| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Stephanie Beswick. Sudan's Blood Memory: The Legacy of War, Ethnicity, and Slavery in Early South Sudan. (Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora.) Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press. 2004. Pp. xxx, 277. $75.00.
This book is a history of the Dinka of the southern Sudan during the precolonial centuries before 1821. There has been a great deal written about the Dinka, mostly anthropological and linguistic. They are a unique and distinctive people: tall, blue-black, eloquent, confident, fiercely independent, living in stateless societies with complex social customs and religious traditions—a combination that Western scholars have found irresistible, although their work has brought little clarity to the Dinka's complex historical past. By the sophisticated and sensitive use of over 300 oral traditions and comparisons with the written and linguistic record, Stephanie Beswick guides us through this confusion to a clear and convincing history of the precolonial Dinka.	1
This book is a revision of Beswick's dissertation. The old-fashioned view is that a dissertation should make "an original contribution to learning." Has the author passed that defining test? To date there has been considerable speculation, nothing more, by archaeologists and linguists that the origins of the Dinka are to be found in the Gezira (Arabic for "island"), that fertile plain lying south from Khartoum between the Blue Nile and the White. The massive evidence from virtually every Dinka oral tradition enables Beswick to make a compelling case that the Dinka indeed originated in the Gezira and were the last wave of Nilotic people to leave, driven out in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Muslim slave raiders from the north (chapters one through three). This is original contribution number one.	. . .

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