Darfur: Colonial violence, Sultanic legacies and local politics, 1916-1956 (Eastern Africa Series, 32) 184701111X, 9781847011114

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Cover photograph: Horseman charge at a tribal gathering in Umm Gozein, North Darfur, c.1940, AWM Disney, AWM Disney, Sudan Archive, Durham 717/12/6 (reproduced by permission of Durham University Library)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-111-4

9 781847 011114

COLONIAL VIOLENCE, SULTANIC LEGACIES & LOCAL POLITICS, 1916–1956

Chris Vaughan is currently Lecturer in African History at Liverpool John Moores University. Previously, he taught at the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Liverpool and Edinburgh. He is co-editor (with Lotje De Vries and Mareike Schomerus) of The Borderlands of South Sudan.

Darfur

This work engages with a fundamental question in the study of African history and politics: to what extent did the colonial state re-define the character of local politics in the societies it governed? Existing scholarship on Darfur under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1916–1956) has suggested that colonial governance here represented either straightforward continuity or utterly transformative change from the region's deep history of independent statehood under the Darfur Sultanate. Chris Vaughan argues that neither view is adequate: he shows that British rule bequeathed a culture of governance to Darfur which often rested on state coercion and violence, but which was also influenced by enduring local conceptions of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and the agendas of local actors. Contemporary conflict and politics in the region must be understood in the context of this deeper history of interaction between state and local agendas in shaping everyday realities of power and governance.

VAUGHAN

‘…a nuanced analysis of the ambiguities of the imposition of state control in Darfur, of resistance and accommodation by indigenous authorities to incorporation into the state at various levels, and how the state and state actors were also transformed through that incorporation.’ – Douglas H. Johnson, author of The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars

Chris Vaughan

Darfur COLONIAL VIOLENCE, SULTANIC LEGACIES & LOCAL POLITICS, 1916–1956

Eastern Africa Series DARFUR

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Eastern Africa Series

Women’s Land Rights & Privatization in Eastern Africa BIRGIT ENGLERT & ELIZABETH DALEY (EDS)

War & the Politics of Identity in Ethiopia

Regional Integration, Identity & Citizenship in the Greater Horn of Africa KIDANE MENGISTEAB & REDIE BEREKETEAB (EDS)

Moving People in Ethiopia

Dealing with the Government in South Sudan

ALULA PANKHURST & FRANÇOIS PIGUET (EDS)

The Quest for Socialist Utopia

Living Terraces in Ethiopia

BAHRU ZEWDE

KJETIL TRONVOLL

CHERRY LEONARDI

ELIZABETH E. WATSON

Disrupting Territories

Eritrea

JÖRG GERTEL, RICHARD ROTTENBURG & SANDRA CALKINS (EDS)

GAIM KIBREAB

Borders & Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa DEREJE FEYISSA & MARKUS VIRGIL HOEHNE (EDS)

After the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan

The African Garrison State KJETIL TRONVOLL & DANIEL R. MEKONNEN

The State of Post-conflict Reconstruction NASEEM BADIEY

ELKE GRAWERT (ED.)

Gender, Home & Identity

Land, Governance, Conflict & the Nuba of Sudan

KATARZYNA GRABSKA

Women, Land & Justice in Tanzania

GUMA KUNDA KOMEY

HELEN DANCER

Ethiopia

Remaking Mutirikwi

JOHN MARKAKIS

JOOST FONTEIN

Resurrecting Cannibals

Lost Nationalism

HEIKE BEHREND

ELENA VEZZADINI

Pastoralism & Politics in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia

The Oromo & the Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia

GŰNTHER SCHLEE & ABDULLAHI A. SHONGOLO

MOHAMMED HASSEN

Islam & Ethnicity in Northern Kenya & Southern Ethiopia

CHRIS VAUGHAN

Darfur

GŰNTHER SCHLEE with ABDULLAHI A. SHONGOLO

Foundations of an African Civilisation DAVID W. PHILLIPSON

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Darfur COLONIAL VIOLENCE, SULTANIC LEGACIES AND LOCAL POLITICS, 1916–1956 CHRIS VAUGHAN Lecturer in History Liverpool John Moores University

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James Currey is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) www.jamescurrey.com and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com © Christopher Vaughan 2015 First published 2015 The right of Christopher Vaughan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-84701-111-4 (James Currey cloth) This publication is printed on acid-free paper

Typeset in 10 on 12pt Cordale with Gill Bold display by Avocet Typeset, Somerton, Somerset

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Dedication

For Eunice, Alan, Vanja and Mila

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Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Glossary Map of Darfur showing colonial administrative divisions and ethnic groups

Introduction

ix xi xii xiv

1

1

State Authority and Local Politics before 1916: The Darfur Sultans, Turco-Egyptian Rule and the Mahdiyya

20

2

Colonial Conquest and the Politics of Alliance in Darfur, 1916–1921

56

3

‘Healthy Oppression’? Native Administration and State Violence in Western Darfur, 1917–1945

80

4

Native Courts and Chieftaincy Disputes in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1937 115

5

Defining Territories, Policing Movement and the Limits of Legibility in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1950

6

Late Colonialism in Darfur: Local Government, Development and National Politics, 1937–1956 171



Conclusion: State Formation, Violence and Conflict in Historical Perspective

Bibliography Index

153

198 212 225

vii

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Acknowledgements

The research for this book was completed with the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, without which this project would not have happened. My archival research in Khartoum, which forms the backbone of this book, was facilitated in particular by the support of SUDAAK (Sudanese Association for Archiving Knowledge). My thanks go especially to Badreldin el Hag Musa, Fawzia Galaledin and Muhammad al-Hassan Muhammad Abdu. Their help with arranging access to archives and visas was absolutely invaluable, and their friendship was a great support in Khartoum. Thanks also to the staff of the National Records Office in Khartoum, especially Directors Taj al-Din, Muhammad Azraq, Awatif, and, in the search room, Khalida al-Shareif and Ahmed Muhammad Adam Hanafi. I was allowed wide access to the rich historical documentation available at the NRO, contrary to preconceived expectations. I would like to thank the National Archives in London; the Rhodes House Library in Oxford; and, above all, the staff of the Sudan Archive in Durham, especially Jane Hogan. Jane is one of the great treasures of Durham, as anyone who has worked in the Sudan Archive will testify. I am grateful to Chris Orton of the cartography unit in the geography department at Durham for drawing the map. The publishers of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History gave permission to reproduce in Chapter 2, material previously published in that journal (www. tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2014.894706). Durham University’s department of History provided a consistently supportive and increasingly inspiring base for my research. The list of debts I have incurred at that institution are difficult to summarize but friends and colleagues who have contributed to this work and my wider academic life in one way or another include Zoe Cormack, David Craig, Poppy Cullen, John Donaldson, Jo Fox, Robin Frame, Adrian Green, Matt Greenhall, Sarah Hackett, Matthew Johnson, Anna Jones, Tamador Khalid-Abdalla, Nicki Kindersley, James Koranyi, Chris Prior, Peter Tenant and Philip Williamson. I was lucky enough to begin research on Sudanese history at the same time as W. J. Berridge, who was a great colleague both in Durham and Khartoum. Without the encouragement and support of Richard Reid I would

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x

Acknowledgements

never have begun this project. More recently at Liverpool John Moores University, James Crossland, Katherine Harbord, Matt Hill and Nick White have all provided intellectual input into this work, and the History department has been a supportive and collegial environment in which to complete the book. I have also incurred many personal and intellectual debts in the wider fields of Sudanese and African studies: some of my creditors include Joshua Craze, Lotje de Vries, Vincent Hiribarren, Miles Larmer, Laura Mann, Paul Nugent, Aidan Russell, Øystein Rolandsen, Jonathan Saha, Iris Seri-Hirsch, Aidan Stonehouse, Mareike Schomerus, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Hannah Whittaker, Alden Young and members of ABORNE (African Borderlands Research Network). Teaching on the Rift Valley Institute’s Sudans course in 2013 was an invaluable experience and made a considerable impact on the final form of this book’s arguments. Baz LeCocq was a truly constructive critic of my work, and again contributed greatly to the finished arguments of this book. Douglas Johnson has been a generous supporter and careful reader of this work, and I am very grateful to him. At James Currey, Jaqueline Mitchell has been a supportive and patient editor. The peer reviewer for James Currey also provided a very useful detailed critique of this work. There are two people who have had a truly profound impact on my academic life, and who I have been privileged enough to call at various times supervisors, colleagues and friends. Cherry Leonardi supervised my research with a degree of creative and critical engagement which went far beyond what could reasonably be hoped for. She has been a constant source of sound advice and friendship over many years, and her influence on this book will (I hope) be obvious to anyone familiar with her own work. Justin Willis has been a meticulous critical reader of this work in its multiple incarnations. He also ignited my enthusiasm for Sudanese and African history as an undergraduate back in 2001, and has been a never-failing support ever since. Both Cherry and Justin have been figures of true intellectual and professional inspiration for me over a long period, and this work would have been impossible without them. The limits and weaknesses that remain in this book are, however, entirely my own. Finally, my family have been the bedrock of support on which this book was based. My mother and father, Eunice and Alan, my parents-in-law Miro and Janka, and my wife, Vanja, have always been consistent in their support of me and my work. My parents have encouraged me in all areas of life to live well – and shown how to do this. Vanja’s patience with my absences (physical and mental) and her active engagement with and belief in this work have been of profound value. Without her, this would never have happened. Finally, our daughter Mila arrived in 2013 and has ever since provided a source of wonderment that has kept me firmly tethered to my rich life beyond work.

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Abbreviations

ADC CIVSEC DC DPMD £E FEA NDD NDDMD NRO RHL SAD SAR SDD TNA WAC WDD

Assistant District Commissioner Civil Secretary District Commissioner Darfur Province Monthly Diaries Egyptian Pounds French Equatorial Africa Northern Darfur District Northern Darfur District Monthly Diary National Records Office, Khartoum Rhodes House Library, Oxford Sudan Archive, Durham Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi Southern Darfur District The National Archives, London Western Arab Corps Western Darfur District

xi

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Glossary

aba diimang

xii

hereditary governor of the southwest province of Darfur under the Sultans Abbala camel-keeping Arab peoples abbo uumo hereditary governor of the southeastern province ‘abd, abid (pl.) slave agawid elders, mediators; sometimes used by the colonial administration to refer to chiefs participating in inter-tribal mediation efforts. angarib rope bed awaid customs Baqqara cattle-keeping Arab peoples bey Turco-Egyptian official/chief dar abode, land, territory: under Condominium rule, an ethnic homeland, in which the majority ethnic group had dominant rights. dimlij sub-chief in central and northern Darfur diya blood-money durra sorghum effendi educated man; often used in derogatory way by colonial officials falagna agent faqih holy man (fiki in Condominium documents) fashir royal residence feriq Baqqara cattle camp fitr Islamic due firsha district chief among Masalit genabek form of address, ‘your honour’ goz area of stabilized sand dunes in Central, Eastern and Southern Darfur districts hafir water-yard, underground reservoir hakim governor hakura land, estate hakuma government jallaba in Darfur refers to riverine traders (gellaba in some Condominium documents)

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Glossary xiii

jibba jizzu khashm beits kuttab majlis

Muslim robe for men seasonal grazing in the northern desert lineage segments government elementary school council, often used for meetings or gatherings involving local elites and officials malik king, title for paramount chief common in Northern Darfur mandub agent maqdum viceroy marissa beer markaz district headquarters muawin subordinate administrative government official mudiriyya sub-province mulahiz police inspector murasla messenger nahas copper kettle drums, symbol of autonomous leadership nas ordinary people/subjects nazir paramount chief, used of Baqqara leaders qadi judge of Islamic law shaibas wooden neck restraints for prisoners sharia Islamic law shartay district chief, in central and northern Darfur shaykh chief, in Darfur usually referring to village-level chiefs sid al-awaid master of the customs sulh peace sulta powers umda sub-chief wadi seasonal river, riverbed wakil deputy zariba a thorn enclosure, camp zeka Islamic due zol ordinary man zalim oppressor zulm oppression zurug dark blue, black

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Map of Darfur showing colonial administrative divisions and approximate locations of ethnic groups in 1929 17°

Dongola

wa

CHAD

r

Ha

16°

di

TEIGA PLATEAU

Wa Galla

Tuar

Kobe

15°

QIMR 14°

Ka

j

M A H R I Y YA

Artag

ZAYYADIYYA BERTI Mellit

FUR Dar Kerne

MASALIT

Wa d i A

zum

Zalingei

Umm Kedada

El Fasher

BERTI

JABAL

Lewing MARRA

FUR

FUR

EASTERN

BIRGID M I S S I R I Y YA

Kordofan

DAJU Nyala

WESTERN

SOUTHERN

BANI HALBA

FA L L ATA

M A’ A L I A

MASALIT Kubbe

11°

Buram H A B B A N I Y YA

TA’ A I S H A

R I Z AY Q A T

UBANGISHARI

10°

9°N

MEIDOB

Kuttum

Geneina

12°

MEIDOB HILLS

MAHAMID

a

Wa

13°

di

I R AY Q A T

BANI H U S AY N

DAR MASALIT Adre

NORTHERN

ZAGHAWA

0 22°E

kilometres

B a h r a l - A ra b

Bahr al-Ghazal

100 23°

24°

25°

26°

27°

Map of Darfur showing colonial administrative divisions and approximate locations of ethnic groups

xiv

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Introduction

Graham Dudley Lampen first set foot in Khartoum at the age of a mere 23. He was soon to join the Sudan Political Service, the corps of British officials governing Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.1 The capital was a disappointment: Lampen recalled in his memoirs that it was ‘sadly unlike an Arab city of my imagination with imposing mosques or elegant minarets’. That night, restlessly anticipating his future, Lampen pored over his map of Sudan. His memoirs claimed ‘my eye was caught by a province called Darfur where large tracts were marked unexplored or uninhabited forest.’ The far north of the province met the Libyan desert and showed only ‘a few dotted tracks and wells of which many had a question mark beside their names’. This was apparently enough to ignite Lampen’s imagination: Darfur… seemed the kind of place I had hoped to find in Sudan. Pioneering, little office work and much trekking, independence of command, no telephones and few telegraph lines, no cars, no bridge or tennis parties or dance nights at the Club…. If I had come to the Sudan not to lead a comfortable town life and carry out local regulations and try the petty criminals, but to rule someone – and I fear this was my undemocratic wish – Darfur seemed to call me!2

This anecdotal material encapsulates the perceptions that shaped colonial governance in Darfur under the British. This region of western Sudan was remote from the centre of colonial power in Khartoum; and 1 

As an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Sudan was ruled by British officials nominally on behalf of the King of Egypt, but practically under British direction in a manner very similar to that employed in British colonial territories elsewhere in Africa. Lampen served in Darfur as Assistant District Commissioner in Northern Darfur 1924–1926, Assistant Resident in Dar Masalit in 1927, Assistant District Commissioner Baggara between 1927 and 1929, District Commissioner Southern Darfur District 1930–1932. He later returned to Darfur as Governor between 1944 and 1949. 2  Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/1/3. This aloof attitude towards the capital and to colonial social life was probably widely shared: Lampen’s sentiments are strikingly similar to those expressed by Harold MacMichael, future Civil Secretary of the Condominium government, on his own arrival in Sudan. See M.W. Daly, ‘Great white chief: H.A. MacMichael and the tribes of Kordofan’ in E. Stiansen and M. Kevane (eds), Kordofan Invaded (Boston, 1998), pp. 102–103.

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Introduction

in the British imagination, therefore also isolated and removed from the modern world. Elsewhere in his memoirs, Lampen wrote of his later return from leave in England to southern Darfur and his first subsequent meeting with Ibrahim Musa Madibbu, nazir (paramount chief) of the Rizayqat Baqqara nomads, and his retainers: They dismounted in dead silence while the Nazir grasped me by the hand: Kaif Halaf… the well known greetings were soothing to my ear and plunged me from London, Europe and the twentieth century straight back into the timeless desert life. The thick bush closed behind me and shut me off from Western Civilisation like a soundproof door. 3

This imagining of Darfur as a land outside of time itself is an extreme version of a very common motif in representations of the region: even the best recent account of Darfur’s history proclaims it to be ‘set apart: huge, remote and poverty stricken’.4 This conception of Darfur as a vast backwater justified its under-development in the colonial period and its continued economic and political marginalization after independence: it continues to shape much political, journalistic and scholarly analysis of the region. Yet this is also a land with a deep history of independent statehood that dates back to at least the late 17th century. The power of the Muslim Sultans of Darfur rested on their control of long-distance trade routes, and in particular the export of slaves to Egypt along the so-called ‘Forty Days Road’ that crossed the Sahara.5 Darfur was also an important stopping point on the long-distance pilgrimage route from West Africa to Mecca. It is home to a complex overlapping range of ethnic groups, pursuing shifting, dynamic livelihood strategies in an environment that presents significant challenges for individuals and communities. Camel and cattle herders (broadly of the north and south of the region) exchange their animals and animal products for food crops grown by cultivators especially in western areas of the region: trade and inter-marriage connect ethnic groups. Peoples move through the various ecological zones of Darfur according to the seasons and rainfall. In other words, Darfur was never the isolated, static backwater of the British (and post-colonial) imagination. And despite clichés of unexplored, blank space on a map, the British governing Darfur were attempting to impose colonial rule on a region of considerable dynamism and political sophistication. These simple facts had far-reaching implications for the character of colonial governance in Darfur, explored in depth for the first time in this book. The British conquered Darfur in 1916 as a supposedly defensive measure in the midst of World War I. Conquest forestalled the much reported (and highly improbable) chance of the Darfur Sultan joining the Ottoman war effort – more significantly it also decisively incorporated the region into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Yet what followed was not a straightforward history of colonial 3 

Ibid., SAD 734/10/5. M. Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow (Cambridge, 2008), back cover. 5  T. Walz, The Trade between Egypt and Bilad as-Sudan, 1700–1820 (Paris, 1978). 4 

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Introduction 3

domination. Whilst the British ruled Darfur in sometimes brutal and violent fashion, local actors, especially the emergent chieftaincy elite, negotiated the terms of their subordination to state power. More than this, these actors shaped the practices and orders of the state at a local level, drawing on a deeper history of ‘dealing with government’.6 Colonial officials were indeed ‘plunged’ into a complex local political environment of which they often understood rather little and, as Lampen’s account suggests, local elites took them by the hand in their attempts to turn the alien power of colonialism to their advantage.

THE PAST OF THE PRESENT The character of the colonial state and the manner of its rule in Darfur is a topic of more than purely historical consequence: significant continuities and parallels may be drawn between the dynamics of power and authority in the colonial period, and those of Darfur’s more contemporary politics and conflicts. Since 2003–4, Darfur has been embroiled in continuing conflict and disorder. By 2015, the level of violence had much reduced from the earliest years of the crisis, which was characterized by many observers as genocide, but peace remained difficult to imagine. Outright rebellion against government in 2003 – the first in Darfur since the early colonial period – by rebel groups denouncing their marginalization in Sudanese politics, prompted a counter-insurgency which led to massive levels of death and displacement. Darfur’s rebellion became a war between its various peoples, as Khartoum armed local militias to target the ethnic groups deemed to be supporters of the rebels. Whilst rebel movements subsequently fragmented and consequently became less effective opponents of government, the Government of Sudan has also been entirely unable to rebuild stable governance arrangements in the region, partly because of its inability to control the local militias that it had itself armed. Existing accounts of the historical roots of the crisis in Darfur often emphasize the significance of colonialism in underdeveloping Darfur relative to the centres of wealth and power in riverine Sudan. They argue this entrenched the marginalization of the region in post-colonial Sudanese politics that finally resulted in the rebellion of 2003.7 Alternatively, Mahmood Mamdani has recently attempted to locate the roots of conflict among Darfur’s peoples in what he terms the ‘retribalisation’ of Darfur by the British, in particular the way they defined land rights in collective, ethnic terms, and the exclusion of certain groups from those rights to land who later became easily recruited into government militias.8 6  C. Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: Histories of chiefship, community and state (Oxford, 2013). 7 Daly, Sorrow, p.  157, 162–171, 184. The classic statement of Sudan’s coreperiphery political geography is given in D. Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Oxford, 2003). 8 M. Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, politics and the war on terror (New York, 2009).

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Introduction

This work eschews the search for definitive root causes of the conflict in the colonial past: it does, however, argue for the significance of colonial (and indeed precolonial) political dynamics in understanding more recent events – both by excavating the history of state violence in the region, pointing to a deep history of intimidation and predation which recent government policy has emerged from, whilst also emphasizing the significance of local initiative in shaping or deflecting state interventions. As well as a dangerous and unpredictable coercive force, the state might also be a usable resource for local actors willing to take a chance in approaching government.9 Indeed, the violence of the state might itself become a resource for local elites. Alongside the use of its own military technologies and armies, the colonial state also facilitated and licensed the violence of particular local groups and individuals, whatever its rhetoric of bringing peace and order to Darfur. This is one of the most striking parallels to more recent violence in Darfur, which has so often been inflicted on people as a joint enterprise between the state military and semi-formal locally recruited militias – as was also the case in southern Sudan during the 1980s and 1990s. What might be termed the outsourcing of violence, or ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap’ was not dreamt up by uniquely evil minds in Khartoum in the 1980s and onwards: rather it was a revival of a strategy employed by an over-stretched colonial state to defeat enemies in a remote borderland, playing on and exacerbating local divisions in order to find ways into the societies it wished to control.10 A closer understanding of the dynamics of interactions between state and local actors in the colonial period therefore also helps us to understand enduring processes of state formation which continue to play out in the present day. The recent conflict in Darfur, rather than being understood simply as an example of specifically contemporary ‘state failure’ or a ‘crisis of governance’, has to be seen against the backdrop of the continual emergence and reshaping of the Sudanese state in the region from historical processes of violence and local negotiation.11 This book is an account of just these processes.

STATE FORMATION IN COLONIAL DARFUR Mamdani’s view of the decisive and negative impact of British rule in Darfur is one example of a broader set of views that argue for the transformative effects of the colonial state on African politics and societies, its radical reordering of local politics and identities in line with an agenda of what James C. Scott calls ‘legibility’ – the goal of remaking 9 Leonardi,

Dealing makes very similar arguments about southern Sudan. A. De Waal, ‘Counter-insurgency on the cheap’, London Review of Books, 5 (2004) pp. 25–7. 11  R. Cockett, Sudan: Darfur and the failure of an African state (New Haven, 2010); S. Hassan and C. Ray (eds), Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan (New York, 2009). 10 

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Introduction 5

and simplifying complex local societies and realities in order to make them more knowable, comprehensible, and therefore governable.12 However, more recent scholarship has voiced growing scepticism over the degree to which colonial states were able to achieve these goals, or control the outcomes of the innovations they introduced. An emphasis on enduring precolonial conceptions of political authority – which emphasize the personal relationships of unequal reciprocity between powerful patrons and their dependent clients – together with growing awareness of the continuous reinvention of ethnic identities over long periods of time, has led scholars to look more closely at the way in colonial projects were compromised or reshaped by the initiative of Africans themselves, and indeed to play down the transformative impact of colonialism in general.13 Yet this remains a controversial debate, and is mirrored by other discussions of whether the state in Africa is – crudely put – weak or strong, and, indeed, debate over the extent to which colonial rule in general relied either on the use of coercion and violence or on accommodation with local populations, especially local elites.14 This book addresses these broad questions about the character and significance of the colonial state in the specific context of Darfur. It argues that colonial government did change local cultures and practices of authority in Darfur, whilst also showing how the historical and cultural context within which the administration operated inevitably shaped the outcomes of those changes. In particular, Darfur’s precolonial history as a Muslim Sultanate created a range of institutions and expectations of government that influenced the character and practices of the colonial state. That said, whereas in several other colonial African territories the British retained the rulers of precolonial kingdoms – for example, in Asante in the Gold Coast the office of Asantehene was restored by 1935, and in Buganda the kabaka’s position was maintained throughout almost the entire period of colonial rule – in Darfur the Sultans were never restored. The British toyed with the idea, and indeed attempted to incorporate members of the old ruling dynasty into their administrative structures, but the Sultanate was not re-established. Instead, various figures of local authority, with varying kinds and degrees of connection with earlier states in the region, were re-invented as servants of the colonial state: their practices of rule 12  For legibility see Scott, J., Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (Yale, 1994), pp. 2–3. The classic statement of colonialism’s transformative power is T.O. Ranger, ‘The invention of tradition in colonial Africa’ in E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). 13  T. Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism and the limits of invention in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History 44 (2003), pp. 3–27; P. Chabal, and J.P. Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as political instrument (Oxford, 1999). 14  B. Lawrence, E. Osborn, and R. Roberts, ‘Introduction: African intermediaries and the ‘bargain’ of collaboration’, in B. Lawrence, E. Osborn, and R. Roberts (eds), Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks (London, 2006); J. Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, 2000); R. Gott. Britain’s Empire: Resistance, repression and revolt. (London, 2011).

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Introduction

varied across space and time, and the degree to which these represented change or continuity with the period of the Sultanate also varied. This book thus attempts to move away from conceptions of either the colonial state or ‘Darfuri’ society as being single monolithic structures, or even as necessarily being clearly divided from one another: rather it emphasizes the multiple, contingent points of interaction between the diverse societies of the region and individual state actors: interactions which constituted the very making of the state. In doing so it moves away from the assumption of distance or alienation between state and society which much existing literature on the core-periphery relationship in Sudan has assumed – real though that distance was – towards an approach which helps us to understand how the Sudanese state has become part of the naturalized order of things in Darfur, even despite its obvious failings and limitations.15 This approach is similar to that taken by recent historical scholarship which has considered state formation in Sudan and elsewhere in Africa as a process which takes place in the heat of local contest and negotiation. Such work has focused on the ways in which state policies and agendas are resisted, evaded or appropriated by local populations in ways which actually shape the way the state is manifested at a local level.16 The analysis here is therefore concerned with the idea of state as process rather than as thing. As such it draws on insights in wider state theory which question the existence of the state as a coherent entity which stands above society and acts upon it, and rather frame the state as an effect or an idea: a convincing claim to be a clearly bounded neutral entity, an effect which masks both internal incoherence and multiple points of embeddedness in what is supposedly a distinct and removed ‘society’.17 The colonial state in Darfur was indeed incoherent, pursuing multiple, often only loosely connected agendas: the importance of personal ‘pet projects’ in setting policy at a local level is striking. This incoherence 15 Johnson,

Root Causes; J. Willis, ‘Hukm. The creolization of authority in Condominium Sudan’, Journal of African History, 46 (2005), pp. 29–50. 16 Leonardi, Dealing; Jocelyn Alexander. The Unsettled Land: State-making and the politics of land in Zimbabwe, 1893–2003 (Oxford, 2006). This is not an altogether novel approach – 25 years ago, Janet Ewald described the ‘building’ of the Taqali kingdom in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan as an incomplete process that emerged out of ‘confrontation’ between kings and subjects – subjects ‘shaped the structure of the kingdom by trying to evade the demands of their ruler’ and also by ‘yielding certain prerogatives’ to those rulers. Soldiers, Traders and Slaves: State formation and economic transformation in the Greater Nile Valley, 1700–1885 (London, 1990), p. 182. 17  P. Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 1, (1988), pp. 58–89; G.M. Joseph and D. Nugent ‘Popular culture and state formation in revolutionary Mexico’ in G.M. Joseph and D. Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the negotiation of rule in modern Mexico (London, 1994); T. Mitchell, ‘The limits of the state: beyond statist approaches and their critics’, American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 77–96.

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gave local populations, especially chieftaincy elites, significant opportunity to shape the state and its agendas at the local level. And while officials did pursue attempts at projecting an image of remote, neutral ‘stateness’, these performances often broke down or were otherwise unconvincing: divisions and conflicts among colonial administrators exposed the confusion of the state, and again local elites were able to exploit those divisions to pursue their own goals. Administrators sometimes felt more connection to local chiefs than they did to Khartoum, or even to El Fasher, the regional hub of colonial culture, even as their adherence to disciplinary, bureaucratic routines of report and official diary writing spelled a continued participation in the culture of the state. The administrator thus became a figure performing in at least two registers, pursuing impersonal effects of distance, neutrality and superiority even as he pursued effects of intimacy and interiority, and usually achieving neither. The colonial state in Darfur was therefore always a fractured, uncertain network rather than a coherent, unified thing, and officials were often ‘participants…not arbiters’ in the processes of bargaining and negotiation which characterized local politics: ‘advocates’ for the rights of ‘their’ people vis-à-vis other groups in neighbouring districts or provinces.18 In his classic work on the Swahili coast, Glassman argued that European intruders were often seen ‘not as challengers to the prevailing system of big man politics but rather as players in the same game… yet another set of potential patrons’.19 Views of British colonial officials in Darfur were surely complex and multiple: but it also seems clear that here too claims were often made on officials as personal patrons rather than distant bureaucrats. And several of these officials almost certainly saw themselves in the same terms. The resulting interconnections between state and local agendas, created an uncertain and fluid political dynamic which was perhaps the principal legacy of colonialism here (as elsewhere in Africa): the pluralistic, hybrid and often contradictory institutional and discursive political landscape bequeathed to post-colonial states, which continues to shape political dynamics and indeed expectations and visions of the state to the present day. They also created a fragile variety of hegemony for the colonial state: it was on the grounds of these local negotiations that government extracted a limited degree of consent to its authority.

VIOLENCE AND GOVERNMENT Despite this emphasis on negotiation, it is crucial to emphasize that violence ran throughout government in colonial Darfur: it was always 18 

B. Berman, ‘Structure and Process in the Bureaucratic States of Colonial Africa’ in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa: Book One (London, 1992), p. 152; D.L. Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, ethnicity and the cultural politics of development (Oxford, 1999), p. 60. 19  J. Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, rebellion and popular consciousness on the Swahili coast (Portsmouth, 1995), p. 178.

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Introduction

the defining context for the local negotiation of political authority. But people, of course, respond to violence in a variety of ways, and are not always silenced by it. People resist the application of force, evade it, even sometimes invite its use in the pursuit of local agendas. The violence of the state is not always simply a pathological external imposition but can also be a resource to achieve particular goals for those able to channel its devastating effects. Indeed, among some people, and at some times, (and rather paradoxically) the state’s use of violence may have been part of the attraction of dealing with it: it was an irresistible and potentially terrifying force with the capacity to destroy local livelihoods, and could be used to intimidate and weaken troublesome rivals. The violence of the state was at its most obvious and explicit in the years of conquest and ‘pacifiction’ in Darfur. The display and use of machine guns was thought particularly effective in terrifying local peoples into obedience; yet these were also years when some local populations were armed by government to assist in the repression of their neighbours. The patterns and direction of colonial violence were thus highly differentiated at a local level, and some peoples profited significantly from their association with government military campaigns. Government was, therefore, an extremely dangerous enemy – but also potentially a powerful ally against local rivals. This was the case not just in Darfur, but was also true elsewhere in Condominium Sudan, and early colonial Africa more generally: Johnson demonstrates that colonial violence against the Nuer of southern Sudan in the early years of Anglo-Egyptian rule was directly instigated and participated in by neighbouring, rival Dinka groups.20 In the Nuba Mountains, similarly, ‘friendlies’, drawn from local populations – both Baqqara Arabs and Nuba – participated enthusiastically in punitive government patrols against resistant Nuba populations.21 The form and direction of colonial state violence was itself sometimes the outcome of a negotiated process, reminding us of the interaction and connection between the different facets of colonial authority and state formation. Of course, the violence of colonialism is definitely not something that should be reduced to the outcome of ground level negotiations among equals. Clearly, colonial subjects were manoeuvring within parameters imposed by the state, and in ways which often ultimately reinforced their own subordination to that state. But to understand state formation, we also need to under20 D.

Johnson, Nuer Prophets (Oxford, 1994), p.  10. For other examples and broader discussions see John Lonsdale, ‘The Conquest State of Kenya, 1895–1905’ and ‘The Politics of Conquest in Western Kenya 1894–1908’ in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Vol. 1 (London, 1992); Jamie Monson, ‘Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918’, Journal of African History 39 (1998), pp. 95–120; D. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, civil war and decolonization (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 26–29. 21  J. Willis, ‘Patrol No. 32: British colonial violence in the Nuba Mountains’, Sudan Studies 28 (2001), pp. 48–49; Ewald, Soldiers, p. 133.

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Introduction 9

stand some of its violence to have been directed and channelled by the influence of local actors. After the falling away of rebellion, and a diminished need for the overt use of military violence against local peoples, the British established a durable politics of alliance with local chiefs who they empowered to enact administrative and judicial functions at the local level. This was a policy pursued in varying form right across Condominium Sudan, although Darfur and neighbouring Kordofan were seen as key ‘laboratories’ for this policy, intended to harness the imagined legitimacy of local elites to the alien state. But as others have noted in wider studies of colonial Africa, ruling through chiefs did not imply an end to violence. 22 At one level the bribes, fines and extra-legal taxation that chiefs extracted from their subjects, exercising and abusing their powers as the local functionaries of the state, created sometimes new forms of structural violence within local societies. Chiefs also inflicted physical violence on the bodies of subjects who refused to fulfil their demands. Torture and flogging were central to the character of chiefly authority in parts of Darfur, and it was these forms of violence and abuse which very much defined the state at the local level in these areas. Moreover, the colonial project of legibility associated with the politics of Indirect Rule – rendering and controlling tribes and tribal territories – might be read as a form of political violence, policing complex inter-group relationships in a manner which impeded people’s everyday livelihoods. Such a policy was sometimes imposed with the use of physical coercive force to keep people within ethnically defined territorial units. The violence of the Sudanese state in recent years in Darfur is unprecedented in scale and scope. But it does very definitely need to be set within this historical context of violent processes of state formation. States are, however, always multi-faceted: and people’s expectations of and attitudes towards the state are accordingly complex and often contradictory. This is particularly obvious in Sudan, as in many other African states. People have come to expect great violence, predation and extraction from the state, but they have also, with remarkable consistency, demanded the state act as a guarantor of collective security, even when the state has been the prime agent of insecurity. Sometimes the state has also been used as an influential ally in the pursuit of local political agendas; and, especially in more recent times, people have demanded the state act as the beneficent provider of public services and economic development. These contradictory attitudes towards government in Sudan have in some contexts been explained in popular discourse by the equally contradictory character of the state. The Nuer of southern Sudan in the 1980s talked of the ‘government of the left’ which included civil institutions of the state that might be made use of and be of some value in people’s lives; 22  Most

famously in M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (Princeton, 1996). For a similar case in Sudan see Willis, ‘Violence, authority and the state in the Nuba Mountains of Condominium Sudan’, The Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 89–114.

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Introduction

and the ‘government of the right’ – the military – which brought only death and destruction. 23 As Ewald argued of the precolonial kingdom of Taqali in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, the state can thus be seen as both ‘predator and protector’. 24 Archival records, unsurprisingly, do not capture much of popular discourse; but this book suggests that state power was indeed both something to be used and something to be evaded in Darfur; indeed that the state was seen as both the agent of order and disorder. The local agents of the state might be the principal source of disorder in people’s everyday lives; yet people also expected that the state should ultimately regulate the behaviour of those agents. This was, perhaps, the most important function of government in the eyes of Darfur’s many diverse populations. In the colonial period, it was the chiefs of Darfur who became the key local agents of the state and therefore also those men who people expected the state to restrain.

