I was born in a village in southern Sudan, growing up without knowing that there was any other kind of society in any other part of the country—or any other religion. As a toddler, I didn’t know what Arabs were or that I, as an African Shilluk, looked different from them. But, by the time I learned how to speak, the first thing we children learned as part of becoming people who know the world was running from the Arabs.
The adults in my village had heard stories of how Arabs had come down from the north and burned other villages to the ground, those who could get away running for their lives, forced to leave the elderly, sick, and wounded to die. Every year they heard these stories, this cycle of terror: the Arab army would come and raid the villages, burn them down, and then come back to see what was left—who had survived and if they had rebuilt again. There was no way to know if this would happen to our village, but, as a child, it wasn’t my responsibility to worry about it.
Sudan had become independent from the British on New Year’s Day 1956, but fighting had broken out between the mostly black, Christian south and the Arab, Muslim north the summer before. The Arab government in Khartoum wanted to force the African tribes of the south to become Muslim and adopt Arabic culture. But the people in the south, whether they were Christian or believed in the ancient tribal religions of the Nile region, wanted to remain the way they were and have political autonomy.
Then, one day, the Arabs came. And they did exactly what the rumors said they would. They swarmed into the village shooting everywhere. My family and I didn’t know what was happening until we heard the shots coming from every direction. I was nine-years-old.
Then, one day, the Arabs came. And they did exactly what the rumors said they would.
We had to run, but the Arabs followed us, and they killed two of my friends who were running away with me. We didn’t even know where we were running, but we ran until these screaming figures firing guns disappeared. We children hid in the bush and tried to sleep as night came, but we were too terrified and had no idea if the Arabs would come back.
The next day, we walked back the way we came and somehow found the village—which was completely destroyed. But, miraculously, my family had survived. Not long after, my father, remembering those stories from other villages, decided that it was pointless to stay and rebuild. Instead, he brought us to the capital of Upper Nile state, which was the town of Malakal.
Malakal was a mixed place, with both Africans and Arabs living there. In fact, there was an Arab family which lived near us, made up of brothers who came from other regions in both the north and the south. One brother was named Abdullahi, and, one day, he asked me to help him bring his luggage onto a steamer which was waiting to cross the Nile. It was the rainy season, when the main type of transport is the ferry, and we lived close to the river, so I was happy to help him. He seemed kind, and not like the other Arabs who had burned down our village and killed my friends.
He told me to sit next to his luggage on the steamer, because he was going to buy things at the market near the riverbank. Without even thinking that anything bad could happen, I took his word and stayed waiting for him to come. He didn’t show up right away, until the time that the steamer started moving out from the dock. I became terrified and I started screaming, and, just in time, he came running and made it onto the boat before it left.
He calmed me down, telling me that the boat had left the dock. There was no way they could turn it back, since it was one of the biggest steamers and ferries have tight schedules. He told me that we had to wait until the boat got to its destination, which was Kosti, capital of White Nile state in northern Sudan—almost 260 miles away down river. He would then help me get on the steamer coming back the other way to Malakal.
There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people on the steamer, and Abdullahi was the only person I could trust. I was lost in the middle of the Nile for the first time in my life. My life was now in his hand. I had to trust him in everything.
Finally, we reached Kosti. There, it turned out that Abdullahi had also kidnapped three other black boys before me, and they were waiting for him. I was the youngest. He brought me and two older ones to the market, which was divided into stands based upon where the sellers lived, with each stand corresponding to a different village. There was a line of trucks ready to take these people home, and we got into one of them. We didn’t know how to count the hours it took or how many miles it was.
The truck dropped us off in a village called Fashishoya, north of Kosti. In Fashishoya, Abdullahi was greeted happily by his family, which was really just a branch of maybe six or seven families. Part of why his relatives were so happy was because Abdullahi come back from southern Sudan and brought “slaves” with him. We didn’t know what the word “slave” meant, let alone that we were going to end up becoming slaves. In fact, Abdullahi’s family was so happy to receive slaves that a dispute broke out among some of the men over who would get the older boys, since they looked stronger and more useful. Eventually, they compromised: one larger part of Abdullahi’s family would get the oldest boy, the smaller one the younger.
