Deim Zubeir, from the Arabic ديم الزبير ["Daim az-Zubayr"], commonly translated as the "Camp of Zubeir", is the historically established but highly controversial name of Uyujuku town in the Western Bahr el Ghazal of the Republic of South Sudan, located in the Western Bahr El Ghazal part of the country, some 70 km from the border with the Central African Republic (CAR), near the Biri tributary of the River Chel.
Due to different transliterations from the Arabic, the name components are also spelled in various combinations Dem, Dehm, Deym, Dam, Daym or Daim, and Zubair, Zubayr, Zoubair, Zoubeir, Zoubayr, Zobeir, Ziber, Zebehr, or Zubier, respectively.
The historical remains of the slave camp have been designated a potential UNESCO World Heritage Centre site. In the collective memory of South Sudanese people, the very name Deim Zubeir rings as a synonym for millennia of slavery, at least since Pharaonic times.
Stefano Santandrea (1966) had written a lexicon and grammatical sketch of the Mboto dialect of the Birri language as spoken in Deim Zubeir.Santandrea, Stefano. 1966. The Birri language: Brief elementary notes. Afrika und Übersee 49. 81‒234.
History
Domination by the Dar Fur Sultanate (18th to mid-19th century) Little is known about historical developments at the location before the second half of the 19th century. Even its original name is not clear: according to the pioneering scholar of Sudan history Richard Leslie Hill, it was called "Bayyu", which is the same name as reportedly remembered by Zubeir Rahma. In slight contrast, Gerasimos Makri writes that the old name was "Bāya" and Douglas H. Johnson mentions it as "Gbaya". Edward Thomas elaborates that "Gbaya" is another name for "Kresh", which is in turn the "name for several groups with origin stories in Western Bahr al-Ghazal and present-day CAR."
Historiography has established that at least since the 18th century people in the Western part of the Bahr El Ghazal river system area were constantly on the move because of external pressures. Social groups were rather small and shifted frequently to avoid attacks from powerful neighbours who already possessed European weapons and forcefully expanded the trans-Saharan and Nilotic trading networks into the hinterlands for the exploitation of copper, ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves.
From the northern side, this pressure increased since the early 17th century with the rise of the Dar Fur Sultanate, as it established a patron-client relationship over the lowlands which became known as Dar Fertit. While Dar means 'home of', Fertit does not describe any ethnic group, but was at the time a pejorative "catch-all word for non-Fur, Arab, non-Dinka and non-Luo groups of Western Bahr El Ghazal". Darfur historian Rex Sean O'Fahey describes the dynamic frontiers as follows: "it was not so much a place but rather a state of mind. As the slave raiders moved southwards, so Dar Fartit moved south."From the south-western side, meanwhile, the people in Dar Fertit came under pressure from systematic raids by Zande chieftains and kings.
Turkiya (1821-1884/5)
The Sudanese historian Ahmed Sikainga describes the impact that the Egyptian-Ottoman conquest of the Funj Kingdom in 1821 had on the lands of Dar Fertit as follows:"It represented the first large-scale efforts to draw the Nilotic regions into the expanding capitalist economy. Following the opening of the White Nile waters for navigation in the early 1840s, bands of European, Levantine, and northern Sudanese traders began to rush to the South. Eager to appropriate the resources of these virgin lands, these traders dominated the region by combining military power, political alliances, slave incorporation, and the judicious organization known as the zariba system. An Arabic word meaning 'thorned enclosure', the zariba in the Sudanese context referred to the small fortified settlements that were erstablished by the traders."
The Northern Sudanese merchant Al-Zubeir Rahma Mansur first came to Bahr El Ghazal in 1856 with a cousin on a mission for the major trader Ali Amuriyy, since the Egyptian government had been monopolising trade in Northern Sudan, which encouraged commercial expansion beyond the state control into the South. Zachary Berman argues that Zubeir was an imperialist "buccaneer" following the market as an archetypical agent, "however unconsciously, of broader global market forces expressing themselves in Bahr al-Ghazal", namely Great Britain and France through Egypt. At first he went for ivory, ostrich feathers and gum arabic, which were greatly demanded luxury goods in Europe. However, like other merchants, he found that profits were not sufficient for the required capital of his own company and hence ventured into slave trading.In 1865, Zubeir's army of slaves killed a local king called Adoo Shukoo and took control of his small territory, transforming the merchant into a monarch. Johnson stresses the strategic importance of the location "where the north-south caravan route from Dar Fartit to Zandeland joined the east-west route to the Nile via Wau, Meshra el-Rek, Rumbek, and Shambe". Lawrence Mire also argues that this critical location allowed him to have wider influence than other traders.
While slave-raiding had been practised by Southern warlords before, the trade was taken under Zubeir to unprecedented large-scale levels. According to another pioneer of Sudan academia, Richard Gray, "by 1867 it was reliably estimated that 1800 slaves a year were being despatched northwards by Zubair". It is widely assumed that in what is now South Sudan altogether as many as 400,000 people were enslaved in just fourteen years. Many thousands are also assumed to have been killed as they resisted. Deim Zubeir became "the metropolis and the clearing house of the slave industry in that part of the world." Zubeir himself later claimed in a number of interviews that the establishment of his rule was a civilising mission in the name of Islam and that locals flocked to him for life service because of the stable conditions he provided in contrast to their previous poverty and insecurity. He also argued that European colonialism in the name of abolitionism was just another form of slavery.
