Is there such a thing as a Legal Sudanese Migrant?
We Sudanese have a long and proud tradition of illegality. For centuries, the British tried to cure us but they eventually gave up. So now, being faced with us yet again, as migrants, as students, as foreign workers, we must insist, please don’t pin the noble title of ‘legal’ on us. We have grown to have somewhat of an issue with the word.
The right to exist: On being Sudanese and the search for legal personhood
Being labelled ‘legal’ stirs in the Sudanese an existential angst usually reserved for practices of deep self-inquiry. It surfaces in everyday contexts such as visa procedures, airport checks, border controls, scholarship and job applications, and other endless moments of interrogation. These unsettling moments when we are expected not only to produce the necessary documents, knowledge, or qualifications to deserve what we seek, but first to prove that we exist at all, on equal footing with the rest of humanity.
For those whose humanity is never questioned, the “normal” humans, these are merely procedural steps, a set of taken for granted rights, visa on arrival sort of rights, to be enjoyed once they easily demonstrate the required criteria. But for us, who have not yet acquired the right to have rights, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the scrutiny cuts deeper. In these times of great sorrows and displacements, it is not only our documents being verified and processed, but our very selves that are placed under that frightening gaze. This is the feeling it evokes in those who have grown accustomed to being rejected for who they are.
These situations create tensions for anyone who passes through them. For ordinary human beings, too. But for us, whose very existence is deemed illegal or only conditionally tolerated, a far deeper layer of legal scrutiny unfolds. Before we can ask for a scholarship, a job, or just a safe place to live among the normally accepted, we must first justify our presence, our being “as civilized as them”.
But for us, whose very existence is deemed illegal or only conditionally tolerated, a far deeper layer of legal scrutiny unfolds.
Our very presence, our attempt to cross into the realm of the human, provokes that famous Fanonian moment in which a white child cries out, “Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!” leaving his embarrassed mother to soothe him, saying, “Don't be afraid, he is as civilized as we are.” That is the condition of our legality. “Being as civilized as them” means erasing who we are and adopting another language [linguicide], culture and world views. In other words, we are legal only when we negate ourselves and acquire and prove new alien selves. For many Sudanese, these procedures are remembered as a ritual of humiliation, a place where dignity is left trampled.
Sudanese-ness and legality: mutually exclusive
The above infographic showing how many immigrants to the UK from a variety of countries are considered as ‘legal’ migrants speaks volumes. The picture, admittedly, looks bleak for us Sudanese. I am not surprised that 87% are considered to be illegal. What truly shocks me is the claim that 13% are considered “legal”. Where could these people possibly come from? How can 13 % be correct when there is no empirical evidence that such a thing as a “legal Sudanese” exists? If our very existence on this planet is deemed illegal, if illegality is our ontological condition, then there can be no such thing as a “legal Sudanese.” The UK authorities must be mistaken. Sudaneseness and legality are mutually exclusive categories.
The background for this infographic is the UK’s recent rejection of student visas and scholarships, for Sudanese nationals. During these times of unprecedented mass displacement, the question of legal/illegal conditions of Sudanese presence everywhere has become central to our identity and everyday life. Simply being Sudanese carries an excessive burden of presumed illegality.
The Sudanese condition of illegality has a historically rooted genealogy. And it is meaningless to discuss the current illegalization of Sudanese students in UK when the very Sudanese existence in their own country has been historically illegalized by their colonizing fathers and colonial compradors-elites. I argue these current rejections are deeply rooted in that historically negated Sudaneseness relegating them to a status approaching nothingness, a “questionable humanity”.
Sudanese nationals: Born illegal
We Sudanese are not seen as legal even in our “own” country. When the British “discovered" us "living" on our empty, virgin land, they considered us an integral and indistinguishable part of the fauna and flora this land was teeming with. What they encountered “there”, empirically, was what social Darwinians, the godfathers of existential hierarchy, had taught them to see. When they cast their light of civilization into this heart of darkness, they discovered our lower existence. And so they hunted our grandfathers as slaves, testing whether we might prove to be useful animals for their grander farming projects. Then came the great missionaries of civilization, whom we mistakenly, apparently, call colonizers. They tried their utmost to civilize us, that is, to legalize our existence on the planet and correct this ontological deviation of less existing beings. We did not have history, religion, arts, or politics, not even the capacity to reason, before they came to save us. In fact, as Achille Mbembe brilliantly points out, nothingness was our defining benchmark. Recognition of our presence, our very being, came to be defined by how much of their religion, language, and culture we had acquired at the expense of erasing our inferior ones. Thus, the golden rule of this redemption was, and still is: the more we accept our nothingness, erase everything that makes us who we are, and refill “ourselves” with the great civilization and culture they offer us, the more our being is recognized and rewarded. Rewarded by scholarships, and leadership positions happily enjoyed by ruling elites better described by Fanon as “black skin white mask”.
Recognition of our presence, our very being, came to be defined by how much of their religion, language, and culture we had acquired at the expense of erasing our inferior ones.
Those who resisted this golden rule were the first to be eliminated. The colonizers targeted those they declared “incurably illegal” and beyond redemption, such as members of the White Flag League and Mahdiya fighters after labeling them terrorists. Elimination became, and remains, the ultimate tool for “correcting” these supposedly unlawful presences in the very land they mistakenly defended as their country. After all, mass killing did not and still does not provoke much guilt. The victims merely crossed from an incurable state of nothingness into eternal nothingness.
If you think this sounds like a far-fetched connection, have a closer look at the millions being killed in our parts of the world today under the new civilizing missionaries: terrorist fighters and democracy promoters.
However, British leaders eventually came to realize that the illegality of Sudanese existence was incurable. They left us, on a historical day we celebrate as “independence”. They left us in the hands of what we now call the "Sudanese" state, led by new "national," "post-"colonial elites who, in their never-ending pursuit of recognition from the white masters, have been running the country ever since in such a way that its security sectors terrorize us, its economic plans impoverish us, and its modern legal system denies the rights of the overwhelming majority of Sudanese.
This is precisely why many state subjects actively avoid the very legal system meant to govern them, and why customary laws are perpetuated as a shield against those illegalizing colonial legal structures inherited and maintained by those who wear white masks. These elites have never ceased the work of trying to get rid of the un-illuminable Sudanese.
Ever since independence, Sudanese people have been killed in these elites' attempts to implement new versions of civilizing missions: Arabism, communism, Islamism, militarism, neoliberalism, anti-terrorism, and all sorts of other -isms. Each time, we are reminded of our very original condition of being "born illegal" and of our state of disposable legality, our contingent right to live, let alone to obtain a scholarship a visa or a residence permit.
I would like to conclude with the words of a scholarship holder, protagonist of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. During his time in UK, he experienced countless, redeeming, self-negating, indoctrinating discourses of civilizing mission he seems to have struggled with. Naturally, the student’s resistance to these attempts of redemption infuriated his English professor at Oxford who would say to him with undisguised irritation: “You, Mr Sa’eed, are the best example of the fact that our civilizing mission in Africa is of no avail. After all the efforts we’ve made to educate you, it’s as if you’d come out of the jungle for the first time”. The following are the words of the student, reflecting his feelings on the day of his return “back” to Sudan and his realization of a self whose existence he had once doubted:
This Sudanese Perspectives blog post is written by Tamer Abd Elkreem, lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Deputy Director of the Peace Research Institute at the University of Khartoum.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the SNAC project or CMI.