Then, like the others, I was given away, too. A female relative of Abdullahi’s had only one son—meaning their household didn’t need one of the stronger, older boys—so Abdullahi gave me to them. As a gift.
I asked them where Abdullahi was, and said that he’d promised me that he would help me get on the next boat back to Malakal, but they said that I belonged to them now and I wouldn’t see Abdullahi again. I cried, but I was punished for crying, and ordered to keep silent. But how can you be silent when you are now being told that you will not see somebody who promised that he will send you back to your loved ones? How can you be quiet when you’re being told that you were given away as a gift?
After the tears finished, I spent two and a half years as a slave—carrying heavy containers of water, sleeping in the same place as the farm animals, doing household chores, and being beaten. I eventually escaped when my “masters” moved closer to Kosti, and—thank God—some people from my Shilluk tribe saw me outside the new house and then helped me slip away.
When the Muslim Brotherhood took over the government of Sudan in 1989, that regime declared a formal jihad against the south on paper, but both “civil wars” were one jihad which began when the Arabs first invaded Africa almost 1,400 years ago.
I had survived that war, which ended in 1972 with the Addis Ababa Agreement, after up to a million and half people were killed (with no one counting those enslaved). But what most people don’t know and no one in the West knew then was that what the media called a “civil war” was actually a jihad—just like the one which had brought the Arabs to Africa in the first place, enslaving millions of Africans and killing tens of millions more.
In 1983, the Arabs got sick of being at peace with my people. Again, they said that all of Sudan must submit to Islam and accept Sharia law, and went back to war. When the Muslim Brotherhood took over the government of Sudan in 1989, that regime declared a formal jihad against the south on paper, but both “civil wars” were one jihad which began when the Arabs first invaded Africa almost 1,400 years ago. It is true that the Arabs hated the peoples of the south because they were black, and wanted their green, oil-rich land, but they also hated us because they believed in jihad.
I was living in Egypt when the 1989 coup happened, and that was when I escaped again (legally) to America. But, about six years after I came to New York City, something very strange happened. In 1993, I had met a Jewish man from Boston named Charles Jacobs who had learned about slavery in Sudan and wanted to do something about it. With a black Mauritanian Muslim diplomat named Mohamed Athié and another South Sudanese man named David Dechand, we founded the American Anti-Slavery Group. More than a year later, when Andrew Cooper, the editor of The City Sun, a black Harlem newspaper, saw Charles and Mohamed on Tony Brown’s Journal, a black community talk show, he asked Sam Cotton, one of his part-time reporters, to see if it was true that Arabs still owned African slaves. In the winter of 1995, Sam published the first of a series of articles showing that there were tens of thousands of other people enslaved just like I had been—but, we found out, there actually were black people who wanted to stop him spreading the truth.
I had never heard of the Nation of Islam, but their members were the ones stealing as many copies of The City Sun as they could so that other black people couldn’t read Sam’s article. Louis Farrakhan’s spokesman, Abdul Akbar Muhammad, then started saying that slavery did not exist in Sudan and that the CIA, FBI, and Israel had made it up. Akbar even went onto Tony Brown’s show with Sam and personally blamed Charles—just because he “is Jewish”! That was funny, because Jews like Charles cared about me when even some black Christians didn’t, and Israel had secretly helped the South Sudanese during the first war against the Arabs. Akbar’s “evidence” that slavery was CIA propaganda was that the Sudanese government had taken him on a trip around the country and he hadn’t seen any slavery—and that his organization had written a book, called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, about how Jews (and not Muslims) supposedly ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
To me, the Nation of Islam boys were just slaves—but, unlike me, they were proud to be slaves, and wanted all other black people to be just like them.
