Darfur , Historical region and former province, western Sudan. It was an independent kingdom from c. 2500 bce. Its first traditional rulers, the Daju, probably traded with ancient Egypt; they were succeeded by the Tunjur. Darfur’s Christian period (c. 900–1200) was ended by the advance of Islam with the empire of Kanem-Bornu. In the 1870s Darfur came under Egyptian rule, and in 1916 it became a province of Sudan. Long-standing ethnic tensions between Arab nomads and sedentary Fur and other agriculturalists erupted in the late 1980s, and sporadic violence ensued. The conflict escalated in 2003, when rebels among the agriculturalist population began attacking government installations in protest of perceived neglect of non-Arabs and of the country’s western region. The government responded with the creation of the Janjaweed (also spelled Jingaweit or Janjawid) militia, which attacked sedentary groups in Darfur. Despite a 2004 cease-fire and the subsequent presence of international peacekeeping troops, by 2007 hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and more than two million displaced.
Darfur Article
Darfur summary
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Sudan Summary
Sudan, country located in northeastern Africa. The name Sudan derives from the Arabic expression bilād al-sūdān (“land of the blacks”), by which medieval Arab geographers referred to the settled African countries that began at the southern edge of the Sahara. For more than a century, Sudan—first as
Africa Summary
Africa, the second largest continent (after Asia), covering about one-fifth of the total land surface of Earth. The continent is bounded on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, on the east by the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and on the south by the mingling waters