Source: https://dacb.org/stories/south-sudan/sorur2-daniel/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 20:56:27+00:00

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Daniel Sorur, a former slave who converted to Christianity, became the first Dinka to be ordained a Catholic priest. He was destined for a brilliant career in the Catholic missionary movement in Africa at the end of the nineteenth century. The great hope of his Comboni missionary mentors was that he would be the agent for the evangelization of his people and other black Africans. Unfortunately, poor health undermined and curtailed his activities, eventually cutting short his life before he could fulfill his promise.
His father Piok Den[g] died in a hunting accident in 1868 when Farim was perhaps eight or nine, and following the Dinka custom of levirate marriage, his mother Aquid married Piok’s older brother, Akhol.  Farim’s older (and only) half-brother Kog died a year later (1869), making him the nuclear family’s sole surviving son. He had three sisters and a foster sister, the daughter of a poor woman who had been taken in by the Den[g] family some years earlier and had been adopted when her mother died.
Farim’s family were chiefly pastoralists who raised cattle and sheep and moved regularly with other clan members across the Bahr al-Ghazal border with southern Kordofan, planting crops when there was time to harvest them. Their farming and grazing patterns inevitably brought them into conflict with the Shilluk, the Nuer, and the Baqqara, resulting in regular loss of lives and livestock. Later, as the Turco-Egyptian government moved into southern Sudan, the Dinka became subject to raids by the Egyptian army and jallaba, petty traders from the northern Sudan who operated on their own or as agents of the government in quest of slaves and other booty. From the 1840s onward, the sale of slaves found a steady market in El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan province, in Khartoum, Upper Egypt, Cairo, and Jidda, particularly male and female children and young women who were wanted for domestic labor and also as slave-wives. The jallaba and the Baqqara eventually worked hand in hand, proving a constant menace to the Dinka. In response the Dinka developed a variety of tactics to defend themselves against these groups, just as they had done to defend themselves against their traditional enemies, the Shilluk.
Farim was captured by Baqqara in 1871, when he was eleven or twelve. Thus began a brutal new chapter in his life, resulting in a journey he could never have imagined as a young boy. What he relates of his capture is typical of the slave narratives that the Comboni missionaries collected and published in their house organs, the* Annali dall’Associazione del Buon Pastore* and its successor La Nigrizia,  but the particular details are nonetheless deeply moving.
The family’s house was located not far from the river, and herdsmen and tillers used to cross it in order to tend the land on the opposite bank. They were also not far from the dry grasslands that Farim calls “desert” in the Memorie, and in times of emergency, men and women and their children used to flee into it in order to escape slave raiders. In the months leading up to their enslavement, the Dinka had escaped or fought off several marauding groups.
After an arduous trip from the Bahr al-Ghazal region, during which additional Dinka clans (the Twic, among them) were attacked and enslaved, Farim and Aquid arrived in El Obeid, the capital of Kordofan. They were left in the compound of Assemani (Uthman), an agent for the principal slaver who was named Abdallahi. Assemani treated him and his mother relatively well.  It was Assemani who gave him a new name, “Surur” (Sorur), which means happiness. It was a common name given to slaves at the time.
Farim remained enslaved for two years. He served his master in a variety of capacities—shepherd, doorman, shopkeeper, tailor,—and was often entrusted with special duties. Assemani and Abdallahi decided to return to the South Sudan on a new slaving expedition, and Aquid volunteered to go as the cook on the chance she might find her daughters and bring them back. Assemani didn’t agree with this idea, and so both she and Farim remained in the camp. However, shortly before Assemani and Abdallahi were due to return, Farim or Sorur (as he was now called), was accused of a minor crime and threatened with a harsh punishment. He feared for his life and decided to escape, either into the grasslands to die or to the newly established Comboni mission house in El Obeid where he understood that slaves were given refuge. (He also feared he might be eaten, as this was rumored about whites among Sudanese slaves.) He opted to take his chances with the missionaries. He was welcomed into the house by Mons. Daniel Comboni, who was then in El Obeid and later repeatedly protected Farim against his former owner. In a dramatic scene, Assemani brought Aquid to the mission in an effort to persuade him to return to servitude. Farim refused, and Aquid angrily turned her back on him, saying in harsh terms that she would never see him again. Later Farim heard that she had tried to escape, had been caught, and then punished by being sent to work under harsh conditions in the fields outside Assemani’s encampment. Indeed, he never saw her again and no doubt their last scene together could never be forgotten. These events occurred in late 1873 and represented in dramatic terms the break between his traditional life and his new identity as a modern man and a Christian.