As the Western media (reluctantly) began to cover slavery in Sudan a bit more, Farrakhan and his thugs eventually talked about it less, but the fight they put up was both disturbing and disgusting. These were people who were so proud of being “black,” and loved to take trips to Africa, but they were defending and actually helping the Arab killers who had enslaved me to kill and enslave more of my people. They behaved like—but worse than—the black Sudanese intellectuals I met who didn’t want South Sudan to become independent, as well as the Sudanese Africans who had converted to Islam centuries before and “become” Arabs—many of whom made up the militias who burned down villages and kidnapped slaves. But Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam were even worse than that, because they were like dhimmah: the people who did not convert but submitted to Islam and became slaves in all but name, and did everything they could to please their Arab masters. To me, the Nation of Islam boys were just slaves—but, unlike me, they were proud to be slaves, and wanted all other black people to be just like them.
But, as time went on, I noticed that a form of the insanity which had turned some black Americans into ignorant Farrakhan worshippers who didn’t want to listen to me was infecting the rest of the stupid Western world. The Nation of Islam is not actually Islam, but their jihadist friends were taking over America.
When 9/11 happened in New York, people learned what “terrorism” was, but not jihad. A few people remembered that bin Laden had lived in Sudan under government protection between 1991 and 1996, and that Sudan was involved in helping the people who planned 9/11, but they were mostly national security analysts. Also, Sheikh Omar Abdulrahman, the man who planned the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, was given asylum by Sudan when he fled Egypt, and then came to America from Sudan in 1990. Even people like President George Bush—a man who was sensitive to the fact that Africans were being enslaved, and signed the Sudan Peace Act in 2002 to try to stop the killing—didn’t know what jihad was, and did almost nothing to wake the country up to the real threat.
It is true that America did help stop the war in Sudan, which ended, if you count the “first” one, after almost exactly half a century, in 2005, after perhaps four million people were killed, seven million forced from their homes, and 200,000 enslaved (just the second time around). Then, in early 2011, there was a referendum on whether the south would have to stay inside Arab Sudan, and nearly 99% voted to leave. South Sudan, with all of its horrible problems, then became independent later that year.
But, unlike South Sudan, America didn’t vote to kick jihad out of its borders. It let jihad take over Dearborn, Michigan, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and universities like Columbia, Harvard, and UCLA. It let Qatar buy up Washington. It let Iran build nuclear weapons. And it let Zohran Mamdani become mayor of my city of New York—the place to which I had come to escape jihad.
I have been speaking about my experiences for more than 30 years now, which was difficult at first, because, in South Sudanese culture, being a slave is a disgrace, and when you talk about it and explain it, you open up the wound. But, because of God, I am a free man, and that’s why I’m speaking: on behalf of those who are not free.
As of now, I live in a free world, and that free world fought a war to end slavery, but it wasn’t easy. In America’s case, hundreds of thousands of people died, to end this practice of one people dehumanizing another. But the West and America won’t fight a war to end jihad. Jihad is new to people here in the West, but it isn’t new, and certainly not to we survivors of Islamization and Arabization.
When I began my mission to tell the world what I left behind, I remember that I was told by one elected official here in the United States that “You are just being paranoid” when I talked about jihad and slavery in Sudan. My response to that gentleman was, “It is not because of what happened to me. It is because I wasn’t a Muslim. If I were a Muslim, I wouldn’t have been victimized. I was being victimized because my people rejected being slaughtered; because they rejected the policy and ideology of Islamization.” That gentleman didn’t understand what I told him, even when I mentioned bin Laden and Sheikh Abdulrahman.
Jihad has come to America, and America isn’t fighting it. It enslaved me and hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese people, and I have spent more than 35 years warning the West what’s coming.
This evil started small, but—mark my words—a decade from now, America, you are going to be surprised. Ten years from now, you will ask yourself, “How did that happened?” The answer is it happened because you didn’t take the words from the mouths of the victims seriously.
