Darfur's Sorrow
The Forgotten History of a Humanitarian Disaster
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- $31.99
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Darfur's Sorrow is the first general history of Darfur to be published in any language. The book surveys events from before the founding of the Fur sultanate in the sixteenth century through the rise and establishment of the Fur state and its incorporation into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1916. The narrative continues with detailed coverage of the brief but all-important colonial period (1916–1956) and Darfur's history as a neglected peripheral region since independence. The political, economic, environmental, and social factors that gave rise to the current humanitarian crisis are discussed in detail, as are the course of Darfur's rebellion, its brutal suppression by the Sudanese government, and the lawless brigands known as janjawid. The second edition of the book brings the story up to date and includes an analysis of attempts to save Darfur's embattled people and to bring an end to the fighting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Daly (A History of the Sudan), arguably the world's most knowledgeable authority on Darfur, enlists history, politics, economics and geography to disentangle the reasons why up to 400,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced in the continuing genocide. A frontier province that resembles the Wild West, Darfur blends plague, famine, drought, cattle rustling, messianic revivalism and Great Power politics with benign and not-so-benign neglect from the centers of power in Khartoum, Cairo and London; as Daly puts it, "bility to conquer but inability to rule might have been the epitaph of successive regimes in Darfur." But the subject matter is often obscured by Daly's overly pedantic tone and compendia of eminent personages and their tribal and religious affiliations. The dedicated reader will require a detailed flowchart to keep the cast of characters straight. The first sections recount Darfur's time as an independent sultanate, a colony and finally part of an independent Sudan; only the last 50 pages or so deal directly with the current crisis. Though Daly makes no explicit predictions, he is less than sanguine about the prospects of the peace process in the near term.