NATIVE ADMINISTRATION Chiefs – defined here as all ‘Darfuri’ holders of authority assumed by colonial officials to derive their authority primarily from custom or tradition, rather than from the colonial state – and their ambivalent relationship to that same state in the system of ‘Native Administration’ are central to understanding the character of colonial governance.25 They also remain figures of great interest in their own right in more contemporary discussion. In some analyses of the current conflict in Darfur the dismantling of the Native Administration in the 1970s by the Nimeiri regime (a course reversed by the current government) is crucial to understanding the failure to mediate the conflicts that broke out from that time. One of the more astute proponents of this view, James Morton, has suggested that the strength of the Native Administration in the colonial period, coupled with the strong emphasis of the colonial state on maintaining order, ‘controlled and settled disputes in a manner that lasted.’26 Yet there are doubts whether present-day chiefs in Darfur still have the legitimacy to broker local peace. Although the Native Administration was re-established by the NIF from 1989, in Darfur it has become de rigueur to draw attention to the ‘politiciza23 S. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with money, war and the state (Berkeley, 1996), p. 110. Also cf. G. Lienhardt, ‘The Sudan: aspects of the south government among some of the Nilotic peoples, 1947–52’, Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 9 (1982), p. 27. 24 Ewald, Soldiers, p. 182. 25  This definition paraphrases J. Willis, ‘Chieftaincy’ in J. Parker and R. Reid (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern African History (Oxford, 2013), pp. 214–215. 26 J. Morton, Conflict in Darfur: A different perspective (Hemel Hampstead, 2004).

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Introduction 11

tion’ of the system in recent years due to the interference of the Khartoum government. 27 However, as some have already noted, the Native Administration was always inherently ‘politicized’: colonial government established the system, and appointed men it believed would be effective allies at the local level.28 Prunier depicts colonial-era chiefs as ‘incompetent, illiterate and corrupt’: for Martin Daly such weaknesses meant Native Administration was clearly a ‘failure’ by 1939.29 But the persistence of the perception (as De Waal has noted) that chiefs are somehow still tied to their local community and distinct from ‘the state’ is striking, in Darfur and elsewhere, right up to the present day. 30 The role of chiefs in Darfur under colonial rule therefore needs more careful analysis and historicization in order to understand why ‘traditional authority’ here – as in other regions of Sudan and in Africa more widely – is still so influential. 31 And in its focus on local politics and administration, this volume is to a significant extent a study of colonial chieftaincy, as well as a study of the colonial state. Chiefs were used by colonial states across Africa as intermediaries, translating and mediating between ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘personal’/‘traditional’ modes of authority. 32 Officials demanded that chiefs deliver taxation and labour for government, and keep control over their subjects via the institutions of ‘Native Courts’ which oversaw the exercise of so-called ‘customary’ law, often in highly punitive form. Yet chiefs sometimes played a protective role vis à vis their subjects, acting as a buffer or even a shield against the extractive demands and alien laws of the colonial state. 33 At other times they were used by their subjects to make demands on the colonial state. 34 These were complex roles which required chiefs to perform to multiple audiences on multiple stages, and not all chiefs succeeded in these theatrics. Indeed, performing to the expectations of either the state or the chief’s local constituency often 27  M. A. Abdul-Jalil, AA Mohammed and AA Yousuf, ‘Native Administration and local governance in Darfur: past and future’, in A. De Waal, War in Darfur (Harvard, 2007), p. 27, pp. 42–66, esp. pp. 49–51. Also see more broadly, E.A.B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and R. van Dijk, ‘Introduction’, in E.A.B. van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and R. van Dijk (eds), African Chieftaincy in a New Socio-Political Landscape (Hamburg, 1999), p. 10. 28  A. De Waal, ‘Sudan: the turbulent state’, in De Waal, War in Darfur, pp. 27–30. 29 G. Prunier, Darfur: The ambiguous genocide (London, 2005), p.  29; Daly, Sorrow, p. 152. 30  De Waal, ‘Turbulent’, p. 27. 31 Willis, Chieftaincy, provides an excellent overview of this body of research and a convincing answer to the question posed here – that ‘tradition’ remains ‘a discursive resource’ that gives chiefs ‘a morally advantageous distance from the state and from the multiple, disappointed expectations of modernity’. p. 221. 32  See D. G. Hatt, ‘Establishing tradition: The development of chiefly authority in the western High Atlas mountains of Morocco, 1890–1990’, Journal of Legal Pluralism 37–38 (1996), pp. 123–53, p. 137. 33  Leonardi, ‘Violence, sacrifice and chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan’, Africa, 77 (2007), p. 542. 34  Willis, ‘Hukm’, p. 47.

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Introduction

necessarily involved contradicting the expectations of one or other audience. It was particularly difficult for chiefs, that while the state demanded they carry out so many of its own exactions, it also expected that chiefs could somehow simultaneously retain local legitimacy: the purpose of ruling through chiefs was indeed to achieve the ‘rub-off’ effect of chiefly legitimacy on the state itself. This gave enemies of chiefs multiple discursive weapons to wield in complaints directed to the state: chiefs could be impugned on the grounds of both their failure to abide by the law of government, as well as their failure to fulfil local expectations of what constituted the legitimate performance of chiefly authority. 35 It might be argued that it is the very vulnerability of the chief’s position which has engendered its resilience: the double-edged constraints on the behaviour of chiefs have constituted the grounds on which chiefly authority is negotiated. Yet it is possible to overstate the vulnerability of chiefs; or at the least a variety of local circumstances needs to be accounted for. Mahmood Mamdani’s model of ‘decentralised despotism’ – representing the chief’s authority as a clenched fist which contained all facets of authority delegated from the state, and ruling through force – retains significant analytical purchase in some contexts: the backing of the state was sometimes sufficient to ensure the survival of even the most abusive and authoritarian of chiefs. 36 In the case at hand, chiefs in colonial Darfur were not a single category of actors, and their position did not remain constant over time. This volume focuses mainly on the senior levels of chieftaincy hierarchies: the men responsible for administering particular ethnic groups or particular dars (territorial districts) on behalf of government – usually called shartay or malik (or sometimes Sultan) in non-Arab societies, and nazir in Arab societies. These men acted as the principal intermediaries between local societies and colonial officials to a much greater degree than more localized sub-chiefs (dimlijs in non-Arab societies and umdas in Arab societies, and shaykhs at the most local level) who – in formal structural terms, if not always in practice – remained at one remove from direct engagement with state authority. Even concentrating on this elite category of chief includes considerable variety. Longer-term historical processes and local culture heavily influenced the specific character of colonial chieftaincy experienced by the populations of the region. As mentioned earlier, in some contexts chiefs acted as the ruthless face of the state’s violence at a local level: state officials excused the abuses of their chiefly subordinates with claims that local peoples expected violence from their rulers, and that such violence was required for effective rule. This was particularly true in western Darfur, where the relationship between local Fur chiefs and the state had been particularly close since the days of the Darfur Sultans. Chiefs had for a long time principally acted as the agents of state power, although they also had spiritual and social obligations to those they governed. Here, colonial chieftaincy seemed to accord rather well with Mamdani’s model of ‘decen35 

Cf. Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism’, p. 12. Citizen, pp. 41–57.

36 Mamdani,

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tralised despotism’ – downward accountability appears to have shrunk, and chiefly despotism was unrestrained by government until the later decades of colonial rule. Yet elsewhere, in areas on the periphery of the old Sultanate principally inhabited by semi-nomadic or nomadic pastoralist societies, intense competition between various sections of ‘tribal’ groups for the occupancy of chiefly office created real hazards for chiefs, in societies where paramount leadership was sometimes a very recent innovation. Even here, the state often backed their local allies against local protest, sometimes reminding protestors of the coercive capacity that might be used against those who disturbed ‘public order’ as defined by government. But senior paramount chiefs in Darfur were not infrequently deposed by the state, partly at the behest of local complaints, and some of the most powerful men of the province became particularly vulnerable in the 1940s and 50s when central government exercised new levels of scrutiny and demanded new levels of probity from its local representatives. In these societies, whilst chiefs benefited from the new powers bestowed by colonial government, chiefs remained ‘not quite’ the state: the ambiguity of their position was particularly pronounced, and not all could keep up with the shifting agendas of government. But even as long-serving chiefs were swept aside, a new generation of the ‘traditional’ elite – educated, bureaucratically competent, and self-consciously modern – emerged to engage with the increasingly technocratic character of government in the final decades of colonialism. While the association of chiefs with the administrative priorities of government was a process sustained throughout the period of colonial rule – and one which continued after independence – it is also clear that the leading chiefly families of the region were able to maintain their local influence by performing the role of intermediary with government effectively on behalf of local populations. One key narrative presented in this study is the way in which chiefs navigated the challenges of association with colonial government, and how they and their families thus emerged at independence as an entrenched provincial elite. This elite – whatever the limits of its influence in post-independence Sudan – has continued to supply many of the leading figures in Darfuri politics and key intermediaries with the Khartoum regime. 37 In such circumstances the continued expectation among analysts – and to some extent among local populations – that the Native Administration should perform a representative and intermediary function for local 37 Ahmed Diraige is one of the most obvious examples of the continued relevance of ‘traditional’ families in post-independence Darfur: the son of a shartay who also became head of the Darfur Development Front, later Governor of Darfur and most recently head of the (now apparently redundant) National Redemption Front alliance of Darfuri rebels who refused to sign the 2006 Abuja Agreement. Tijani Sese is another, a member of the family of the dimingawi in Zalingwei district – chiefs who trace their heritage back deep into the history of the Darfur Sultanate – who has served as Governor of Darfur, more recently head of the rebel Liberation and Justice Movement until 2015, and simultaneously the head of the Darfur Regional Authority.

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Introduction

societies in contemporary conflict-struck Darfur, particularly with regards to local peace-building, appears at once perfectly explicable and worryingly naive . 38

LAW, ILLEGALITY AND GOVERNANCE In the same account with which this introduction began, Lampen claimed that the Darfur administration (still – and unusually – largely military in character by the late 1920s) worked by ‘enforcing security and public order by direct and downright measures often illegal but never unjust’. 39 The claim of just illegality surely rests on the assumption that individual officials knew the kind of justice required in their particular district better than the authors of any formal, uniform legal code. Indeed, while officials did depend on the partnership with local chiefs, they nonetheless also remained highly autonomous, only loosely controlled rulers in their own right. Writing about Guy Moore, the DC of Northern Darfur for fourteen years between 1932 and 1946, a Darfuri academic, Sharif Harir, admiringly suggests: Sultan Moore was capable of observing the strictest sense of justice which the legal code provided: and as he was the law itself, he was also able to enforce more than the letter of the code.40

Individual officials both embodied and transcended the law. Moore was not the only official commonly referred to as Sultan, a label which equated officials with the precolonial rulers of Darfur. This was an act of flattery, but it also reflected the reality of the substantive autonomy which DCs wielded in managing the affairs of their district. Officials could turn a blind eye to the illegality of chiefly authority because they themselves also exercised an extra-legal, highly personalized authority. Mamdani recognized the commonality in the position of chiefs and colonial officials in an overlooked passage from Citizen and Subject, where he argued that the term ‘chief’ needs to be understood in a broad sense, stripped of all racial connotations: chiefs were really nonspecialised, nonlegal administrative personnel whose broad portfolio also included judicial functions. As such they should be seen to include both native chiefs and white commissioners… Defined by the role of powers and role of the office they occupied, the commissioners were really the white chiefs of Africa.41

38  See J. Tubiana, V. Tanner, M.A. Abdul-Jalil, Traditional authorities’ peacemaking role in Darfur (Washington, 2012) for an excellent report on the contemporary position. 39  Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/1/3. 40  S. Harir, ‘The politics of numbers: Mediatory leadership and the political process among the Beri Zaghawa of Sudan’, PhD thesis (Bergen, 1986), p. 161. 41  M. Mamdani, Citizen, p. 114; also M. Crowder ‘The white chiefs of tropical Africa,’ in M. Crowder, Colonial West Africa (London, 1978), pp. 122–150.

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Introduction 15

One of the arguments pursued in this volume is that chiefs and officials, despite their apparent role as embodying the law, often colluded in creating a form of rule which was defined by its illegality. The key achievement of the colonial period in Darfur has often been claimed to be the maintenance of law and order.42 Yet illegal misdeeds were not the destructive opposite of benign state rule: rather they often constituted and defined the state and its local manifestations.43 Ann Stoler has suggested that ‘imperial states by definition operate as states of exception that vigilantly produce exceptions to their principles and exceptions to their laws’.44 Ruling outside of the law was, then, the very definition of colonial rule. Nonetheless, the state’s rhetorical claim to be governing by the rule of law in Darfur and Sudan also created opportunities for local actors to use that rhetoric against unpopular or oppressive local rulers. Officials were often unsympathetic to such efforts; but, as briefly suggested above, by the 1940s the state took the idea of the rule of law more seriously than it had before. This was the period of so-called ‘modernization’ and certainly of greater bureaucratization, and these changes introduced new hazards for chiefs seen to be out of touch with the new expectations of government. Even colonial officials themselves came under greater scrutiny by agents of central government dedicated to enforcing legal norms in Darfur and across Sudan. Darfur’s colonial experience therefore demonstrates the relationship of law to power and resistance to be ambiguous, context specific, and historically contingent, and the colonial state to be more than a ‘state of exception’. If the state retained its authoritarian character even at independence it was nonetheless increasingly constrained by its own reformist ideology and drive to uniform bureaucratization.

GEOGRAPHY AND POPULATIONS In geographical terms, Darfur encompasses a wide range of ecological zones and an equally wide range of livelihoods. The edge of the desert, in Northern Darfur, was primarily inhabited by camel pastoralists in the colonial period, although as early as the 1930s quite large-scale migration southwards occurred due to environmental pressures. The main groups in this particular zone were the Zaghawa, the Meidob (both non-Arab camel pastoralists), the Zayyadiyya, the Bani Hussayn (Arab pastoralists and semi-pastoralists) and various smaller groups of Arab camel pastoralists, collectively labelled ‘the Northern Rizayqat’ by the colonial administration, due to their alleged links to the Rizayqat of Southern Darfur. The district of Northern Darfur encompassed all 42 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 241. For a similar argument regarding colonial Burma see J. Saha Law, Disorder and the Colonial State: Corruption in Burma, c.1900 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 44  A.L. Stoler, ‘On degrees of imperial sovereignty’, Public Culture 18 (2006), p. 138. 43 

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Introduction

of these groups, as well as the Berti, another major group of non-Arab agriculturalists, and various other smaller ethnic groups.45 Most of the groups mentioned had their own dars (defined territory in which the ethnic group has presumptive primary land rights) within the single administrative unit of Northern Darfur District. Further south, and east of the Jabal Marra (the north-south mountain range in Darfur), lies the quz, an area of stabilized dunes which sees greater rainfall than the northern semi-desert, and where a range of agriculturalist and pastoralist peoples lived: it covers the colonial districts of Central, Eastern and Southern Darfur. The provincial capital, El Fasher (the old capital of the Sultans since the late-18th century) is within this region, as were the various settlements of people in Eastern Darfur pursuing gum arabic production. The quz also encompasses the southern Baqqara belt, where the various (mainly Arab) cattle nomad groups were located: Rizayqat, Habbaniyya, Ta’aisha, Bani Halba and Fallata. The most fertile land in Darfur lies to the west of Jabal Marra and indeed also in the Jabal Marra itself. Here a very broad range of agricultural crops were grown. O’Fahey terms the area the Fur heartland, although this ecological zone also encompasses the Masalit, on Darfur’s western frontier with Chad, which was part of French Equatorial Africa in the colonial era. However, Dar Masalit was a separate administrative district during colonial rule (and afterwards), under the ‘Indirect Rule’ of its Sultan. Other ethnic groups also inhabited this western part of Sudan, including the Qimr and the Daju. As this summary of Darfur’s ethnic and ecological geography suggests, the region is hugely heterogeneous, and attempts to describe (as here) a correspondence between territory and ethnicity stumble over the same flaws as colonial attempts at ethnic naming.46 In reality, inter-marriage, trade, migration and shifts in livelihood produced networks of inter-ethnic interaction rather than clearly defined, exclusive ethnic territories. This did not, however, preclude the notion, in some areas at least, that particular areas of territory belonged to particular groups of people: the British did not invent the notion of the ‘first-comer’, as suggested by the speed with which local populations made territorial claims to colonial officials upon their arrival in Darfur. The description given here of key livelihood strategies is also a simplification of a more complex reality: production systems in Darfur, as in much of the north-east African region as Johnson and Anderson suggest, might be best understood as a ‘continuum, along which individuals and groups may move through time – back and forth from herding to cultivating… when opportunity or need dictates. This flex45  Notable pieces of anthropological work on the peoples of Northern Darfur include L. Holy, Neighbours and Kinsmen: A study of the Berti people of Darfur (London, 1974); M.J. and J. Tubiana, The Zaghawa from an Ecological Perspective (Rotterdam, 1977). 46  See P. Worby, ‘Maps, names, and ethnic games: the epistemology and iconography of colonial power in northwestern Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 20 (1994), p. 371.

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Introduction 17

ibility is… an important part of the strategy of security against ecological adversity.’47 In practice, the Baqqara grow crops and keep cattle, the Berti herd and cultivate: the difference is (very importantly) one of extent. Moreover, in the fragile environment which Darfur’s populations inhabited, interaction across ecological zones was critical to livelihood and survival strategies: cultivators and cattle-keepers exchanged food crops for animals and animal products. Indeed, anthropological research conducted in the 1960s revealed that in Darfur – as elsewhere in Africa – shifts in dominant livelihood strategies could entail shifts in ethnic identification. Fur who acquired sufficient cattle to require a nomadic lifestyle became Baqqara or Zaghawa; equally sedentarization could entail a shift to Fur identity. British attempts to draw clearer lines of separation between peoples, and to concentrate particular populations in particular spaces for ease of administration threatened the efficacy of complementary livelihood strategies which reached across ethnic lines of division, though the state never succeeded in effectively policing the boundaries which it created. Whilst it attempts to be inclusive in coverage, this study does not provide a complete or synoptic view of politics in colonial Darfur: rather it principally focuses on particularly well-evidenced cases and regions. As a result, three key areas receive most coverage here: Western Darfur or Zalingei District, which comprises the Fur heartland of the Darfur Sultanate, and where British attempts to harness the legitimacy of the precolonial Keira Sultanate went hand in hand with official toleration of violent abuse by chiefs on the ground; Southern Darfur District, especially the areas populated by the Baqqara cattle pastoralists and semi-pastoralists, and their ‘invented’ nazirs (paramount chief); and Northern Darfur District, especially the Zaghawa, Northern Rizayqat and Meidob camel pastoralists. These areas demonstrate something of the diversity of the experience of colonial rule, whilst also being suggestive of commonalities of dynamics and experiences across diverse ecological and geographical contexts.48

SOURCES AND STRUCTURE This study is based on a mixture of official and personal written records. Documents from the Khartoum National Records Office and 47 

D. Anderson and D. Johnson, ‘Introduction: Ecology and society in northeast African society’, in D. Anderson and D. Johnson (eds), The Ecology of Survival (London, 1988), p. 6. See also G. Haaland, ‘Economic Determinants in Ethnic Processes’ in F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (London, 1973), pp. 58–73; Haaland, ‘Nomadism as an Economic Career among the Sedentaries of the Sudan Savannah Belt’ in I. Cunnison and W. James (eds), Essays in Social Anthropology (London, 1972), pp. 149–172. 48  For an excellent account of Dar Masalit both before and during colonial rule see L. Kapteijns, Mahdist Faith and Sultanic Tradition: The history of the Masalit Sultanate (London, 1985).

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Introduction

the UK National Archives are combined with the personal papers of British District Commissioners who worked in Darfur, which are kept at the Sudan Archive in Durham. The most obvious problem with this reliance on the colonial archive is the absence of oral histories from Darfuris themselves. Nonetheless, official and personal papers still reveal a great deal about the complex relationships between chiefs and officials, and do provide some insights into the expectations and behaviours of people beyond the chieftaincy elite, even if rudimentary in form. The richness of particular individual accounts (for instance Lampen’s memoirs and reports, and Moore’s reports) are particularly helpful in providing insights into the making of state authority. This study develops its core argument of the interconnection and interdependence of state power and local politics through the particular periods and contexts of its individual chapters. Chapter 1 examines the history of government and local authority before the arrival of British colonialism. It lays particular emphasis on the diversity of local configurations of authority under the Darfur Sultans, reflecting the limits of state power as well as the complex mosaic of societies over which the Sultans claimed to rule. But it also describes a history of growing state intervention in the politics of local chieftaincy, even in areas of peripheral relationship to the centres of state power, especially in the brief but significant years of Turco-Egyptian and Mahdist rule in the region. This history was one of the key foundations for the limited hegemony of British rule. The following chapters examine the establishment and development of colonial rule within a broadly chronological framework. The second chapter focuses on large-scale and everyday state violence, and the arming of local militias which was characteristic of early attempts to establish control by the state. This period has particular resonance for more recent history in Darfur. The third and fourth chapters respectively focus on sedentary western, and pastoralist northern and southern Darfur to examine the character of the Native Administration chiefs empowered by the British. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the violence of the state was channelled and exploited by Fur chiefs and tacitly accepted by the state in the first two decades of colonial rule; Chapter 4 examines the more negotiated character of chieftaincy in pastoralist societies and the methods and language used by those who attempted to engage the state in local chieftaincy politics and rivalries. It suggests that the greater visibility of protest against chiefs in pastoralist societies paradoxically demonstrates the greater strength of colonial hegemony in these societies than in the Fur heartland. Chapter 5 keeps the focus on pastoralist (or semi-pastoralist) societies and examines colonial attempts to impose a model of ethnic territoriality on these peoples; it emphasizes both the violence of the state in pursuing such an agenda, and the resistance of ordinary people to territorial controls. It also shows that local elites were sometimes more enthusiastic than state officials themselves in the encouragement of this agenda, largely for reasons of self-interest. Chapter 6 examines the changing char-

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Introduction 19

acter of the late colonial state and late colonial chiefs, demonstrating the growing emphasis on bureaucratic regularity which produced new challenges and opportunities for chiefs. It also shows that even a limited programme of colonial development created new tensions and rivalries between the peoples of Darfur. Finally a consideration of the interaction between local and national politics in the last years of colonial rule demonstrates that while colonial hegemony was eventually undone in Darfur, the state’s hegemony was actually reinforced, as was the authority of the chiefs and their families who continued to claim the role of primary intermediary between government and people in the changing political circumstances of the 1950s. Change – especially in the rhetoric and practice of government across the various periods examined here, and the way this affected the character of chiefly authority – is significant to this account. But it is perhaps the continuities in the story that are most striking: the authoritarianism of government, its ready recourse to coercion and violence to extract obedience, alongside the demand that government settle local political disputes and regulate the behaviour of its own agents at a local level. This was a negotiated authoritarianism whose strengths (the overwhelming force that stood behind its isolated officials, and its (varying) capacity for engagement with local politics) mirrored its weaknesses (its inability to more productively penetrate local societies, or to fully comprehend local politics). These weaknesses and strengths were not unique to the colonial state. Whilst the British had greater military capacity than the Sultans, and, conversely, less understanding of local societies and politics, the grounds on which a limited but crucial degree of state authority was negotiated – that of local struggles for authority and power – were rather similar in both precolonial and colonial Darfur. Jeffrey Herbst’s argument that states in Africa have consistently faced problems in the ‘broadcasting’ of power over time also seems to apply well to Darfur, although the underlying resilience of such apparently fragile states is also equally striking.49 The current day crisis in Darfur has brought the state to a nadir in its authority in the region , yet, as will be suggested in the conclusion, the persistence of the state as the central reference point in Darfur’s politics and the focus of local political ambition signals that opportunities for rebuilding the authority of government do perhaps still exist. 49 

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J. Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton, 2000), p. 3.

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1 State Authority and Local Politics before 1916: The Darfur Sultans, Turco-Egyptian Rule and the Mahdiyya

In Darfur, the British encountered a history of state formation which defied their perception of the region as an isolated, static backwater. The Darfur Sultanate functioned as an independent state for two centuries before colonial interventions in the region – and this state was built by Fur elites: the Keira descent group. Claims by the Sultans of partial Arab descent and the adoption of Arabic as the written language of the state (although with Fur continuing as the spoken language at court) would facilitate the avoidance by colonial officials of the intellectual challenge that Fur state-building posed to their ideas of racial hierarchy, ideas which persistently positioned Arabs above non-Arab Africans (or ‘negroids’ as the British referred to these peoples). Later, from the late-19th century, Darfur experienced a brief period of rule by the Turco-Egyptian colonial administration in Sudan (1874–1885), followed by attempts by the Mahdist state to assert its authority in Darfur (1885–1898), and the restoration of the Sultanate under Ali Dinar (1898–1916). Existing historical scholarship on precolonial Darfur has emphasized the significance of the state-building processes led by the Fur Sultans, and the functioning of a bureaucratic administration which allowed the state to exercise regularized authority over its subjects.1 Mamdani has celebrated the ‘detribalising’ impact of central government by the Sultans and condemned the re-tribalization of Darfur by the British.2 This emphasis on the growing unity of Darfur under the Sultans, and therefore the existence of such a thing as a Darfuri identity in the region, has been influential in both scholarly and activist fields in recent years.3 1 

O’Fahey, Sultanate. Saviors, p. 15. 3  O’Fahey argues for the existence of a collective sense of Darfuri identity in Sultanate (especially in the refreshingly personal preface pp.  xiv–xv and in the closing pages, pp. 303–304); Alex De Waal also argues for a ‘palpable sense of regional identity’ in the 1980s despite conflicting ‘moral geographies’, in ‘Who are the Darfurians? Arab and African identities, violence and external engagement’, African Affairs 104 (2005), p. 18. The current author’s own time in Khartoum in 2008 brought home the reality of Darfuri political identity in contemporary Sudan. 2 Mamdani,

20

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Such arguments also fit with a wider body of (quite venerable) work in African history that sought to identify ‘states’ in precolonial Africa and thereby provide evidence of African political creativity and sophistication in order to counter western images of timeless stagnation or primitivism. Yet Sean O’Fahey’s authoritative work on the Sultanate, despite its overall emphasis on the existence of a functioning state, has also demonstrated the uncertainty and fluidity of governmental and administrative arrangements in Darfur, and the limits to the reach of the Sultan’s authority. Moreover, O’Fahey’s work, and much of the amateur anthropological research pursued by colonial officials, demonstrate the diversity and vitality of local political cultures which the Sultans claimed to rule.4 Indeed a re-examination of English-language primary sources and of O’Fahey’s work suggests that rather than emphasizing the uniformity and solidity of something called ‘the state’ in Darfur, it might be more profitable to think in pluralistic terms about precolonial authority, especially at the local level and in everyday life. State authority and local forms of authority were not two discrete spheres under the Sultans, just as they were not under the British. This is not to say the Sultans lacked influence: even in its peripheries, the state still had an important role in local chieftaincy disputes, often intervening and being drawn into local politics at the behest of local actors. Indeed, politics and government in Darfur was saturated with highly personalized patron-client relations at all levels, rather than functioning according to some impersonal bureaucratic logic. Building personal associations with the sultans in particular was crucial to advancing political interests or ambitions in the precolonial state. But the interaction between state and local political spheres did not do away with alternative sources of authority and legitimacy to those bestowed by the state, which often sprang from alternative ideas about spiritual power and legitimacy at the local level. Such local ideas about authority, sometimes non-Islamic in character, sat in some degree of tension with a state which relied on Islam as a key tool of centralizing authority. This way of thinking about precolonial Darfur – as an arena of multiple, overlapping and somewhat competing forms and sources of authority – underpins one of the key arguments of this book: that despite the growing bureaucratic capacities of the state under the British, state 4 

Both these points could also be made of other precolonial attempts at statebuilding in the greater Nile Valley region. Jay Spaulding’s work on the Funj Sultanate of Sennar also describes an ‘intricate and sophisticated institutional system’ whilst simultaneously emphasizing the dependence of rulers on a noble class which created ‘inherent limitations’ on state authority even in the period of the Sultanate’s ascendancy. The Heroic Age in Sennar (East Lansing, 1987), p. xvi, 61. He also emphasizes the diversity of regional identities within the Sultanate at p. 43. Ewald makes a similar – if more sceptical – case about the much smaller and more fragile kingdom of Taqali in central Sudan, emphasizing that here ‘state formation remained a disputed and unfinished building process’. Soldiers, p. 8. See also Kapteijns on the rise of the Masalit Sultanate on Darfur’s western frontier in the late nineteenth century. Mahdist, p. 140.

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State Authority and Local Politics before 1916

and non-state forms of authority nonetheless remained both interdependent and in tension during the colonial period. It also places Darfur more firmly within the context of a historiography that has increasingly emphasized the ‘fragile, uncertain nature of status and influence’ and ‘the multiplicity of forms of powerful knowledge’ in precolonial Africa.5 This chapter also sketches out some possible ideas about good governance (to use an anachronistic phrase) under the Sultans: what made a good or a bad Sultan? These ideas had a long-term vitality which influenced people’s expectations of government under the British, who were judged in comparison to their predecessors. The arguments proposed here draw on descriptions elsewhere of what has been termed an ‘ideology of Sudanic kingship’ existent in the wider region through the precolonial period (based on studies of the kingdoms of Sennar, Taqali and Dar Masalit), although I have avoided trying to be too systematic or comprehensive about defining such an ideology.6 Despite this emphasis on long-term continuities, the final sections of the chapter also demonstrate important historical changes in the character of authority and government in the later years of the 19th century just before the Condominium. The extent of state intervention in the politics of the old peripheries of the Sultanate intensified under Turco-Egyptian and even Mahdist rule, as local chiefs were increasingly used by the state as local representatives. British colonialism thus appears as the next stage in this increasing trend to state intervention in local politics, rather than as a break with preceding developments.

THE DARFUR SULTANATE The Darfur Sultanate is first referred to in late-17th-century travellers’ and traders’ accounts.7 The precise origins of the Sultanate are unclear, as is the relationship of what is readily termed ‘Fur identity’ to the state itself, despite the name of the area: Darfur (land of the Fur). Fur, now understood as an ethnic label, needs to be understood as primarily a political identity of affiliation with the state, linked to the southward expansion of the Keira descent group from the Jabal Marra Mountains.8 However, it is worth noting that even core areas of the Sultanate never became ethnically homogenous: one such, Dar Tebella (land of meeting/collection/assembly) was inhabited by Masalit, Daju, Sinyar and Arabs. Colonial era anthropological work suggested that people ‘became Fur’ by adopting the Fur language, and officials were aware that the Fur were not a ‘tribe’: rather they were defined by their language, ‘common to them all’. The same research also noted that the 5  Willis,‘Chieftaincy’, pp.  211–213 has an excellent discussion of this literature. 6 Spaulding, Sennar, pp. 120–135; Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 167. 7  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 32–33. 8  Ibid., pp. 36–39.

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Fur had, before colonial rule, ‘accepted people of any origin as Fur if they settled with them’, pointing to an even more flexible conception of identity.9 Haaland’s anthropological research in the 1960s after independence – which found that the movement of individuals between Fur and Baqqara identities was common – suggests that colonial policies did less to prevent such flexibility (or ‘illegibility’) than officials might have hoped.10 Islam was the state religion of the Sultanate from an early stage, although O’Fahey makes it clear that away from the ‘core’ of the kingdom, ‘earlier patterns of belief were hardly disturbed by nominal conversion to Islam’. Indeed, ‘Islam spread from the ruling institution outwards and downwards’ and did so in very ‘uneven’ fashion. 11 This ‘Islamic hybridity’ was also reflected in local judicial practices which worked by a combination of sharia and local ‘customary’ law.12 Meanwhile the Sultan’s person remained sacred, surrounded by a mix of Islamic and non-Islamic ritual.13 As will be shown below, this hybridity was not always comfortable, and tensions arose at times between a government which relied on Islam as a tool of state power, and local elites who inhabited a complex world of mixed beliefs and spiritual practices. From the late 17th century, the Keira enjoyed increasing involvement in long-distance trade, and Darfur became an increasingly significant commercial crossroads, most famously on the Forty Days Road to Egypt (being heavily involved with the slave trade), although also with other trading links to the north, west and east.14 Control of the slave trade was central to the power of the Sultanate: the violent capture of people located outside Darfur’s (shifting) southern frontiers was an essential part of the exercise of state power, and alerts us to the ‘intrinsically violent nature’ of the state in this region over several centuries, not just the recent past.15 These peoples were defined as non-Muslim, outside the dominant religious and political communities of the region, and were thus legitimately enslavable in the eyes of the ruling elite; both Fur elites and Darfur Arabs enslaved these peoples, collectively known as Fartit in local discourse.16 On the other hand it would be misleading to suggest that state violence was only directed at enslavable outsiders: subjects of the Sultan were also subjected to considerable predation and violence by agents of the state.17 Peoples on the periphery of the state who resisted submission to the Sultans were repeated targets of extreme violence. In the early 19th century the ‘bloodbath of the Bani Halba’ 9 

Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30. Haaland, ‘Nomadism’, pp. 151–152, 162–163, 168. 11  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 230–231. 12  Ibid., pp. 212–219 13  Ibid., pp. 92–99. 14  Ibid., pp. 239–244. 15  De Waal, ‘Darfurians’, p. 20. As O’Fahey puts it, slave raids were ‘in effect, a mobile Sudanic state’. Sultanate, p. 244. 16  Fartit became Fur over time as the state – and the reach of Islam – expanded southwards . See O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 167–170 for a concise explanation. 17  Ibid., pp. 81–2. 10 

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State Authority and Local Politics before 1916

inflicted by the Sultans’ forces was a particularly notorious massacre; in 1900 Ali Dinar declared the Ma’alia should be ‘exterminated’ and his forces were said to have subsequently killed 300 of their people.18 Those who disobeyed the Sultan’s authority might also find themselves vulnerable to enslavement, regardless of their religious faith: certainly Ali Dinar summarily excluded groups of recalcitrant Muslims from the body politic and made them enslavable.19 Summary judgement and violence was integral to the character of the precolonial state.

The morality of rule The Sultans of Darfur were powerful men, but they were not the all-powerful ‘oriental despots’ imagined by travellers who wrote about the region. As well as the obvious limits to the reach of the Sultans’ authority, their rule was also the object of scrutiny, judgement and gossip by their subjects. We can only catch glimpses of this in the written record, firstly in the work of Muhammad Umar al-Tunisi, the Egyptian merchant who spent a number of years in early 19th-century Darfur. Al-Tunisi became a personal associate of the Sultan of the day, Muhammad al-Fadl,20 and established himself as a recognizable figure in court society. The views and stories he reports are therefore likely to be drawn from the elite strata of Darfur societies, but are nonetheless revealing of ideas about government and authority in the Sultanate, or the ‘ideology of kingship’ as we might term these. Secondly, the German traveller Gustav Nachtigal’s account of Darfur’s history – which he visited on the eve of Turco-Egyptian conquest in 1874 – reinforces the ideas reported by al-Tunisi. These accounts demonstrate the respect accorded to military success against external enemies, whilst also documenting the resentment of ordinary people to the material burdens that incessant military campaigns placed on them. They suggest a value attached to Islamic piety and learning as practised by the Sultans (at least among elites). They reveal that both excessive cruelty and violence and excessively ‘mild and moderate’ government might be grounds for criticism of the Sultans.21 However, most importantly for our purposes, they repeatedly emphasize the importance of effective central control over government representatives who governed (or claimed to govern) the localities, and were sometimes related to the Sultans by kinship ties. It was these men who were responsible for most of the everyday state oppression and extortion experienced by local populations and elites. It is probably wise not to draw too stark a dichotomy between any sense of ‘public duty’ and ‘private interest’ when thinking about the workings of the Sultan’s government, but 19th-century accounts do reveal an enduring tension over the character of government in Darfur: whether it was a predictable and therefore usable set of institutions, or 18 G. Nachtigal, Sahara and Sudan: Volume 4 (London 1971), p.  302; H.B. Theobald, Ali Dinar: Last Sultan of Darfur (Bristol, 1965), pp. 46–8. 19  See below. 20  Muhammad al Fadl ruled between 1803–1838. 21 Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 324.

