s the communist government collapsed and the Anuaks for the first time had breathing room and hoped to return to their own land and culture. They returned and were temporarily in charge of their land but the Ethiopian government asserted control of the regional government and the Anuak found themselves with no strong leadership to assist them in self-determination. Instead, they were put in jail.

The International Human Rights Law Clinic of the Washington College of Law submitted this report:

The racial discrimination in the Gambella region must be placed in the larger context of racial divisions in the whole country. In 1991, the new Ethiopian government implemented a system known as “ethnic federalism.” This system of governance divided Ethiopia into nine regions along ethnic lines. In Gambella, the Anuak initially controlled the federal government, but the Highland population soon took control. … Human Rights Watch reports that the result of ethnic federalism has been that “the Anuak are now a minority in what they regarded as their own land.” Ethnic federalism has served to disenfranchise the Anuak while fostering tribalism and racial divisions.^[9]

In 2003 the Anuak were squeezed with no peace. A great massacre occurred. Hundreds were killed. Obang Metho reports that 424 educated Anuak were massacred beginning on December 13, 2003. “In less than three days, at least four hundred and twenty-four persons were slaughtered in a well-calculated plan utilizing a prepared list of the names of educated Anuak men and leaders.“^[10] Obang continues:

Similar actions were taken by Ethiopian troops in many of the rural towns in the Gambella district, causing many more victims and much more destruction of homes, crops, property and granaries. In addition to those killed in Gambella town, it is estimated that over fifteen hundred more people have been killed since that time.^[11]

After the massacre, people left, never to return. The Law Clinic report gives this account:

During the December 2003 massacres, ENDF [Ethiopian National Defense Forces] soldiers attacked buildings, roads, and other parts of civilian infrastructure in the Gambella region.  Houses, a school, and a medical clinic were burned down in the Anuak village of Okuna Pino, and thousands of houses were razed or burned in other villages. In addition to destroying buildings essential to basic economic, social, and cultural rights, the ENDF targeted people responsible for implementing their rights; for example, the ENDF targeted educated Anuak for death or torture, therefore compromising the right of the Anuak to education. In two villages, ENDF soldiers destroyed maize grinding mills that were collectively owned, claiming they needed to search for bullets in the flour.^[12]

After, a story of displacement and resettlement followed. The Ethiopian government, its crony interests and foreign corporations came in and took over the best land and then left when no oil was found. The land was indigenous land and the government did not have a right to the land but the Gambela region became the epicenter of the landgrabs in Africa. Many different countries and large corporations have pushed the Anuak off their land, cleared it, and now have left it largely dormant and empty with tractors and other large equipment remaining inoperable. Even though oil has never been found, the land remains fertile and rich—and this indigenous land of the Anuak still has the potential to become the breadbasket of this part of Africa.

There is been little or no recovery from the war. On the South Sudan side, the Anuak have been left alone and have returned to a traditional river culture, but Ethiopia has not returned to normal.

Omot Ochan summarizes this bleak story:

The Anuak are peace-loving. They want to cultivate the land. But others come and take the land from the Anuak with no pay for the land. This was not private land but it was the community’s land. It was farmed on, but nothing has been received for the Anuak. They just wanted the land.  The central government does not care about a marginalized group of people. All want a piece of the land.^[13]

The Shadow report states:

The Gambella region is resource-rich…. One Anuak civilian told the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard, “what causes all the violence is probably the gas and oil we have. Problems are always happening nearest the oil.” [It was later found that all the oil wells were dry.] The Anuak have not been allowed to participate in development plans.^[14]

This is a bleak picture to be sure. But 4000 or more Anuak have settled in Minnesota and the upper Midwest and Canada, and are carving out a new life, establishing new stories to be told and a new heritage to pass on to the young. In Ethiopia, the mango trees are still there, the river is still huge, the Nile perch can still be caught. Though the Oberos, Agwagas and Nirnams are not sung so much anymore, the Anuak culture still survives and, one prays, will thrive and blossom once again.