The Politics of Literacy in the Nuba Mountains: Vernacular Literacy Movement in the Nuba Mountains

The key argument of this paper is that the British colonial logic of language and literacy in Sudan linked scripts with ‘race,’ religion, territory and subjectivity. This coloniality of literacy was inherited by post-colonial rulers in Sudan (whether military or democratic). For more than two decades, the colonial system intended to separate the South from the North and to govern them as two self-contained racial and territorial entities before it reversed this separatist policy. Alphabetic literacy was one of the fundamental resources in the implementation of this segregational policy.

In both the colonial and post-colonial literacy policies, linguistic diversity is conceptualized as ‘a problem’ to be managed through monolingual and mono-scriptal ideologies (Latin script in the former and Arabic script in the latter). Both literacy economies operated with essentializing semiotic complexes: In the case of British colonialism, the semiotic complex contained the Latin alphabet and Christianity as defining aspects of a Southern ‘race’ and territory. The missionaries, along with the colonial administration, displaced pre-colonial religious traditions in the South. They also invested Arabic script with a particular indexical load as a key marker of Islam, a Northern identity and territory.