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rather an unpredictable, violent predatory force – the principal form of disorder in people’s everyday lives. Evidence both for the pervasiveness of misbehaviour of agents of the state, and for the expectation that the ruler should tackle this, appears in accounts of the Sultanate from the 18th century onwards. A striking example of forceful Sultanic regulation comes from the reign of Sultan Umar Lel in the 1730s: when he ‘received complaints of zulm (oppression) against 30 leading chiefs, he had 15 executed by the men’s gate and 15 by the women’s gate of the fashir’ (royal residence).22 Sultan Muhammad Tayrab, who ruled in the latter part of the 18th century (1752–1786), is noted by O’Fahey to have overseen the most decisive period in Darfur’s history, reorienting the state eastwards towards the Nile Valley, via the conquest of Kordofan in the final years of his reign.23 Al-Tunisi’s account of Tayrab’s rule suggests how courtly elites at least, and probably others, understood successful rule: ‘during his reign there was fertility and peace, and all provisions were cheap.’ But this did not last indefinitely: …towards the end of his life, he was detested on account of the extravagant conduct of his children, who were in number more than thirty…. These princes were ever wandering on horseback through Darfur; and if they heard of any valuable thing at once seized it as their property. Everyone suffered by them. 24

Even worse was that ‘complaints were made to the prince [Tayrab], who would not, however, believe or pay any attention to them.’ There was here an expectation that the Sultan would act to restrain the younger generation from their predations on the population, but he failed to do so – these were after all his own sons. By the end of Tayrab’s reign, the children of the Sultan were apparently described as ‘the source of all evil in Darfur’.25 In comparison, Tayrab’s brother and successor Abd al-Rahman26 was discussed in unambiguously positive terms by al-Tunisi. O’Fahey focuses on the Sultan’s agenda to widen the reach of Islam in daily life and court ritual in Darfur, an agenda which al-Tunisi, educated at al-Azhar in Cairo, no doubt favoured.27 But al-Tunisi’s informants also emphasized his success in bringing security to the roads on which commerce depended, and the resulting healthy trade that developed during his years. ‘Justice and equity’ were also important – both achieved by a tough but even-handed approach to misdemeanours: ‘He had no pity on those who committed an act of violence or spoliation of any kind, however nearly related [my emphasis].’28 This readiness to 22 

O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 46. Ibid., p. 48. 24  Muhammad b. Umar al-Tunisi, Voyage au Darfour (1845), translated by Bayle St. John. p. 31. 25 Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 289. 26  Abd al-Rahman ruled between 1787 and 1803. 27  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 232. 28 Al-Tunisi, Voyage, p. 45. 23 

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rein in the predation of relatives seems to have been a key feature of the rule of Abd al-Rahman, which compared well with the later years of his brother’s reign.29 On the other hand, whilst the Sultan ‘easily became angry, he calmed promptly and pardoned easily’: the idea of showing mercy towards unfortunate wrongdoers was a key expectation of the ruler that would endure into the British period. 30 Individual subjects were also said to approach the Sultan in person with complaints of injustice while he was travelling through his realm . The expectation that the ruler should be able to redress complaints and grievances that were brought to them personally was widespread, and a key role of Sudanic kingship more generally in the Greater Nile Valley beyond Darfur. 31 But al-Tunisi’s own time in Darfur coincided with the early years of the rule of Muhammad al-Fadl, who was then still a very young Sultan. His impressions were not good. In Darfur most of the villages are nearly devastated by the violence and tyranny of the governors. The few places that are well inhabited are those whose chiefs have sufficient power to excite fear. The sufferings of the people were extreme. Muhammad Fadl was still young; he passed his time in pleasure, in riding, in drinking, and with women. His governors overwhelmed the people; every one feared to possess wealth; there were no longer any ranks or classes; the lowest kind of people were promoted to the greatest honours, slaves became viziers, the most respectable and revered men became humiliated. 32

For Tunisi this description of social breakdown and disorder was linked with Muhammad’s individual moral weakness and his failure to live as a good Muslim. In any case the reported depopulation of parts of rural Darfur in these years is significant: people were exercising the classic form of resistance to authority in Africa – the exit option, simply moving away from the predatory violence of the state. 33 Al-Tunisi suggests it was only fear that was preventing others from leaving the territory, and notably those making predatory demands on the population were the governors, the key agents of the Sultan. In these years it was again the state itself, as embodied by its local governors, which was the principal source of disorder, fear and oppression. From Muhammad al-Fadl’s reign, it became common for royal charters to address officials and chiefs as ‘those oppressive [officials] who are overbearing with the rights of the Muslims’. 34 This suggests a kind of endemic 29 

In the early 20th century the Sultan of Dar Masalit took similarly stern action against 30 governors related to him. Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 202. 30 Al-Tunisi, Voyage, p. 48. Nachtigal’s account is rather different, suggesting that Abd el-Rahman ‘never forgave acts of hostility’. Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 293. See also Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 128. 31  In Sennar, neglect of the ruler’s judicial role in settling disputes and righting wrongs would be grounds for deposition. Spaulding, Sennar, p.  64. See also Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 167. The ‘investigation of complaints’ is a central aspect of the role of the ruler in Islamic cultures more broadly. O’Fahey, Land, p. 10. 32 Al-Tunisi, Voyage, p. 205. 33  F. Cooper, Africa in the World (Harvard, 2014), pp. 14–15. 34  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 191.

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oppression of the state’s subjects (as well as also showing a clear link between religious identity and political inclusion). This was a tendency that recurred throughout the Sultanate’s subsequent history. Looking forward several decades, Nachtigal’s description of the once-great trading centre of Kobbei in 1874 similarly mentions ‘eighty well-known families who had been victims of the zulm of the government’ and had moved out of the town. 35 In this case it was slave officials, favourites of the Sultan, who were thought to be the principal agents of ‘extortion’. 36 This material is of course fragmentary and limited in scope, as well as highly partial in perspective. But the key ideas advanced here about what it meant to be a good ruler – most notably being responsive to the complaints of subjects and able to control and punish the wrongs of subordinates – are ideas that surface repeatedly in the expectations of government (and to some extent chiefship) articulated by local peoples in the colonial period: in this sense O’Fahey’s claim that the ideal of good government in Darfur was ‘probably as little as possible’, requires some qualification. 37 Colonial rule was to a significant extent judged against an existing set of moral expectations of how government should function: and these demanded the ruler take an active role in regulating the activities of his agents on the ground.

Seeing the state: festival and legitimation As was the case with many other precolonial African states, ritual was a key tool of the legitimation of the ruler’s authority in Darfur. Perhaps the most significant of state rituals was the annual festival of drums, at which the Sultan brought his subjects together in the capital, demonstrating their supposed united attachment to the Sultan’s authority. Nachtigal described the precolonial festival in detail. Every chief and senior administrative official of the Sultanate was obliged annually to send a prescribed number of cattle to El Fasher to be sacrificed as a memorial to the old Sultans as part of the festival of drums. These men were also obliged to come themselves to Fasher with a number of followers. They camped for seven days in front of the royal palace, in itself a display of subordination to the surveying eye of the state. Then, seven days later, the military reviews would begin. Men would be lined up on horseback, arranged into seven different groups, each one to be inspected individually by the Sultan. 38 This appears to have been a tightly-scripted encounter, with apparently ‘modern’ practices of surveillance and inspection pursued by the Sultans. 35 Nachtigal, Sahara,

pp. 255–6. In Dar Masalit, Sultan Abbakr (the second Masalit Sultan) was also resented for the oppression of his slave officials: he was known as ‘sultan of the slaves’. Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 154. 37  O’Fahey himself also suggests subjects could ‘expect a measure of justice and not too much zulm’ – this is perhaps a more complex and demanding expectation than the formulation quoted above would suggest. Sultanate, p. 193. 38 Nachtigal, Sahara, pp. 338–45. 36 

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Yet the participation of ordinary people in precolonial gatherings also involved some amount of negotiation and interaction between rulers and subjects. Nachtigal’s description demonstrates this clearly. When the Sultan had passed the horsemen, there would be a general stir. Each man sought to press his horse into its most spirited posture and to thrust himself forward. All the musical instruments whistled, drummed, jingled and rattled. The king’s drums boomed in the distance… Gourds filled with little stones were brandished on all sides; people with little bells in their hands swarmed around the royal procession. Metal plates were banged against each other, weapons clashed together; in short, everything at the same time made a deafening uproar, which, however, according to the local standards, was dignified to the highest degree… As the royal procession passed, everybody got as close as he could to the prince, so that he might be observed by him and give a greeting, an example which I followed, raising and brandishing my musket in greeting. The king replied to these greetings by gently raising and lowering his sword, and then took up his position in the middle of the broad square.

At this point the assembled horsemen then took their turn to ride past the Sultan, and once this was done ‘the horsemen now surged hither and thither, greeting this or that dignitary, and delighting in their horsemanship.’39 It has been argued that the performances of individual horse riding skill, here and elsewhere in Sudanic Africa, reminded rulers of the physical power of their subjects, and their latent potential for resistance.40 It seems that therefore these physically vigorous acts were an accepted part of the script for these events. So, as well as the state ordering and inspecting its subjects, the festival was also about government putting itself on display: as much as the state captured its subjects in its gaze, so subjects gazed back at the state. But the crowding in of horsemen on the ruler in Nachtigal’s account also suggests that people were competing with one another to be recognized by and to gain access to the Sultan. In so doing, the participants also helped to reinforce the Sultan’s personal authority, even as they appeared to threaten it. The festival was a performance of the interactive relationship between state and society, a ‘site of political negotiation’ in Apter’s words.41 People wanted the ruler to recognize them, even as they recognized the ruler’s authority. These gatherings provided a useful template for colonial government to follow in its efforts to create its own legitimacy, as we will see later.42 The emphasis on mutual recognition and the negotiation of authority demonstrate that despite the violence of the precolonial state in its local manifestations, at its centre it created elaborate mechanisms to legitimate its authority among its subjects. This mixture of violence and negotiation remained characteristic of state authority into the colonial period. 39 

This taken from Nachtigal, Sahara, pp. 341–5. A. Apter, ‘The Subvention of Tradition: A Genealogy of the Nigerian Durbar’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.) State/Culture: The Study of State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Cornell, 1999), p. 220. 41  Ibid., p. 224. 42  Apter suggests such gatherings may have been common across pre-colonial western Sudanic states. Ibid., p. 220. 40 

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Government and administration in the core of the Sultanate Turning from the Sultans themselves more explicitly to their representatives at a local level, it is possible to discern more of the limits and extent of state authority on the ground in Darfur. A close examination of governance in the core of the Darfur Sultanate reveals that while authority was to some extent regularized by the state in this heartland area (roughly central and western Darfur), state representatives also acquired socially and politically meaningful ties to the localities they governed. Beneficiaries of the hakura system (land grants given to favoured individuals by the Sultans) whilst at one level agents of state centralization, also became locally domesticated through ties of marriage to local elites. There was, in other words, a continual process of interpenetration between state and locality, though not in a manner which altogether effaced alternative sources of authority to that of the state. This section examines the role of the shartays, or local administrative chiefs, of Darfur, and also (briefly) the hakura system to draw out these arguments. The administrative system of the Sultans in the core regions of its power relied on a mixture of officials and chiefs with varying ties to centre and localities. O’Fahey asserts that in the first 60 years of the 18th century there was a decisive shift away from the powers of ‘Fur’ chiefs, towards the sultans, with the creation of a ‘supertribal bureaucracy’, the increasing use of Islam to supplant local institutions, and the recruitment of slave troops to lessen the sultan’s dependence on local chiefs.43 However, this was not simply an assertion of ‘state’ against ‘non-state’ authority. O’Fahey argues that senior ‘lineage chiefs’, in the course of state expansion, ‘had grown into a class of hereditary title-holders’: they were a key part of the state itself.44 Darfur was split administratively into four provinces with ruling lords or governors such as the aba diimang (governor of the southwest province) or the abbo uumo (governor of the southeast province). These men were from dynasties probably as well established as the Keira line itself, dynasties which had become incorporated in the expansionist state.45 Like so many other subsequent officials and notables, they therefore had one foot in local structures of authority within the communities they inhabited, and one foot in the state’s hierarchy. Sultans tried to create an elite accountable only to the centre by adding new layers of authority on top of what already existed, or by parcelling out land that lay within the territories of present chiefs. But, repeatedly, as ‘emissaries acquired local interests, the sultans were forced constantly to renew their rule from the centre.’46 Below these major lords, local state representatives also played a complex role between state and non-state: whilst their formal powers were defined by the state, they also seem to have had an important 43 

O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 45. Ibid., p. 47. 45  Ibid., p. 117. 46  Ibid., p. 163. 44 

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sacral role within the community. The four provinces of the Sultanate were each divided into district chiefdoms or shartayas. They were very much defined as territorial, not tribal units: shartays were associated with particular dars, each of which contained a variety of lineage groups, often of significant ethnic diversity. Shartays were either appointed or confirmed by the sultans: they were hereditary positions, although as we will see, their heritability was at the will of the sultan. O’Fahey gives the following description of the shartay’s role in Dar Diima in western Darfur: The shartay’s village was the district centre for taxation, justice and military levies. His compound was a smaller version of the sultan’s fashir [palace], within which was the shartay’s stone where the chief sat to render judgement on cases brought by the dimlijs to his attention… other duties included the allocation of land to newcomers and grazing and livestock migration routes… His revenues came from a proportion of the fines and blood money he could impose, and from his land, to which his people were obliged to contribute labour [seven days a year].47

This all appears to be a relatively well worked out system of state defined authority. Moreover, the Sultans often preferred to appoint outsiders to the position of shartay, men who were not already identified with the communities they would administer. For instance, many of the shartays of the Berti in eastern Darfur appear to have been descended from two West African pilgrims who had settled in the area on return from pilgrimage, and who gained the Sultan’s favour.48 As the Sultanate expanded southwards from the Jabal Marra region, so it imposed shartays over the territories and peoples it acquired: the local community might ‘become Fur’ over time, as assimilated subjects of the state, but state-appointed chiefs might originally have been outsiders.49 Arabs were also sometimes appointed as shartays over ‘Fur’ populations, reminding us that there was no sense in which a non-Arab ‘Fur’ state excluded Arabs from its bureaucracy. Several chiefs were also of slave descent, very obviously marking their dependence on the Sultan rather than any ‘traditional’ authority.50 Administrative chieftaincy could therefore be very much an ‘invention’ of expansionist, centralizing sultans: O’Fahey alludes to a ‘common pattern of relative instability among middle-ranking chiefs’.51 Shartays might thus appear to be purely the instrument of state power from above. The idea that state power was built on the employment of outsiders with few ties or loyalties to the people they governed was also true of the falagna (agents) employed by the shartays: these were ‘outsiders who quarrel with their own people for some reason or other and come and settle with a shartay to whom they stand in relation of son to father’.52 The importance of 47 

Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 52. 49  Ibid., pp. 172, 175–6. 50  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 106. 51  O’Fahey, Sultanate.,p. 176. 52  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 214. 48 

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personal ties of loyalty, akin to kinship, in forming a coherent cadre of state authority set apart from local societies is clear. Yet despite often gaining their positions as outsiders, shartays seemed to have a limited sacral as well as a secular role: they took on responsibilities to the communities they governed that were not merely extractive roles defined by the state but that also protected the social health of the communities they governed. Crucially, shartays were installed in their positions with non-Islamic, or sometimes a mix of Islamic and non-Islamic sacral ritual, enacted by the ‘old men and women of the customs’. The content of these ceremonies varied from place to place: in one example elders stripped the candidate of his clothes and sprinkled him with water, before the newly made shartay donned a new set of clothes.53 These ceremonies served to create a tie between the shartay and the land and community he would govern: as one informant put it in the colonial era, ‘Who except the lord of the land could have customs?’54 Local elders installed the shartay, not a more senior figure in the administrative hierarchy. And when the awaid (customs) were not performed by an acceding chief, it was believed that failed rains, famine or the death of animals belonging to the communities they governed would be the outcome.55 Precolonial shartays therefore might be understood as occupying a somewhat ambiguous position between state and society, with obligations both upwards to the state, and downwards to the communities they administered. They occupied their position as appointees of the Muslim state, yet they also depended on local non-Islamic spiritual experts to legitimize their position in the community. Aside from the figure of the shartay, the significance of the sid al-awaid, (the master of customs) who installed the shartays in the ritual ceremonies should not be underestimated. In Fur communities, these also performed annual ceremonies at the beginning of each rainy season to ensure the rains would be good, usually involving the sacrifice of an animal. At a more everyday level these men and women had the crucial power to heal those hurt by malicious spirits – in one story a shartay fell unconscious after a spirit scared his horse, and only the women of the customs could revive him with water and flour. 56 However, the relationship between these experts and the shartays varied considerably. In Dar Beira shartays provided the animal to be sacrificed at the annual awaid but did not actually attend the ritual – marking out the limits of the shartay’s ritual responsibilities 53 

P.J. Sandison, ‘Notebook on Zalingei’ SAD 511/4/34. Sandison was describing the accession ceremonies used by shartays in the colonial period, but also believed these followed long-established patterns dating back to the days of the Sultanate. There is no particular reason to doubt this was the case, though the possibility cannot be discounted. Cf. O’Fahey’s use of Arkell’s accounts of installation ceremonies, Sultanate p. 176. 54 Ibid. 55  Ibid., SAD 511/4/33. 56  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/ 30, p. 43.

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and powers. 57 In Dar Fia the shartay himself was also one of the sid al-awaid, and awaid were performed on some stones just outside the shartay’s house if there was a delay in the rains. 58 In this instance, there was no distinction between state and local, ritual authority. The relationship between shartay and the sid al-awaid was very important for the success of the ceremonies guaranteeing rains: in Dar Kerne the leading sid al-awaid told a colonial official that heavy rains always fell after the customs ‘unless the heart of the sid al-awaid is black as for instance if he has been insulted by the shartay…’59 Here, it was customary for the shartay to present the sid al-awaid with a fine robe to keep him in good humour. State-appointed shartays had to keep on the right side of the local spiritual elites who legitimized their role in the local community, or risk disastrous outcomes for those he governed, and thus his own authority. As well as the sid al-awaid, the local sub-district chiefs, the dimlijs, who answered to the shartay in the official state hierarchy, were crucial figures of authority at a local level. Indeed, within any given community there were often multiple dimlijs who were either more or less associated with the state. The dimlij al-hukm was the dimlij of the government: sometimes he was, again, appointed from among the ‘outsiders included in the dimlijia’ by the shartay, bringing him collected taxes and criminals to be fined. The dimlij’s office was named after the thread tied to his wrist on his appointment by the shartay¸ which was taken from the shartay’s carpet, symbolizing the bond between the two men. But he might also be removed at the behest of the local community who could appeal for this removal to the shartay. If the shartay did not respond to such pressure from below, then people simply moved out of the area in a classic gesture of rejection of their chief’s authority. The dimlij al-hukm therefore occupied a somewhat perilous intermediary position. In contrast, the dimlij al-ada (the dimlij of the people) was ‘the oldest and wisest descendant of the original settler or inhabitant. He is highly respected and revered, and once appointed is never changed till his death. On his death he is usually succeeded by his son.’ This figure, who claimed authentic local roots, kept his distance from government: he was seen as much more important ‘in the eyes of the people’ than the dimlij al-hukm. He mediated and made peace in the case of local disputes including those stemming from acts of killing; he also settled compensation arrangements. Sometimes this man was also one of the sid al-awaid.60 In short, authority at a local level was not monopolized by the Sultans and their formal representatives: rather authority was wielded by a 57 

Ibid., p. 29. Ibid., p. 35. 59  Ibid., p. 42 60  This material on dimlijs taken from Arkell’s notes of a conversation with the umungawi, 13 Nov. 1937, Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 214. On the dimlij in Dar Masalit during the years of its rule by the Darfur Sultans, see Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 43. 58 

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heterogeneous group who claimed a greater or lesser degree of association with either state or ritual power. The Fur had a saying which explicitly drew connections between domestic, political and spiritual authority: ‘the hakim (governor), one’s parents, one’s wife’s parents and a faqih are all like the sun, you cannot look them in the face.’61 This chapter has not considered the role of the faqih in any detail – but O’Fahey’s account makes it clear that Islamic holy men were important figures of local authority alongside the sid al-awaid and the shartays, offering ‘spiritual, educational, magical and medical’ services to the communities who they lived among, whilst also benefitting from state patronage.62 Of course, the prominence of Islam in the Sultanate in any case always complicated any clear distinction between political and spiritual authority. But there were also some tensions between central court culture based on an orthodox, institutionalized form of Islam and local societies characterized by syncretic customs and beliefs. When an 18th-century shartay of Dar Wona from the Fur section of Nyogunga died, it was found that his estate did not include a Qur’an: the Sultan of the time ‘was so angry that he said he would have no more shartays from that section of which he ordered that one third should be killed and one third enslaved and sent to Fasher.’63 Here Fur subjects of the Sultan were suddenly excluded from the body politic because of their lack of correct faith – and were made enslavable as a result. Nonetheless, the tension between state Islam and local syncretism should not be overstated. As O’Fahey argues, the sultan’s own ‘ritual cycle was essentially the magnification by the state of local life’, thus showing the Sultans to wield an authority ultimately grounded in the same world of ‘Islamic hybridity’ inhabited by the shartays, even as court culture was characterized by Islamic learning and scholarship.64 Within the heartland of the Sultanate, as well as functioning through appointed shartays, the Sultans also used a system of land grants which created additional, sometimes competing loci of state-sanctioned authority at the local level. Hakura privileges over land (or, less often, people) were made to favoured individuals, particularly holy men (fuqara) and merchants, from the early 18th century, and have attracted significant scholarly attention because of the legacy of written documentation they produced. The system has often been treated as a key aspect of the centralization of power under the Sultanate. Estate holders had rights to customary taxes and labour from their tenants, 61 

Ibid., p. 22. O’Fahey, Sultanate, p.  227. O’Fahey also mentions the sambei – agents of some of the more powerful shartays in their dealings with the dimlijs – and at the village level the headmen and head of the village mess. 63  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 77. 64  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp.  92–9. This is rather different to the stark divide between Muslim kings and Nuba highland leaders in the Taqali kingdom: the local spiritual authority of the latter remained quite distinct from and uncaptured by the ruler. Ewald, Soldiers, pp. 8, 181. 62 

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and often enjoyed exemption from state taxation.65 One shartaya could contain many hakura estates. Grantees attracted followers onto their estates, serving to populate sparsely-peopled rural areas. O’Fahey states that the system cumulatively created ‘a grid of estates that increasingly submerged the older chiefly order’.66 A good example of this is the state’s response to a Birgid rebellion in the mid-eighteenth century, when large parts of Birgid territory were granted as a hakura to a favoured Kinani Arab, Sulayman bin Ahmed, originating from the Blue Nile. In the course of this, the established shartay was dismissed to make way for the outsider. Sulayman’s family carved out a new administrative shartaya in the south of Dar Birgid which became known as Dar Birgid Kajjar, with all the previous chiefs in the area subordinated to the favoured family.67 There are also examples of estate holding fuqara whose families became shartays and dimlijs. In some cases, fuqara attempted to tax outside of their estate encroaching on the authority of local chiefs: this was, however, something the Sultans discouraged.68 Yet there is a crucial problem with viewing the hakura system as simply asserting state against non-state authority. The local elites it usually challenged were dimlijs and sometimes shartays, who were at the very least partially associated with state authority, not simply independent local leaders. Hakura grants were often an expression of the transfer of favour and influence between one client of the state to another. Indeed, the hakura system did not always transfer the state’s authority from chief to estate holder in any straightforward manner. O’Fahey notes that in southwestern Darfur and around El Fasher ‘competition for estates led to the submergence of the dimlijs’, but ‘elsewhere accommodation between the local community and its chiefs and their overlord was more characteristic.’69 In comparison to similar grants of privilege made in the Borno kingdom in West Africa, local chiefs were not so completely subordinated to estate holders.70 Moreover, O’Fahey’s information about dispute resolution in hakura estates suggests the ultimate subordination of estate-holders to shartays. The shartay often heard more serious cases arising within the estate, and then would share any fines with the estate holder. In Western Darfur, the stewards of the estate holders would also collect the Islamic dues, zakat and fitr, themselves, but took ‘a proportion each year to the shartay from whom in turn the sultan’s emissaries collected a part for their master.’71 And hakura holders did not remain sealed off from the local elites of the areas they held rights in: intermarriage between new 65 

O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp.  137–161. A similar, though not identical, system existed in Sennar: see Spaulding, Sennar, pp. 40–41. 66  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 137. 67 Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 287. 68  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 227. 69  Ibid, p. 138. 70  Mamdani cites O’Fahey on this point, but actually reverses his meaning. Mamdani, Saviors, p. 118 and cf. O’Fahey, Sultanate p. 140. 71  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 144–5.

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and old families gradually domesticated these clients of the state into local networks of patronage and kinship obligation.72 Indeed, established local elites might themselves become estate holders: members of the Tunjur ruling family obtained hakura rights from the Sultans in the late 17th century.73 As La Rue suggests, the distinction between ethnic dar and hakura estate might thus become blurred in practice.74 Estate privileges and chiefly authority, individual estates and ethnic dars could segue together, in ways which later became rather confusing for colonial officials attempting to determine rival claims to territory and authority.75 Rather than the one-way process of ‘detribalisation’ which Mamdani suggests, or even a top-down overhaul of the existing local state elite, the granting of hakura rights created a pluralistic landscape of authority and power even in the heart of the Sultanate, in which various groups of actors competed with one another for authority, often as rival representatives of the state. The coherence of the state itself under the Sultans should therefore be questioned rather than assumed. Finally, the personalization of authority even in the Sultanate’s core should be emphasized. Connection to the sultan, via marriage or service, was a crucial means for personal advancement within the state hierarchy. Land grants and appointments to office were made at the Sultan’s pleasure, and could always be revoked. Estate owners took care to have their estates renewed when a new sultan came to power.76 Perhaps most intriguingly some ordinary people managed to enter the Sultan’s personal service as moagi (buffoons) in order to free themselves from the authority of local chiefs: they then became ‘the sultan’s dogs’ and no shartay could exercise any authority over them.77 The idea of building a personal relationship of protective subordination with the sultan to shield oneself from local authorities that claimed to represent the ruler, demonstrates how conventional hierarchies might be trumped by enterprising individuals.

State authority and tributary chiefs on the ‘peripheries’ In the various peripheries of the Sultanate, state authority was less regularized and remained in even more obvious coexistence (or competition) with non-state forms of authority. O’Fahey usefully states that ‘like other Sudanic states the sultanate may be seen structurally as a series of zones radiating out from the centre, in which the nature and strength of the ruler’s authority varied.’78 In more remote areas, the state’s power was very limited. In part this reflected the limited interests of the Sultans in these zones: in peripheral pastoralist areas, their 72 

Ibid., p. 157. O’Fahey, Land, p. 46 74  GM La Rue, ‘Khabir ‘Ali at home in Kubayh: A brief biography of a Darfur caravan leader’ (Boston, 1984), p. 11. 75  DC Fasher to Governor, 4 May 1937, NRO 2. D Fasher A (54)/5/26. 76  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 135. 77  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 115. 78  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 179. 73 

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key concerns were the payment of tribute and, perhaps more importantly, the freedom for trading or raiding parties to pass through such territories unhindered. Yet the Sultans often played crucial roles in the chieftaincy politics of the (predominantly pastoralist) peripheries. Accessing the personal patronage of the Sultan was a key means by which local elites could legitimize their own bids for power. Such appeals to the Sultan’s authority also imaginatively constructed the state even at its furthest peripheries. Many groups at the peripheries of the state retained a substantial degree of political autonomy: the Zaghawa are one example, though this was also true of the Meidob, Zayyadiyya and Berti in Northern Darfur, and the various Baqqara (cattle owning) and Abbala (camel owning) nomadic Arab groups of both Southern and Northern Darfur respectively. O’Fahey notes the importance in these areas of ‘the formal and informal mechanisms whereby relations between sultan and tributary were maintained or adjusted – marriage alliances, the giving of gifts, the bestowal of drums or titles, or the sending of cavalry to collect tribute.’79 In the south, the Baqqara, although sometimes engaging in violent conflict with the Sultans, and at other times paying tribute, also very much controlled their own affairs. The slave-raiding zone of the sultanate had always passed though and beyond the Baqqara belt, creating a ‘continual source of tension between the cattle nomads and the sultans’. Al-Tunisi notes the Rizayqat, the largest and (even in the early 19th century) the most powerful Baqqara group, sometimes beat and killed agents sent to collect the Sultan’s tribute; Nachtigal documents in detail the ill-fortunes of the 18 expeditions sent by Sultan Hasin against the Rizayqat during his 35-year reign.80 However, centralized authority amongst these peoples does not appear to have been permanently institutionalized before the late 19th century. Among the Rizayqat there was no permanent paramount leader before 1874, despite their effective military resistance to the Sultans: the heads of the various khashm beits (major lineage segments) were said to be almost independent of each other, and were known as nahasat, as each man had his own nahas and a bracelet as a badge of rank.81 Nahas were copper kettle drums, and the ‘paramount symbol of autonomous authority throughout Darfur’; their possession bestowed great prestige upon their holder. Nevertheless, when Zubayr Pasha, the powerful slave trader, met the Rizayqat in 1866 to form an alliance, he dealt with no less than 80 shaykhs, perhaps suggesting the continued limits even to the authority of the nahasat.82 79 

Ibid., p. 182. Voyage, p. 59; Nachtigal, Sahara, 308–313. 81  Dupuis, Deputy Governor Darfur to Governor, 28 Feb. 1925, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/12. It is unclear how these nahas were obtained. Nachtigal describes these men as shuyukh en-nahas: see Nachtigal, p. 37. 82  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p.  263. Nachtigal mentions individual ‘distinguished’ Rizayqat sheikhs by name but never points to a permanent leader; indeed he mentions Hasin’s dealing with four hundred sheikhs. 80 Al-Tunisi,

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In the north of Darfur, there was a longer history of paramount chieftaincy. Here, the Sultans could intervene at key moments in local politics to decide who should be the chief: indeed such chieftaincies had probably emerged because of the need to deal with the Sultanate.83 A lack of regularized institutional state rule thus did not prevent the capacity to decide on the local ruler among the various northern peoples. Equally, local actors could enlist the support of a remote state in local affairs in order to advance their own position. The Berti, neighbouring the Meidob, have a long tradition of chieftainship and kingship associated with the Basanga lineage, going back to their ‘culture hero’, al-hajj Muhammad Yambar. This lineage continues to rule in Dar Berti to the present day.84 However, the various minor lineages within the Basanga were often in rivalry with one another for the position of malik. At particular moments the Sultans could intervene to support or depose candidates or existing maliks, depending on the ability of the rival candidates to mobilize the Sultan’s support. As Holy puts it, ‘every choice of a new [Berti] sovereign has been a compromise between the ideas of succession and the demands of higher authorities to whom every sovereign had to be acceptable.’85 This remained true throughout the precolonial and colonial periods. Among the Zaghawa peoples of northern Darfur there were numerous myths of origin around the various chieftaincies or sultanates of these people. The first sultan of Dar Kobe was said to have won his position because of his skill as a hunter: he was not Zaghawa by origin, but rather of Daju ethnicity. His skills meant he was able to barter a leg of elephant meat in return for nahas from starving Mirra emigrants moving out of Darfur. Later, the same man’s success as a hunter meant he ‘was able to feed so many followers with meat that he became chief’. He was said to have sent a gift of ivory to Sultan Ahmed Bukr of Darfur, who confirmed him in his position and married his great-granddaughter, creating a powerful alliance between this remote, minor pastoralist sultanate and the much larger kingdom of Darfur.86 Of the various ‘peripheral’, tributary subject peoples, O’Fahey acknowledges that the Zaghawa had ‘the most lasting and intimate relationship with the Sultans’.87 Intermarriage between central and peripheral elites was one of the principal ways of binding together the core and peripheries of the Sultanate – but it also brought the periphery into the heart of the core. Sultan Muhammad Tayrab was the child of the marriage alliance mentioned above: the succession conflict that followed Tayrab’s death was in part a struggle between Fur and Zaghawa elites for control of the state.88 83 

A. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge, 1984), p. 166 makes this point about nomadic leadership more generally. 84  Ibid., p. 52. 85  L. Holy, Neighbours and Kinsmen: A study of the Berti people of Darfur (New York, 1974), p. 118. 86  Arkell papers, SOAS PP MS 71/06/13. 87  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 182–185. 88  Ibid., pp. 57–58.

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In Dar Galla, another Zaghawa territory, various sections were all independent under their own dimlijs until the 19th century. Then a Zaghawa orphan, ‘Abd al-Karim, brought up at the court of Muhammad al-Fadl, successfully drove troublesome Irayqat nomads out of Dar Galla on the Sultan’s behalf and was made shartay as a reward. His family still held office in the colonial period although rival sections still contested the authority of the shartay.89 Again, this man was not a figure of established local authority, even though he was Zaghawa by origin. Once established in their alliance with the Sultans, the Zaghawa chiefs were often supported by their powerful patrons against rebellion by rival lineage groups. Equally, if they crossed the sultans they might find themselves stripped of office or territory.90 Chieftaincy in even remote areas was usually linked with the state as an important intermediary role where the Sultans had little direct control or institutional structures established locally: a particularly common scenario among pastoralist societies more widely. Harir suggests that in general precolonial Zaghawa chiefs were defined very much by their management of the relationship between their section and the Sultans, and in providing overall defence and security for their people against outsiders. In contrast to colonial chiefs, they represented their people to the Sultans, and not vice versa.91 This, he argues, was quite different from the British period, when chiefs were institutionalized as salaried employees of the state and made into judicial authorities, with wide powers over resources and dispute settlement within the tribe. Whilst this seems broadly convincing, some measure of accountability to the centre, if only in the delivery of tribute to the Sultans, did matter among precolonial peripheral chiefs. And the logic of maintaining some level of influence over remote areas by alliance with local elites, and by intervention in chieftaincy politics, was common to both the Sultans and their colonial successors.92 It is also worth noting at this point that the various chiefs discussed here among the Zaghawa, Berti and Meidob peoples also coexisted with spiritual and ritual experts who sometimes provided an alternative, rival pole of authority within communities: in one case among the Zaghawa the key local political rival of an incumbent chief was the sid al-awaid.93 The non-Arab chiefs of northern Darfur were also legitimized by accession ceremonies very similar to those of the Fur of central Darfur, again suggesting an overlap between secular and sacral authority. Among the Zaghawa of Dar Kobe, at the accession of their sultan, a camel was slaughtered and the new sultan ‘stood in its paunch to increase his royal powers’.94 In another Zaghawa ceremony, ‘virgin daughters of the new shartay must pour water on a certain tree and 89 

Ibid., p. 108.

