page_title: Deim Zubeir
section_title: Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1955)
hierarchical_section_title: Deim Zubeir / History / Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1955)
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: In 1900, an Anglo-Egyptian "reoccupation" force of Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers entered Bahr El Ghazal. Most of them had reportedly been recruited from the defeated Mahdist army and "were chiefly ex-slave natives of the Province", which caused some unease amongst the population.
  
  The first British officer to conduct a patrol to Deim Zubeir was Major William Boulnois in early 1901. His mission found that 
  "the shrunken remnant of the population, constantly raided not only by the Azande but by other groups, had in despair given up all attempt either to keep livestock or to cultivate. Forced down to the level of primitive 'hunters and collectors', they now existed 'chiefly on the natural resources of the forest - roots, seeds, wild honey, fruit and wild beasts'." 
  One year later, Captain Arthur Murray Pirie officially "occupied" the place for the annexation of Bahr El Ghazal, but was soon recalled for a punitive expedition. 
  The first inspector to head the post was an Egyptian officer, who was soon succeeded by the Scottish Lieutenant David Comyn. According to Santandrea, Comyn "found only one building worth mentioning, namely the newly erected fort of the French". However, Comyn writes in his memoirs that he also saw "the charred remains of the stockade" of Sulaiman's fortifications. Even a decade later, one of Comyn's successors wrote that "the burnt stumps of his stockade, and the mud walls of his houses" were still visible.
  Soon after his arrival Comyn ordered the construction of a new fort "to take the place of the one of green brick built by the French", since the competition with the Congo Free State for control of Southern Sudan was not over yet. From 1902 on, negotiations were conducted between London and Brussels, accompanied "by provocative incidents":
  In this context, Belgium's King Leopold II ordered a "scientific" mission to Bahr El Ghazal under Charles Lemaire and Louis Royaux in 1902. Its vanguard led by Captain André Landeghem reached Deim Zubeir in February 1903, but the Condominium government of Sudan prevented the expedition from moving on to the copper-rich area of Hofrat en Nahas and Landeghem aborted the mission. Leopold gave up his claims to the Southern Sudan only in 1906, in return for keeping a part of it as the Lado Enclave for the duration of his reign.
  In 1903, Deim Zubeir became the capital of the Western District of Bahr al-Ghazal. In 1905, Comyn was assisted by a Syrian medical doctor, an Egyptian police officer and a scribe. The number of “irregular troops" at the time was around 120, recruited mainly from the local population. Comyn himself claimed that under his command Deim Zubeir became a "pioneer of red-brick buildings in Southern Sudan". According to South Sudan historians M.W. Daly and Øystein H. Rolandsen, "immediate profits were realized from confiscation and sale of the zaribas' stored ivory."
  A doctoral thesis by a South Sudanese historian found that the introduction of tax collecting under Comyn in 1904 was particularly unpopular, since harsher conditions were applied than in neighbouring districts. Locals who could not pay taxes were forced to do road construction work instead. Daly concludes that "the most noticeable effect of 'administration' of this type was the recalcitrance of those administered." In his memoirs, Comyn defended himself against his contemporary critics as follows: "The hardship and discontent which arose was, I am sure, due to the fact that, in the neighbouring district of Wau, everything that was refused at Dem Zubier — i.e. rifles, ammunition, spirits, money, &c. — was freely scattered."
  According to some sources, the administrative headquarters of the Western District of Bahr al-Ghazal were moved from Deim Zubeir to Raja in 1906, according to others in 1907 or early 1908, against the opposition of local leaders in Raja. Deim Zubeir residents at the time included a substantial number of ex-soldiers and former slaves, who had lost their ethnic ties and converted to Islam with Arabic as lingua franca. Refugees from French Equatorial Africa (FEA) settled i
caption: Zubeir Rahma in 1896 during his Cairo exile
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