In his published autobiography, Farim or Sorur relates how he started learning Italian and Arabic at the Catholic mission in El Obeid, and also began catechism classes. He was baptized by Mons. Comboni in 1874. Comboni had become his mentor and had given him his name; henceforth he was known as Daniel[e] Sorur. He studied for a further year at the Khartoum Mission School, and then was selected in 1876, along with Arturo Morzal [Mursal], an ex-slave from Dar Fur, to be sent to Verona for further studies. Comboni petitioned Pope Pius IX asking that both be admitted to the Collegium Urbanum, Rome, and his request was granted; both boys entered the college in 1877. Sorur studied philosophy and religion in a course of studies that would lead ultimately to the priesthood; Arturo dropped out, opting instead to study medicine.
While he was still in Rome, Sorur began to work on a manuscript about the Dinka and their customs, and one of his several unpublished manuscripts, “Qual il mio paese nativo” (What is my Native Country), was written at this time (ca 1881). Part of this work was included in his autobiography, later serialized in* La Nigrizia* in 1887-88, and part was translated into German and published in 1888 and then republished in 1890 and 1900.  It was also during the period in Rome that he began another work called “Le pene dei negri schiavi in Africa” (The Travails of Black Slaves in Africa) in which he developed his ideas about the salvation of black people through the instrument of Christianity. In it he also equates Islam with modern slavery and the strangulation of the African spirit, and opines that his black brethren will never progress unless they escape Islam and embrace Christianity. The editing of his work was finished around 1885.  By the end of his formal studies, Sorur had not only shown considerable intellectual capacities, but was also fluent in Italian, French, German and English. He had established himself as a spokesman for the conversion of Africans to Christianity, a role for him that the Comboni mission fathers must fervently have sought.
In 1883, however, Sorur fell seriously ill  and was sent to recuperate in the warm and dry climate of Cairo, where the Comboni mission had constructed a new church and two mission schools in the new and fashionable quarter of the city known as Ismailia. After seven months there, he was deemed well enough to finish his studies at the Jesuit University in Beirut, which he did in 1886. In the summer he went to Ghazir, a village in the Lebanese mountains, to undertake further studies in Arabic and to teach French and Italian.
After his ordination, Sorur’s memoir (Memorie) was serialized in five issues of the mission bulletin La Nigrizia. Its purpose was clearly to introduce him to a wider audience, including the European financial supporters of the Comboni mission in Africa. It contains dark references to struggles between the Dinka, the Shilluk, the Baggara, and the slavers, be they itinerant merchants from the north (jallaba) or Turco-Egyptian government officials, but also the narrative of his dramatic escape from slavery, his mother’s doom-laden rejection, and his decision to embrace a life with the Christians over a life under Islamic rule. This latter part was the message that the missionaries wished to impart to the thousands of non-Muslim Sudanese who had been forced into slavery in the nineteenth century, and to the mission’s backers who supported the crusade against slavery and their efforts to Christianize Africa.
Sorur spent only eighteen months in Sudan. The mission in Verona seems to have realized his value as the spokesman for the Combonis’ work in Africa and they brought him back to Europe in 1889 to participate in a major fund-raising trip for the mission being undertaken by Bishop Franz Xavier Geyer. The aim of the journey was to raise money for the Central African Mission’s institutions in Cairo (which by now had expanded to new grounds located on the island of Zamalek) and for the construction of churches in Sawakin and Helwan. Fluent in French as well as in Italian, German, and English, Sorur enjoyed great success as a speaker and proved especially popular in Austria and Germany. His ability in languages and his gentle demeanor won him many friends. Many Europeans had never seen a black person before, and were often stunned by his appearance.  Later Sorur joined for a short period Cardinal Lavigerie’s ardent crusade in Europe against slavery in Muslim northern Africa.