90 Harir, Numbers,

p. 78. Ibid., p. 8. 92  See similarly for the Darfur Sultans in Dar Masalit, Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 47. 93  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 20. 94 Ibid. 91 

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stroke its bark, imploring it to temper their father’s rule with compassion.’95 Chiefs on the periphery of the state were legitimized by association with local ritual that demonstrated the hybrid and syncretic character of spiritual belief and local authority.

State authority on the peripheries: maqdums In the 19th century, the Sultanate created a new position of maqdum which primarily asserted the state’s power and control over the peripheral nomadic populations who were so difficult to dominate, thus also to increase state control of the increasingly lucrative slave trade.96 Yet whilst the maqdums appear an important part of the rise of the state and the decline of communal authority, they did not remain detached from local dynamics.97 O’Fahey translates the term as ‘commissioner or viceroy’, and the holders of this position were granted some of the trappings of royal office, in order to emphasize their link to the sultan: ‘royal insignia, Qur’an, carpet, stool, and lances, but not the nahas’.98 Maqdums were thus clearly marked as representing the sultan’s person, but were not recognized by the state as having autonomous authority in their own right, as the granting of nahas would have implied. They counted qadis as part of their entourage, also suggesting that they could play an important judicial role that attempted to impose the more formal aspects of court justice (based in written Islamic scholarship) on the localities. But significantly, O’Fahey also suggests their strength lay in the ‘warbands they led’: they were de facto ‘semi-autonomous and highly mobile warlords’.99 They became authorities in their own right, as well as representatives of the state. Nachtigal, travelling through Darfur in the early 1870s, observed that the maqdum was honoured by those he governed ‘as if he were the king himself’.100 Local societies gained experience in managing these powerful and semi-autonomous officials that would serve them well in their interactions with British officials. Some of the maqdums became closely tied to the societies they supposedly governed as a representative of the state. The role of the maqdum of northern Darfur became a hereditary and, crucially, landed position. The maqdum was thus domesticated into the region which he governed. O’Fahey explains this well when discussing government representatives more generally: Appointment by the centre was sooner or later converted by the appointee or his descendants into locally-based power, as grants of land became hereditary and intermarriage linked the family to the local elites. Thus to situate a notable fully, one should know the lands he held and his kin connections, as well as his formal position in the hierarchy. Such information is rarely complete, and 95 

Arkell papers, SOAS PP MS 71/06/13. O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 186. 97  Cf. Mamdani, Saviors, p. 129. 98  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 185. 99  Ibid., p. 189. 100 Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 309. 96 

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the resultant two-dimensional picture produces a sharp dichotomy between rulers and ruled that ignores the localised and communal aspects of their relationship.101

The southern maqdumate was a less stable role, being more oriented towards military conflict with the Baqqara, with whom tensions over access to southern slave-raiding zones as well over as the payment of tribute to the Sultans, remained significant throughout the 19th century. The area that the maqdum covered stretched from Rizayqat country right to the western borders of Dar Sila and Masalit territory. As a result the southern maqdum was a very mobile warlord, moving with troops to zones of conflict, ordering chiefs to produce taxes, and even imposing the death penalty, previously reserved to the Sultans. O’Fahey suggests that conflict with the southern nomads meant Darfur’s southern borders remained a ‘warring frontier’ throughout the 19th century.102 Thus the state became mobile in its borderlands, in order to overcome its deficiencies in what Herbst would term ‘broadcasting’ its power, and manifesting itself in highly violent, coercive form.103 Yet the maqdums did not replace or overwhelm other local elites. While there is little detail of how they interacted with local chiefs, there is evidence that maqdums sometimes shared judicial fines with shartays, dimlijs, and estate-stewards: rather like the holders of hakura grants, they added an extra layer to the local hierarchies of power, but did not efface these.104 Mobile colonial officials to some extent inherited the role of the maqdum (minus the explicit military function): they embodied the state at its peripheries, but also had considerable independence and autonomy in the exercise of their authority.

TURCO-EGYPTIAN RULE Turco-Egyptian rule in Darfur, from 1874–1885, attempted greater levels of state penetration into what had previously been relatively autonomous peripheral regions. This had a significant impact on the centralization of political authority within ‘tribal’ units in these areas, which general accounts of this period in Darfur do not sufficiently emphasize. From the 1820s the Turco-Egyptian government in northern Sudan had increasingly involved shaykhs and elders in government, as crucial intermediaries between officials and local society.105 As with the later Condominium, the imperial outsiders sought figures of local authority who could carry out government business in a region where the state had a weak institutional presence. In the course of applying such strat101 

O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 112. Ibid., p. 186–187. 103 Herbst, States, p. 3. 104  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 215. 105  A. Bjorkelo, Prelude to the Mahdiyya: Peasants and traders in the Shendi region (Cambridge, 1989), p. 46. 102 

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egies, Daly suggests, the government was ‘as often a pawn in intertribal feuds as it was an arbiter of them’, something which would be repeated in the colonial period in Darfur.106 The Turco-Egyptian state applied this strategy to newly conquered Darfur in the 1870s: simultaneously, communities in Darfur appear to have increasingly accepted the utility of having a single representative to deal with the hakuma (government). As a result, even in areas where political authority was previously decentralized and fluid, paramount chiefs emerged as more stable intermediaries between government and local societies. This appears a good example of Khazanov’s observation of the general tendency for positions of centralized leadership among nomadic communities to be created out of growing interactions between nomad groups and the ‘outside world’, especially states.107 None of this made Turco-Egyptian administration equivalent to later British ‘Native Administration’: the key judicial innovations of Native Courts were a British development. Nonetheless, Turco-Egyptian rule, the first attempt by an alien Nile-valley based state to exert authority in Darfur, did significantly increase the association between government and previously ‘peripheral’, autonomous chiefs, an important shift which requires attention. When Sudan was initially conquered by the Turco-Egyptians in 1821, rebellion in the Nile Valley indefinitely postponed plans to conquer Darfur.108 It was Turco-Egyptian advances into what is now South Sudan in search of slaves that destabilized the Sultanate, as traders competed with the Darfur state for control of its valuable southern slaving zone. Increasingly, the slavers pushed westwards into Bahr al-Ghazal, where they began to interact with the Baqqara on the southern fringe of the Sultanate. The most powerful of the traders, Zubayr Pasha, made a fragile alliance with the Baqqara in 1866, but found the nomads to be unreliable allies when, with the encouragement of the Sultans, a faction attacked his caravans in 1873. Zubayr invaded Darfur in 1874: Sultan Ibrahim Qarad was killed, and El Fasher was captured. The Egyptian administration wasted no time in asserting its authority over Darfur: Zubayr was returned to Cairo.109 Despite continued violent resistance to its rule – notably from the Keira dynasty itself, resistance which would continue into the period of the Mahdiyya – the new regime went about setting up administrative structures, dividing Darfur into four mudiriyyas or sub-provinces that roughly corresponded to the old magdumate commands: the Egyptians therefore maintained some of the spatial organization of government from the Sultans. But they also introduced the innovation of matching administrative territories with imagined ‘tribal’ units: sub-provinces 106 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 50; also see Bjorkelo, Shendi, p. 11. Nomads, p.  166. It also provides a parallel example to the kingdom of Taqali, which institutionalized its power in the face of dangers and opportunities presented by the coming of the Turkiyya in the 1820s. Ewald, Soldiers, pp. 44–45. 108  O’Fahey, Sultanate, pp. 76–79. 109  Ibid., pp. 261–276. 107 Khazanov,

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were divided into qisms which took some account of tribal dars in the former peripheries of the Sultanate.110 And the new regime sought out chiefly allies whom it could rely on to carry out some key administrative functions, with significant implications for local political authority in parts of Darfur. Poll tax in western Darfur was assessed, for example, on the estimates of local population made by the remaining local chiefs; amongst nomadic groups, shaykhs continued to collect communal tribute.111 Turco-Egyptian intervention brought particularly important innovations in the centralization of authority within some of the previously peripheral tribes, as both the new rulers and their subjects saw the worth of dealing with one another through effective single intermediaries. As we have seen, before 1873 the Rizayqat were politically decentralized. However, dealings with Zubayr Pasha seem to have focused politics in the tribe around two key factions by 1873: one supporting Zubayr, led by Madibbu Ali and ‘Uqayl al-Janqawi, and the other supporting the Sultans.112 Clearly, there were differences of opinion over whether the Sultan or Zubayr was the more likely to emerge as the most powerful. The pro-Sultan faction instigated an attack on Zubayr’s caravans in 1873 at the Sultan’s own suggestion, forcing a rift in the tribe.113 Madibbu and ‘Uqayl now fought with Zubayr against their internal rivals, who subsequently fled to El Fasher when Zubayr successfully expanded his control into Rizayqat territory.114 It was around this time that the paramount chieftaincy was created, with Madibbu its first occupant. Local informants during the colonial era suggested differing versions of this process: some said Zubayr himself created the position, and others that the Rizayqat elite decided to unite under Madibbu against the continued incursions of Zubayr’s mercenaries.115 (Habbaniyya, Ta’aisha, Fallata and Bani Halba accounts suggest that Zubayr was responsible for the creation of their paramount chief).116 Once the Rizayqat paramountcy was created, it was immediately contested: the Awlad Um Sallama section (which ‘Uqayl headed) did not fully accept Madibbu’s authority.117 But the Rizayqat chieftaincy soon functioned as a key ally of the new regime. Interactions between Rizayqat leadership and the Turco-Egyptian state afforded opportunities to both sides. In 1877 the Rizayqat fought with Gordon (then Governor-General of the Sudan) to put down resistance from the Mima and Khawabir groups in southern Darfur. This also allowed the 110 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 50. Ibid., p. 52. 112  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 265. 113 Daly, Sorrow, p. 38. 114  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 266. 115  Saville to Assistant Director of Intelligence 23/10/17, SAD uncatalogued Baring papers; Willis, Director of Intelligence to Private Secretary, 20 Jan. 1923, NRO CIVSEC 66/12/107. 116  ADC Baggara to Governor ,14 Mar. 1925, NRO 2.D Fasher 54/3/12. 117  Willis, Director of Intelligence to Private Secretary, 20 Jan. 1923, NRO CIVSEC (1)66/12/107. 111 

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Rizayqat opportunity to move against rival, unregulated traders in the Bahr al-Ghazal.118 Gordon, determined to crack down on the slave trade in 1879, let the Baqqara cattle nomads in general, including the Rizayqat, loose on the jallaba (traders of riverine origin) in southern Darfur who supplied slave traders with arms: the Baqqara looted the traders for their many possessions, including clothes and slaves.119 This is a striking anticipation of the use of the Baqqara as local proxies pursued by both British and independent Sudanese states: it also demonstrates how local elites could seize on state agendas to pursue their own material interests. The growing association between Baqqara chiefs and the Turco-Egyptian regime was also reflected in a change in their titles. Slatin, Governor of Darfur in the years immediately before the Mahdiyya, titled Baqqara chiefs as beys.120 The term bey is of Turkish origin: it was used in the Turco-Egyptian Empire to refer to administrative and military officials below the rank of pasha. But it also has (older) connotations of the idea of a local tribal chief. The title thus captured the ambivalent position of these newly created paramount positions, between the state and their subjects, and of course, anticipated their further incorporation under British rule. It was also clear that demonstrating administrative ability to the new regime was a crucial means of advancing individual position, as it would be under British rule. In western Darfur, Hajjam Hasab Allah was recognized by the new colonial regime as head of the Masalit following his successful collection of tax. This started the creation of a Masalit chieftaincy (or sultanate as it was termed). Other Masalit firshas (chiefs), previously independent of one another, seemed to accept the utility of having a leader able to deal competently on their behalf with this unpredictable outside force. By 1880 Hajjam was made bey by the Egyptians but also started to behave very similarly to the sultans of Darfur within his own Dar, exercising powers of life and death, appointing and dismissing chiefs, and making land grants. But interestingly, oral testimonies collected by Lidwien Kapteijns in the 1970s suggest that Hajjam is remembered ‘as the precursor, not the founder of the sultanate’ and is remembered as bey, not Sultan. He would be deposed as an unpopular and oppressive ruler with the coming of Mahdist revolution.121 Despite this growing centralization, Turco-Egyptian rule in Darfur always remained fragile and in the early 1880s discontent with the exactions of the Egyptian government and their troops was mobilized behind a messianic religious revolt to eject the colonizers from Darfur, and the rest of Sudan.

118 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 54. Ibid., p. 51. 120  Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur, ‘Proposals for Devolution’, 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 121  On Hajjam see L. Kapteijns, Mahdist, pp. 66–72. 119 

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THE MAHDIYYA IN DARFUR Mahdism can be defined as the belief in Sunni Islam ‘in a divinely guided being who will restore the kingdom of God on earth’, a belief which has inspired a number of politico-religious movements across the Muslim world and particularly in Asia and Africa.122 In Sudan, discontent with the Turco-Egyptian regime created fertile ground for the mobilization of such beliefs, and military campaigns led by the Mahdi himself, Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah, a Sammaniyya sufi, had rapid success against the Egyptians, culminating in the fall of Khartoum in January 1885 and the establishment of the Mahdist state in Sudan. Darfur, as a reservoir of support, was key to the success of the movement. And the history of the Mahdist state, particularly under the Mahdi’s successor after 1885, the Khalifa Abdullahi Muhammad, had significant ramifications for the peoples of Darfur. The Mahdiyya has been regarded as a fiercely centralizing, detribalizing state, intolerant of alternative political and religious structures and loyalties in Sudan:123 Ewald argues that the Taqali kingdom of central Sudan (built up during the Turkiyya) was ‘destroyed’ by the Mahdiyya.124 The most startling evidence of this intolerance of local political loyalties in Darfur is the coercive relocation of many of the Baqqara (and other peoples, especially local elites) to Omdurman by Mahdist forces, where they could be kept under the watchful eye of the state.125 But at other times the Mahdist state, faced with the same dilemmas of transmitting power in remote Darfur as its predecessors and its successors, aimed to govern through local chiefs. It was the failure to establish a productive modus vivendi with these elites that led the Mahdist state to some of its more extreme assertions of authority over Darfur’s peoples: yet the state continued to oscillate between enmity and attempts at alliance with local elites throughout the Mahdiyya. Moreover, in its earliest years, the Mahdist movement was seized upon by local elites in Darfur as an opportunity to throw off the burdens of Turco-Egyptian power, and as a new source of patronage to be employed when making claims to political authority. The Mahdiyya drew much of its early strength from the interaction between patterns of local political competition, discontent with government and its own politico-religious discourse (much as was the case in later rebellions against the British colonial state). In the period leading up to Mahdist rebellion, the pattern of disenfranchised claimants to chiefly office appealing to powerful patrons outside of Darfur, patrons located at the heart of state power in the Nile Valley, began to emerge, a pattern which would also persist into the British colonial era. In particular, the mobilization of the Rizayqat behind the Mahdist revolt was very much the product of a chieftaincy dispute at the head of 122 

O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 280. Saviors, p. 141; Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 80. 124 Ewald, Soldiers¸p. 182. 125 Daly, Sorrow, pp. 77–78. 123 Mamdani,

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the tribe. In 1881 Madibbu Ali had fallen from grace with the Egyptian government: deposed, he went east to join the Mahdi. Later that year, Madibbu returned with instructions from the Mahdi to raise rebellion among the Rizayqat, which he did very successfully, destroying government forces as he went and also gaining support from Habbaniyya, Bani Halba and Berti.126 However, the Rizayqat elite again was divided: Madibbu’s rival Uqayl stood aside from the rebellion.127 Nearly a decade earlier the elite had split between supporting either the Sultans or Zubayr. Now a reversal of hierarchy within the elite had led Madibbu to seek patronage from outside Darfur, at the ‘core’ of the new state, and he returned to his people as an agent of revolution. Madibbu’s personal ambitions did the Mahdist cause a great favour in Southern Darfur. Indeed, Mahdism depended on local chieftaincy rivalries for its initial success. More broadly, the response of the peoples of Darfur to the gathering revolt depended a great deal on the political calculations of local elites and on patterns of local rivalry. Mahdism did not have universal support within Darfur: Kapteijns colourfully suggests the new regime ‘split Darfur as deeply as the French Revolution had split western Europe’.128 The Mahdi had written to many of the local chiefs of Darfur to ask for support.129 But two potential patrons (the Turco-Egyptian government and the Mahdist rebels) now competed for the support of adversarial local elites, and the potential for intra- and inter-tribal political rivalries to play out in armed conflict was greatly increased. We now know what the outcome of battle between Egyptian and Mahdist rulers was: but local actors at the time could not be so sure. When Slatin left Dara in 1882 his forces were made up of 2,000 regular troops, but more strikingly also included 7,000 irregulars. These were drawn from factions opposed to those local elites who had aligned themselves to the Mahdist movement. These included Zaghawa, Beigo, Birgid and Missiriyya participants.130 The force was defeated decisively by Madibbu Ali and the Rizayqat, but the role of locally recruited troops in supporting what we might see as a lost cause shows that not all of Darfur was waiting to rise up in the name of the Mahdi. Local political calculation, and the playing out of local rivalries was thus central to building and contesting the Mahdist state. And broad political and religious motivations could be manipulated and used as a justification for the pursuit of distinct local agendas.131 Nonetheless, the Mahdist state represented a capture of the very core of the Turco-Egyptian state from the periphery: support from Darfur 126 

Ibid., pp. 64–67. P.M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan (Oxford, 1970), p. 74. 128 Kapteijns, Sudanic, p. 73. 129 Daly, Sorrow, p. 64. 130  Ibid., p. 65. 131  Ibid., p.  66. Ewald, Soldiers, details the ambiguous interactions between local ambitions and divisions and Mahdist agendas of control in the Taqali kingdom at pp. 120–129. 127 

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was crucial to the success of the revolt against the colonial government. Indeed, the Khalifa Abdallahi, head of the Mahdist state for most of its existence, was famously a member of the Ta’aisha tribe, one of the main Baqqara groups in southern Darfur.132 However, the Khalifa was also well aware of the distaste among the Baqqara tribes, especially the Rizayqat, for central state authority: just as they had supported Zubayr against the Sultans only to turn against the Turco-Egyptians less than ten years later, how long would they remain under the control of the Mahdist state? Madibbu Ali, initially such a crucial ally, now attempted to shore up his position in Darfur by recruiting disgruntled members of the Mahdist forces based in the Nuba Mountains: when he refused a summons by the Mahdist governor of southern Darfur, he was attacked, defeated, captured and finally executed.133 This was an extraordinary reversal in fortune, and suggests just how fragile nomad-state alliances could be. Madibbu’s execution was an unparalleled statement of the power of the state in the Rizayqat dar. Yet the Mahdist state also intensified some of the governing strategies of the Sultans, albeit with a new focus on Omdurman as the core of state power. The Khalifa often placed great importance on chiefs making personal journeys to Omdurman to swear allegiance in cases where he was doubtful of their loyalty, maintaining the emphasis on the personal interactions between central rulers and local elites that the Sultans had also pursued. While chiefs had previously come annually to El Fasher to pay tribute and participate in annual festivals, now they were to proceed across Sudan to Omdurman to pay homage to the ruler. Moreover, those who made such a journey were sometimes imprisoned or killed when they arrived at their destination. The forcible relocation of whole tribes from Darfur to Omdurman was the most complete expression of this policy: this was, in fact, the ‘core’ quite literally trying to absorb and thus nullify the ‘periphery’. In 1888 the Rizayqat, Habbaniyya and what remained of the Ta’aisha were ordered to relocate from Darfur to Omdurman. Only half the Habbaniyya made it there: half escaped back to Darfur, and their paramount chief was murdered en route.134 Another leading Habbaniyya chief, Mahmud Abu Saad, was made a simple shaykh of a town quarter in Omdurman by the Khalifa.135 Nonetheless, these policies stopped short of destroying chieftaincy outright. In some cases, the deportation of chiefs provided opportunities to their local rivals (of whom there were often many), to seize power in their absence. In Dar Habbaniyya, the Shibool section asserted paramount authority over the Habbaniyya who remained in Darfur, following the murder of their Ri’afa rival.136 Rather similarly, when the Meidobi chief Jami Khir was forcibly moved to Omdurman, Mansur 132 Daly,

Sorrow, pp. 71, 77. Ibid, p. 72. 134  Ibid., p. 78. 135  ADC Baggara to Governor, 14 Mar. 1925, NRO 2.D Fasher 54/3/12. 136 Ibid. 133 

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Sulayman, of the rival Urrti section, who remained in Jabal Meidob, proclaimed himself the malik of all the Meidob.137 And Mahdist assaults on local structures of authority sometimes provided leaders with opportunities to gain prestige by the organization of military resistance. Jami Khir, the Meidobi chief mentioned above, played a key role in resistance to the Mahdist incursions into Jabal Meidob. The Mahdist state exploited local rivalries in an attempt to crush the Meidob resistance: Berti and Zaghawa, both of whom had suffered from Meidobi raids, sent troops to support the Mahdist military effort. As Jami later put it ‘all our wells were held by jehadia. They held our wells for a year. We stole water at night’. But this resistance was nonetheless successful enough to establish Jami for a time as ‘paramount king’ in a peace deal with the Mahdist state: and Jami would later hold power under the British administration.138 The policies of the Mahdist state thus perhaps sometimes unintentionally strengthened the idea of chieftaincy, even as it attempted to undermine it. Still, the regime did not recognize ‘tribes’ nor the hereditary rights of chiefs – in Mahdist thought political legitimacy stemmed from religious vocation. To this extent, the Mahdiyya posed an ideological challenge to the authority of both recently created paramounts, and longer established hereditary chiefs. In the old core of the Sultanate, shartays who had worked for the Turco-Egyptian government were sometimes dismissed and replaced by Mahdist appointees. The government was ready to confirm or depose whoever it liked as chiefs. But there was little new about this: as we have seen, the Fur Sultans often intervened directly to depose or appoint favoured allies, even at the peripheries of their kingdom. And Mahdist appointees were usually drawn from established local elite families who had a long-running rivalry with existing shartays, not complete outsiders.139 Whatever the rhetoric of the Mahdist state, links between identity and authority did have some relevance. Most obviously the Ta’aisha were de facto a particularly important ‘tribe’, making a particularly notable contribution to Mahdist military forces: the Khalifa did not forget his origins.140 Prominent individual Ta’aishi governed peripheral provinces as military governors, including Darfur.141 Indeed, Darfuri informants in the colonial period sometimes referred to the Mahdist state as ‘the Ta’aisha’. State patronage remained a resource to be accessed in the service of individual ambition. The long established pattern of interaction between state and local politics remained important during (and after) the Mahdiyya. Indeed, the Mahdiyya persistently attempted to rule Darfur through reliable local intermediaries, who sometimes seized on their position to create local chieftaincies. The man remembered as the 137 

G.D. Lampen, ‘A short account of Meidob’, Sudan Notes and Records XI (1928), p. 59. 138 Ibid. 139 Daly, Sorrow, p. 77. 140 Holt, Mahdist, p. 160. 141 Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 74.

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founder of the Masalit sultanate was Ismail Abd al-Nabi, a faqih who rose to power as a loyal Mahdist intermediary with the Masalit, essentially occupying the same position as his predecessor bey Hajjam, but from a rival clan, the Gernyeng. Ismail was imprisoned in Omdurman in 1888, four years into his reign; he never returned from there to Dar Masalit. (His son consolidated the Sultanate in conflict with the Mahdist state.) Ismail always referred to himself in official documents as amil al-Mahdi: Mahdist agent. Yet local contemporaries referred to him as jubbay, a local equivalent for Sultan. Ismail had one title for the government, and another for his people. Thus, the Mahdiyya sometimes created new chiefs.142 Mamdani’s characterization of the period as a revolutionary ‘all-out assault on chiefly power’ is overstated.143 Later in the period, as the fortunes of the Mahdist state ebbed as a result of famine, cholera and military defeat, ruling in co-operation with local chiefs in Darfur became the explicit strategy of the administration.144 After repeated rebellions against the Mahdist state in Darfur, Uthman Adam Jano, the Mahdist general and governor, held a province-wide tribal gathering at Dara, the old headquarters of the southern Darfur maqdumate, in 1889, where he attempted to set up, in O’Fahey’s words, ‘a system of Indirect Rule’. Mahdist administrative strategy anticipated British colonial methods: officials ‘were to dwell in the midst of the tribes’ to collect tax and ensure religious conformity.145 How Mahdist ‘Indirect Rule’ worked in practice remains unclear. On Darfur’s troubled western frontier the strategy appears to have borne little fruit, judging by the repeated military expeditions in subsequent years. Even then, however, expeditions were sent with rival claimants to the local chiefly thrones – rivals, not necessarily simply outsiders. In place of the several existing chiefs deported from Dar Zaghawa to Omdurman, the Mahdist state appointed one Mahmud Wad Bahr, a member of the Tuar ruling family, as their principal intermediary with the Zaghawa. Mahmud was unpopular: he had a Fur mother and had been disinherited from the throne of Dar Tuar for this reason.146 But nor was he exactly an outsider. It is also worth noting that local populations sometimes rejected imposed chiefs: on these grounds the Sultans of Dar Qimr and Dar Tama were both expelled by their peoples in 1894.147 The Mahdist state did not attempt to destroy the institution of chieftaincy: rather it was appointing more pliable men into these roles. Like the later colonial government, where it attempted too obvious an ‘invention’, its candidates might not be successful. In sum, while the Mahdist state sometimes undermined or attacked specific chiefs, it remained surprisingly pragmatic, with governors aware of their limited resources in a region far from the centre of the 142 

For Ismail, see Ibid, pp. 123–137. Saviors, p. 141. 144  Ewald makes a similar observation in Taqali. Soldiers, p. 127. 145 Holt, Mahdist, p. 165. 146  Tigani Salih, Islam, pp. 128–130. 147 Daly, Sorrow, p. 82. 143 Mamdani,

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state’s power. The regime had this in common with its Turco-Egyptian predecessor, and with the states that followed it. Mahdist governors sometimes recognized the need to utilize local intermediaries to assert the state’s authority. And some of these intermediaries managed to build up considerable local authority as a result.

ALI DINAR, LAST SULTAN OF DARFUR In 1898 an Anglo-Egyptian force invaded Sudan, impelled by a variety of motives, not least securing British control of the Nile, and the Mahdist era came to an end. In its place the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was established, with Britain in practice the ruling power. European imperial expansion was thus framed as Egyptian ‘reconquest’ of an old imperial territory. Ali Dinar, grandson of Sultan Muhammad al-Fadl, who had been brought to Omdurman seven years previously, now escaped with a group of notables linked to the Keira regime, and seized power in El Fasher, restoring the Sultanate. Ali Dinar gave formal recognition to the sovereignty of the Sudan Government in Darfur and agreed to pay annual tribute. For the time being, Darfur was too remote and lacking in economic value to be of further interest to the British. To some extent, Ali Dinar’s relationship with the Anglo-Egyptian government was rather similar to that of ‘peripheral’ tributary chiefs with his own royal predecessors. Here we examine how Ali Dinar sustained the processes of centralization in Darfur which had intensified in the 1870s, but also how authority at a local level remained the object of competition and uncertainty, even among state officials themselves. 148 O’Fahey suggests that Ali Dinar was ‘autocratic’ in comparison with the earlier Sultans, adopting more direct methods of rule.149 However, if he continued some of the centralizing tendencies of the late 19th-century occupiers of Darfur, Ali Dinar also in some ways restored the old order of the Sultanate. His rule saw an assertion of Islamic orthodoxy against Mahdism, and the restatement of earlier hakura grants. Ali Dinar also suppressed several localized Mahdist risings, usually executing the ringleaders (a practice which the British were to continue in the early years of their rule).150 This sense of the threat posed by unorthodox belief extended beyond Mahdism and included figures of local, non-Islamic spiritual power: the sorts of people who had always existed alongside the state hierarchy providing spiritual protection for local communities. One man in central Darfur was known to bring seeds out of the local wadi when it spurted and ‘in time of famine he would dive into the water of the lake and produce kisra (bread).’ Ali Dinar demanded the man, who he called a magician, come to El Fasher, 148  As argued in G.D. Lampen, ‘History of Darfur’, Sudan Notes and Records, 31 (1950), pp.  177–209. Mamdani deals with Ali Dinar incredibly briefly on pp. 152–3 of Saviors. 149  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 287. 150 Ibid., p. 289.

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to be kept under surveillance in the centre of state power. But the man refused to go: instead armed men were sent out to carry him in, bound to a rope bed. When he reached the Sultan’s palace the man ‘refused to take his hands from his eyes so as not to see the Sultan. So the Sultan had him beaten to death.’151 The magician’s refusal to acknowledge the authority of the ruler sealed his fate at the hands of summary state violence. Parts of the Fur heartland were governed by a maqdum in Ali Dinar’s time: maqdums were no longer simply agents of the state in its periphery, but were used to govern the ‘core’ of the Sultanate. The old provincial governors (the aba diimang or abbo uumo, for instance) were given no formal powers under his regime. This did not, however, result in a definitive shift to more effective central control: while the maqdum theoretically subordinated existing officials in this region, these latter were not removed, creating parallel, partly competing, structures of authority, which further contributed to the pluralistic character of authority at a local level.152 The maqdum headed a military force divided into groups of jehadia which lived (and presumably preyed on) village populations, each commanded by an officer known as the rasmia. These military groupings paralleled the structures of shartays and dimlijia of older provenance, and the existence of these multiple hierarchies meant ordinary villagers often ended up paying taxation to both authorities. One colonial era informant suggested that ‘in each village you had one of the dimangawi’s [or the abo diimang’s] men and one of the maqdum’s men, all of whom had to find a living.’153 This also had implications for justice and dispute resolution: the fines imposed by shartays who still heard cases were shared with the ras mia, who also increasingly kept the justice done by the shartay under surveillance. Cases which were appealed beyond the shartay were heard jointly by the dimangawi and maqdum, who would again then divide the fine. One colonial official was given the impression that ‘if the dimangawi got the chance to settle a case without the maqdum’s knowledge he did so.’ The structures of the state in its heartland became increasingly competitive and overlapping in these years, intensifying the local regulatory pluralism of the Sultanate. Ali Dinar also readily replaced established chiefs in the Fur heartland with his own appointees.154 As always, personal ties to the Sultan were a great help: Wingate suggested that Ali Dinar had replaced ‘men of family’ with his own favoured ‘upstarts’.155 In reality this was merely the latest manifestation of a tendency by both the Turco-Egyptian and Mahdist governments to replace servants of previous governments with 151 

Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30. Ali, p. 208. 153  Arkell papers, ‘Administration of Dar Kerne and Dar Abu Dima under Ali Dinar’, PP MS 71/06/30/022, p. 51. 154  Statement of Daud Abu Hassan, 25 July 1936, NRO Darfur 1/1/5. 155  Wingate, Governor General Sudan, comment on MacMichael’s ‘Memo Concerning the Future Status of Darfur’ (n.d. c.Sept 1915), SAD 127/3. 152 Theobald,

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their own appointees.156 This was not always a smooth process. Often Ali Dinar appointed personal confidants with whom he had spent time whilst in Omdurman and who did not necessarily have significant local support. One of these was Abd al-Mula Dukhan, appointed shartay of Dar Turra by Ali Dinar: ‘…when some of his people rebelled, he got troops from Ali Dinar, and by the Sultan’s order enslaved some of them, and sent them into the Sultan’s household.’157 (Protection from enslavement was thus again shown to depend on loyalty to the state.) Other appointees drawn from networks established during Ali Dinar’s days in Omdurman were said to be valued by the Sultan because of their cultural sophistication: one shartay was so appointed because he was ‘so smart and spoke Arabic well’.158 But these were qualities which might also inspire mistrust in local populations, as the British would later discover. Well established ways of managing relations with the peripheries of the state persisted under Ali Dinar: for example, the Sultan married a princess of the Dar Sila royal family, on Darfur’s western frontier.159 But there were also attempts at increased administrative centralization in more remote areas. Ali Dinar, like the Turco-Egyptians, and to some extent the Mahdist state, started to deal more systematically with paramount chiefs on the peripheries. These men increasingly answered to the Sultan via appointed manadib, transferrable agents of the state (in this sense, rather similar to colonial district officials). These manadib were not given grants of land in the areas they controlled: they had no powers over life and death. Their subordination to the state and absence of ties to the locality was therefore more marked than the maqdums who had preceded them. The Sultan also pursued increasingly direct interventions in the chieftaincy politics of the peripheral cattle and camel nomads, alongside the military expeditions which are discussed at length in existing scholarship on this period.160 At least some of the Baqqara chiefs whom the British recognized as nazirs (in another adoption of Turco-Egyptian terminology for local chiefs), were termed shartay by Ali Dinar, emphasizing the derivation of their authority from the state.161 And as chiefs became more directly identified as agents of the state, so Ali Dinar became more heavily involved in the intricacies of local chieftaincy politics. In 1900 Ali Dinar appointed a chief of the Irayqat Arabs, a tribe whom had been the target of repeated state violence in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but whose chiefs do not appear to have previously been appointed by the centre.162 Among the Bani Halba, whom he 156 

Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur, ‘Proposals for Devolution’, 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 157  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 232. 158  Ibid, p. 107. 159 Daly, Sorrow, p. 96. 160 Theobald, Ali, pp. 44–55; 123–137. 161  Interview with Nazir Ahmed al-Sammani al-Bashar, Khartoum, 14 Nov. 2008. 162  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 289.

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fought so ruthlessly, he also appointed a paramount chief to whom he granted nahas.163 Ali Dinar’s reign also saw an intensified degree of control by the state over the roles of the chiefs it now ruled through: colonial officials were later told that ‘tribal heads were kept strictly to heel by the manadib and not encouraged to see cases on their own.’ These chiefs, with their obvious ties to central government, may also have enjoyed shrinking legitimacy among those they were supposed to rule. Indeed, ‘the nazir of the Habbaniya would not have ventured out of his military post in Ali Dinar’s time without an escort, and was once chased home by his own section when he attempted to take dues from them.’164 This suggests a close association between state military forces in the peripheries and the supposedly ‘local’ chiefs. Al-Ghali (the nazir) later made it clear to a British official that he had survived Ali Dinar’s reign by ‘his faculty in keeping on the right side of the Sultan’s local representative and by timely presents to the Sultan himself’.165 He would partially maintain these strategies in the period of British rule. But the Rizayqat were the major test case for Ali Dinar’s centralizing ambitions, and showed the limits of his authority. Musa Madibbu, the new chief, enjoyed considerably more autonomy from the state than did his Bani Halba or Habbaniyya neighbours, and managed to rebuff Ali Dinar’s major military expedition against his people in 1913. But his position was not yet altogether secure.166 Musa’s key rival, Bishara Wad Abdullahi of the Um Sellama section (the old rivals of the Madibbu family from the 1870s), used discontent aroused by Ali Dinar’s demands for tribute to gain support for his opposition to Musa’s authority. British officials believed that ‘Musa has little authority over the majority of the Rizayqat Arabs’. One officer heard reports that Musa never slept in his own house at night for fear of murder by Ali Dinar. Musa’s consequent requests to the British for support demonstrate the way in which colonial state formation was a process that originated in the political imaginations of local actors before its material manifestation on the ground. Musa’s pleas for arms and protection were largely ignored before 1915, but the language used was revealing: Musa claimed in correspondence with the British that ‘as we are your subjects we hope to enjoy your protection.’167 One intelligence report stated that Musa ‘repeatedly told our informant that he wants a Government post in his country, and that he has asked for this many times’.168 But Ali Dinar himself also appealed to the Sudan Government, particularly when reminding the British of their interest in preserving Anglo-Egyptian (and thus, in practice, Darfur’s) sovereignty against French incursion. 163  Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 Feb. 1926, NRO CIVSEC (1)66/12/108. 164  Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/4/45. 165  Ibid., SAD 734/9/55. 166  Bence Pembroke to Governor Kordofan, 29 June 1915, ibid. 167  Musa Madibbo to Slatin, 27 Apr. 1914, quoted in Theobald, Ali, p. 132. 168  Kaim SI, Kordofan to Governor Kordofan, 11 Nov. 1915, NRO Darfur 1/1/12.

