Mathiang Yak Anek

Mathiang Yak Anek was born in the 1860s to a Dinka family in the Pagok Pathiong Gok community of Turkish Sudan (now South Sudan).[1] As a child, she was abducted from her village by Turkish-Egyptian traders and taken as a slave to the regional slaving post of Tonj.[1]

Anek was sold and then taken north to Omdurman, the capital of the Mahdist State,[1] where she was resold.[2] She was forced to undergo female genital mutilation,[2] a common experience for female slaves. For three years, she worked as a slave near Buri. She learned to speak Arabic and was informally married to a man in Northern Sudan.[1]

Following the turbulence caused by the advance and the victories of the British colonial troops during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan, Anek escaped from slavery and returned to her home in Pathiong Gok where she resumed a traditional lifestyle.[2] She married a man named Dahl Marol.[1]

Anek gradually acquired stature among the Dinka of Pathiong Gok, convincing them of the worth of her knowledge of Arabic and her aggressive nature. She was eventually made a female chief and established residence in Rumbek, which had become a regional headquarters of the Anglo-Egyptian colonial administration. Anek initiated contact with colonial administrators and acted as a mediator between her people and agents of the foreign occupation. She was awarded a golden sword by a British officer for "keeping the peace" among the Gok Dinka.[2]

Anek clashed with Wuol Athian, a rival military leader and traditional priest of the Dinka community of Agar who had allied with the Nuer to attack the Turko-Egyptian garrison at Rumbek in 1883.[3] At a gathering of the region's chiefs, Anek debated Athian, successfully made a public case against him, and was awarded a gray cow as recompense. The incident was considered dishonourable for Athian.[1]

At the next annual gathering of chiefs before the British colonial officials, a charge was made against Anek claiming that she had slapped Athian on his buttocks. The charges were likely false, but considered a "grave offense". It was said that Athian was mobilising a war force to attack the Pathiong Gok. To resolve the situation, colonial officials stripped Anek of her chieftainship and appointed a man to be her successor.[1]

Afterwards, Anek abandoned her house in the city and moved to the countryside.[1] Following her rule, Gok had a higher rate of female chieftains than most groups of Dinka people.[2]

• Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention
• Slavery in Sudan

• Beswick, Stephanie (2004). Sudan's Blood Memory: The Legacy of War, Ethnicity, and Slavery in Early South Sudan. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. ISBN 978-1-58046-151-1.