Sudan v. Christians

"The whole place is run by the police. Armed soldiers and government spies are everywhere. Priests and nuns are imprisoned for trivial reasons." So charges Roman Catholic Father William Dowds, a South African-born missionary, of the country where Christian missions are currently faring worst: the Sudan. Since last November, 77 Catholic priests (including Dowds), brothers and nuns, as well as 28 Protestant missionaries, have been exiled from the Sudan. As of last week, only about 50 missionaries, many of them aged and ill, were left to care for the 500,000 Sudanese Christians, four-fifths of them Catholics.

Sudan's anti-Christian campaign is a product of history and geography, as well as of Islam's militant spread across modern Africa. The 8,000,000 Sudanese of the sandy north are Arabic and Nubian in origin, and Moslem to a man. Most of the 4,000,000 inhabitants of the swampy and forest-covered south are black Africans, who know that in the days before British rule Arab traders sold their ancestors into slavery and have long sought some measure of local autonomy from Dictator Ibrahim Abboud's all-Moslem government. Since Independence Day in 1956, the Southern Sudan has been intermittently torn by riots, strikes and revolts. The government charges that European and American missionaries backed the insurrections, and has steadily cut into Christian religious rights. Friday was made the national day of rest in place of Sunday. In 1957, the Sudan Ministry of Education expropriated all mission schools and hospitals without compensation. Last November missionaries were ordered to apply for licenses, renewable annually, to carry on their work. Not one license has been issued so far.

Sudanese officials have cracked down on missionaries on the flimsiest of excuses. Priests and brothers have been fined or jailed for "illegally" administering medicine to the sick, or admitting orphans to mission compounds. Missionaries are forbidden to conduct services outside their churches, must get written permission from local authorities before leaving their communities. They may not build new chapels; nor may they baptize children under 18 without getting parents' consent.

The Sudanese Ministry of Information insists that the policy of the government "has always been, and shall always be, freedom of worship for all citizens without discrimination." Exiled missionaries insist that Christians are being forcibly converted to Islam, and last week heard that the Cathedral of Juba, on the White Nile, had been converted into a mosque.

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