Customer Reviews

Let My People Go

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This book was recommended to me by a therapist. When I read it, I was amazed at all of the slavery that was going on in Sudan. It was a moving book, and very detailed on the hard ships being forced onto fellow human beings just because of their religion. It makes me want to get involved!

A lucid account which unravels the complexity of Africa's difficulties. This book is far more than another bit of mounting evidence of atrocities against prosperous Black Africans recently documented by the UN.

This book simplifies the daunting complexity of the Sudanese Civil War, and brings the reader a veteran african missionary's love for both Arab and Black African People Groups. The peacemaking missions between Moderate Arab muslims and Black Christians and animists are present paradigms for people of all races.

This is the story of the 1998 odyssey of the author into Sudan, the modern slave state in north Africa, to redeem slaves stolen from their homes in southern Sudan in the unrelenting process of Islamization and Arabization of the Black Christian South.

Cal Bombay traveled with Christian Solidarity International chief executive John Eibner and president Baroness Caroline Cox, who is also a deputy speaker in Britain's House of Lords.

Bombay describes in simple terms the rogue regime of Ahmed el Beshir, who had violently overthrown the previous government in 1989. Government forces, armed with helicopter gunships, send janjaweed jihadists into the south to capture and behead the men, while enslaving women and children. The only resistance comes from southern Sudan's splintered and sometimes corrupt Sudan People's Liberation Army.

He also discusses the process of redemption in which he was involved, whereby slaves were purchased from their Arab masters and set free in their Dinka villages. The latter, however, are the constant targets of genocidal raids and slave-taking.

As we see today in Darfur, the process of Islamization and Arabization continues apace. Cox, Eibner, Bombay, Charles Jacobs of the American Anti-Slavery Group and people like them are the only ones doing anything about it.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Two years later, following the November 1996 account of Gregory Cane and Gilbert Lewthwaite of the Baltimore Sun, another gripping account of the reality of a Modern Black African Slave Trade in Northern Africa. Continued Arabization and Islamization of the Black Christian South; administered by the Arab Muslim North's helicopter gunships, and consummated by immaculately White Robed Muslim slave traders' scavenging the Black African Christian survivors. This is an account of an attempt by a small international human rights agency, at the desparate emancipation of a few of the many hundreds of thousands of formerly prosperous Black Africans from the wealth of Southern Sudan who have been subjected to the ultimate horror: a modern rebirth of the Black African Slave trade.

In raids shielded from International Observation by Khartoum's designated "restricted areas", Black African Christian Women and their Children are led from the prosperity of their once beautiful, well developed towns, reduced by helicopter and horseback raids to rubble. They are sent, half clad (if at all) in rags, on slave trains to the Arab Muslim North, where they face further horrors. Most are sold as slaves to Arabs. Some are simply given as wives. Adolescent Black Women are the most vulnerable, facing forced sexual mutilation. Forced to renounce Christianity and accept Islam, their culture and race are erased as they accept Arabization through mandatory mutilation, education, and sometimes marraige. Some choose death.

The author is no stranger to Africa, having served there 17 years in Kenya and Uganda, and later in Ethiopia. His exposure to the experience of G.C. and G.L. of the Baltimore Sun buying a young black boy out of slavery, writing his story in the Baltimore Sun in late November 1996, was his first shocking revelation of the renewal of a modern Black Slave Trade in Northern Africa.

Though the author's words may occasionally seem hastily written, this is soon over shadowed by refreshing and fairly frequent prose which one would be hard pressed to improve: masterful prose so rich that this review ought justifiably to have been composed entirely of quotes. This was a real treat; not to be unexpected from a man who is an active commentator. Cal Bombay is also an active missionary, and so neither should it be a surprise that his love and affinity for Black African People are irresistibly knitted to the reader. The reader is carried not so much to the land of Sudan, as given the heart of the people. One views this atrocity from the ground, shoulder to shoulder with Black People as horse men and helicopters overtake not victims, but true friends of the author's, with their neighbors, and families. The reader is spared a sense of overbearing identification with the actual horror of the atrocities, though Mr. Bombay's warmth for the people is infectious.

The book includes steps that the reader can take to follow up on this tight lipped area of discussion in our public Media, and to bring this modern horror to the light of national attention.

The Author's concerns that the Khartoum government's agendas of Arabization and Islamization of the Black South of Sudan, will trigger a sort of domino effect allowing the destruction of Black African Culture in all points south once the wealthy resources of Black Southern Sudan are secured by the Arab Muslim North in Khartoum with its ties to radical islamic leadership in Bagdad, is not convincing. One wonders if Mr. Bombay has abandoned full recognition of his own faith in the face of this seemingly pressing situation. He does not once consider the potential impact of the infiltration of a predominantly peaceful, moderate muslim north by so many hundreds of thousands of black christians due to the actions of a small unpopular handful of Radical Muslims enjoying the reigns of Sudan for what promises to be only a short time.

Read this book and learn a love for Black Africa that will last a lifetime. The Author unravels the complexities and enables insights into African Issues that are clarifying; that shed light on intimate issues in modern Africa. The Author has provided a compelling and wonderful resource for the newcomer to the compexities of modern African issues.

As Americans, can we afford to ruminate over our own history of participation in the Northern African business of trading Black Slaves, to the exclusion of taking action in the face of the rebirth of the Black African Slave trade in Northern Africa?

to the author: i'm an independent Sudanese American researcher, in Sudan History&Culture:

Would you go one on one with me on this "slavery" issue?

in the mean time please answer these questions:

(*)What does Sudan or "Bilad Al Sudan" means? (*)Based on what, you call those from the North Arabs, and those in the South Blacks? (*)This agony is the fruit of the westren clonial jungels all over Africa and Sudan is no exception. ..so Why are you silent when it comes to the role played by the west? for the Sudanes it was the west who set up this time bomb,in the first place..and this "Slavery" thing is nothing but an other Trojan horse, in the upcoming water war. Sincerely, Bashasha