Of different ethnicity, they had different languages, different religion, different customs, and different lifestyles. In short, the two groups had nothing in common. They practice Christianity or folk religions. They speak the Madi, Thok Naath, Otuho, Dinka, and other languages. The southern third was inhabited by African peoples of the Nuer, Dinka, Zandi, Acholi, Bari, and Moru tribes.

The northern two-thirds of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was inhabited by Afro-Arabic people who practice Islam and speak Arabic. They were one of numerous “disasters through map-making” in colonial Africa. The condominium’s borders were drawn on the limits of a 19th century Egyptian military expedition. The capital and largest city was Khartoum, where the Blue and White Niles meet. It was located south of Egypt, west of Ethiopia, and north of Uganda and the Congo. It was a condominium with Great Britain and Egypt sharing control of the territory. Sudan (since 2011, Sudan and South Sudan) was from 1899 called the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. (A soldier of the Nile Provisional Government with a WWII German MG-34 in 1969.) (Anya-Nya with a WWII British SMLE rifle in the early 1970s.) WWII firearms shown are Bren machine guns, a MP-40, a Sten Mk.II, and SMLE rifles.) (Mossad agent David Ben-Uziel nom de guerre “John”, with Anya-Nya in southern Sudan around 1970. This conflict is today overshadowed by the “second” war which was much more violent and fought with Cold War-era weapons. Even in the latter stages, it was dominated by old WWII weapons. What is often called the country’s “first civil war” ran from, depending on when the start date is counted, 1955 to 1972.

Sudan has seen so much warfare over the past 100 years that it is sometimes hard to tell when one war ended and the next began.

Sten mark 2 spring