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When it suited him to emphasize his tributary status, he was well able to do so.169 Indeed the key factor which contributed to the downturn in relations between Ali Dinar and Khartoum was the perceived failure of the British to respect their obligations as Ali Dinar’s suzerain and supporter: they did not send him arms or ammunition in his struggles against internal dissent; they did not sufficiently protect him against French incursions on his western frontier; and they failed to restrain their own subjects – especially the Kababish – from camel raids against Ali Dinar’s people.170 Given these repeated failures, Theobald’s judgement that the only surprise with regard to the Anglo-Egyptian invasion of 1916 was not that ‘it eventually occurred, but that it had been postponed for so long’ seems sound.171 The Sultanate itself was also gripped by internal crisis in its final years which facilitated the ease of conquest by the British. Increasing conflict between Ali Dinar and the nomadic populations on the edges of the Sultanate, coupled with a devastating famine in 1913–14, created what Ali Dinar called a ‘year of commotion and bloodshed’, followed by ‘plague and disease… such as we have never seen’.172 The ambitions of the Sultan were undone altogether in this concatenation of disasters.

CONCLUSION When the British conquered Darfur, there was no need to impose a ‘counter-revolution’ against a ‘detribalising’ Sultanate, as Mamdani would have it: the last Sultan himself, and indeed his immediate predecessors, had actually laid the ground for much of their own administrative policy.173 While chiefs became ever more clearly associated with the state under British rule, this was very much the continuation and intensification of a process that had already begun under states with increasingly penetrative ambitions in the region. Centralization had not meant detribalization. Rather it had brought about the opposite: a growing ‘tribalization’ of authority, as governments relied on local elites to govern straightforwardly labelled ‘tribal’ units, and simultaneously associated these leaders more directly with the authority of the state. As chiefs’ roles were formalized, so they were also brought under greater surveillance by the state itself. And the increasing readiness of these centralizing regimes to dismiss and appoint chiefs in line with their own administrative priorities also intensified a culture of competition between potential chiefs for the attention and patronage of the state. Local elites were able to present themselves as true Mahdists or pliable servants of the Sultan, in order to gain or 169 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 97. Theobald, Ali, p. 35. Ali, p. 174. 171  Ibid., p. 176. 172  Ali Dinar, cited in A. De Waal, Famine That Kills (2005: Oxford, 1989), p. 65. 173 Mamdani, Saviors, p. 143. 170 Theobald,

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maintain their position. These strategies of co-opting state power in line with local elite interests would be continued under British rule. And the repeated creation of new offices and privileges by Sultans eager to refresh and renew their rule from the centre created a regulatory landscape characterized by fluidity, competition and pluralism, rather than a clearly defined, fixed or impersonal hierarchy. In this sense, asserting the existence of a well-established bureaucratic state in Darfur risks overstating the coherence of the state’s structures and hierarchies, when in fact we might understand the state best as a work-in-progress, constantly remade and reshaped in the interactions between the ambitions of centralizing rulers and the interests of local elites.174 Thinking about state formation as a process of continuous negotiation and violence also provides a useful guide for understanding the developments of the era of British rule. The persistence of the idea that the ruler should control and limit the excesses of his representatives, and the persistence of the ruler’s role in local chieftaincy politics, is also striking – government clearly existed very much as a powerful idea and guarantor of political order in people’s imagination, even as its local manifestations were characterized by incoherence, predation and disorder. The idea of government as predator was perhaps never stronger in the periods examined here than in the late 19th century. As O’Fahey has noted, the period from 1874–1898 is still remembered as um kwakiyya – ‘the years of gunfire’ or ‘the years of damnation’ depending on translation.175 The fears of government and the conflicts associated with struggles for control of Darfur were at this time inscribed in the landscape itself, thus firmly entering local memory. One mountain in western Darfur was named Jabal Killing: ‘mountain of fear’. It was said to have been given this name because of the operations of Sultan Harun in this area during Fur resistance to the Turco-Egyptian conquest and the fear among local people that he would ‘draw the Turks to attack them’.176 In these years, more than ever, ordinary people associated the state with violence and fear. Nonetheless with the restoration of the Sultanate under Ali Dinar, the Sultans themselves remained, in ideal terms at least, guarantors of justice, order and useful potential allies in local struggles, despite Ali Dinar’s own increasingly controlling and predatory style of rule. In 1901 Habbaniyya shaykhs had complained of Rizayqat predation to Ali Dinar, pleading that ‘we are unjustly oppressed and appeal to you, oh promoter of justice to return to us what has been looted’ (just as the Rizayqat complained to the British in similar terms against Ali 174 

Ewald makes just this point in her commentary on the history of Darfur, suggesting that the growing power of the landed elite as a result of Sultanic favour suggests a ‘process much more ambiguous than centralization under an increasingly complex Islamic bureaucracy’. Soldiers, p. 158. 175  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 275. 176  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 230.

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Dinar).177 This conception of the state – as located between threat and opportunity – remained central to ideas of government during the Condominium.178 177 Letter

from shaykhs Bakhri and Muhammad Uthman, 6 August 1901, quoted in Theobald, Ali, p. 48. 178  A similar formulation to that of Deborah Poole, ‘Between threat and guarantee: justice and community in the margins of the Peruvian state’, in V. Das and D. Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Oxford, 2007), pp. 35–67.

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2 Colonial Conquest and the Politics of Alliance in Darfur, 1916–1921

The famine and violence of the final years of Ali Dinar’s reign, together with the first years in which the Condominium state established its authority in Darfur might well be described as a second um kwakiyya (time of damnation) for the peoples of Darfur. Whilst the troubles of the final years of Ali Dinar’s reign are well acknowledged (and will not be discussed further here), the violence of the early years of Condominium conquest and rule has been downplayed in the existing literature.1 This is surprising, given that readily available documentation evidences the widespread violence brought by the arrival of the British, both during the initial conquest and through the years following to 1921. Conquest, as well as the casualties it inflicted on Ali Dinar’s troops, made arms more widely available, and licensed major raids and counter-raids between local populations. In the first years of British rule, state representatives used violence as a matter of course to enforce their demands, and met violent rebellion with the full, crushing force of the state’s military technologies. This was a period of great turbulence and insecurity. But colonial conquest and ‘pacification’ in Africa – always a process that involved considerable violence – has repeatedly been shown not simply to have been a one-way encounter between overwhelming European technology and military organization, versus African armies decimated by the Maxim gun. Colonial violence was also channelled in specific directions, against specific peoples, and was not experienced in the same way by all populations. This variability was the product of the manner of interaction between colonial officials and officers – who aimed to exploit and exacerbate local divisions in order to facilitate their conquest, and members of local elites – who aimed to turn colonial military technology to their own advantage in the pursuit of local rivalries.2 In Darfur (and along its frontiers), this interaction between state

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1  For the final years of Ali Dinar’s reign see De Waal, Famine, pp. 64–65; Theobald Ali, pp. 123–161. On colonial violence: Daly, Sorrow skirts around the issue, pp.  113–114 and in Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge, 1986), p. 282; Theobald’s account of the conquest sanitizes what was in reality a messy and often brutal campaign, Ali, pp. 162–207. 2  For eastern Africa see J. Monson, ‘Relocating Maji Maji: The Politics of Alliance and Authority in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, 1870–1918’, Journal

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and local interests resulted in the rise of tribal militias, who wielded government military technology with significant impunity whilst serving both colonial and their own, local agendas. These so-called ‘friendlies’ were prominent in colonial military campaigns, both in 1916 and in the following years. It is worth noting that the language of ‘friendly forces’ was one revived by the Sudanese state in the later 1980s, when it armed the militias that went on to target civilian populations in South Sudan in the civil war of those years. 3 The janjawid in Darfur are also clearly another variant of the same strategy: arming militias and letting them run free against those defined as enemies of the state. The logic of this strategy is one inherited from colonial government, and its use by an over-stretched Sudanese state in Darfur to achieve political and military objectives is therefore thoroughly unsurprising. Others have commented that the janjawid need to be seen against the backdrop of militia violence of the 1980s and 90s in Sudan more broadly:4 one purpose of this chapter is to suggest that they need to be seen in much deeper historical perspective. Moreover, the pattern of exploiting local rivalries to achieve control was not even a novelty of the Condominium period. We have already noted Gordon’s use of the Baqqara against traders implicated in the slave trade during the Turco-Egyptian years; and more generally the Mahdist and Turco-Egyptian states in Darfur exploited rivalries among and between local populations to extend their own military capacity: the ‘irregulars’ who fought with Slatin against the Mahdists in the 1880s are the clearest anticipation of the use of friendlies by the British in the years of their conquest. Going back yet further, when the Sultans sent expeditions against rebellious nomadic tribes in northern and southern Darfur, they often aligned themselves with the neighbouring rivals of these peoples as ‘auxiliaries’.5 Nonetheless, the readiness with which the British armed local allies in order to achieve control in Darfur is striking, and emphasizes the significance of continuities between the early colonial period and the decades which preceded it. This chapter is also concerned with the difficulties of establishing administrative control by a state with almost no local knowledge – a state that could not see – in the aftermath of a conquest that had itself encouraged the proliferation of arms and intensified local rivalries and divisions. It considers the use of violence to intimidate subjects into obedience to be a central tool of administration during the first years of Condominium rule: state violence was just as prominent here as in other ‘peripheries’ of Sudan examined by Johnson (southern Sudan) (contd) of

African History 39 (1998): 95–120; J. Lonsdale. ‘The Conquest State of Kenya, 1895–1905’ and ‘The Politics of Conquest in Western Kenya 1894–1908’ in B. Berman and J. Lonsdale Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Vol. 1 (London, 1992). 3 Johnson, Root Causes, pp. 81–83. 4  For instance see J. Flint, ‘Beyond ‘Janjaweed’: Understanding the militias of Darfur’, Small Arms Survey (Geneva, 2009), pp. 16–17. 5 Nachtigal, Sahara, p. 302.

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and Willis (the Nuba Mountains). Yet it is also clear that the state was seen as a potentially valuable ally in local political struggles, despite – or perhaps because of – its propensity to use force to impose its will. State relations with local elites in these first years of rule were particularly fragmented and administrators remained the objects of manipulation by local elites even as they struggled to impose their own will on the ground. These dynamics could result in biased official involvement in local disputes, with the aim of rewarding or protecting local allies: it was these sorts of interventions, coupled with the everyday experience of coercive and violent methods of rule that resulted in the outbreak of rebellion against the state.

THE CONQUEST OF DARFUR The relationship between Ali Dinar and the British was in decline before World War I: the outbreak of war intensified this decline, and encouraged the increasingly restless ambitions of Governor General Wingate to launch his own military adventure and expand Sudanese territory. A successful propaganda campaign was run against the Sultan: unsubstantiated reports of German and Ottoman influence in Darfur were repeated ad nauseam. More specifically, Ali Dinar was portrayed in Cairo and London as a dangerous ally of the Sanusiyya, the Sufi order based in Libya which was then fighting against the British in Egypt under the encouragement of the Ottomans. The evidence for the real dangers of this ‘Islamic alliance’ was limited, but it provided justification for what was a very minor military campaign in the grand scheme of World War One.6 There was also another interesting justification for the invasion presented by Wingate in correspondence with his superiors in Egypt – not so much the alliance with the Sanusiyya as an apparent anxiety about the stability of Condominium authority in Sudan, and evidence that local elites expected British protection against what was depicted as the threat of Ali Dinar’s expansionist ambitions. As Daly and Theobald suggest, this was likely a disingenuous justification on Wingate’s part – yet it is also clear that local elites really were pushing for support against Ali Dinar from the Sudan Government.7 In particular, the 6  Jay Spaulding and Lidwien Kapteijns provide significant documentary evidence of this alliance, whilst acknowledging the limits of its ‘tangible qualities’. An Islamic Alliance: Ali Dinar and the Sanussiya, 1906–1916 (Evanston, 1994), p. 3. Ali Dinar’s growing hostility to the British during World War I is better explained by British failure to protect his interests during the preceding years, and his correct appraisal of hostile British intentions, than by ideological fervour. For British official rhetoric and propaganda see J. Slight, ‘British Perceptions and Responses to Sultan Ali Dinar of Darfur, 1915–1916’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38 (2010), pp. 237–260. 7 Theobald, Ali, p. 173. Daly, Sorrow, pp. 109–112. An earlier account by Daly gives rather more weight to Wingate’s stated concerns about the loyalty of Kordofan tribes. Empire, p. 176.

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powerful chief of the Kababish nomads of Kordofan province in Sudan, Ali al-Tom, forwarded correspondence that he received from Ali Dinar to the British, which he claimed as proof that the Sultan was planning hostilities against the Kababish. Ali demanded rifles from the government ‘to defend his tribe’.8 Correspondence among senior officials suggests that, at the least, such demands provided significant rhetorical support for Wingate’s agenda to invade Darfur. Wingate was able to argue in correspondence with Egypt that ‘we cannot risk a serious loss of prestige in the Sudan by inaction’.9 The governor of Kordofan, Savile, was perhaps particularly alive to these anxieties, given that he governed the frontier with Darfur, and was an active advocate of invasion even before Wingate came round to the idea. Savile conjured an extremely colourful picture of what might happen if Ali Dinar was allowed to cross the border into Kordofan: Once we let AD take the initiative and arrive with a jehad-preaching army into Kordofan and once we let the western tribes see such an army arrive unopposed in their country and occupy even a mile of their territory in the name of religion and issuing a call to the faithful to make war on the infidel, how many minutes their loyalty would last, I would not like to say… the government troops would then find themselves opposed not by AD’s army, but by the whole population of Western Kordofan supported by AD’s army… every discontented man in the country – and it cannot be denied that there are such… and every man who has lost his slaves under the present regime would immediately become a preacher of jehad and we should have 1882 repeated.10

However, it is clear from the written record that the Sudan Government was not altogether sanguine about the costs and risks of an invasion. Multiple concerns existed, not so much about the Sultan’s armies, as about the environment in which men, animals and machinery would have to operate. The extreme heat; the lack of water; the lack of transport infrastructure – all these were real concerns of those planning the campaign.11 Moreover, the area the military were to operate within was not one well known by the British – and was vast enough that Ali Dinar might potentially evade the military forces sent against him. A key worry, as Savile’s note above suggests, was that Ali Dinar would break out across the border into Kordofan and destabilize British rule in Sudan as a result. All of these factors: the lack of local knowledge, the hostile environment, the porosity of the border between Darfur and Kordofan, meant that from an early stage the British were thinking about the need to arm local populations on the Darfur-Kordofan border, to keep Ali Dinar trapped within his own territory. Plans were drawn up for activation in the event of Ali Dinar crossing the border into Kordofan which involved the recruitment of ‘friendlies’ among the Kordofan tribes on a substantial scale; this would include the distribution of 1480 rifles and 8 

Assistant Director of Intelligence to Wingate, 27 June 1915, SAD 127/2/31. Wingate to Clayton, 28 July 1915, SAD 469/10. 10  Savile, Governor Kordofan to Civil Secretary, 2 July 1915, SAD 127/3/2. 11  Wingate to Clayton, 21 Feb. 1916, SAD 470/1/73–4. 9 

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amassing a force that would amount to 4500 men in total. 12 These plans were never actually implemented – Ali Dinar never had the chance to cross the border – but the recruitment of local militias on a smaller scale would be a part of the military campaign and have important repercussions for Darfur. The British were also being pushed for support by Musa Madibbu of the Rizayqat, who had successfully repelled a major military expedition by the Sultan in 1913, but who remained vulnerable to Ali Dinar’s military force. One telegram from the Assistant Director of Intelligence reported his demands: ‘Musa asks Government to save him from Ali Dinar and sent in a message that if we would only send him one Shawish (lieutenant) he would be content.’13 By September 1915 Wingate had in principle approved the arming of the Rizayqat, although he was wary of entering into a full alliance: We are not sure of the degree of control and influence that Musa can exercise over the Rizayqat, and while it is desirable to help a shaykh apparently well-disposed to us to consolidate his position in the tribe we must remember that both he and his tribesmen have heavy scores to pay off against the Sultan.14

In other words, Wingate was aware that any such alliance may have been of more value to Musa Madibbu than it was to the Sudan Government. When a British agent finally met with Ibrahim Musa Madibbu, the chief’s son, the latter pushed hard for the distribution of rifles and ammunition, claiming ‘the fact that these were issued by Government would put great heart into the tribe’,15 and that other tribes would desert Ali Dinar ‘because none of them would fight the Government, and to fight the Rizayqat who were backed by Government arms would be the same thing’.16 But it was surely Musa himself whose prestige would be most boosted by securing this weaponry and association with the British. The meeting agreed that 300 rifles and ammunition would be sent to the Rizayqat, and that these would be Sheikh Musa’s private armoury for the time being and should on no account be issued among the various sections of the tribe. Ibrahim agreed at once that to do this would be useless and the arms would lose all their value. He said a selected body of riflemen would be formed and would be kept together to act as a distinct unit.17

Both Kelly, commander of the rapidly assembled Darfur Field Force, and Harold MacMichael (at this point Intelligence Officer for the expedition and rapidly accruing political influence that would later be mani12 

Instructions to units, 24 May 1915, SAD 127/2/55. Assistant Director of Intelligence to Governor General, 14 Sept. 1915, SAD 127/3/112. 14  Wingate to ADI, 8 Sept. 1915, SAD 127/3/103. 15  Savile to Governor General, 25 Sept. 1915, SAD 127/3/126. 16  Bassett note on conversation with Ibrahim Musa Madibbo, 22 Sept.1915, SAD Baring papers (uncatalogued). 17 Ibid. 13 

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fested in his appointment as Civil Secretary) both expressed strong opposition to courting the cooperation of the Rizayqat and Kababish to any substantial extent. Kelly suggested that their help in fighting Ali Dinar’s main forces would be of no benefit, and that both groups ‘would be sure to devote entire energies to looting in offensive villages south and north of Fasher and evading any chance of encountering armed resistance’.18 Wingate was much more sanguine, suggesting It is important to recognise the Rizayqat alliance and not to run any risk of offending their amour propre by appearing openly to ignore their proferred assistance. Kababish have been found a harmless vent for their energies and it would I consider be desirable to treat Rizayqat in similar manner.19

Kelly was relieved to receive correspondence from Musa Madibbu some days later which claimed that the Rizayqat had not engaged in any raids since being armed by the government, and that Musa had his people well in hand.20 It is impossible to know Musa’s precise calculations, but it seems he had secured military resources from a government in need of allies and then neatly avoided any commitment to that government’s battles: the Rizayqat pursued their regular dry season migration south to the Bahr al-Arab river before the campaign began. Later in the campaign the British attempted to persuade Musa to establish a military post to the south of Jabal Marra: Musa refused on the grounds that his people were ‘much too wild, would be quite useless for the purpose intended, would merely scatter after plunder and incur enmity of all the tribes in the neighbourhood, and would incidentally dislike being so far from their own homes.’21 Musa perhaps was not entirely confident in his own capacity to control his fighters, given that internal factional opposition to his rule was still quite vigorous within the tribe. A lack of military engagement did not prevent Musa from making a considerable profit from selling hundreds of ardebs of durra at inflated prices to the expeditionary force.22 And Musa’s increasing closeness to the British also secured him impunity for the looting of Ali Dinar’s cattle in the event of military engagement: Wingate confided to Kelly that he ‘should not altogether object to [the Rizayqat] taking possession of some of AD’s personal property in consideration for all that he has taken from them.’23 The arming of the Rizayqat was perhaps one of the acts which provoked Ali Dinar to move his forces towards the frontier with Sudan, alongside the growing deployment of troops in western Kordofan later in 1915. In February 1916, Ali Dinar occupied Jabal al-Hilla, an area 15 miles from the border with Kordofan. For Wingate, this was sufficient justification for the despatch of armed forces to seize this terri18 

Kelly to Wingate, 20 Apr. 1916, SAD 128/2/25. Wingate to Kelly, 21 Apr. 1916, SAD 128/2/47. 20  Kelly to Wingate 23 Apr. 1916, SAD 128/2/65. 21  Kelly to Wingate, 29 Aug 1916, SAD 130/2/84. 22  Kelly, Narrative of events, 1 Sept. 1916, SAD 130/3/42. 23  Wingate to Kelly, 3 May 1916, SAD 128/4/56. 19 

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tory from Ali Dinar: this was the Darfur Field Force commanded by Kelly. The British were therefore the first to cross the border, an act defended as a ‘show of force’ without which ‘our tribes near the border would be in danger of continuous raids and Government prestige would rapidly decline in our western districts, with serious effects on the whole Sudan.’24 At the same time Wingate sent out military patrols in Kordofan ‘to reassure the local people and to prevent the alarm from spreading further east’: these apparently had a ‘tranquilising’ effect in the concerned areas.25 Ali Dinar’s move eastwards also prompted the arming and mobilization of the frontier peoples and the creation of ‘friendly’ military posts along the frontier: Wingate described this explicitly as ‘confiding the supervision of our somewhat lengthy frontier to the various Arab tribes living in the vicinity’.26 This scheme included peoples living along the border with Darfur from Dongola in the north to Rizayqat territory in the south. The biggest force was to be recruited among the Kababish: 200 rifles and ammunition were to be sent to Ali al Tom, and the participants were to be paid 2.5 piastres a day. One hundred Kawahla were to be recruited and armed on the same basis, and another 150 in total among the Hamar, Humr and Missiriyya. In total the border force recruited in Kordofan was to number 450 men armed with rifles, all mounted on horses or camels, and all paid by government.27 This was a tenth of the size of the force first proposed for defensive purposes, but was a significant addition to the 2,000 strong Darfur Field Force, which faced Ali Dinar’s army of between 2,500 and 3,500 men.28 The forces thus created on a ‘tribal’ basis were to be commanded by nazirs or their representatives. The ‘friendlies’ were, in theory, to be under the command of Kelly, the commanding officer of the force which entered Darfur, and instructions were drawn up for all the chiefs leading their locally recruited militias. Wingate admitted during a visit to the frontier: My only fear in this arrangement is that these Arab Patrols who will of course be partially armed with rifles, may be inclined to take the law into their own hands, but my old friend Al Miralai Bashir Bey Kambal, who has accompanied me throughout the trip, has volunteered to go along the whole of the Kordofan-Darfur frontier and arrange the patrol system, giving the Arab nazirs very careful instructions as to what their men may or may not do. 29

Despite the relatively limited size of the border patrols in comparison to earlier defensive plans, the arming of the border peoples was not as smooth or controlled as Wingate suggested it would be. The instruc24  Wingate to Clayton, 16 Feb. 1916, SAD 470/1/55; Wingate to Kitchener, 15 Mar. 1916, SAD 470/1/102. 25  Wingate to Clayton, 16 Feb. 1916, SAD 470/1/55; Wingate to Henry, 17 Mar. 1916, SAD 470/1/115. 26  Wingate to Clayton, 17 Mar. 1916, SAD 470/1/97. 27  ADI to Wingate, 24 Apr. 1916, SAD 128/2/65. 28 Theobald, Ali¸ pp. 177, 192. 29  Wingate to Clayton, 17 Mar. 1916, SAD 470/1/97.

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tions to the patrols included the proviso that ‘The forces comprising posts are not to seize or demand by force any provisions or tebeldi water from natives.’30 But the first signs of trouble followed the occupation of Jabal al-Hilla: immediately afterwards the Kawahla launched raids on their neighbours across the border who now inhabited British occupied territory. Kelly commented, ‘the less we see of these Kordofan nas [subjects] this side of the frontier the better.’ He went on to criticize various Hamar friendlies who had supported the British occupation of Jabal al-Hilla: …they were quite useless, they never did what they were told, and only showed themselves when the force had actually occupied a place, and then only turned up to loot, I caught three of them red handed and had them on the ground there and then and gave them 20 each after which with MacMichael’s advice I packed the whole lot home. 31

Wingate’s plan contained one particularly interesting explicit provision: that Ali el Tom and the Kababish would actually occupy the area inhabited by the Meidob people in north-eastern Darfur. This was a step beyond a ‘patrol’ of the frontier: it entailed the occupation of Darfur territory not by the Egyptian Army but by a subject people of the Sudan Government. Wingate had been persuaded in a face-to-face meeting with Ali el Tom that the big nazir could enact this occupation with ‘the consent and goodwill of the people there with whom he is on good terms’. 32 But as the border patrols amassed, intelligence reports suggested considerable anxiety among the populations of eastern Darfur who feared becoming the victims of raids from their neighbours, now armed with government rifles. As the Darfur Field Force advanced further into Darfur through May 1916, occupying El Fasher by the 23rd May, the Kababish also went well beyond the occupation of the Meidob, striking south and west, and attacking the Berti people of central-eastern Darfur. Ali al Tom informed the British of these advances very quickly: his first letter to the British had a tone of ‘self-congratulation on having assisted government by defeating the Berti’. Ali had seized ‘many Berti herds on the definitely stated assumption that latter our enemy’. 33 The British rapidly sent instructions for Ali to come to terms with the Berti and Kelly lost no time in urging Wingate to withdraw the Kababish post at Meidob as quickly as possible, citing rumours that the Kababish were ‘looting inoffensive civilian population’. Kelly also thought it very unlikely that there would be any active Turkish or Sanussi interference in Darfur’s affairs, and suggested that Wingate would ‘doubtlessly [be] considering the advisability of withdrawing all intelligence posts’. 34 30 

Instruction to Beshir Bey Kambal, 24 Apr. 1916, SAD 128/5/11. Kelly to Wingate, 26 Mar. 1916, SAD 127/8/12. 32  Wingate to Kelly, 26 Mar. 1916, SAD 127/8/3. 33  MacMichael to Wingate, 1 June 1916, SAD 129/1/32. 34  Kelly to Wingate, 2 June 1916, SAD 129/1/33. 31 

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But Wingate was unapologetic, and rather than scaling back the arming of these de facto militias, instead expanded them. The border patrols had taken on a political significance beyond their military utility: the creation and maintenance of the posts was instead seen by Wingate as a means of keeping the frontier tribes loyal, by both bestowing the prestige of association with government military action and providing arms with which these peoples could launch raids against their local enemies. Upon receiving Kelly’s messages, Wingate informed him that he was recruiting 150 men from the Hawawir tribe to police the Natrun wells in the northern desert frontiers of Darfur and Sudan. 35 The loyalty of the Hawawir had been somewhat in question in the months preceding the invasion. Wingate argued I quite realise that such a post will not necessarily altogether block the road through the Natrun district as there is so much water about in different localities, but I suggested it rather with the idea of giving the Howawir something to do and so make them feel that, like the Kababish and other tribes working on the cordon, they would also take their share. 36

Ali el Tom had indeed also suggested that the Hawawir be armed ‘so that there should be no jealousy between the tribes’. 37 The spoils of conquest were to be distributed widely. In another note to Kelly, Wingate even more explicitly stated: ‘…they [the Arab militias] will inevitably carry on their natural bent when they see a chance of doing so with impunity – all you can do is to give strict orders against the practice and punish heavily when you get a chance.’38 Preventing raiding altogether was an ‘impossibility’. 39 He went on to acknowledge that the Hawawir militia were almost inevitably going to worsen this situation vis-à-vis neighbouring populations in Chad: ‘I have very little doubt that the Hawawir post at Bir Natrun will get involved with Bedayet raiders and we may have some desert fighting in that region, but I do not look upon this as altogether undesirable.’40 Kelly and MacMichael, in this case the men on the spot, were concerned about the effects of all this on the building of an administration in Darfur: Wingate was unmoved. It is worth noting that Wingate’s enthusiasm for arming Arab nomads in Darfur had its parallel in his central role providing political and military support to the much better known Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in the same year.41 The tensions created by the arming of militias spilled over into the months following the invasion and the death of Ali Dinar in November 1916 at the hands of an Anglo-Egyptian force. The northern desert 35 

Wingate to Kelly, 3 June 1916, SAD 129/1/35. Wingate to H. Jackson, 3 May 1916, SAD 128/4/53–54. 37 Ibid. 38  Wingate to Kelly, 5 June 1916, SAD 129/2/25 39  Wingate to Kelly, 3 June 1916, SAD 129/1/35. 40  Wingate to Kelly, 5 June 1916, SAD 129/2/25 41  M. W. Daly, The Sirdar: Sir Reginald Wingate and the British Empire in the Middle East (Philadelphia, 1997), pp. 227–238. 36 

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frontier with Chad which the British acquired after the conquest of Darfur remained a particularly turbulent zone: the further arming of the Kababish by the British facilitated cross-border raids by the Kababish against Gura’an nomads located in French territory, which contributed to tensions in relations between the French and the British. By the end of 1917 the French were threatening to ‘chastise’ the Kababish who they described as ‘brigands’: the British feared the French were being manipulated into action by the Gura’an.42 The facts of events on the northern frontier were much less apparent than the way in which the distribution of arms and the licence given to raiding by the British had created security problems that were exceedingly difficult to resolve. The arming of the border tribes by the British was a policy calculated to produce a certain level of disorder as a price worth paying for facilitating local support for a colonial military adventure. But other groups in Darfur did not wait to be armed by the British in order to seize opportunities for advantage presented by the arrival of a new government and by the chaos created by the arming of militias. In the far north of Darfur, the Sultan of the Zaghawa Kobe, Dosa wad Ferti, reported Kababish raids against his people to the British: it was soon found that the scale of these raids had been greatly exaggerated ‘to induce government to send troops to support [Dosa] against his brothers’ who were locked in a contest for the Sultanate.43 In the south of Darfur, the Bani Halba cattle nomads launched a series of raids against their neighbours, claiming to the British that those neighbours were themselves rebels against the incoming government. The nazir of the tribe himself posed as the representative of the British when seizing cattle during these raids.44 South and west Darfur were said to be in a ‘state of lawlessness’ by July 1916.45 As well as attempts to seize advantage from the presence of the British, there was also considerable score-settling pursued at a local level against those who had enacted the coercion and predation of Ali Dinar’s state. In eastern Darfur the Birgid people under the leadership of their chief Adam Taw rounded up and killed around 50 of Ali Dinar’s soldiers with no encouragement from the British – they also thoroughly pillaged the estates of one of the Sultan’s military commanders in the area.46 The British invasion thus precipitated a bout of widespread inter-group violence in Darfur, some of it directly instigated by British tacit support for looting and raiding carried out by their own allies. This would create dilemmas for the British in the aftermath of the invasion; but the way in which British military strategy had licensed widespread violence in Darfur was glossed over by Wingate’s reports, which suggested that ‘the contribution rendered by many of the native chiefs and notables affords perhaps the most striking testimony to the general 42 

Stack to Wingate, 4 Jan. 1918, SAD 130/9/64. MacMichael to Wingate, 11 June 1916, SAD 129/3. 44  Kelly to Wingate, 24 June 1916, SAD 129/9/22. 45  Kelly to Wingate, 24 July 1916, SAD 129/9/25. 46  Kelly to Wingate, 6 June 1916, SAD 129/9/13. 43 

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recognition by the native population of the benefits conferred on their country by British rule.’47 Such rhetoric was cynical cover for a policy which had indeed conferred material benefits to those on the ‘right’ side of the conflict at the expense of those who were seen to be on the wrong side. Moreover, existing correspondence only hints at the way in which the Darfur Field Force themselves contributed to the lawless state of the province in the aftermath of conquest: one note from Kelly after the occupation of El Fasher simply states ‘regret to say good deal of crime among 13th and 14th Sudanese since arrival, chiefly absence, house breaking, looting and rape. Very difficult to detect offenders’.48 As well as exemplifying the use of a ‘politics of alliance’ and the unconcern of colonial officers for the wellbeing of civilian populations, the invasion was also the first of many pieces of political-military theatre put on by the British in Darfur. Wingate and his officers wanted to make an impression on local peoples: to demonstrate the might of the new government through the use of what they hoped would be terrifying military technologies. From an early stage of planning the invasion, Wingate started to imagine the excitement of sending RAF planes out for the Darfur expedition: as he put it in notes to Kitchener, ‘a few bombs dropped in the vicinity of Ali Dinar’s residence at El Fasher might precipitate matters considerably’.49 The use of two planes was indeed approved at the end of March 1916. These were initially used to drop proclamations offering the aman (peace) for any of Ali Dinar’s troops who surrendered, and warning women and children to take cover if bombs were to be dropped: Wingate gave orders that no bombs were to be dropped without warning.50 A few weeks later bombing expeditions had begun. Machine guns were used to cut down Ali Dinar’s troops from the sky. Wingate was delighted to relay the news of the aeroplanes’ use to his superiors: ‘the alarm the aeroplanes must have given that scoundrel Ali Dinar is delightful to contemplate’, he wrote.51 The Sudan Herald also gave top billing to the contribution of the Royal Flying Corps to the invasion.52 And when British officers recounted tales of the derring-do of the expedition in later years they told colourful and perhaps apocryphal stories which they picked up from local informants about the impact of the planes. One suggested when an aeroplane appeared over El Fasher ‘the Sultan was made to remain inside his palace, as his followers feared that the pilot would let down a rope with a hook on it, hook him and wing him off’.53 Yet the effects of the planes in Darfur was not unambiguously positive for the British. An initial report on one of the first bombing expeditions around the village of Mellit in central Darfur suggested that these 47 

Morning Post 26 Oct. 1916, SAD 448/3/30. Kelly to Wingate, 10 June 1916, SAD 129/9/16. 49  Wingate to Kitchener, 15 Mar. 1916, SAD 470/1/109. 50  Wingate to Clayton, 2 May 1916, SAD 470/2/26. 51  Wingate to Clayton, 31 May 1916, SAD 470/2/67. 52  Sudan Herald 27 May 1916, SAD 448/3/26. 53  Sarsfield-Hall lecture on the conquest of Darfur, 13 Jan. 1929, SAD 681/11/1. 48 

