The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan

The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, known commonly as the Black Book (Arabic: الكتاب الأسود al-kitab al-aswad), is a manuscript detailing a pattern of disproportionate political control by the people of northern Sudan and marginalization of the rest of the country. It was published in two parts, the first in May 2000 and the second on August 2002. While published anonymously, it was later revealed that the writers had strong ties to the Justice and Equality Movement, a rebel group active in the conflict that later erupted in Darfur to the west.

The first page of the Black Book, Part I, states its thesis: "This publication unveils the level of injustice practised by successive governments, secular and theocratic, democratic or autocratic, since the independence of the country in 1956 to this date." The main argument is that the riverine Arabs near Khartoum have centralized power around themselves, proven by a statistical analysis. The first of the many charts details the populations of the various regions and number of Federal/National-level representatives, as a percentage of the total, since independence. It pointed out that every single president had come from the North. The book goes on to break down these numbers of representation by regime since independence, constitutionally mandated posts, and state governorships, all illustrated through charts. After dealing with the central point about inequality in positions of high office, the Black Book goes on to detail similarly disproportionate results in the number of Attorneys General, executive staff in the Ministry of Finance and the National Council for Distribution of Resources, which allocates oil wealth, as well to note the cultural domination of the national media by northerners. Practically every major sector of society is analyzed to show a pattern of northern control.

Academic Abdullahi El-Tom, in his critique of the book, states that the latter half is not nearly as well-argued as the heavily statistical beginning, making points that are then not substantiated and sometimes falling into polemical statements. For example, the Black Book states that the equipment that was to be used for the Western Highway Project was diverted to the Northern Highway Project, which is both widely rumored and believed, but no evidence is provided to back it up. El-Tom further makes the following observations: it has an implicit view of Sudan as Islamic; it emphasizes the grievances of Western Sudan (i.e. Darfur and Kordofan) over the other marginalized regions; and it has an unforgiving stance towards all the north, rather than just the three clans identified as controlling the government (i.e. the Shaigiya, the Jaaliyeen and the Danagla).

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