Ill-health was probably the reason for his return to Cairo in 1891, where Sorur remained during the final period of his life, teaching at the mission schools in Cairo and later Helwan, where most of his students were Egyptians or sons of Europeans. Helwan had become famous as a spa, and no doubt the baths and the dry climate helped Sorur cope with his illness. Biographies written about him do not suggest that he was involved in the education in Zamalek of ex-slaves or other Sudanese in Cairo at the end of the nineteenth century where the Comboni Institute taught useful trades and catechism. Rather, the surviving photographs of him at their boys’ school in Helwan picture him with young Egyptian students. Sudan remained closed off until it was reconquered by an Anglo-Egyptian force in 1898. But by that time, his health was failing him.
On the Dinka, a modern term, Stephanie Beswick,* Sudan’s Blood Memory* (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004), 13-14.
This story, perhaps apocryphal, is included in the unpublished manuscript by Anon, “Slave & Priest,” in the Archivio comboniani Roma, A/30/1/1, 2 and 19; included in Aldo Benetti, *Don Daniele Sorur, Salvare l’Africa con l’Africa *(Helwan, Egypt, privately printed, 1996), 85-120.
For the main biographical facts, Daniel Sorur, “Memorie scritte dal R.P. Daniele Sorur Pharim Den,” La Nigrizia 5 (1887), 146-51, 171-77; 6 (1888): 56-59, 77-84, 111-119.
Qual e il mio paese, Archivio comboniani Roma, A/30/2/9/, 10.
Qual e il mio paese, 22-23.
I am grateful to Fr. Joaquim Valente da Cruz, president of the Studium Combonianum, for guiding me through the dating of thes manuscripts in the Comboni archives; for the text of the extant letters from him dated 1883, when he was recovering from ill health, it is clear he had read the works by Fr. Joseph Lanz and Fr. Mitterrutzner published in the 1860s. I am also indebted to Fr. Joaquim for sharing these letters with me.
http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigrizia; for example, see Maria Liscok. For other slave narratives, see the story of St. Bakhita Josephine, also known as Josephine Bakhita, “A Universal Sister: Blessed Bakhita Josphine,” in Wheeler, Announcing the Light, 23-28.
Following Memorie, part 3: 175-76.
Other pieces were excerpted by E. V. Toniolo, “An Early Manuscript on the Dinka Written by a Member of this Tribe,” Sudan Notes and Records 41 (1960), 107-13; later published Elias Toniolo and Richard Hill, “A Dinka Priest Writing on his own People,” The Opening of the Nile Basin, 196-203 (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1974), 196-203.
Letters from the period mentioning “coughing up blood,” suggesting tuberculosis. Giulianelli to Simeoni, Cairo, 11 luglio 1883, Archivio Comboniani Roma, A/30/13/3 (minuta).
Deng says they “were half mad of joy”: Nigrizia 5 (1887), 123.
According to the 1882 census, the Sudanese and Nubian population in Cairo numbered 15,428; after the Mahdist revolt in 1882, several thousand Sudanese must have come to the capital. The census figures are found in Egypt,* Direction du recensement, Recensement général de l’Égypte*, 2 v. in 3, Cairo, Imprimerie nationale de Boulaq, 1884-85.
Casimiro Giacomelli, Il Mio Giornale, mss in Archivio Comboniani Roma, A 145/8, 2 vols., vol. 1, 156, photocopy viewed at Comboni House, Cairo.
Sorur to Sogaro, Sawakin, 27 Dicembre 1888, Archivio Comboniani Roma, A/30/13/36. On his time in Sawakin, Introduction (translated into Italian) to the Polish edition of Sorur’s “Memorie,” Pamietnek Niewolnika Afrykanskiego, Krakow, 1891.
University of Notre Dame Archives, C/WKC CHUD, Den to Hudson, l January 11, 1889. On the stay in Sawakin, see also Fr. E. V. Toniolo, “An Early Manuscript on the Dinka Written by a Member of this Tribe,” Sudan Notes and Records 41 (1960), 107.
ACR A/30/1/1, “Slave & Priest,” 1. The copy I used was a photocopy reproduced in Benetti, Don Daniele Sorur, 85-120.
It is now in the Archivio Comboniani Roma, A/30/2/10. The background on the history of this manuscript was provided in an email from Fr. Joaquim, April 20, 2011.
See his obituary by Giuseppe Beduschi, “Il Rev. P. Daniele Sorur, nero della tribu dei Denka, missionario dell-Africa Centrale,” Nigrizia 18 (1900), 27-29, 44-45, 74-75.