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had successfully hit Ali Dinar’s troops and forced them to evacuate the area. But as the Field Force advanced into Mellit they found that the bombs had killed a wife and child of the Berti shartay Adam Tamim, and had wounded several other women: no soldiers had been killed.54 Kelly ‘thought it better not to mention this in my despatches, as long as the present system of aerial warfare is permitted then so long must women and children run an equal danger of injury with men, and this no matter how careful one is.’ Weather conditions made it very difficult for the pilots to see the ground, and large cloth arrows laid down to assist pilots to find their way were often taken by local populations creating further confusion for the pilots.55 One pilot had a nervous breakdown in the difficult conditions; another was badly wounded by gunfire from the ground.56 By the end of May it had been decided that no further reconnaissance would take place. Kelly later confided to Wingate that the planes had not been worth the ‘great expense’, suggesting that ‘we never had one single bit of information from them of any sort’.57 But perhaps this missed the point: the real value of the aeroplane lay much more in the impression the British believed it would make on the minds of newly conquered subjects rather than its specific military value. Wingate was indeed continuously alive to this aspect of the operation in other contexts as well as that of air power. He offered Kelly some of the British Camel Corps from Kordofan province to reinforce El Fasher but ‘for visual effect’, rather than for any substantive military purpose.58 However, evidence for the view of local people on the technologies employed by the British is very limited: a Royal Flying Corps note suggested that Natives express no amazement when they see a machine flying, but when they see a man get out of it they are staggered. One of them was heard to say ‘The government was always great, but now it is greater than ever.’59

Daly depicts the conquest of 1916 as a ‘tidy triumph’ for the Sudan Government and its Governor General, Wingate, emphasizing the ‘expert’ preparation of the campaign, ‘carried out with attention to detail worthy of a much stronger opponent’.60 Whilst the invasion encountered no serious obstacles to its basic military success, this account has nonetheless emphasized that the British were not fully in control of the consequences of their invasion and the strategies they had employed for success. The generalized violence and disorder that spread throughout Darfur at the time of the conquest is entirely absent from existing accounts of events. And challenges to effective control and administration did not cease with the death of the Sultan. 54 

HA MacMichael to ADI, 27 May 1916, SAD 731/6/126. Royal Flying Corps summary of information, July 1916, SAD 129/7/12. 56  Kelly to Wingate, 25May 1916, SAD 129/9/7. 57  Kelly to Wingate, 20 Sept. 1916, SAD 130/4/19. 58  Wingate to Kelly, 23 Sept. 1916, SAD 130/4/55. 59  Royal Flying Corps summary of information, July 1916, SAD 129/7/12. 60 Daly, Sorrow, p. 108. 55 

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ESTABLISHING COLONIAL GOVERNMENT As is clear from the narrative offered here, Darfur did not become an effectively administered province of Sudan immediately following the violence of conquest. Rather the earliest years of colonial administration remained characterized by a highly unstable oscillation between very substantive devolution of powers to local chiefs on the one hand, and the ready use of state violence in order to achieve basic administrative goals on the other. As Daly suggests, the thinking behind the ‘Native Administration’ policy that was soon to be applied to Sudan as a whole was very much present in the attitudes of Harold MacMichael, Darfur intelligence officer, who formulated the basis for British administrative policy in Darfur immediately after its conquest. MacMichael and Wingate toyed with the possibility of installing Abd al-Hamid Ibrahim – the eldest living member of the senior dynasty of the Sultanate – as an intermediary between government and the peoples of central and northern Darfur, with the idea that some of the prestige of the Sultanate could be maintained under British rule. However this was soon discarded in favour of the idea of ruling through the chiefs of the various communities of the province.61 Interestingly, however, this might not equate to the automatic recognition of current office-holders by the government: Wingate noted that …where upstarts have been put in by the Sultan, it would probably be found convenient and expedient to replace them by men of family who would soon acquire the necessary influence over their followers and whose interests will consequently be linked with the new Govt.62

This was a flexible approach to ‘Native Administration’. It summed up quite well the approach that would be taken by the British in the early years of administration, when there was another shuffling of the deck: some lost, some won from this process, just as had been the case during the previous 40 years of rapid changes in government. The lack of effective surveillance and control by colonial government in the earliest years of British rule meant that the chiefs who did gain the recognition of government were largely left to their own devices, under much less surveillance than had been the case under Ali Dinar. One official suggested in retrospect of these years that ‘in general we allowed the tribal heads to administer their own tribes and impose fines very freely under the impression that this was the traditional method of rule.’63 The occasional description of powers granted to chiefs at this time suggest a very broad scope for action: MacMichael granted a Zaghawa malik the power to inflict unspecified ‘customary’ fines, as long as he consulted with his agawid and referred murder cases to the government.64 61 

See memos by MacMicahel at SAD 127/3 and 127/7. Wingate note on ‘Memorandum concerning the Admin policy to be followed in Darfur in the Immediate Future’, SAD 127/7. 63  G.D. Lampen, note on Native Administration (n.d.), SAD 735/4/45. 64  Dupuis to Civil Secretary, 12 Jan. 1924, NRO CIVSEC 66/10/96. 62 

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Having said this, even in the earliest years of British rule, when administration was at its most unstructured, the sporadic presence and rulings of colonial officials still had an important impact on local politics. Administrators readily intervened in local territorial disputes and chieftaincy politics, dismissing and appointing chiefs with few qualms. In the person of the touring Inspector – later, District Commissioner – always a mobile force in local politics, state power flowed in ‘arterial’ fashion: along relatively narrow and concentrated channels, formed by the movements of the official.65 Yet when subjects did not comply with colonial directives, individual administrators were sometimes ready to use crushing punitive force against local communities. In the early years of British rule, administrators were usually also military officers, and did not distance themselves from the military technologies of colonial power. In 1918, 6,000 cattle were seized from the Bani Halba by a government military patrol in southern Darfur: in the estimation of the officer who led the raid, this ‘seriously crippled them’.66 Yet even as the state used ruthless force to exert authority, it remained sought out by a range of people as a resource which could be pulled into local disputes. Just as some groups had materially benefitted from military alliance with the British during the conquest, so some actors sought out benefits from working with the state in other local political spheres. Even during the conquest people had approached military officers for support in local disputes: one officer suggested that people ‘seemed to take the occupation of the country very casually… While I was in Gillan’s tukl (hut) one of the Darfuris came to him, and wanted him to settle a land dispute, apparently quite sure that the British were going to administer the country right away.’67 Similarly, during 1918 the British started to tour the border sultanates that ran along the border between Chad and Darfur: one report by MacMichael suggested that ‘an impression had got abroad that we were about to occupy and administer Dars Tama, Qimr and Masalit (and even, it seems, Wadai!)’ and ‘intrigue’ had started ‘as soon as we arrived in Masalit.’ A chief from Wadai who was discontented with the lowly position he occupied in the French administration came to Dar Masalit and ‘wrote privately to [MacMichael] by name to the effect that he hoped to accompany us to Wadai and be reinstated in his original position’.68 In other words, despite the frequent resort to force in the early years of British rule, government even in its most rudimentary and indeed brutal form was viewed as a resource as well as a threat by some local people: a dangerous force that could be turned to local advantage if manipulated correctly. Moreover, the extremely limited character of knowledge of local affairs held by colonial officials ensured that they remained rather easily manipulated in line with the personal agendas of influential local elites. 65 

Cooper, F., ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), p. 1533. 66  Angus Gillan, Inspector Nyala, SAD 723/3. 67  Storrar diaries, 7 Apr 1916, SAD 52/1/321. 68  MacMichael report on Dar Masalit, 1918, SAD 730/10/11.

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The state’s interventions in local politics were often highly partial and biased towards the interests of their key local allies. The influence of local elites over individual British officials often had crucial effects on the direction of policy decisions. In the remote peripheries of northern Darfur this was perhaps at its most obvious. Complex chieftaincy politics were well beyond the understanding of individual officials. The first inspector of Northern Darfur, Sarsfield-Hall, was persuaded by persistent local elites to give the Turrti section of the Meidob people independence from the leading Meidob malik in 1917. A later DC in the district noted, ‘I doubt if Sarsfield-Hall realised the Turrti only numbered around 20.’69 But it was perhaps in the politics of inter-ethnic territorial disputes that the partial and biased character of colonial interventions had their most dangerous and damaging impacts, as the state made some of its first, disastrous forays into imposing ‘legible’ administrative solutions on complex local realities. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the experience of early colonial governance in southern Darfur where the degree of misrule and the character of the state’s engagement in local politics sparked outright rebellion.

SOUTHERN DARFUR AND THE NYALA UPRISING In September 1921, a force of 6,000 rebels attacked the government headquarters at Nyala in southern Darfur, led by one Abdullahi Suheini, an Islamic holy man who declared himself the nabi ‘isa (prophet Jesus), sent to overthrow the Antichrist (the British). The Inspector of Southern Darfur District, Tenant McNeill, and the district veterinary officer, Chown, were among those killed in the attack.70 The government was saved from utter humiliation only by the resistance put up against the rebels by government troops and police led by Yuzbashi (Captain) Effendi Riziq. A major patrol then toured southern Darfur to exact collective revenge on the populations that had supported the rebellion. The patterns of engagement between the colonial state and local elites were central to understanding the causes of the rebellion, the largest single uprising against the Condominium in the history of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, known as the Nyala rising.71 McNeill had himself been all too aware of the way in which the complexities of local politics could drag him into taking dangerously partial positions in local rivalries. As he put it: 69  Arkell note on Jebel Meidob, 9 July 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. Sarsfield-Hall was Inspector of Northern Darfur District between 1917 and 1921. 70  McNeill was Inspector El Fasher in 1917, and later that year became Inspector Southern Darfur District. 71  Hassan A. Ibrahim, ‘Mahdist uprisings against the Condominium Government’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 11 (1979). pp. 440–471 discusses the rising in the context of other neo-Mahdist rebellions in early Condominium Sudan.

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every nazir and umda is guilty of slavery offences, of bribery, of misappropriation of property, of extortion etc etc that it is impossible to gloss over them if a determined faction wish to bring them to light. South Darfur is quicksand.72

The metaphor is striking: the state sucked into the dynamics of intense local competition, trying to erect its authority on shifting ground. McNeill’s comment also suggests that legal norms espoused by the colonial state, often bypassed by chiefs in daily practice, could also be a resource for local actors to draw upon in making complaints against chiefs that were primarily made for local political purposes. Whilst complaints against chiefly zulm (oppression) made to the ruler had a long history in Darfur, the very hesitant introduction of anti-slavery laws73 and the legal-bureaucratic norms of the state expanded the repertoire of language of protest available to the ambitious or discontented. Representatives of the early colonial state were uncertain as to how far ‘the rules’ should be applied, and where the limits of acceptable chiefly behaviour lay. McNeill’s own tendency was to apply them rather thoroughly – indeed, too thoroughly for his own good. McNeill was pushed by one of his most important local allies towards taking action against chiefs who might otherwise have stood against rebellion. Malik Mustafa Galgham was a government assessor at Nyala, and previously an official in the Ali Dinar regime at El Fasher. He was one of the many linkages the British regime preserved with the Ali Dinar years, trusted for his knowledge of the people, serving as ‘McNeill’s chief native adviser’ but later perceived to have ‘served too many Governments’ and to be ‘feathering his own nest’. He consistently underplayed the threat of rebellion, which was later interpreted as suggesting his covert support for its success. In a retrospective account, Mustafa Galgham was predictably represented as the epitome of the ‘lying native’: ‘weaving the silken web of oriental tact, preferring the words Mr McNeill best liked to hear, most wanted to believe’. Most importantly Galgham had informed on many of the local leaders of Southern Darfur to McNeill, pointing out their failure to adhere to colonial legal norms in taking bribes or extorting wealth from their people, which resulted in the imprisonment of several of these men. In particular, Malik Dud Murra, the most authoritative figure among the Masalit of Southern Darfur, was in gaol at the time of the rising. The readiness of the Masalit to join the rebellion was later seen to have been facilitated by Malik Dud’s absence from his people.74 It was noted that ‘the fact that every chief in South Darfur had been imprisoned for breaking the law did not inspire their loyalty.’ 72  McNeill Inspector SDD to Governor Darfur, 8 Apr. 1921 NRO CIVSEC (1) 16/2/4. This is a rather similar sentiment to that expressed by Gordon when he acted as Governor-General of Sudan in the 1870s: ‘Darfur is a regular cockpit.’ C. Gordon, July 28, 1877, in G.B. Hill (ed.), Colonel Gordon in Central Africa (London, 1881), p. 256. 73  For details on the government’s ambivalent attitude and policy towards slavery see Daly, Empire, pp. 231–239; 443–446. 74  Wordsworth, DC SDD, ‘Notes on Nyala Rising’, 1942, NRO Darfur 1/19A/102.

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More importantly, particularly close allegiances with individual chiefs could draw the administration into taking biased positions in local disputes. McNeill took a partial position in territorial politics between the Habbaniyya Arabs and Masalit in Southern Darfur, which was a crucial factor in causing the rebellion. This was itself likely related to McNeill’s own engagement in Habbaniyya chieftaincy politics. Contest between the Shibool and Riafa sections of the Habbaniyya over the nazirate of the tribe had been resolved in the Riafa section’s favour, and in 1920, Mahmud Abu Saad had been reappointed as nazir by McNeill.75 Mahmud was a powerful figure in the politics of southern Darfur, and owed his position to McNeill’s support. In contrast, the Masalit were considered a minor group, and McNeill had kept his distance from their chiefs. A year after Mahmud’s appointment, and shortly before the rising, McNeill made a ruling on the location of the boundary between Dar Habbaniyya and the lands of the Masalit who lived in Southern Darfur, which was advantageous to the Habbaniyya and bore no trace of consultation with the Masalit. McNeill fixed the boundary at what he believed to be the ‘traditional’ line of division along the Wadi Khaddai, a key watering point. However, the area around the wadi was likely to have been a zone of interaction between these peoples, rather than a strict boundary between them. Wadis in Darfur served (and serve) as focal watering and grazing points for the seasonal migration of pastoralists; the fertile area around them is also attractive to cultivators. They often act as markers of ethnic frontier zones, but attempts to define rights of access and ownership in such areas have the potential to create tensions between populations drawn to them. When McNeill drew the boundary at the wadi this meant that all land south of it was now defined as part of Dar Habbaniyya, within which the Habbaniyya now had the right to collect customary dues from anyone cultivating or otherwise using what was now defined as their land. The Habbaniyya nazir was not slow to seize this opportunity, demanding payments from many Masalit who cultivated to the south of the river. Many of the rebels interrogated by officers after the Nyala rising mentioned this new imposition as a major grievance, one suggesting that it was the chief reason for Masalit involvement in the revolt.76 Colonial officials would later acknowledge that wadis were bad places to mark out boundaries ‘since villages tend to cultivate both sides of a Wadi. This involves difficulties in collecting cultivation and other dues.’ 77 But this crude ethnicization of privileged rights over scarce, well-watered land was one manifestation of the early colonial state’s ignorance of local realities, establishing rigid boundaries between peoples even in zones of previously longstanding interaction. It also seems to have demon75 

Willis, Assistant Director of Intelligence to Governor Darfur, 17 May 1920, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A)54/3/12. 76  Savile, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 30 Jan. 1922, NRO CIVSEC (1)122/1/1. 77  Assistant Resident Dar Masalit, Report on Darfur-Dar Masalit boundary, 2 Apr. 1932, NRO 2. Darfur, Dar Masalit, 6/1/1.

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strated the perils of overly close relationships between officials and individual chiefs. It is also important to note that some of the most prominent figures of the rebellion were ambitious and/or frustrated players in chieftaincy politics, marginalized by the state. This suggests a significant continuity with earlier rebellions of the late nineteenth century that had also drawn on the discontent of those who had lost out from state interventions into local politics.78 One of the ringleaders was a deposed ex-chief of the Ibba Fallata, who had been influential in the days of Ali Dinar. But by and large the ringleaders were also said to be ‘young and vigorous’ – the rising perhaps drew on generational tensions, with younger men asserting their interests against an entrenched powerful elite of older men, dependent on their allegiance with government for their authority.79 The rebels appointed the son of one of the established Masalit leaders, Ibrahim Wad Abukr Abd al-Rahman, as ‘Sultan’, with the intention of replacing his father.80 Finally, the rebellion also drew on widespread discontent with the manner of tax collection enacted in southern Darfur. Investigations after the uprising found that the muawin (a subordinate Sudanese colonial official) of Southern Darfur had tied up some of the umdas of the Masalit during tax assessment and even publicly flogged them for bringing in insufficient revenue. The same muawin was also known for taking women in every village he visited, before he even visited the village headman. It was said that the rebels called out his name in the course of the rising.81 While this seems to fit with the broader tendency for British officials to blame their ‘native’ subordinates for bringing the government into dispute, it is also worth noting that the offices of the muawins were the buildings in Nyala that were burnt down by the rebels.82 This provides an important reminder that local imaginings of the state were by no means simply created from interactions between British officials and local people: lower level state employees could also be crucial in these processes. As under previous regimes, predatory demands for revenue created widespread discontent on which millenarian leadership could draw.83 An outbreak of cattle plague in 1921 surely intensified the general discontent with government demands – as Kapteijns has noted, colonial tax assessments were not reduced to account for such devastation, and were thus even more resented.84 78 Kapteijns,

Mahdist, p. 88. DCSDD to Governor Darfur, 2 Feb. 1922, NRO CIVSEC (1)122/1/2. 80  Political Officer Patrol 99 to Governor Darfur, 1 Feb. 1922, NRO Darfur 1/1/3. 81  Wordsworth, DC Southern Darfur District, ‘Notes on Nyala Rising’, 1942, NRO Darfur 1/19A/102. 82  Moawin Nyala to Governor, 27 Sept. 1921, NRO Darfur 1/1/3. 83  See Kapteijns, Mahdist, pp.  78–79, 90 for the way in which Mahdist ‘plunderings and arbitrary confiscations’ had earlier fed into the revolt of Abu Jummayza in western Darfur in 1888. Mahdist uprisings had also occurred during the increasingly predatory reign of Ali Dinar. 84  Ibid., pp. 230–231. 79 

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PATROL 99 After the initial dispersal of the rebels, the British made it their first priority to put on a theatrical display of force, to demonstrate that ‘the strength of the government is not to be gauged merely by forces at Nyala’. The governor of Darfur wanted to the patrol to move ‘with as much display of force as possible’.85 Patrol 99, as it was known, involved two Mounted Infantry companies, three Camel Companies, 100 Western Arab Corps infantry, seven Vickers Guns and 200 friendlies (local militias). The patrol engaged with and defeated surviving rebels who had regrouped, but also imposed collective punishment on the communities perceived to be the key supporters of the rebellion: the Masalit and Fallata of southern Darfur. Both peoples lost thousands of cattle to the depredations of the patrol, almost everything they had, according to the governor of Darfur.86 The mass seizure of cattle was a punishment that had also been used by the Sultans and the Mahdist state against peoples deemed rebellious and recalcitrant.87 The collective punishment imposed by the British was not unfamiliar to local populations, though surely no less resented.88 Again, in this patrol, the British made use of local rivalries among the peoples of southern Darfur: the arming of local groups to assist the state in achieving its military objectives therefore remained an important strategy of control in the early years of ‘pacification’ as well as during the conquest of Darfur itself. Habbaniyya ‘friendlies’ were particularly active in the seizure of cattle from the Masalit, most of which they were allowed to keep by the government: Mahmud Abu Saad, for example, the Habbaniyya nazir close to government, seized around two hundred cattle for himself.89 In total, ‘friendly’ tribes kept around 5,000 of the cattle seized from the Masalit and Fallata: government once again thus legitimated and supported what were effectively mass raids by their allies against populations deemed rebellious.90 As well as benefitting materially from participation in the patrol, local elites could also denounce their rivals as rebels or fanatics, and bolster their own position as a result. But even more striking was the emphasis placed on the use of military technologies to make an impression on the minds of the people: this was even more explicit in 1921 than it had been in 1916. In the late 85 

Governor Darfur to Director of Intelligence, 28 Feb. 1922, NRO Darfur 1/2/7. Savile, Governor Darfur to Director of Intelligence, 28 Feb. 1922, NRO Darfur 1/2/7. 87 Theobald, Ali, p. 44; De Waal, Famine, p. 64; Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 98. 88  It is worth noting the obvious point that the principle of collective punishment against instances of resistance was widely accepted and used in early colonial Africa. Lugard made clear statements on the necessity of such actions in his 1906 Political Memoranda. See I.F. Nicolson, The Administration of Nigeria (Oxford, 1969), pp. 148–149. 89  Savile, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 25 Oct. 1922, NRO Darfur 1/1/6. 90  Director of Intelligence to Governor, 19 Jan 1922, NRO Darfur 1/2/7. 86 

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1920s, stories were told by Habbaniyya about the conduct of the patrol (which they or their fathers accompanied) under the leadership of OC (Officer Commanding) Grigg: There he stood with his little stick in his hand, no weapon, but only his stick and held us back till the machine guns had fired burrrrr. Then the Masalit fled and he lowered his stick and let us go after them.91 I heard my father say that when Grigg bey led the patrol against the Masalit their faqihs wrote lists of the Koran on paper and washed off the ink and drenched a bull with it and then sent the bull to charge the Government army; but it was shot dead with a machine gun before ever it reached them!92

The power of the machine gun is the dominant motif, including its capacity to overwhelm spiritual forms of protection. But what should also be noted is the close association of this new technology with the individual British officer, armed with only a stick. The state itself was perhaps understood to consist of these varying elements: the apparently isolated local administrator, and the usually invisible technologies of violence which lay behind him. Such display of force was intended to quell signs of unrest throughout Darfur, not just in the south of the province where the rebellion had broken out. At Kebkebia in northern Darfur, Bimbashi (Major) Craig gave ‘a demonstration ride … in the Rolls Royce box car [an armoured car equipped with a machine gun turret]. The demonstration created a great impression – a large number of the people locking themselves in their houses.’93 Sometimes the display of military technology was also explicitly intended to bolster the authority of the chiefs, by demonstrating the force which stood behind their position at a local level: this was certainly the case in Dar Rizayqat where nazir Ibrahim Musa Madibbu gathered his people for a ‘demonstration of the machine guns’.94 Challenges to the nazir’s authority from factional rivals melted away in the aftermath of the patrol. As well as the use of military technology, the British also readily mistreated the corpses of their vanquished opponents to create more gruesome spectacles for their subjects to internalize. Whilst offering an amnesty to rank-and-file participants in the rebellion, the state declared the ringleaders of the rising to be outlaws and offered rewards for their killing or capture. In other words, the state suspended its own legal norms in order to destroy its enemies, exercising the most naked form of sovereignty possible. The absence of evidence against ringleaders reinforced the preference of officials for their murder. The governor of Darfur was ‘very glad Adam al-Jallabi [one of the ringleaders] was shot’ as it prevented the ‘farce’ of having ‘no evidence 91 

G. D. Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/79. Ibid, SAD 735/1/170. 93  OC Darfur to Chief Staff Officer Egyptian Army, 23 Nov. 1921, NRO CIVSEC (1)122/1/1. 94  OC No 3 Company to OC Patrol 99, 1 Dec. 1921, NRO Darfur 1/1/6. 92 

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whatever’ against him.95 Rewards were paid to those ‘bringing the head of each man together with some persons known to the Government who can identify the head as that of the person for whose killing the reward is intended’.96 Again, ‘friendly’ forces were readily used to pursue the ringleaders and were felt to be particularly effective for this task: McNeill’s successor in Darfur commented that ‘surprise was essential’ to catch the ringleaders and ‘uniforms were considered undesirable’. The inspector commented that friendly forces had conducted ‘what was practically a disciplined exhibition, with which any force of police or MI (Mounted Infantry) could be satisfied … they were fighting without government supervision of any kind, on behalf of the Government at considerable risk to themselves’.97 Ringleaders who were killed by the military or friendly allies had their heads severed and sometimes displayed in Nyala; two corpses were burnt in the centre of the town before a crowd of the town’s inhabitants. Such atrocities were explicitly intended to deepen ‘the impression that the government is too strong to fight against’.98 Again, these were reminiscent of tactics used by the Sultans to demonstrate their power. The market square of El Fasher had regularly been the site of public executions and as recently as 1909 Ali Dinar had displayed the heads of rebels there.99 The British were, consciously or otherwise, replicating some of the practices of their predecessors, ruling through a politics of fear. The patrol therefore appears to have demonstrated the most destructive and violent face of the state possible, in an attempt to intimidate subjects into submission, yet this was accompanied by some efforts at conciliation with those groups that had rebelled. Violence did not preclude negotiation. The new British administrator (now termed District Commissioner) of Southern Darfur accompanied the patrol on its tour of pillage, in order to hear and respond to local grievances.100 This might at first appear a meaningless gesture, but the government subsequently moved the Masalit-Habbaniyya boundary ten miles south of its present location, to the benefit of the Masalit.101 Taxation resentments were also addressed after the rising. The voracious assessment boards were abolished in Darfur, and a general cultivation tax was rather set at a flat rate, eliminating over-assessment by muawins.102 Subjects in 95 

Savile, Governor Darfur to DC SDD, 14 April 1923, NRO Darfur 1/1/4. Proclamation by Savile 11 Dec. 21, NRO Darfur 1/1/4. 97  DCSDD to Governor, 2 Feb. 1922, NRO CIVSEC (1) 122/1/2. 98  ADC SDD to Governor, 7 Sept. 1924, NRO Darfur 1/1/5. 99  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 215; Theobald, Ali, p. 76. As Kapteijns notes, ‘Dealing summarily with human life [was] a recurring element of the mystique surrounding the sultans of the eastern Sudanic belt’. Mahdist, p. 69. At p. 166, Kapteijns also details collective executions and the public display of corpses by the Masalit Sultans. 100  Savile, Governor Darfur to DC SDD, 4 March 1922, NRO Darfur 1/1/5. 101  ADC Political Officer Patrol 99 to Governor Darfur, 1 Feb. 1922, NRO CIVSEC (1)122/1/2. 102  Report by the Governor General on the finances, administration and condition of Sudan (Khartoum, 1923). 96 

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southern Darfur thus experienced the bi-polar character of the state in the course of a single patrol.103 Crucially, however, the association between the two was clearly very close: the District Commissioner, a civilian official, had personally accompanied the military patrol. The DC was now surely seen in terms similar to the old maqdums of the south during the Sultanate: these men had been mobile warlords, combatting resistance but also settling disputes and hearing complaints. The Nyala rising also had some significance for the general direction of administrative policy in Darfur. The overall official perception that emerged from the rebellion was that the state needed to be more closely aligned with strong local authorities, who could provide effective support to the government. The Civil Secretary noted in missives to the Governor General’s office after the rising that ‘practically every tribal shaykh in the district (excepting those of the Messalit and Fellata)… acted loyally and gave active assistance to the Government’.104 Investigations among the Massalit suggested that ‘the poorer people joined the faqih but the umdas did not’.105 Whilst this might have been something of an exaggeration, it is clear that in the aftermath of the rising most of the chiefs of Darfur did decisively throw their lot in with government – where some sub-chiefs continued to protect prominent leaders of the uprising with whom they had kinship ties, these individuals were dismissed or punished by the administration. Chiefs were therefore seen to be useful allies against Mahdist millenarianism: they were to report and arrest faqihs who appeared radical in their preaching, and unauthorized agents of the Mahdi’s son, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi (often referred to in colonial documents as SAR). As Kapteijns points out, chiefs had their own reasons to support this policy – most obviously the movement of many of their subjects to Aba Island, SAR’s base of power in eastern Sudan, which threatened to undermine the basis of their own authority.106 Officials were increasingly aware that their support of chiefs had to be more obvious, direct and regularized to ensure that chiefs delivered the results expected of them. Support for the rising had come from areas in Southern Darfur ‘where the malcontents and ne’er do wells of many tribes were collected among three badly controlled and fanatic tribes – the Gimr, Masalit and Fallata’.107 One of the two Fallata nazirs was thought to have had ‘no hold whatever over his nas’.108 The rising therefore reinforced British assumptions that colonial subjects should be contained within clearly bounded and controlled 103  S.

Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas (Berkeley, 1996), p.  110; see also G. Lienhardt, ‘The Sudan: Aspects of the South Government among Some of the Nilotic Peoples, 1947–52’, Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies 9 (1982), p. 27. 104  Civil Secretary to Private Secretary, 11 Mar. 1922, NRO Darfur 1/1/5. 105  DC SDD to Governor, 24 Jan 1922, ibid. 106 Kapteijns, Mahdist, pp. 240–243. 107  IDC SDD to Governor, 24 Jan 1922, NRO Darfur 1/1/5. 108  ADC Political Officer Patrol 99 to Governor Darfur, 1 Feb. 1922, NRO CIVSEC (1)122/1/2.

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tribal units. Some reports suggested that the most significant source of support for the rising was thought to be ex-slaves of the Habbaniyya, who were now concentrated in the ‘black’ area around Kalaka, where the Masalit were also at their most numerous. By this count, it was not thought to be the Masalit proper who were the majority among the rebels, but rather ‘detribalized persons’, ‘submitting to no proper control’. Many of these rebels lived in villages in the border zone between Dar Habbaniyya and Dar Fallata and they gathered at Um Bellula, a lake on the borders of Fallata and Habbaniyya country. And the rebels moved along the boundaries between different chiefdoms: a later DC suggested ‘it almost looks as if the faqih had an insight into the value of running the boundary fence so that all could disown him’. When Fallata and Fur chiefs were asked whether the faqih had been in their territory they each claimed that he had been in the territory of the other. 109 The lesson was plain: the rebellion had gained energy in spaces that were at the peripheries even of local systems of authority. Such spaces had to be more effectively controlled: a lack of tribal ‘discipline’ was the greatest danger colonial government faced. In short then, whilst the Sudan Government was already shifting towards the idea of regularizing and formalizing the judicial powers of local chiefs in the early 1920s, the Nyala rising became a source of additional rhetorical support for that policy. But it is worth pointing out here that the policy did not immediately prevent the recurrence of unrest in Darfur. In 1927 another Mahdist inspired rebellion broke out, much smaller than the Nyala rising, and this time occurring in western Darfur – but it demonstrated the persistence of misrule in the particular context of that district. We will return to this in the next chapter.

CONCLUSION The early years of conquest and pacification in Darfur, until at least 1921, should be understood as years of continuity with the several decades that preceded them. Rebellion and the crushing use of state violence to repress such rebellion were consistent features of the political landscape between 1871 and 1921.110 Nonetheless, the scale of explicit resistance to British rule never again reached the peak shown during the Nyala rising. Put simply, the brutality and violence of the response to the rebellion had shown the disparity between the military capacity of the state and that of rebellious subjects was too wide to be challenged. The machine gun was an unbeatable enemy. After 1921 some people started to deal more directly with the state perhaps because they saw it as overwhelmingly powerful: those who gained the support 109 

Report on the Nyala Rising, Orlebar papers (date unknown), SAD 739/13/26. The Ali Dinar period was marked by rebellion, repression, and finally severe famine and increasing disorder in the final years of the Sultanate, though O’Fahey’s informants did not include these years in their definition of um kwakiyya.

110 

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of the state in their local political struggles would gain a powerful ally indeed. And local representatives of the state had also shown themselves to be not altogether unreceptive to local demands and elite interests. Even as the patrol looted local economies a single British official listened to local grievances and revised a much-hated boundary; taxation demands were amended; most significantly, the state associated itself more closely with local chiefs, devolving legally defined powers to these men while simultaneously increasing their own direct surveillance of local affairs. But, while more systematic engagement between state and subjects developed after 1922, the performance of violence remained an important tool that could be used by the state to project its authority. And the extent to which government built legitimacy throughout the province even in the following decade was limited. Whilst the use of military patrols was restricted, the rule of chiefs as supported by the state at a local level was in some areas replete with the use of coercion and violence to achieve administrative goals. This is particularly clear in Western Darfur District, the site of one of the most ambitious and spectacular failures of Native Administration in the province, examined in the next chapter. This period also has considerable significance for contextualizing the events of recent years in Darfur. If the British were not the first pioneers of the arming of ‘friendly’ forces against their enemies, they were very ready practitioners of this strategy, especially obviously during the conquest itself, when local militias were given de facto licence to pursue their own independent agendas whilst supposedly acting in the name of government. The widespread inter-group raiding and violence around the time of conquest, and the echo of this in the aftermath of the Nyala rising, evidences a deeper history of state power ceding its monopoly on violence in order to achieve short-term military and political goals in Darfur than is often acknowledged in contemporary literature. Over-stretched states have consistently relied on local partners for cheap military support in this remote region: and they have risked diluting their own sovereignty in order to do so. The next chapters will consider how the British attempted to build a more stable and ‘legible’ administrative system that would make such strategies unnecessary; yet as we will see the state’s sovereignty remained partial and dependent on local allies who it only controlled to a limited extent.

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3 ‘Healthy Oppression’? Native Administration and State Violence in Western Darfur, 1917–1945

Beginning in 1922, the Sudan Government regularized the so-called ‘customary’ authority of chiefs of various kinds across northern Sudan – an approach which would also later be adopted in southern Sudan under the aegis of Southern Policy. The elevation of the pragmatic policy of ruling through local intermediaries into a governing ideology of ‘Indirect Rule’ – or ‘Native Administration’ as it was termed in Sudan – is a process that has attracted much attention from scholars of colonial Africa. Yet the ground-level conflicts and negotiations that shaped the functioning of this system remain worthy of our attention as revealing central dynamics of state formation and local politics. The case of Darfur reminds us that deeper histories of pre-colonial state formation in Africa, which provided well established local elites that might be co-opted by colonial government, did not preclude innovation and violence, shaped by the structures, discourse, and the ultimate weaknesses of the colonial state, as well as by the interests and practices of those who it recognized as its agents on the ground. Indeed, given the continually shifting and violent processes of state formation in pre-colonial Darfur, this should be no surprise. As Spear has argued more widely of colonial Africa (albeit with rather less emphasis on state violence), state power was ultimately both constituted and constrained by its reliance on local elites.1 Moreover, a close examination of these processes reveals considerable differences in historical experience in various areas of Darfur, alongside significant commonalities. The analytical unity of ‘Darfur’ is too often assumed in scholarship and reporting; Darfur needs to be examined as a collection of diverse regions and cultures. Accordingly, the following chapters are divided in their coverage between Western Darfur District, or Zalingei District as it was sometimes called – the heartland of the Fur people – and the pastoralist peripheries of the region, in both southern and northern Darfur. Part of the reasoning behind this division is the rather different character of chieftaincy politics and protest in each case. Protest among the sedentary Fur, compared to that of the (semi-) nomadic pastoralist peripheries, reveals to a considerable extent the 80

1 

Spear, ‘Neo-Traditionalism’, pp. 8–13.

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relative weakness or strength of the state in these different locales. A central expectation of government in Darfur was that it regulate and limit the exactions of its representatives at the local level. Protest – and the government’s response to it – was a crucial means of establishing the regulation that populations expected from the state in a context where other forms of communication between state and society were very limited. Protest could damage the legitimacy of the state, but could also engage local populations and officials in a dialogue which might constitute the very making of the state at a local level. Chiefship in the two regions under examination also has a rather different and deeper historical trajectory. As already demonstrated, chiefship in the Fur heartland of pre-colonial Darfur had held close associations with state power for at least a century: appointments and powers were set by the Sultan, and the shartays of Darfur had responsibilities both up to the state level as well as down to their subjects. Crucially, shartays had wielded judicial powers delegated from the state well before the arrival of any external colonialism. In the pastoralist peripheries, the institutions of chiefship were much less closely tied to and defined by the state. Whilst northern Zaghawa pastoralists had been under the authority of paramount chiefs for some centuries, southern Baqqara peoples had only recently come under the rule of state-appointed nazirs. The concentration of institutionalized judicial authority in the hands of these pastoralist chiefs was much more of an ‘invention’ than was the case in the Fur heartlands. These varied histories of chiefship had important implications for the varied politics of Native Administration in these regions. However, the following chapters demonstrate commonalities as well as differences in historical experience. Darfur did not share one common political culture: but nonetheless there were also important commonalities between pastoralists and farmers, Arabs and non-Arabs – especially in terms of local expectations of rulers – that defy the racial binaries and lines of division which the British believed to structure the societies they governed.

