First Sudanese Civil War

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sudan's first postcolonial civil war began in August 1955, months before formal independence, when southern soldiers of the Equatoria Corps mutinied at Torit over fears of continued northern domination once the British colonial administration left. It grew into a guerrilla insurgency led by the southern Anyanya movement, an initially loose coalition of former Equatoria Corps soldiers and southern political exiles that gained covert regional and Israeli material support as the war lengthened, against the Arab-Muslim dominated government seated in Khartoum.

General Ibrahim Abboud's military government, in power from 1958 to 1964, pursued Arabization and Islamization policies, including mandatory Arabic instruction and the March 1964 expulsion of foreign Christian missionaries from the south, that deepened southern resistance rather than settling it. The war ended with the March 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, brokered with World Council of Churches and All Africa Conference of Churches mediation, which granted southern Sudan its own Southern Regional Government with genuine regional autonomy.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Historians divide over how central religion was to the First Sudanese Civil War's causes and character. Scopas Poggo, in the dedicated history of this specific war, argues that Khartoum's Arabization and Islamization drives were the turning point: General Ibrahim Abboud's government mandated Arabic instruction and, in March 1964, expelled foreign Christian missionaries from the south, policies that southerners increasingly understood as an assault on their own religious and cultural identity and that hardened a regional revolt into a war fought substantially in religious and ethnic terms.

Douglas Johnson, whose history spans both Sudanese civil wars, argues instead that the deeper and more durable cause was the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries by successive Khartoum governments, a center-periphery dynamic that predates and outlasted any one government's religious policy. The March 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement's autonomy settlement held for eleven years, until President Jaafar Nimeiry's 1983 imposition of Sharia law and abrogation of the agreement reopened the conflict as the Second Sudanese Civil War.