An assessment of Deng and his career can be found in Fulvio De Giorgi, “Tra Africa e Europa: Daniele Sorur Pharim Den,” Contemporanea, Rivista di storia dell ‘800 e del ‘900, 7, 1 (January 2004), 39-67; reprinted in Archivio Comboniano 42, 1 (2004).
Anon, “Daniele Den Farin Sorur, Alunno del Collegio Urbano primo fiore del Sacerdozio indigeno nell’Africa Centrale” Alma Mater, Rome, Nos. 9-10 (1930), 87-94.
Anon, “Slave & Priest,” ms in ACR, A/30/1//1; included in Benetti, Don Daniele Sorur, Salvare l’Africa con l’Africa, 85-120.
Beduschi, Giuseppe. 1900. “Il Rev. P. Daniele Sorur, nero della tribu dei Denka, missionario dell-Africa Centrale,” Nigrizia 18, 27-29, 44-45, 74-75.
Benetti, Aldo, Don Daniele Sorur, “Salvare l’Africa con l’Africa,” Helwan: privately printed, 1996.
Beswick, Stephanie. 2004. Sudan’s Blood Memory. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
Debrunner, Hans Werner, Presence and Prestige: Africans in Europe: A History of Africans in Europe before 1918, Basel: Basler Afrika Biblographien, 1979, 328-330.
Di Falco, Rossana di Falco, Un Missionario africano di Europe: Il caso di Padre D. Sorur, Dissertation, Aquila, 1998.
De Giorgi, Fulvio. 2004. “Tra Africa e Europa: Daniele Sorur Pharim Den,” Contemporanea, Rivista di storia dell ‘800 e del ‘900, 7, 1, 39-67; reprinted in Archivio Comboniano 42, 1 (2004).
Egypt, Direction du recensement, 1884-85. Recensement général de l’Égypte, 2 v. in 3, Cairo, Imprimerie nationale de Boulaq.
Giacomelli, Casimiro. Il Mio Giornale, 2 vols., ms in ACR, A 145/8. Photocopy viewed at Comboni House, Cairo.
Nikkel, Marc. 1998. "Daniel Sorur Farim Deng: ‘Comboni’s Adoptive Son’," in Andrew C. Wheeler and William B. Anderson, eds.*, Announcing the Light: Sudanese Witnesses to the Gospel. *Nairobi: Paulines.
Powell, Eve M. Troutt. 2012. Tell This in my Memory: Stories of Enslavement from Egypt, Sudan and the Ottoman Empire. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Chap. 5 contains a biographical treatment of Sorur (171-85).
Santandrea, Stefano. 1948. “Bibliografia di studi africani della Missione dell’Africa central.” Verona: Missioni Africane, 30, 31-32, 48.
Sorur, Daniele. “Diary of an African Slave, Introduction” (translated into Italian) to the Polish edition of his “Memorie.” Pamietnek Niewolnika Afrykanskiego, Krakow, 1891.
_____. Letters. In ACR, A/30/13.
_____. 1887-88. “Memorie scritte dal R.P. Daniele Sorur Pharim Den,” serialized in La Nigrizia 5 (1887), 146-51, 171-77; 6 (1888): 56-59, 77-84, 111-119.
_____. 1964. Le pene dei negri schiavi in Africa**: manoscritto conservato nell’Archivio delle Missioni africane di Verona, edito con un’introduzione e note da Renato Boccassino. Roma: Euntes Docete.
_____. Den[g] to Hudson, l January 11, 1889, in the University of Notre Dame Library, Archives, C/WKC CHUD.
E. V. Toniolo, E. V. 1960. “An Early Manuscript on the Dinka Written by a Member of this Tribe,” Sudan Notes and Records 41, 107-13; later published in Elias Toniolo and Richard Hill, “A Dinka Priest Writing on his own People,” The Opening of the Nile Basin (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1974), 196-203.
This biography was researched and written by Dr. Terence Walz, Independent Scholar based in Washington D.C., co-editor with Kenneth M. Cuno of Race and Slavery in the Middle East: Histories of Trans-Saharan Africans in Nineteenth-Century Egype, Sudan, and the Ottoman Mediterranean (American University in Cairo Press, 2010).

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