RACIAL HIERARCHY AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPEDIENCE To a great extent, the assumptions behind colonial policy in Darfur were held by administrators across Sudan and indeed across British Africa: the idea that ‘tradition’ was the surest means through which to rule, and that the intrusion of modernity into such traditions was potentially dangerous, undermining administrative stability. These ideas were colourfully elaborated by Governor-General Maffey at the time of the major Native Administration legislation in Sudan in 1927: Maffey wrote of protecting the Sudanese from ‘the septic germs of modernity’ by supporting traditional structures of rule.2 In the way 2 

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Maffey, Governor General to Governors, 1 Jan. 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/9/33.

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the story of colonial government has widely been told by historians, the African traditions which the British so relied on were imagined to be ‘tribal’ in character: Africans were thought to naturally belong to tribes, each of which was a distinct culture unit led by a chief. 3 These were to be made into administrative units, conveniently and cheaply governed by their natural chiefly leaders, with only light supervision from their British masters. As well as harnessing traditional legitimacy to the colonial state, this policy was always about reducing the costs of government: Berry’s formulation – that Indirect Rule was a means of achieving ‘hegemony on a shoestring’ – is entirely apt.4 Yet whilst the policy of Indirect Rule had a fairly consistent rationale across British Africa, colonial officials did recognize difference among the hugely diverse communities they ruled, and were perhaps less dogmatically attached to the idea of distinctively tribal administration than has sometimes been suggested. Frederick Lugard, architect of the classic form of Indirect Rule in Northern Nigeria, fully believed that the Emirs of that region were ‘alien’ Hamites in origin, who had forced the submission of weaker ‘natives’; but they were also very capable and useful ‘intermediaries’ between the local populations and the British, whose rule was to be preserved and supported, if tempered by British standards of morality.5 Of course, in the British imagination such ‘advanced’ communities as seen in northern Nigeria were not the norm in Africa: ‘primitive’ or ‘early tribal’ societies were much more so. But Darfur, in the British imagination at least, had more in common with the Muslim Sokoto Caliphate of northern Nigeria than it did with the principally stateless societies of Kenya or Tanzania. Interestingly, the idea of importing an expert from Nigeria with experience of Indirect Rule to advise on policy in Darfur was rejected by officials who preferred to avoid imposing lessons from West Africa as though the business of administration were ‘a direct science’.6 Ultimately, pragmatic solutions had to be evolved to particular circumstances. Nonetheless, existing ruling institutions of the ‘advanced community’ that Darfur represented were to be integrated into colonial administration. Therefore, whatever the innovations of Indirect Rule, British discourse maintained the idea that their mission in Darfur was to restore the traditional institutions of the Sultanate that had been damaged by the turbulence of the late 19th century. This idea was not novel to Darfur: the British often saw it as their mission not just to preserve but also to restore the ‘authentic’ 3 

Ranger, ‘Invention’. S.Berry, ‘Hegemony on a shoestring: colonial rule and access to land’ Africa 62 (1992), pp. 327–55 5  F. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (London, 1922), p.  198. The use of Ganda elites in the administration of non-Ganda kingdoms and peoples in colonial Uganda points to a similar conception of the utility of the ‘sophisticated’ kingdom of Buganda. See A. D. Roberts, ‘The sub-imperialism of the Baganda’, The Journal of African History 3 (1962), pp. 435–450. 6  MacMichael, Civil Secretary, 27 February 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 4 

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traditions of the societies they governed in the face of the ‘disorder’ of the preceding century across Africa.7 But this does seem to have taken on a particular ideological force in Darfur. The Governor of the province in the years when enthusiasm for Indirect Rule was approaching its height, Bence-Pembroke (1925–1927), noted that Darfur had been ‘governed by a single Native Administration for more than two centuries’ before the arrival of the Egyptians in the 1870s. It was also Darfur’s tragedy, in the British imagination, that Ali Dinar had ‘made no attempt to rule his kingdom on the lines of his forebears’. The British mission was to restore the right order of things in Darfur, and reverse the evidence of recent decay: Bence-Pembroke wrote wistfully of the ruins of mosques and ‘long-vanished villages, which testify to a past prosperity’.8 This nostalgia had its limits, however. While the British experimented with using surviving members of the Sultanic dynasty to enhance their legitimacy in parts of Darfur, they ultimately shied away from restoring the Sultanate. This can in part be attributed to the failings of these experiments with the Keira dynasty, to be explored in this chapter. Moreover, as we have already seen, the institutions of the Sultanate had never enjoyed a universal reach among the societies of Darfur, and the British were not blind to this. Administrators in Darfur therefore also recognized that they were dealing with diverse societies, with quite distinct histories and cultures of governance, even if they explained this diversity in crude terms of racial biology. Among the nomadic populations of Southern Darfur, the British placed great emphasis on tribal identity and territory (ironically, given the only recent creation of paramount chieftaincy in this area); whilst in other areas, especially in western Darfur, more straightforwardly administrative territorial divisions were maintained, with no particular ‘tribal’ connotation, reflecting an apparently greater (though never universal) cultural homogeneity in the Fur heartland. Officials often emphasized that Fur was not a tribal identity, but a linguistic label.9 Others emphasized the existence of a kind of ‘Dar-patriotism’ in some areas, itself evidence of group identification with territory that nonetheless had no ethnic connotation.10 ‘Tribe’ was not therefore the only guiding logic of British administrative policy in Darfur. Officials were also quite frank here, as elsewhere, about the extent to which effective administration required innovation that often included the amalgamation of smaller communities into larger, apparently more viable administrative units under single heads. Such a tendency in policy reached a peak in the later 1930s when the then Governor of Darfur, Ingleson, argued for the grand amalgamation of all the non-Arab populations of southern and western Darfur under the lead7 

Ranger, ‘Invention’, p. 249. Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur, Proposals for devolution, January 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 9  Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30. 10  Dupuis to Keen, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/23/67. 8 

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ership of a single chief, on the grounds that these peoples had ‘ceased to be tribally minded to an amazing extent’. His own experience of the region suggested that groups including the Daju and Birgid of southern Darfur had ‘lived with, or intermarried with the Fur for so long that their customs are indistinguishable and in many cases they speak Fur as well as Arabic’. Ingleson expressed a strong preference to ‘avoid division into separate tribal entities where they are ceasing to exist’.11 Amalgamations of diverse populations under a single head might not be the most stable of political units, as we will see in subsequent chapters: these might be vigorously contested by peoples or sections who were thus brought under the authority of ‘outsiders’. But the British often favoured the potential efficiencies of such innovations, reflecting the state’s preference for ‘legible’, tidy administrative units. Giving each ethnic group its own administrative machinery would have created a vast number of small, untenable units even more difficult to govern than to represent on a map. Although official attitudes to tribe demonstrated some degree of flexibility, there was also a racialized dimension to administrative policy that went beyond simple pragmatism. The British often drew distinctions between what they imagined to be relatively sophisticated Arabs on the one hand and primitive ‘negroid’ populations on the other, in line with the dominant racial thinking of the day. As one put it, in terms of ‘beliefs and prejudices’ there was ‘a considerable area of common ground between “Arabs” and British. There was much less when you came to the Negroids.’12 One official described the Fur as ‘lice’ and Arabs as ‘gentlemen’.13 It is important to note that Arab elites in Darfur made similar assertions about the inferiority of non-Arabs, and that colonial conceptions of racial hierarchy were reinforced by local discourses. This could have important implications for the management of inter-group relations: when mediating tensions between Rizayqat and Dinka on Darfur’s southern borders Lampen admitted that ‘I felt from my Arab associations some of the Baqqara prejudice against these peoples as barbarians confronting the fringe of the civilised world’: he also described the Dinka as ‘abominable beggars’.14 Here, local conceptions of race were associated with a long history of enslavement of Dinka by the Rizayqat (as well as consequent inter-marriage between these two peoples). But colonial officials nonetheless brought their own racial thought into these contexts, ideas which they sometimes expressed in particularly vicious language. Another official wrote of the Dinka in his diary: ‘a bigger lot of bastards I have never seen in my life… a wise though not beneficent government would wipe out the entire race… God must bear the blame for the creation of the Dinka and we the further blame for 11 

Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 26 June 1938, NRO CIVSEC 2/1/1/3. Ingleson served as Governor between 1935 and 1944. 12  P.J. Sandison, ‘Fragment on devolution’, SAD 691/5/144. 13  Crawford diary, 15 January 1933, SAD 502/5. 14  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/33, 735/1/50.

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not having exterminated them.’15 While such violent language was rarely committed to writing, ideas of racial hierarchy clearly influenced the thinking of officials on the ground in Darfur. Racial difference was thought to impact on the success or failure of Indirect Rule: the ‘common ground’ between Arabs and British was thought to make the policy easier to manage in Arab areas than among non-Arab populations. Officials also emphasized what they perceived to be a history of enmity between the Arabs of Darfur and the Fur state to legitimize an administrative system which – at least in the state rhetoric of the day – attempted to keep these two racial groups separate: Bence-Pembroke suggested ‘The Arab will never submit to the Fur, nor the Fur to the Arab.’16 MacMichael claimed there was ‘an Arab system and a Furian system’ in Darfur and that ‘each can and should be followed up in its own sphere’.17 Such a view was not altogether imaginary – there was a long history of violence between the Sultans and the Arab nomads who lived on their frontiers – though it ignored very real ties of trade, intermarriage and periods of peaceful cooperation between these groups. Moreover, as already noted, the Sultans had also sometimes appointed favoured Arabs to administer non-Arab populations, thus asserting the state’s authority over that of local leaders, regardless of ‘race’ or ethnic identity. Indeed, despite their rhetoric of separation, it is striking that the British were also willing to amalgamate non-Arabs and Arabs in territorially defined administrative units, even from the earliest days of colonial rule. In 1929 the Kalaka court was established in southern Darfur at Buram, the major settlement in Dar Habbaniyya, bringing together Arabs (Habbaniyya) and non-Arabs (Masalit and Fallata) under the court presidency of the umda of Nyala town, Adam el-Nur. The detail of this structure is worth explanation: Adam’s ethnicity was Jima’a Arab (a tribe from the White Nile area of central Sudan), and he was therefore assumed to be impartial in disputes between Darfuri tribes; the chiefs of the Habbaniyya and Fallata both regularly stayed with him when they visited Nyala, and, crucially, he had previously been Ali Dinar’s agent in Kalaka.18 He was, nonetheless, an Arab: there was no question of subordinating the Habbaniyya to a ‘negroid’ court president. Why was such an experiment attempted? Kalaka was the area in which the Nyala rising had taken root, characterized by a mixed, heterogeneous population, which existing devolution of powers to tribal heads had failed to satisfactorily manage. Officials acknowledged there were ‘no well-defined tribal boundaries’ between the groups in 15 

Crawford diaries, 14 March 1933, SAD 502/5/79 Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur, ‘Proposals for Devolution’, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 17  MacMichael, Civil Secretary, notes on proposals for devolution, 31 Jan. 1927, NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60. 18  Dupuis, Governor to Civil Secretary, 25 February 1929, NRO CIVSEC 1/21/62. 16 

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this area, who lived in close contact with one another: the northern umudiyya of the Habbania was over half populated by Masalit, and Fallata and Masalit villages were ‘cheek by jowl’. Most serious crimes therefore involved members of more than one ethnic group, so an inter-tribal court was necessary to manage these complex cases and relationships.19 It is therefore important to note that the rhetoric of ethnic and racial classification and separation was sometimes – indeed often – undone by a reliance on more complex structures which could deal with the realities of inter-ethnic relationships and interactions that crossed the racial dichotomies of the British imagination. Indeed, two years after the establishment of the Kalaka court, the new umda of Nyala, a Fur, was made President of a new southern district court that included several other Arab and non-Arab groups under its jurisdiction. One small Arab group, the Tarjam, opted for inclusion in the Fur-led court as a means of avoiding amalgamation with their neighbouring Arabs, the Bani Halba, with whom they had very poor relations. To justify this amalgamation of groups of varying ‘racial’ identity, the Governor of Darfur claimed ‘generally speaking the Darfur “Arab” has no rooted objection to Fur domination’, implicitly relying on the history of Fur Sultanate as a precedent for this arrangement, and contradicting views expressed elsewhere about the impossibility of Arabs submitting to the Fur. 20 Officials sometimes claimed a positive virtue for these expedient arrangements, suggesting they improved inter-tribal relations; such claims would become more common in the later years of colonial rule. 21 In short, colonial discourse could be extremely malleable when required to justify convenient administrative solutions. Racial thought was real, and influenced policy and practice; but it was often subordinated to administrative expediency. This all also reminds us that ethnic homogeneity never existed on the ground in any territory of Darfur: only in the imagination of colonial officials, and not always even there.

CHIEFTAINCY POLITICS AND PROTEST IN PASTORALIST AND SEDENTARY COMMUNITIES Despite these complexities, and the relatively common amalgamation of peoples in single administrative units, there were some real differences in the experience of Native Administration between pastoralist and Fur societies in Darfur that are worthy of note. If one considers the history of chieftaincy disputes in colonial Darfur, the evidence is particularly striking: while factional disputes over office were extremely common in pastoralist societies, these were almost unheard of among the Fur. Why was this? 19 Ibid. 20 

Dupuis, Governor of Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 Apr. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 21  DPMD April 1937, Fasher District.

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In nomadic societies, internal political conflict is paradoxically a key means of creating social coherence and hierarchy, as participants in that conflict assert their social status by the fact of their participation. As Asad puts it, rivals in competition with one another do not consent so much to ‘the concrete results of the competition at any given time, as the necessity for competition itself’.22 This sort of lineage or section based internal competition was present in pastoralist societies in Darfur before the arrival of the British, but it intensified with the advent of Native Administration, and the greater powers bestowed on those recognized as paramount chief. The British often referred to such competition expressed in vigorous chieftaincy disputes as evidence of a ‘democratic Arab spirit’ – but non-Arab pastoralists, especially Zaghawa, experienced similar kinds of internal tension and competition. The consequent prevalence of chieftaincy disputes in the pastoralist peripheries of Darfur occupied much of the energies of colonial administrators. This stands in quite stark contrast to the history of western Darfur under British rule, where chieftaincy disputes and competition for office are almost completely absent from the archival record. One official, MFA Keen, stationed in Zalingei between 1932 and 1935, suggested the lack of overt chieftaincy politics could be explained with reference to the Fur ‘mentality’, and what was termed the ‘complete lack of public opinion or spirit’ among the Fur, who he compared very negatively with Arabs in this respect. The idea of majlis or tribal council among the Arabs – where tribal affairs might be vigorously debated – was in Keen’s view wholly absent in western Darfur: ‘the Fur is not majlis-minded’.23 But leaving the racialized imaginaries of officials behind, one might draw on Mamdani’s analysis of pre-colonial chieftaincy to more effectively explain the differing trajectories of chieftaincy politics in the different societies of Darfur. Mamdani establishes a dualistic model of pre-colonial chiefs: one category was closely tied to pre-colonial states, and fulfilled functions defined by the ruler. This he calls administrative chieftaincy. Another category was more clearly local in character, accountable only to local communities: this Mamdani calls ‘traditional’ chieftaincy.24 In the case of Darfur such a dichotomy may be difficult to sustain: as we saw in the first chapter even chiefs on the peripheries of the Sultanate held important links with central state apparatus. Yet it is also clear that chiefs in ‘core’ areas of the Sultanate were much more closely tied to the state apparatus than their more remote equivalents. The shartays of western Darfur, who often managed to retain their positions under the British, had already acted very much as direct functionaries of the Sultans, even if they also had spiritual ties and obligations to the communities and land they governed. As such, and as Mamdani argues more widely, such administrative chiefs were always somewhat 22 Asad,

The Kababish Arabs: Power authority and consent in a nomadic tribe (London, 1970), p. 234. 23  Report on the Zalingei Emirate, 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 24 Mamdani, Citizen, pp.  39–42

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more accountable upwards to the ruler than downwards to local populations, and were usually supported by the state against local complaints. This may help to explain the (probably over-blown) observation of Keen that ordinary Fur had ‘always regarded authority as synonymous with oppression. He is still terrified of anyone having or claiming any authority.’25 This was not simply a colonial prejudice: Sultanic documents shows that rulers themselves acknowledged the endemic nature of official oppression. It was this history, some officials claimed, that meant it was very rare for them to hear complaints made by Fur against their chiefs. It was also the case that the existence of the shartay’s office – and its heritability within particular families – was simply much better established than that of the Baqqara nazirs, and the sedentary Fur had fewer fissiparous tendencies than nomadic pastoralists. Nonetheless, colonial assumptions of inherent Fur passivity require challenge: we have seen that people had long expected limits to be set on the predations of state agents. Officials claimed that they had little contact with the ordinary peasant due to ‘his own backwardness and superstition and to his ignorance of Arabic’.26 In fact it was the failure of officials to learn Fur, together with the tendency for the state to support the oppressions of the shartays which no doubt created a widespread sense that approaching government was a fruitless endeavour. While chiefs and some elders were able to communicate with officials in Arabic – the only local language which administrators received training in before their arrival in Sudan – most ordinary people spoke only Fur, and as a result presenting complaints against one’s chief was virtually impossible. Colonial officials did not fulfil their expected function of controlling and restraining the oppressions of their own agents until at least the late 1930s. Yet ordinary Fur did themselves act in a number of ways to evade the oppressions of their shartays and, when possible, to influence the agents of government to regulate their subordinates: migration, appeals against court decisions and outright rebellion were part of the repertoire of protest, which was expressed less in terms of factional competition for office, and more in direct rejections of the authority of shartays by ordinary people. One might suggest that while protest politics was less visible in the Fur heartland than in the pastoralist peripheries, when it became visible to the administration, it reflected popular sentiment against particular shartays rather than factional rivalries among elite families. Despite the reality of local resistance, the history of administrative chieftaincy in western Darfur principally remained a history of oppression and violence, sanctioned and supported by British administrative agents. Particularly in the first two decades of colonial rule in western Darfur, violence was not perceived by officials to be a problem for the state’s legitimacy if it was enacted by chiefly subordinates, who it was 25 

Zalingei Annual Report 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 Mar. 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/21/62 26 

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believed had a deeper history of using violence to wield authority. In other words, the violence of the shartay was branded as locally ‘legitimate’ violence by officials who found it convenient to thus both distance themselves from and tacitly accept the use of force to maintain control. Although the British were also well aware of the limits of the extent to which they controlled or defined the roles of the shartays – and at one level this demonstrates the limits of colonial power – this sort of imprecision was also not an issue that required resolution. As long as tax was brought in and rebellion did not occur, then the use of violence to achieve the limited goals of the state was perfectly acceptable. The violence of the state was thus increasingly devolved to and enacted by local chiefs who embodied the force of the state at a local level: they shaped the character of the state on the ground. While the state itself explicitly remained distant from and ignorant of local societies – not even being able to communicate in the language of the people – its capacity and will to regulate the behaviour of its agents was utterly lacking. As a result, the legitimacy of the state in western Darfur was perhaps particularly weak in these years. Yet attempts to approach government or senior Fur leaders to complain about abuses also demonstrates that the Fur still expected government to fulfil this key role and thus suggested how government might gain a foothold in societies which many officials dismissed as too primitive to ever understand.

STATE VIOLENCE AND THE SHARTAYS BEFORE 1928 There is little detail on the early years of colonial rule in western Darfur in the archival record, but anecdotal material suggests that the use of violence (in several different guises and scales) was central to the everyday practice of administration. The first military inspector of the district readily flogged shaykhs to extract forced labour, and was remembered by local people as having ‘hanged a murderer in the market-place on a market day on a tree’ on his arrival in the district: such a spectacle deterred any further homicides during his tenure.27 But the Fur did not simply grant obedience to the new rulers: in 1918, a prisoner escaped from custody, and was sheltered by villagers in the Jabal Marra mountains. The new civilian inspector of the district, Angus Gillan (an Oxford graduate, Olympic rower and later Civil Secretary of Sudan) saw this as ‘an excellent opportunity to inflict a sharp lesson on those somewhat turbulent people’. He burnt all three villages in the area where the prisoner was reported to be held. Approaching the last of these villages, ‘the people were seen to be fleeing and, as they refused to stop, fire was opened on them, unfortunately with no results, owing to long range.’28 Collective punishment remained central to state authority. 27 

28 

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H. Boustead, The Wind of Morning (London, 1971), p. 123. Gillan, Report to Governor re tour in Jebel Marra, 28 Mar. 1918, SAD 723/3/2.

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The Fur suffered not just from the predations of state officials, but also from those of their own chiefs. Initial attempts to impose some sort of regularity on the judicial powers wielded by the shartays of western Darfur were limited in character and it was later recognized that the shartays in these years had ‘reverted to unrecognised and more or less surreptitious dealing’. 29 After the Nyala rising, although the Fur shartays were not included in the 1922 Powers of Nomad Sheikhs Ordinance – because they were the chiefs of sedentary communities – they were nonetheless given sulta (powers) by the government which allowed them to impose fines of up to £E3 in criminal cases. 30 Given the way in which the years of more centralized control under Ali Dinar had created new rivals to the authority of the shartay at a local level, the very fact of leaving the shartay to exercise judgement without close supervision – and with the support of the state – was an important shift in the dynamics of local authority. The courts run by the shartays ran roughshod over the interests of local populations: shartays oversaw sharia property cases as well as criminal cases and were known to confiscate whole estates for themselves as punishments on occasion, in a bizarre take on sharia justice. Shartays also took on new kinds of administrative roles delegated by the British and exploited the novelty of such roles to create new avenues of accumulation: vaccination programmes run in times of epidemic outbreaks of disease were overseen by the shartays who charged ‘vaccination fees’ to those participating in the programme. 31 British officials were well aware of such abuses. But they did rather little to intervene against them in the early years of their rule. When officials approached shartays about their abuses, their response was to argue that the Fur only understood this form of authority, and that ‘unless coerced and reminded constantly of their state of subjection, they get completely out of hand’. 32 This line of argument was easily accepted by officials, whose existing prejudices coincided with the justification presented by the chiefs. Officials and chiefs colluded in the creation of a new form of ‘decentralised despotism’ that fits Mamdani’s classic analysis rather closely. 33 Chiefly abuses both depended on and constituted state authority at a local level. It is hardly surprising that the British turned a blind eye to the coercion and extortion employed by shartays given the practices they had themselves employed in the first years of their rule. Yet whilst British 29 

Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 12 January 1924, NRO CIVSEC 66/10/96. 30  MacMichael Civil Secretary to Legal Secretary, 9 Feb. 1924, NRO CIVSEC 66/10/96. 31  Dupuis, Governor of Darfur, to Civil Secretary, 13 May 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/20/61 32  Dupuis, Governor of Darfur, to Civil Secretary, 13 May 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/20/61. 33 Mamdani, Citizen, p. 144.

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officials kept their distance from the practices of their shartays, Sudanese police officers still supervised the collection of taxation and the rounding up of labour for road-clearing. In these fields of administration, shartays were kept quite close to heel by the policeman who ‘finds no common ground’ with Fur society ‘and remains a stranger and object of terror’: policemen were not recruited locally, and were often Chadian migrants with at best only limited connections to local communities. Indeed, despite the devolution of judicial roles to the shartays, officials believed that by the late 1920s ‘without police the Fur will do nothing.’ 34 In other words, the state by the late 1920s still rested on the direct and indirect use of coercion. Whilst officials routinely referred to the passivity of the Fur, people attempted to resist oppressive forms of authority where they could. Officials noted that migration remained the main form of protest: Fur moved out of their dar into neighbouring areas where authority was perceived to be less oppressive. This was especially common along the border between Dar Masalit and Western Darfur District. Here, Fur shartays carried out violent raids against people they claimed to have run away to Dar Masalit to evade government taxation. And it was in this turbulent border area between Zalingei and Dar Masalit that a new, relatively minor rebellion broke out in 1927: it appears this was principally supported by those who had been ‘driven from their homes’ by the demands of the shartays and continued to be subject to violent expressions of those demands. 35 The Zalingei rising of 1927, as it was known, was led by a faqih forecasting the coming of the Mahdi. Anywhere between 70 and 300 Fur, Masalit, Daju, and Tama joined the rising: the official record is unclear. As in the Nyala rising, the youth of participants was noted: there was a preponderance of ‘unbearded boys’ among the captives, who had perhaps been the particular targets of the extortions of their shartays. 36 The majority of the faqih’s followers, however, abandoned him even before confrontation with the military occurred, upon hearing rumours of the advance of government troops. The faqih himself was shot the same day by a police patrol. 37 The small scale of the rebellion and the ease of its defeat has led scholars to almost completely ignore it. 38 Yet the rising sheds further light on the dysfunctional relationship between state and society in western Darfur. In the context of a major outbreak of relapsing fever which killed tens of thousands of people in the region, the physically invasive procedures of government delousing campaigns (which involved stripping and showering targets, particularly humiliating for women, and the destruction of spiritual charms) 34  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 Mar. 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/21/62. 35  Hugh Boustead, Confidential Report on Zalingei 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 36  DPMD March 1927, ibid. 37  Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ‘Report on the rising of El Fiki el Muhagir in January 1927’, 10 Apr. 1927, NRO Darfur 1/23/126. 38 Daly, Sorrow, p. 107.

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were thought to be a key motive for the rebellion. 39 Later it was heard that the faqih had in fact blamed relapsing fever on the government, and that only a rebellion would cure the disease.40 The faqih was also said to have promised to end government taxation: ‘with God’s help, I shall have you relieved from government taxes this year,’ he said to Fur shaykhs.41 Promises of loot (apparently money and clothes) at Zalingei, the centre of government administration in the district, may also have been important in motivating participation: when one captured participant had been asked where he had been going with the faqih, he replied ‘to eat Zalingei and Geneina’.42 The rebellion was once more a surprise to the government, suggesting the continued limits of government knowledge in peripheral border zones: the Resident of Dar Masalit had toured the border area shortly before the rising but had found no sign of trouble.43 The recurrence of familiar motifs in the government response to the rebellion is striking: the bodies of rebels were transported and publicly exposed next day in Zalingei. A company of the Western Arab Corps was sent with the DC of Zalingei to ‘demonstrate the government’s strength’ in displays of ‘field firing’.44 Bence-Pembroke wrote to the ADC Zalingei that ‘the spears and other weapons of the inhabitants of all implicated villages may, if you think fit, be collected and burnt in the presence of the villagers.’45 On this occasion, however, there was a greater focus on punishing individual ordinary participants in the rebellion, partly because of the much smaller numbers involved. Eighty ‘participants’ were now sentenced in court to imprisonment terms of between six months to ten years.46 Many of these were ‘to be employed making roads throughout Zalingei District in sight of their friends’.47 So, once more, subjects were to see the results of disobedience, although public executions were now deemed unnecessary. The responses of local chiefs to rebellion varied. For his crucial role in reporting the rising, and following its movements with his own troops, shartay Ali Bakheit was presented with £E30 and the King’s Medal.48 But 39 Ibid.

40  Cavendish, DC Zalingei to Governor Darfur, ‘Report on Zalingei uprising’, Sept.1927, NRO CIVSEC (1) 5/1/9. 41  Statement by Abdullahi Bombro, 18 yr old Fur to Preliminary Investigation for Enquiry into the Zalingei Uprising, February 1922, ibid. 42  Grigg, Resident Dar Masalit to Dupuis, 8 Feb. 1927; Governor to Civil Secretary, Report on uprising 10 Apr. 1927, ibid. 43  Grigg, Resident Dar Masalit to Dupuis, 8 Feb. 1927, ibid. 44  Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ‘Report on the rising of El Fiki el Muhagir in January 1927’, 10 Apr. 1927, NRO Darfur 1/23/126. 45  Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to ADC Zalingei, 9 Feb. 1927, ibid. 46  Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ‘Report on the rising of El Fiki el Muhagir in January 1927’, 10 Apr. 1927, ibid. 47  Purves, Deputy Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 12 Feb. 1927, NRO CIVSEC (1) 5/1/9. 48  Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ‘Report on the rising of El Fiki el Muhagir in January 1927’, 10 Apr. 1927, NRO Darfur 1/23/126.

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village-level shaykhs either joined the rising or at least made no attempt to stop their people joining it. When the police arrived at Hilla Kabira village pursuing the faqih¸ according to the lead officer’s later statement, the village shaykhs ‘denied any knowledge of the faqih, so I beat one of them, who after ten strokes, submitted that the faqih had left the village the night before with thirty followers’.49 Shaykhs also made no attempt to arrest participants afterwards. Officials noted an ‘apparently intentional omission to inform their umdas and the markaz… As is usual in such cases they preferred to sit on the hedge and do nothing until they saw which way the wind was blowing.’50 Several shaykhs who participated in the rising were given heavier sentences than the rank and file followers.51 Clearly not all levels of the chiefly hierarchy were equally aligned with the state: indeed the gulf in this respect between paramount chiefs and village shaykhs has persisted to the present day.52

THE ZALINGEI EMIRATE In 1928, the British instated the eldest living member of the senior line of the Fur ruling dynasty, Ibrahim Abd al-Hamid, as maqdum of Zalingei (or western Darfur). This major shift in administrative policy had been discussed well before 1928 – the possibility of the administration using Abd al-Hamid in a senior role, even as Sultan of Darfur, had been mooted as early as 1915, when it was noted that his hereditary claim was better than that of Ali Dinar, although Wingate and MacMichael finally decided to rely instead on ‘tribal’ leaders.53 The recreation of the maqdumate was part of the wider introduction of Native Administration reforms in Darfur introduced from 1928. Yet the Zalingei rebellion, much like the Nyala rising before it, had surely provided further support to the case for change. The British here believed they were exploiting the history of the Sultanate, and the ‘traditional’ hereditary authority of Abd al-Hamid to boost the legitimacy of government in the region, but instead they created a position which sat awkwardly between association with the independent prestige of the Sultanate and subordination to the alien, colonial state. Pre-colonial maqdums were appointed representatives of the Sultans who represented the state in peripheral regions; under Ali Dinar they had 49 

Shawish Fadl Musa statement, 26 Jan. 1927, NRO CIVSEC (1) 5/1/9. Bence Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ‘Report on the rising of El Fiki el Muhagir in January 1927’, 10 Apr. 1927, NRO Darfur 1/23/126. 51  Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 18 Feb. 1927, NRO Darfur 1/23/126. 52  C. Leonardi and M.A. Jalil, ‘Traditional authority, local government and justice’, in J. Ryle, J. Willis, S. Baldo, J.M. Jok (eds), The Sudan Handbook (Oxford, 2011). 53  MacMichael, ‘Memo Concerning the Future Status of Darfur’ (n.d. Sept 1915), SAD 127/3 Abd al-Hamid was descended from the eldest son of Sultan Muhammd Fadl, while Ali Dinar was descended from his fifth son. See Theobald, Ali, p. 149. 50 

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become less independent figures but were also increasingly used in the core of the Sultanate. The colonial government repeatedly attempted to revive the office of maqdum in Darfur, in the hope that these would exercise supra-tribal authority over diverse populations in a manner which was recognized as historically legitimate by local peoples: this reminds us again that the British were never solely wedded to the notion of tribe as the master administrative unit. Attempts were made to revive the office at various times in northern, western and southern Darfur. In the northern and southern parts of the province, these attempts fell short of the British hopes of creating great overlords, but proved to be useful and relatively durable in governing diverse populations of mixed ethnic identities. In southern Darfur, the position of maqdum has indeed persisted to the present day. 54 But the British experiment in establishing a maqdumate in western Darfur was more problematic. The basic contradiction was that they had mixed up independent hereditary royal prestige with subordination to the state. No member of the ruling Keira dynasty – least of all someone of the seniority of Abd al-Hamid – would ever have occupied the position of maqdum in precolonial Darfur. The position itself, while prestigious, especially in the nineteenth century, was also clearly one of subordination to the Sultans – and it was often occupied by men who were of slave origins. Situating Abd al-Hamid in this role, answerable to the British, thus damaged the independent standing of the royal dynasty, even as the British tried to mobilize its prestige to their advantage. Whilst the British had tolerated the abuses of the shartays and their own lack of contact with or understanding of ordinary Fur, they hoped the maqdum might begin to overcome the gulf that existed between state and subjects. Abd al-Hamid was, however, a well-travelled, cosmopolitan individual with a complex life history that had involved considerable engagement with the state well before 1928. While the sons of Ali Dinar were perceived by officials as drunken dissolutes (some of them dwelling in El Fasher, some in Kordofan, all excluded from any real power), Abd al-Hamid was a man of maturity and reliability in British eyes.55 In 1875, when he was still young, the Egyptians had removed Abd al-Hamid from Darfur to Cairo, where he would pose no threat. When the British occupied Sudan in 1898, Abd al-Hamid had moved to Kosti in the Nile Valley where he had established himself as a successful commercial farmer. But he had simultaneously acted as an agent for the Intelligence Department: his well-established connection with the British put him in a strong position. In the eyes of one official he combined ‘hereditary advantages’ and the ‘prestige of his supe54 Tubiana

et al, Peacemaking, p.  17. However, the Government of Sudan has severely restricted the scope of the magdum’s authority to the Fur of the region in a striking example of ‘retribalisation’. 55  Policy to Ali Dinar’s family is discussed at length in NRO CIVSEC 66/2/9. One of his sons was appointed as basi in El Fasher in the 1930s, essentially as a means of controlling the unruly clan.

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rior civilisation’, achieved by his contact with the wider world outside Darfur.56 Abd al-Hamid lived until 1931, but his brief period as maqdum (by 1930 re-titled Emir, emphasizing his hereditary princely status) provoked ambiguous responses from the populations brought under his authority, which reflected his ambivalent status as both insider and outsider. Officials were certainly delighted to include evidence of enthusiastic receptions for Abd al-Hamid from local populations and shartays alike, of which there was plenty, in their reports. Some of this material is quite striking: on Abd al-Hamid’s first tour of the district the shartays ‘spontaneously offered to him the collection and distribution of the fitr, the proceeds of which had, since the downfall of Ali Dinar, largely fallen into their own hands’.57 This appears a notable surrender of authority and a recognition of legitimacy. Even two years into his reign, reports claimed hundreds of ordinary people came out (or – perhaps – were mobilized) to meet the Emir on tour, and to touch his robes. The Resident of Zalingei (as the DC of the district had been re-named, in the enthusiasm for Indirect Rule which had taken hold by then) commented that while the Emir ‘had a truly Egyptian love of organized processions and fantasia… the popular attitude to which I refer is quite apart from this and I have often seen it manifested in villages which had no previous warning of his arrival’58. Moreover, chiefs from other districts of Darfur wrote to the Emir suggesting that they be incorporated in the Emirate – strikingly this included the leaders of some small Arab tribes, the Hotiyya and Ta’alba, as well as Fur chiefs located in Southern Darfur. This was primarily motivated by a desire to escape the control of the Missiriyya nazir in southern Darfur, to whom all these groups had been subordinated by the British – but it also shows how the Emir was seen as a new potential protector and patron. Strikingly, these particular requests were granted by the administration – partly on the grounds that the Hotiyya and Ta’alba Arabs were particularly closely inter-married with the Fur and were regarded as zurug (or black) by the Missiriyya of southern Darfur, a good example of the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities among local populations.59 Moving further afield, Dinka chiefs in the most remote southern periphery of Darfur addressed the Emir directly as ‘Sultan of Darfur’ in petitions that protested against the state’s plans to relocate them in western Bahr el-Ghazal.60 More troublingly for the colonial government, during an (unusual) assault on a Zalingei policeman in 1929, the assailant suggested that ‘the day of the Government was finished’, a remark interpreted by offi56  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 Mar. 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/21/62. 57  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 19 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/20/61. 58  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/64. 59  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 15 Feb. 1930, NRO CIVSEC 1/21/63. 60  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/64.

