page_title: Deim Zubeir
section_title: Turkiya (1821-1884/5)
hierarchical_section_title: Deim Zubeir / History / Turkiya (1821-1884/5)
caption_attribution_description: English: ex-slave Salim Charles Wilson aka Hatashil Masha Kathish in 1888
context_page_description: Deim Zubeir, from the Arabic ديم الزبير [“Daim az-Zubayr”], commonly translated as the “Camp of Zubeir”, is the historically established but highly controversial name of Uyujuku town in the Lol State of the Republic of South Sudan, located in the Western Bahr El Ghazal part of the country, some 70 km from the border with the Central African Republic, near the Biri tributary of the River Chel.
  Due to different transliterations from the Arabic, the name components are also spelled in various combinations Dem, Dehm, Deym, Dam, Daym or Daim, and Zubair, Zubayr, Zoubair, Zoubeir, Zoubayr, Zobeir, Ziber, Zebehr, or Zubier, respectively.
  The historical remains of the slave camp have been designated a potential UNESCO World Heritage Centre site. In the collective memory of South Sudanese people, the very name Deim Zubeir rings as a synonym for millennia of slavery, at least since Pharaonic times.
  Stefano Santandrea had written a lexicon and grammatical sketch of the Mboto dialect of the Birri language as spoken in Deim Zubeir.
context_section_description: The Sudanese historian Ahmed Sikainga describes the impact, which the Egyptian-Ottoman conquest of the Funj Kingdom in 1821 had on the lands of Dar Fertit, as follows:
  "It represented the first large-scale efforts to draw the Nilotic regions into the expanding capitalist economy. Following the opening of the White Nile waters for navigation in the early 1840s, bands of European, Levantine, and northern Sudanese traders began to rush to the South. Eager to appropriate the resources of these virgin lands, these traders dominated the region by combining military power, political alliances, slave incorporation, and the judicious organization known as the zariba system. An Arabic word meaning 'thorned enclosure', the zariba in the Sudanese context referred to the small fortified settlements that were erstablished by the traders."
  The Northern Sudanese merchant Al-Zubeir Rahma Mansur first came to Bahr El Ghazal in 1856 with a cousin on a mission for the major trader Ali Amuriyy, since the Egyptian government had been monopolising trade in Northern Sudan, which encouraged commercial expansion beyond the state control into the South. Zachary Berman argues that Zubeir was an imperialist "buccaneer" following the market as an archetypical agent, "however unconsciously, of broader global market forces expressing themselves in Bahr al-Ghazal", namely Great Britain and France through Egypt. At first he went for ivory, ostrich feathers and gum arabic, which were greatly demanded luxury goods in Europe. However, like other merchants, he found that profits were not sufficient for the required capital of his own company and hence ventured into slave trading.
  In 1865, Zubeir’s army of slaves killed a local king called Adoo Shukoo and took control of his small territory, transforming the merchant into a monarch. Johnson stresses the strategic importance of the location “where the north-south caravan route from Dar Fartit to Zandeland joined the east-west route to the Nile via Wau, Meshra el-Rek, Rumbek, and Shambe”. Lawrence Mire also argues that this critical location allowed him to have wider influence than other traders. 
  While slave-raiding had been practised by Southern warlords before, the trade was taken under Zubeir to unprecedented large-scale levels. According to another pioneer of Sudan academia, Richard Gray, "by 1867 it was reliably estimated that 1800 slaves a year were being despatched northwards by Zubair". It is widely assumed that in what is now South Sudan altogether as many as 400,000 people were enslaved in just fourteen years. Many thousands are assumed to have been killed as they resisted. Deim Zubeir became, "as it were, the metropolis and the clearing house of the slave industry in that part of the world."
  
  Zubeir himself later claimed in a number of interviews that the establishment of his rule was a civilising mission in the name of Islam and that locals flocked to him for life service because of the stable conditions he provided in contrast to their previous poverty and insecurity. He also argued that European colonialism in the name of abolitionism was just another form of slavery.
  
  In 1871, at the height of his power, when Zubeir controlled much of the Bahr el Ghazal region as well as what are today parts of Chad and the CAR, he was visited at Deim Zubeir by the pioneering botanist and ethnologist Georg Schweinfurth, who was the first European to see the place. A blog series by the Smithsonian Libraries summarises the impressions of the Baltic German scholar and abolitionist, who went on to become a leading proponent for colonial ambitions of the German Empire, as follows:
  “He found it to be a small town of many thousands of people, including Zubayr’s army, government officials, and traders and their armies, all with their wives, concubines, children, personal slaves and their families, plus a group of religious authorities (ulema). To survive, this parasitic community raided surrounding villages, stealing cattle and food crops and taking slaves not only for service in the zariba but also to work the traders’
caption: Salim Charles Wilson in 1888
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