In 1871, at the height of his power, when Zubeir controlled much of the Bahr el Ghazal region as well as what are today parts of Chad and the Central African Republic, he was visited at Deim Zubeir by the pioneering botanist and ethnologist Georg Schweinfurth, who was the first European to see the place. A blog series by the Smithsonian Libraries summarises the impressions of the Baltic German scholar and abolitionist, who went on to become a leading proponent for colonial ambitions of the German Empire, as follows:<blockquote>"He found it to be a small town of many thousands of people, including Zubayr's army, government officials, and traders and their armies, all with their wives, concubines, children, personal slaves and their families, plus a group of religious authorities (ulema). To survive, this parasitic community raided surrounding villages, stealing cattle and food crops and taking slaves not only for service in the zariba but also to work the traders' own farms back in northern Sudan and, of course, to sell to foreign markets. Schweinfurth reported seeing four classes of slaves, all subjected to unbelievable degradation and cruelty': adult men, who served as soldiers; boys ages seven to ten, who carried their guns and ammunition; women, 'passed like dollars from hand to hand' as wives, concubines, and household servants; and both men and women to do field work and care for animals. He also reported that Zubayr's court was 'little less than princely.' "</blockquote>In 1873, the Ottoman rulers of Sudan acknowledged Zubeir's power and granted him the title of governor over Bahr El Ghazal. One year later, he conquered the Darfur sultanate with his army of bazinger slave soldiers. As Zachary Berman concludes, Deim Zubeir was "simultaneously imperial and imperialized, an empire unto himself as well as part of overlapping overarching powers."At this point, the Khedive ruler in Cairo moved against Zubeir's ambitions and had him detained indefinitely from 1876 on. Instead, Zubeir's son Suleiman took over and renamed Deim Zubeir into Deim Suleiman (also transliterated into various spellings like Dem Soliman, Daym Sulayman etc.). Suleiman took advantage of the discontent that had grown amongst Northern Sudanese traders because of high taxes and the anti-slavery efforts imposed by the government in Khartoum and started a rebellion in 1877.Suleiman's revolt was, however, short-lived. In 1878 and 1879 his forces were defeated by an Egyptian army under the Italian Romolo Gessi. The support of local Southern allies and their proxy forces led by the Zande king Tombura and Golo chief Kayongo played a key role in the war. Suleiman surrendered, but was executed regardless. Gessi moved into his former residence and set up headquarters there. One of his first steps was to disarm many of his own troops, who - by his own account - "were no less brutal and savage than Suleiman's troops."In November 1879, the Austrian photographer, writer and scientist Richard Buchta visited Gessi, who retained the name Deim Suleiman. In a letter to Schweinfurth he wrote that Gessi, with the support of local Southern fighters whom he had armed as proxies, "did not just chase away the slave-traders, but actually annihilated them. Without any mercy, hundreds of Jellaba were chased into the bushes like wild beasts and butchered to death."
The Russian-German explorer Wilhelm Junker, who visited Deim Suleiman shortly after Buchta, noted that:"Soliman Bey Ziber had undoubtedly greatly strengthened the place, especially in recent times. Around the whole zeriba runs a double and treble palisade, 26 feet high; within this enclosure the several courts are separated by matting almost hard as boards, and behind them are grouped the high and spacious dwellings sur-mounted by conic roofs. Soliman's residence, now occupied by Gessi, was built in the style of a two-storeyed house in Khartum; there were also several other strong brick structures, besides magazines well suited for their purpose."
With regard to demographics, Junker observed: "so great a mixture of tribes has resulted from the Arab rule, that it is no longer possible to lay down accurate frontiers between the several populations."
The most prominent slave, who was freed during Gessi's war against Suleiman, became Hatashil Masha Kathish. While this is how he himself wrote his birth-name, other sources spell it as Hatashil Macar Aciethiec or Atobhil Macar Kathiec. He was born around 1859 as the son of a Gok Dinka chief in today's Cuiebet and captured in 1876 by slavers, who renamed him "Salim". In 1880, he met the Church Missionary Society missionaries Charles T. Wilson and Robert Felkin in Deim Suleiman, became the servant of Wilson and joined him on his way back to England. There he was baptised in 1882 under the name Salim Charles Wilson and later started doing missionary work in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, becoming known as "The Black Evangelist of the North".
Deim Suleiman remained the official capital of Bahr El Ghazal and housed many shops with craftsmen famous for their skills, though Wau became the greater commercial centre. According to Father Stefano Santandrea of the Verona Fathers, the first buildings of burnt-bricks in the province were erected under the rule of Gessi as well as the first school, "to which 17 chiefs were already sending their children. They were receiving instruction (in Arabic) together with over 100 children of the local troops". Gessi declared his expectation to draw government clerks from the indigenous graduates after a few years.