Slavery, possession and history: the construction of the self among slave descendants in the Sudan

The aim of this article is to study the ṭumbura spirit possession cult of the Sudan as a historical phenomenon directly associated with the social and political changes of the last hundred years. Ṭumbura can be found in the poor neighbourhoods and surrounding shanty towns of the big urban centres of northern Sudan. The majority of the cult's devotees are descendants of nineteenth-century African slaves who had been brought as slaves to the north from the southern and western Sudan by Arab Muslim northerners. Their conversion to Islam notwithstanding, the slaves and their descendants have always been regarded by the Arab northerners as subhumans with no religion, descent or history. In ṭumbura these claims are contested. Initiation into the cult enables the devotees to construct a positive self-identity and assert that they too are Muslims, descendants of Adam and Eve, and a social category with a specific sense of history—in other words, human beings. During the colonial and post-colonial periods the position of the slave descendants within the social formation changed considerably as new groups of people made an appearance. These were the refugees from the south who had fled famine and civil war and today populate the shanty towns that surround the capital, Khartoum, and other cities in the north. The refugees enabled the slave descendants to move away from the margins of the society and closer to their erstwhile Arab masters. This movement has triggered a process of identity transformation which has reflected on the popularity of ṭumbura , which has started to decline rapidly. At the same time the remaining groups are in a process of structural reorganisation which follows the lines of zār borè , another, more popular, female cult practised mainly by people of Arab descent.