Word: animists
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...quest to prepare for a Soviet war, the empire continued to nibble at China and estranged itself from the U.S., Chiang's chief supporter and, embarrassingly for Tokyo, the source of most of Japan's strategic materials. National self-strengthening took on fanatical proportions. The state religion built around animist Shinto beliefs was transformed into full-fledged emperor worship. And despite shortages in food and electricity due to the military allocations, the Empire of the Rising Sun believed it was destined to shine over all of East Asia. "Manchuria alone is not enough," wrote navy Lieut. Commander Tota Ishimaru...
More than a million people have already died in the conflict between the predominantly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. Now some 250,000 are wasting away in Juba, the besieged southern capital, which has been virtually shut off from outside relief since September. Aweil, 600 miles southwest of Khartoum, got its last food train eight months ago; 8,000 exhausted people perished there during the summer. How many more have gone, no one knows...
...wealth and all of the national government, and the south, which resents at once the north's control and its neglect. The S.P.L.A., dominated by Dinka tribesmen, demands repeal of Shari'a, or Islamic law, and establishment of provincial parliaments. But the plight of the largely Christian and animist tribesmen in the south has worsened dramatically since January, when the S.P.L.A. launched an offensive, capturing the strategic crossroads town of Kapoeta and about a dozen smaller towns. In the months since, the S.P.L.A. has managed to tighten a stranglehold on all the southern government-held garrisons...
Perhaps the most intractable of the country's troubles is the war in the south, pitting the local African population, largely Christian and animist, against the predominantly Arab Muslim government of the north. Former President Gaafar Nimeiri, who was overthrown in a popular uprising in 1985, aggravated the existing religious and racial differences by imposing a set of harsh Islamic laws that call for floggings and amputations for criminal offenses even by non-Muslims. Abolition of the laws is a key demand of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, whose antigovernment rebels control much of the rural south...
...whose well-meant meddling provoked a long-ago international incident. The journalist's unveiling of how colonist and native took advantage of peculiarities in the other's mental makeup provides the revelatory pleasures of a mystery. Dickinson also manages to evoke the evolution of feminism, the modern Islamization of animist tribes, the rise of media hegemony and the fall of the British empire. His descriptions are extraordinarily vivid, his characters plausibly selfish and self-deluding, and his climax is an obliquely told yet unforgettable moment of horror...