In 1902 the British Government unilaterally delimited the 1,500 mile frontier between the Sudan and Ethiopia, and after prolonged negotiations Emperor Menelik II accepted the boundary. It was badly flawed. Instead of following the base of the precipitous Ethiopian escarpment the boundary followed the rivers leaving to Ethiopia the swampy plains in the Sudan below of the Baro (Openo) Salient jutting into the Sudan, the home of the Anuaks (Anywaa). Today there are some 70,000 Anuaks with their principal town and center at Gambella below the escarpment on the north bank of the OPeno River. Named after the Anuaks chief of the region, Gambella was leased to the Sudan Government as a commercial station in 1902 for Sudan steamers to carry out Ethiopian highland coffee much in demand, highly profitable, and a principal source of revenue for the Sudan when Baro (Openo) was navigable from June to November. From 1921 until 1947 this tiny enclave (1 sq.mile) was administered by only two British officials of the Sudan Government with the title of ?Customs Inspectors.? In 1956 the Sudan Government surrendered its lease to Ethiopia in the spirit of African brotherhood, and the fact that the export of Ethiopian coffee was now by truck to Kassala and Khartoum making steamers redundant.

There are three fundamental factors that have characterized the history of the Anuaks in the twentieth century and remain today at the beginning of the twenty-first: the political structure of the Anuak society, the long hostile relationships with the Nuer of the Sudan on their western frontier, and the failure of the Ethiopians to establish their administration and governance in Anuakland.

The Anuaks are a Luo speaking people of the Eastern Sudanic language family that includes the Luo of Kenya and Uganda. They migrated into their present homeland in the late eighteenth century from the southern Sudan to settle in clusters of villages in the Baro (Openo) Salient and along the rivers Pibor and Akobo. Though the Anuaks traditionally believed in almighty spirit known as Jwok and trees played an important part in their religion and even today there are villages which include "Holy" trees.

They were cultivators with some cattle under kings and chiefs who ruled more by consensus than decree. There was no central authority except among the southern Anuaks on the Akobo who acknowledged the authority of the ?Royal Emblems,? but since the emblems were often acquired in a vicarious fashion they did not symbolize political stability. The historic character of the Anuak political life enabled the Ethiopians to play-off one chief against the other that simply perpetuated Ethiopian mal-administration or no administration at all.

The second constant factor in Anuak (Anywaa) life, past and present, is the hostile relations with the neighboring Nuer of the Sudan. At the end of the nineteenth century the Nuer embarked upon expansion eastward into the Anuak territory across the Pibor River and into the Baro (Openo) Salient. The Anuaks (Anywaa), who were skillful elephant hunters, bargained ivory for guns from Ethiopian, Swahili, and Oromo traders from the highlands awash in guns at the beginning of the twentieth century and remain so in the twenty-first, the only difference being the efficiency of automatic weapons in contrast to breech loading rifles.

The Anuaks defeated the Nuer at the turn of the nineteenth century seizing large numbers of Nuer cattle that they have not forgotten. During the first half of the twentieth century the British struggled to contain conflict between Nuer and the Anuaks with only modest success on a porous, isolated frontier administered by a few beleaguered British officers for the Sudan Government had no intention of expending scarce resources to control the borderlands when they received no support from the Ethiopian Government on its side of the frontier. In the Sudan the latter half of the twentieth century has been dominated by the civil war in the South that has only ceased on January 9, 2005 after fifty years of conflict but has accounted for two million southern Sudanese dead and four million refugees, thousands of whom have been Dinka and Nuer who have fled across the border into the Baro Salient. Here they have sought safety and sustenance in three huge refugee camps supported by international non-government humanitarian organizations. Many have been settled on surrounding land that is indisputably Anuak. The prospect of the Anuaks losing their homelands to their traditional enemies not by conquest but by the efforts of Western humanitarian agencies is bitterly resented by the Anuaks who see only force as a means to redress Nuer colonization?.

The third factor is the failure of Ethiopia to control the frontier, administer the Baro Salient, and provide good governance. Underlying much of Ethiopian policy or lack thereof is the historic disdain by the highlanders, principally the Amhara but also the Oromo, for the Africans on the Sudan plain below the escarpment, the Anuaks and the Gamuz. Racism is compounded on the plains below the highlands by their isolation, swampy and forested terrain, and a porous frontier. When Ethiopia was strong under Haile Selassie from 1930 until his overthrow in 1975, the Ethiopian Government would send its punitive expeditions into Anuakland often to be defeated but certainly of insufficient strength to establish a stable, continuous, and effective administration. By and large the Anuaks were more or less left to their own devices punctuated by the occasional foray and fragile administration of Ethiopian authorities at Sudan and Gambella. Historically, the government regarded Anuak as marginalized people living in a hostile environment with few resources and for whom the most appropriate policy was being neglected. During the 1990s the present government has launched a more aggressive policy of Amharaization. The Anuaks have reacted with the same hostility as to the loss of their land to the Nuer. Discontent runs deep in a land awash with guns, and the Anuaks have only to look across the Pibor River into the southern Sudan to see that insurrection is the answer.

Robert O. Collins, Professor of History, Emeritus, University of California Santa Barbara
www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/collins.htm

Read a History of the Anuak to 1956by Dr. Collins.