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cials as a reference to the rise of Abd al-Hamid.61 The sense that the creation of the maqdumate might be a step towards the re-establishment of the Sultanate – or indeed was the re-establishment of the Sultanate and the end of the ‘colonial day’ (or moment) – is intriguing: it was an impression which the British had to some extent quite wittingly encouraged. By 1931 the Emir’s house and offices had been moved away from the Zalingei markaz in an obvious gesture of symbolic independence from the state, and the new administrative centre of Hamidia (named after the Emir himself) was established. Dar Turra of the Jabal Marra area was brought within the administrative boundaries of Hamidia on the Emir’s request, as it was the site of the tombs of the sultans, and its inclusion was a sign of the Emir’s historical ties with the old Sultanate. Indeed, the establishment of Hamidia was described by officials as ‘the visible sign of the definite re-establishment of the Fur royal dynasty.’62 A separate budget was also set up for the Emirate.63 By 1931 proposals had been floated by the Governor of Darfur to exclude the Emirate from the writ of the Sudan Penal Code and the Civil Justice Ordinance altogether, and to allow the Emir to function without any reference to colonial law. The Civil Secretary rejected this, suggesting it raised the rather extreme possibility of Native Administrations becoming independent legislative centres.64 But the proposals suggest how the provincial administration was pushing to recreate the authority of the Sultans: discussions had been live among officials from a very early stage in governing the province over whether or not the revival of the Sultans was required for effective governance, and in 1930 Dupuis (Governor of Darfur between 1927 and 1935) had gone as far as to suggest the maqdumate was ‘really a deliberate attempt at a potential revival of the Fur Sultanate’.65 If so, it later ended as a clear failure. Official enthusiasm was also grounded in the perception that the Emir’s own governing style had won the state some legitimacy in Darfur. Reports noted an important shift in the politics of protest: the court of the Emir – an appeal court against the judgement of shartays – became a space where complaints about the oppression and misrule of the shartay could be voiced. One of the Emir’s first acts was to dismiss and heavily fine a shartay who had ‘in a fury’ kicked a boy to death – though it is notable that no more severe punishment was imposed.66 61 

Batty to Governor Darfur, 6 Jan. 1930, NRO Darfur (1)1/37/185. Sandison, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 20 Jan. 1932, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. 63  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930; Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 30 Apr. 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/22/64. 64  MacMichael, Civil Secretary to Governor Darfur, 16 May 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/64. 65  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 30 Sept. 1930, NRO Darfur 1/35/178. It seems Gordon also considered restoring the Sultanate under Abd al-Hamid during his term as Governor-General of Sudan in the 1870s. ‘Gordon’, p. 350. 66  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 March 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/21/62. 62 

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Another shartay was also suspended under suspicion of having caused a woman to miscarry.67 The level of physical violence exercised by the shartays is striking. Officials suggested people were gradually overcoming their ‘inherited terror’ of the shartays, though it is probably more accurate to say they were taking advantage of the first practical opportunity they had had to complain against their chiefs.68 The Emir was, to some degree, performing one of the key tenets of good rulership in Darfur which British officials had utterly neglected. Perhaps as a result, officials also suggested police coercion was no longer required for the key administrative tasks of tax collection and the rounding up of road-building labour.69 Direct evidence of local views of the Emir is of course limited, but officials suggested that the Emir’s key strength in the eyes of local populations ‘was that he had the quality of Baraka – divine grace – the most important attribute of leadership to according to Islam… Even ill-disposed persons did not circulate lying rumours about him, as they did about everyone else.’70 Baraka is a hereditary virtue: the Emir’s hereditary prestige lay at the heart of his successes.71 But as hinted earlier, British reports also attempted to make a virtue out of the fact that Abd al-Hamid was not simply a ‘local figure’, but rather an individual of complex, hybrid cultural characteristics. Indeed, Abd al-Hamid seemed to perform this role with significant skill, and like other chiefs created an impression of cultural superiority shared with state officials, whilst also demonstrating ‘insider’ understanding of local society: early in the period of his administration, in conversation with the Governor of Darfur he claimed to be appalled by the local prevalence of sloth and drunkenness, and by the obvious retrogression of the Fur people from their energy and enterprise… but he does not, fortunately, turn away from them in disgust as inferior beings.72

Abd al-Hamid was, therefore, the ideal ally in the British mission to restore the Fur country to its former glories. At his installation, he urged the shartays to ‘give up excessive marissa drinking and not to be led astray by rumours of the Prophet Jesus’ arrival’.73 Sobriety was key to the prevention of further religious uprisings, and the shartays should themselves behave with a new degree of self-control and discipline in line with the expectations of colonial government. Moreover, Abd al-Hamid’s willingness to hear a wide range of appeal cases in his court was interpreted by officials as evidence of an ‘almost European 67 

DPMD March 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/21/62. Dupuis to CS, Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930, 8 Feb. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 69  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/64. 70  PJ Sandison memoirs, SAD 691/5/138. 71  O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 221. 72  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 28 Mar. 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/21/62. 73  Purves to Governor Darfur, 23 Dec. 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/20/61. 68 

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disregard of his own convenience in official hours’, and that ‘owing to his extensive contact with Europeans, Abd al-Hamid had gained tolerance’.74 Yet equally, Abd al-Hamid’s clear association with the state and his cultural complexity was a potential weakness – and officials knew this. One obvious mistake was made on his first visit to Zalingei when he appeared ‘wearing a high waisted evening dress suit with a fancy cummerbund and silver handled walking stick – and an individual rubber dicky’.75 But beyond his costume, there were more serious structural problems that fed into local perceptions of the Emirate. One official, PJ Sandison, who toured Zalingei in 1931–2 during his brief appointment as Resident was struck to find ‘how vivid the independent Sultanate still was in the people’s minds, and how important were questions of legitimacy and succession’. In conversation with one of the most powerful shartays of the region, Atim of Dar Kerne, Sandison found that Atim always talked of the Emir of Zalingei as ‘the Emir the Government has put over us.’ We had thought that because he was a lineal descendant, in fact the son, of the last legitimate Sultan, he would naturally be acceptable as the ruler of a part of his father’s domains. This was not how Atim saw it. A Sultan was a Sultan. He had the right to appoint viceroys, but had an alien government that right?76

Atim may have been talking here primarily as a major shartay whose prestige and independence had been challenged by the arrival of the Emir. But his comments nonetheless are suggestive of the idea that the Emirate itself was seen primarily as an institution of the alien state, not an institution belonging to the Fur themselves. Indeed, Sandison himself, despite his strong support of the Emir, suggested that he was ‘rather out of place ruling the feudal barons. I fancy he felt almost as alien to it all as I did’.77 The Emir’s own coterie and entourage surely contributed to this sense of ‘foreignness’. As also seems to have been the case in pre-colonial Darfur, the biggest challenge and most important role for any major figure of authority was to control the behaviour of his immediate clients and supporters. The Emir, like chiefs elsewhere in the region, made significant use of manadib (agents) to carry out various administrative functions for him at a local level. For Abd al-Hamid many of these manadib were associates of his from his time in Kosti, who had followed him west from the Nile Valley. In the early days of his rule, some of these were acknowledged to be ‘jackals enriching themselves in his name’: ‘sophisticated easterners’ who ‘either posed as his representatives or endeavoured to obtain lucrative posts under him’ at the expense of established local elites. British officials claimed 74 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. Grigg, DC Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 1 April 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)/1/20/61. 76  Sandison memoirs, SAD 691/5/127. 77  Sandison memoirs, SAD 691/5/138. 75 

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Abd al-Hamid in fact kept these men under close control, and ‘hates delegating authority’, supposedly limiting the damage these outsiders could do.78 But many of them sat on the Emir’s court, and doubtlessly contributed to an impression among the shartays in particular that the Emir’s administration was an imposition set over them. Though all those who sat on the court were Fur – and this was therefore described as a ‘purely Fur government’ – officials also noted that ‘the trend of Native Administration’ under Abd al-Hamid, ‘a comparative foreigner’, was ‘to become less native than before’.79 Perhaps more significant than the Nile Valley character of the central administration was the fact that the shartays remained very difficult to control. Having won significant independence from state control in the 1920s, it was not easy to reinstate clear limits to their authority, and neither the Emir nor the state itself had the resources to keep the shartays under close surveillance. Moreover, at an everyday level, shartays clearly mattered a lot more in people’s experience of government than the more remote Emirate court: as one official noted the shartays affected the ‘daily life of the zol miskin [the poor man] far more than the efficiency of the central executive’.80 Rather, the state and the Emir remained subject to and shaped by the indeterminate and arbitrary rule of the shartays. Sandison suggested in retrospect that the shartays of Zalingei ‘had an outlook entirely alien to our own, and actively opposed to it’. Yet he also acknowledged that they were not unskilled in managing colonial officials, and especially in restricting contact between officials and ordinary people. They were squat, burly men, whose people were always kept at a distance by retainers. They greeted me with bluff, hearty welcomes, and sent presents of meat on the hoof. They put up straw shelters for me to sleep in, and brought clean white sand from the wadi to cover the floor. They carried complete tukls (huts) out from the village for the police and servants. In this way they did far more for me than I would have expected anywhere else. I believe they regarded me as a representative of the Sultan – and everyone was expecting me to shout ‘Off with his head’. So everything possible had to be done to prevent this. I could almost hear the older men saying to their sons ‘Don’t tell him more than you must. It always leads to disaster.’ They pretended not to understand, they played the idiot boy, or merely told stupendous lies…. It was some time before I began to realise what was happening. 81

There is probably truth in the idea that shartays drew on their experience of managing agents of the Sultans when managing colonial officials: these were men who knew how to deal with government, and restrict its intrusion into their own sphere of rule. Nonetheless, there were attempts to regulate the behaviour of shartays from above. The Emir brought the shartays into Zalingei for ‘obser78 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1930, 8/2/31, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. Batty, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, Note on Native Administration in Zalingei District, 6 Jan. 1930, NRO Darfur 1/37/185. 80  Keen, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 4 June 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/66. 81  Sandison memoirs, SAD 691/5/137. 79 

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vation and training’ twice a year, in an echo of the Sultans’ regular summonses to their chiefs, in a new more bureaucratic guise.82 But this surely had a limited impact. More potentially significant was the removal of sharia cases from the jurisdiction of the shartays in 1929, which had been the focus of so much abuse and extortion before 1928: instead the qadi of the Emirate was to hear such cases. The qadi was a Fur who had returned from Kosti with the Emir, Sheikh Ibrahim Abd al-Bari, ‘who though educated at El Azhar [Cairo] still speaks his mother tongue and was hard at work settling sharia disputes’, running his own panel on the central court.83 However, officials suggested that, having been stripped of their sharia powers, the shartays collected ever higher levels of ‘unofficial dues’ – in other words, finding new avenues of extortion to replace the old, of which adultery cases were surely one avenue. Officials tried to normalize and explain patterns of extortion by Fur chiefs with reference to the ‘great store’ placed on ‘pomp and worldly show’ by the shartays who were notably well dressed and provided ‘large hospitality’. And the ordinary Fur was said to be ‘proud’ of such show, and ‘grudgingly willing’ to fund it by submission to demands for ‘dues’ from shartays.84 Of course, such an analysis has been revived by more recent academic research on political culture in Africa more generally: this appears one example of a wider ‘politics of the belly’ where those in power ‘eat’ wealth in order that they may continue to be able to behave in the generous manner expected of those in authority.85 Some degree of unequal reciprocity indeed appears to have been present in some areas of the relationship between chief and subject: officials believed that in return for seven days of labour a year on the estates and cultivations of the shartay ordinary people received substantial quantities of meat and marissa from their chief.86 Yet the frequency of appeals on adultery cases, let alone other evidence of complaint and resistance, suggests that ordinary people did not simply accept the demands and judgements of their chiefs. Gradually, concerns about chiefly abuses would grow and prompt further action by the administration, though this was principally the result of growing concerns about the efficacy of the Emirate itself, following Abd al-Hamid’s death in 1931 and the succession of his son Muhammad al-Fadl.

THE LONG COLLAPSE OF THE EMIRATE The record of the failings of Muhammad is as substantive as the record of the strengths of Abd al-Hamid. The principal concerns of officials 82 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 9 Mar. 1929, NRO CIVSEC 1/21/62. 84  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. 85  Bayart, J.L., The State in Africa: The politics of the belly (London, 1993). 86  H. Boustead ‘A Brief historical note on the forms of Administration in Western Darfur from the time of Sultan Mohammed Fadl till the present day (1938)’ RHO MSS Perham 547/1. 83 

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were oriented around two key areas of weakness: firstly, the lack of cultural sympathy which Muhammad enjoyed with the Fur, and his associated tendency to behave more like a minor government official than a distinguished member of the Keira royal dynasty, and secondly, the lack of effort Mohammed put into his attempts to control his shartays. But whilst the vehementally critical tone of reports was new, the substance of these concerns were not. Existing flaws with the Emirate were exposed and were perceived to have deepened following the succession of Muhammad: they were not new problems created by the succession. Continuous criticism finally culminated in the complete collapse of the Emirate experiment by 1937. However, as we will see, this marked a reformulation of attempts to govern through institutions of ‘traditional’ prestige in western Darfur, rather than an abandonment of such a policy. Official criticism of Muhammad was immediate, but became elaborated over the first years of his rule into a classic critique of the over-ambitious bureaucratically minded ‘native’. The Resident of Zalingei presented this at its clearest in 1933, writing To his half-baked effendi ideas picked up among second rate semi-educated colleagues in a commercial firm in Sennar, his father must have seemed old-fashioned indeed and he set out to model himself on a sort of glorified Ma’mur and to avoid as far as he could all irksome control.87

Muhammad had been raised and come to adulthood in Kosti, and had worked in a bureaucratic setting: he clearly lacked the performative skills to project an image of cultural authenticity in the way his father had at least partially succeeded in doing. Crucially, he did not even speak Fur: which surely reinforced the impression he was just like any other alien official.88 Unsurprisingly therefore, Muhammad also removed himself from directly hearing appeal cases, rather preferring to hear a précis of the case by his court councillors before giving a decision. Officials believed ‘this weakens the realisation by the common people that they are actually being tried before the Emir, as well as sometimes giving him the harassed mien of an overworked DC’.89 This practice also of course raised the prominence of the easterners in the Emir’s court in the Emirate administration. Instead of hearing complaints, the Emir himself was more preoccupied with ensuring taxation was effectively collected, and was seen to value the ‘kudos’ gained with government via successful collection more than a reputation for ‘karama’ (divine favour) with his people.90 In general his administration looked too much like a government markaz for the taste of his official bosses. Where Abd al-Hamid had been content with a ‘collection of grass huts’ to host his 87 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. H. Boustead, ‘Note on Emir Mohamed Fadl’s regime as a Native Administration’, 1938. RHO MSS Perham, 536/3. 89  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Resident Zalingei, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 90  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 88 

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administration, Muhammad built a ‘red-brick house with the highest roof in Hamidia’.91 The Governor of Darfur commented ‘I do not like the atmosphere of his HQ. There is an artificiality about it and an aping of Government trappings – his ghaffirs trying to drill like police.’92 Muhammad was harshly judged for behaving too much like a bureaucrat, whether that be a ma’mur or a DC: the Emirate experiment was one which was explicitly intended to harness the prestige of traditional legitimacy, which the British never believed Muhammad possessed. Yet ultimately the ‘foreignness’ of the Emirate was inherent in the institution. British officials themselves often made unfavourable comparisons between the neighbouring Sultanate of Dar Masalit, which had before the arrival of the British been ‘fighting for its very existence under an independent Sultanate’, and the Emirate which was ‘from a purely local point of view a foreign importation… an artificial unit’. Even leaving Muhammad out of the picture, a more sober assessment concluded it would ‘take much time before the new unit means any more to the people than the accidental association of a Government markaz’.93 This suggested that the British knew that the Emirate, despite the breathless enthusiasm displayed by officials during its first years of existence, would inevitably be seen as a government institution, not an authentic local administration, and certainly nothing like a re-establishment of the Sultanate. An attempt to engender an authentic sense of ‘Fur’ identity among the sons of shartays who attended the government school established in Zalingei in 1932 can be read as an effort to encourage a sense of loyalty to the Emirate: to prompt these future leaders to ‘realise their participation in a large tribal unit’. But this was also doomed from the outset: Sandison complained that the schoolmaster, like the Emir, did not speak Fur, and that, unsurprisingly therefore, ‘my suggestion that the writing of the Fur language in Latin characters should be taught in subordination to the routine teaching of Arabic, was held to be impracticable.’94 The master showed no enthusiasm for collecting ‘Darfur historical or moral tales’.95 In general the perceived failings of the school mirrored those of the Emir: the master ‘finds it difficult to appreciate that the atmosphere of table and chairs is not as suitable for the shartay as for the future government clerk.’96 Indeed none of the shartays sent their sons to this latest government innovation for several years: it was the sons of the Emir’s entourage from Kosti who attended this entirely appropriately ‘sophisticated’ type of school.97 91 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1931, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Resident Zalingei, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 93  Keen, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 4 June 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/66; Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67; The negative comparison to Dar Masalit was often made: see also Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 31 Mar. 1936. 94  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1932, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. 95  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 96  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1932, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/22/65. 97  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/68. 92 

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Muhammad’s perceived failings were not simply those of a bureaucratically minded effendi. On a personal level his moral failings were widely known: ‘reckless indulgence in women’ led to a combined attack of syphilis, gonorrhoea and malaria in 1932.98 But more significantly, he made no effort to combat the abuses of his subordinates. His manadib, agents of his authority at the local level, were said to become more independent and abusive under his rule: ghaffirs and listing clerks were known to extort money out of local populations for taxation, and shaykhs and elders complained that they ‘never seemed to finish paying taxes to Muhammad Fadl and his relations out on collecting raids in our dars’.99 Although this is a reported translation, the language of collection as raid also suggests the continued violence of predatory taxation practices. Even more significantly, the everyday abuses of authority by the shartays became abuses which the Emir and his staff now became participants in, rather than opponents of. This was of course entirely at odds with the administrative purpose of the Emirate, but it also reflected the difficulties of governing Zalingei by working against the shartays rather than with them. Abd al-Hamid had not found effective ways of regulating the shartays: Muhammad seemed to find the most effective way of dealing with them to be to join in with their abuse. In British reports, on the one hand, the Emir was criticized for treating the shartays much as ‘a ma’mur used to treat hedgerow umdas’100; he lectured them ‘in the manner of a schoolteacher’.101 Yet this manner masked a more profound failure to control the local agents of rule. Shartays regularly ignored the role of agawid, the elders who would in the past have advised on disputes and cases of customary law. Instead, the shartay would hear of some delinquency, generally adultery and without summoning or seeing any of the parties will send one of his falagna [messengers, sometimes armed with rifles] to collect what he can in the way of a fine… The process of extraction may entail the flogging of one or more persons – as like as not the husband of the woman if the case is one of adultery and the paramour can not be fined.

The results of such practice could be disastrous for individuals: in one example, a shartay demanded a fine from the father of an unmarried pregnant girl for her ‘fornication’. The father tied his daughter up in an open space in the middle of the village and demanded the name of her lover: her silence meant she was slowly beaten to death.102 98 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. Whilst this attack on sexual indulgence seems a typically moralistic colonial judgement, it is worth noting that this had also been part of the nineteenth century criticisms of the Darfur Sultans discussed in Chapter 1. 99  H. Boustead, ‘Note on Emir Mohammed Fadl’s regime as a Native Administration’, RHO MSS Perham 547/5. 100  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Resident Zalingei, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 101  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 102  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67.

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It is perhaps particularly significant that dimlijs and even the smallest village shaykhs were indulging in similar practice and often pocketing the proceeds without informing their shartay. Ethnographic work carried out by officials in Jabal Marra in the 1930s noted a significant shift in sexual mores among the Fur principally enforced by the dimlijs. In the past, informants suggested, the accepted route to marriage was that a man would sleep with a woman and then marry her. Now in Zalingei district this custom had almost completely died out, and instead when ‘an unmarried girl becomes pregnant she also has to pay a fine of 30 takkiyya (cloth) or £E3. She is imprisoned in the dimlij’s home until she confesses who is the father of the child: and he and his father have to pay a fine of 30 takkiya too.’103 Such practices of course chime with hardening attitudes towards the policing of sexual behaviour right across the continent, as elder men in positions of ‘traditional’ authority attempted to assert their control over the bodies and labour of women – and young men – in the context of changing colonial economies. In western Darfur the eastward migration of many young Fur men to work on the Gezira scheme was surely one factor leading to elder men asserting this control over the younger generation.104 This sort of endemic extortion – facilitated by the autonomy with which low level administrative actors might claim authority for themselves – and the violence associated with it, finally prompted the British to abolish all sulta powers held by the shartays and dimlijs in Zalingei in 1933. These were to be replaced by a structure of five sub-courts of the Emirate Central Court to be run by the five most powerful shartays who were to be paid salaries by the government. The other, less powerful shartays would not be compensated for the loss of their powers.105 Amalgamations of smaller administrative units in larger structures under closer central control was thought to be the answer to a culture of abuse. The salaried shartays were now to be reinvented as ‘the essential link between the Emir and his people’ rather than as ruthless, predatory individuals.106 It was also hoped that they would replace the manadib from Kosti in carrying out administrative tasks for the Emir at a local level. This attempt at bureaucratic restructuring, and at the creation of a legible judicial system, was a resounding failure. A year after the establishment of these courts, the responsible official, Keen, bemoaned the continuity in practice at a local level. For those shartays who had lost their sultas ‘a residue of vague and undefined “customary” powers’ continued to be exercised: the Resident admitted he was ‘completely in 103 

Arkell papers, SOAS, PP MS 71/06/30, p. 23. practices might also be interpreted as the result of the spread of a more strict Muslim morality since the Mahdiyya: certainly Ali Dinar was known to have hanged adulterers during his reign. O’Fahey, Land, p. 10. 105  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 9 June 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/66. 106  Keen, Resident, Zalingei to Governor, Darfur 4 June 1933, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/66. 104  These

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the dark as to what is going on and also as to who has any genuine powers and of what they are supposed to consist. In practice it has become a system of akl [eat] whatever you think you can get away with.’ In other words government had utterly failed to impose what they imagined to be ‘order’ on a system of local authority whose predations they had enabled and depended upon. In a return to pre 1930 norms, any collection of taxation was now said to involve ‘promiscuous flogging’.107 Shartays frequently imposed parallel, personal taxation alongside the demands of the government. But, crucially, this was not enacted by the shartays alone. Rather, the ghaffirs of the Emirate worked together with the shartays to impose such demands. In one notorious case, the shartay of Dar Tebella demanded dual taxation from his villagers: one man was brave enough to pronounce that he would leave for Dar Masalit to escape such abuse. The Emirate ghaffirs as a result whipped the man and tied him to a tree with his underwear removed in the heat of the day. Keen noted this was ‘obviously regarded as nothing out of the ordinary. I even doubt if it occurred to the spectators that the Emir or the Government might disapprove.’ The case only reached the Resident’s ears because the Emir was out ‘on trek’ when the complainant approached Zalingei for redress. In another case a woman was similarly ‘suspended by her wrists’ and flogged by ghaffirs who believed she knew the location of an unlicenced rifle.108 Torture and humiliation defined the everyday state in the Emirate by the mid 1930s, if not before. It is clear that the Emirate staff and the shartays were working together to impose a highly coercive form of authority over the Fur. But it is also clear that it was convenient for officials to side-step their own responsibility for this state of affairs by solely blaming Muhammad. Notably, a quasi-military character to taxation assessment by state police persisted. In order to check the taxation lists drawn up by shartays, government sent police to take villages ‘by surprise and surround them before dawn’. More broadly, the tendency to excuse the violence of the shartays on the grounds of the backwardness of the Fur was alive and well in official discourse. The Governor of Darfur in response to Keen’s despairing report suggested that ‘beating is a well recognised and generally accepted form of punishment amongst the Fur. And in spite of the widespread oppression which the report implies, the Fur as a whole remain a cheerful, industrious folk.’109 This incredibly sanguine response also suggested that any additional ‘bullying’ by ghaffirs was the fault of the Emir’s administration, and that shartays could not be held responsible for such abuses. Meanwhile the business of ‘eating’ fines and dues from the people was said to not be offensive to ordinary people as long as shartays were open-handed in return. There were dissenting voices in the administration. Dudley Lampen, now working in the Civil Secretary’s Office in Khartoum, suggested 107 

Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. Keen to Governor Darfur, 18 Dec. 1934, NRO CIVSEC 1/1/23/67. 109  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Resident Zalingei, 8 July 1934, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/68. 108 

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that the ‘brutalities’ exposed in the 1934 report could not be ‘dismissed as customary punishments’, and suggested there should be a ‘purge’ of offending shartays, and the dismissal of the Emir should be considered. He suggested that Residents in Zalingei had focused too much ‘on the framework of administration’ and advising the Emir, ‘while the vital duty of knowing what was going on among the people and what they thought has been given a secondary place’.110 In yet another discussion of the culture of abuse the following year, the Civil Secretary noted ‘one must make some allowance for Fur mentality. He has always been accustomed to rough handling and probably expects it from his rulers.’ But he supported the essence of Lampen’s points and the need for ‘humane administration.’111 It was left to the Governor General to state the approach to be taken in Zalingei: If the Emir’s or local functionaries’ authority has not been adequate to prevent torture and flagrant injustice, let the state step in and see to it that their perpetrators are punished summarily and without any regard to their political standing. A few shartays sentenced to good terms of imprisonment in a government prison, some floggings of agents who have resorted to torture unwarrantably, would, I should say, do more to guide rulers and peoples into better paths.112

In fact the previous Resident had already imprisoned one shartay and dismissed two others: the local administration had started to take action against those who had been caught out. But it is nonetheless revealing that the Governor General’s solution to the use of unsanctioned physical violence as a means of administration was to use ‘official’ and thereby supposedly legitimate violence against the state’s local agents. As noted earlier, the Sultans had sometimes gone as far as to execute officials whose local oppression threatened the legitimacy of the state. The appointment of a new Resident in the person of Hugh Boustead in 1935 was to shake up the administration of the Emirate: the military man, recently Commander of the Sudan Camel Corps, was known for his ‘great energy’ and it was hoped he would encourage a ‘healthy liking for outdoor pursuits such as polo and riding’ on the part of the Emir.113 But in an interview with the Governor General, Stewart Symes, before travelling to Darfur, Boustead was reminded you are going to a very backward district where the chiefs in the past have had absolute control and there has been a good deal of oppression. Some of it is healthy oppression and do not forget this.114 110  G.D. Lampen, Note on Zalingei District Annual Report 1934, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/1/23/67. 111  Civil Secretary note on Zalingei Emirate Annual Report, November 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 112  Governor General note on Zalingei Emirate Annual Report, 23 November 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 113  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Keen, 8 July 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. 114 Boustead, Wind, p. 110.

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But this laissez-faire philosophy did not persuade Boustead: his appointment marked the arrival of a more activist form of colonial rule than the Fur had previously experienced. He acted as Resident and DC in Zalingei between 1935 and 1940, and again from 1945 to 1948. Boustead believed that his willingness to learn Fur once he was appointed in Zalingei set him apart from previous administrators. A lack of fluency in the local language had imposed real constraints on the administration’s capacity to build legitimacy by hearing complaints directly. Boustead was the first official who could at least attempt to communicate with ordinary villagers – the elusive ‘zol miskin’, dismissed by previous administrators for their passivity and absolute terror of government. Indeed he claimed to speak Fur better than the Emir; whether or not this was strictly true, such a perception was in itself one factor which came to play against the Emirate’s survival – one of its key purposes had been to establish closer communication with the ordinary Fur. The functioning of the Emir’s central court more generally was said to be impeded by the fact that only three members of the court spoke Fur, though ninety per cent of cases were brought to the court in Fur. Boustead aimed to change this by replacing the non-Fur councillors with agawid (elders) from the various local branch courts that had been set up. Boustead hoped these people would be ‘peasant Fur, and coming from every quarter of the Emirate, should be in position to put the Emir in touch with the people’. Boustead also aimed for the Emir’s brothers (who sat on the court) and clerks to learn Fur. Boustead believed that his own mobility and constant trekking was essential to building relationships with ordinary people and what he hoped would be the associated legitimacy of government: he spent almost nine months of his first year in Zalingei on the move.115 But the extent to which he managed to talk to ordinary people is difficult to assess. Chiefs in Zalingei, as elsewhere in Darfur, certainly worked hard to keep Boustead away from sources of potential trouble in their villages. One of Boustead’s first key targets in 1935 was Dar Lewing, on the western side of Jebel Marra, where the oppressions of the local shartay, Yusuf Abdullah had prompted the migrations of entire villages away from the dar. Boustead was met ‘by the shartay’s falagna on the borders of his dar, and surrounded by a crowd of them… making normal contact with the ordinary villager impossible’.116 But it was not just the shartays who worked to prevent Boustead speaking with ordinary people. When Boustead took the Emir with him to hear cases in Dar Guldo, which neighboured Dar Lewing in the west, he discovered that the Emir stationed a ghaffir on the road turning people away from the court hearings. Boustead then stayed behind after the Emir returned to Zalingei, and sent messengers out into the hills to let people know the court was hearing complaints 115  Boustead, Resident of Zalingei to Ingleson, Governor Darfur, 12 Dec. 1935, NRO Darfur 1/37/185. 116  Boustead, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 30 Nov. 1935, NRO Darfur 1/37/185.

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in Guldo. The response was striking – over one hundred Fur villagers who had fled Dar Lewing and the oppressions of the shartay came into Guldo to make their complaints directly to Boustead. Some of these people had already appealed to the Emir to intervene: they had paid to petition the Emir, and had received a letter addressed to their shartay in return: the only effect of this had been to increase the shartay’s demands for labour and money. Money had been ‘extorted from the relations of people who were tied up in the shartay’s house, for many days (and in the most uncomfortable positions) until the money was forthcoming.’117 This is of course an example of particularly notorious oppression and peculiarly vociferous complaint – but it nonetheless shows the way state officials might be sought out by people as a vessel for complaints, with the expectation that local agents of government would be punished as a result. Compensation was granted to victims, though the shartay remained in his position. Boustead noted that despite his extortions, Yusuf was also generous –a key trait for any chief in the eyes of the administration – and a ‘likeable character’.118 Yusuf went on to build a strong relationship with Boustead over time, as we will see. Nonetheless the Governor of Darfur strongly criticized Boustead for this mild response, saying that encouraging complaints could ‘undermine the authority of traditional leaders’ and that the Fur ‘may prefer what to our eyes is minor oppression at their hands than strict justice from a government puppet’.119 The consistency with which such discourse was repeated even in the face of mass complaints and migrations is extremely striking. More significantly, the episode demonstrated collusion between the Emir and the oppression of local shartays. Yusuf had sent considerable amounts of money unofficially to the Emir, who had thus profited from local extortions. This was one of the nails in the coffin of the Emirate. More generally Boustead noted the Emir showed an ‘amused contemptuousness’ towards Fur peasants who attempted to use his court as an arena for complaint.120 By 1936 the Civil Secretary described the Emirate as an ‘unremarkable Native Administration, distinguished only by its ‘backwardness’, and therefore in need of more ‘direct administration’.121 Even at this late stage, the colonial government was attached to its failed experiment: the Governor General suggested it was desirable to ‘maintain the facade of the emirate and theory of a native chief… as being more agreeable to Fur mentality’.122 But by 1937 major financial irregularities on the part of the Emir finally broke the patience of the administration and the emirate was dissolved. 117 

Boustead, Confidential Report on Zalingei, 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. Wind, p. 116. 119 Ingleson, Governor Darfur, Instructions to Resident Zalingei, December 1935, NRO Darfur 1/37/185. 120  Boustead, Confidential Report on Zalingei 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 121  Civil Secretary to Governor General, 14 Apr. 1936, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 122  Governor General note on Zalingei Emirate, 16 Apr. 1936, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/68. 118 Boustead,

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COURT BUREAUCRACY VERSUS PERSONAL RULE Whilst central government rhetoric in 1937 was starting to shift away from an exclusive emphasis on the virtues of rule through traditional authority (see Chapter 6), the collapse of the Emirate in Zalingei merely prompted a more regularized, bureaucratic form of Native Administration. Boustead’s answer to the oppression of earlier years was to expand the network of shartays’ courts and ensure their capacity to reach ordinary people; all shartays now became salaried servants of the state. Significant effort was put into the establishment of ‘open court buildings where all could come and go, and all could see what was going on’, constructed from ‘Zalingei thatch with brick pillars and support’. Such design and materials would ‘establish the dignity of the courts’ as Boustead believed the Fur attached ‘great importance to an imposing building’.123 Significantly, the courts were to be based at the market centres of each dar. Boustead claimed this location would bestow an ‘enormous natural propaganda element’ to the courts given the frequency with which the Fur attended market; more importantly, he noted that markets were ‘the common scene of quarrels’.124 This association of courts with market centres was also very common in southern Sudan, where Cherry Leonardi has shown chiefs’ courts to be a means of settling property disputes arising from market transactions, as well as a vehicle for mediating between monetary and non-monetary economies.125 It may be that the Zalingei courts were not dissimilar in function and significance. This was primarily an exercise in bureaucratization, but Boustead also used the results of his own amateur anthropological and historical research to legitimate the courts as ‘merely the regularisation under our rule of an old-established custom, which has remained instinct in the life of the people’.126 But some shartays clearly saw the courts as a restriction on their personal autonomy: the expansion of the courts systems was indeed a means to bring the shartays back under closer state control. For example, Shartay Yusuf Abdullahi reportedly saw the Guldo district court, under his presidency, as an ‘unfortunate innovation’ and ‘an infringement on his feudal rights’.127 Before the Guldo court had been set up, Shartay Yusuf had been notorious for forcing adulterers to work on his personal cultivations. But Boustead also attempted to codify local customary law to prevent such personal abuses: fixed scales of fines for different categories of offence were established for the courts to impose. Strikingly, many of the young men in Dar Lewing subsequently approached the shartay’s court ‘insisting that past punishments had exceeded the powers laid down in the new 123 Boustead,

Wind, p.  176; Zalingei District Annual Report, 1937, RHO MSS Perham 547/2. 124  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/68. 125 Leonardi, Dealing, esp. p. 66, 95–98. 126  Zalingei District Annual Report 1936, RHO MSS Perham 547/2 127  Zalingei District Annual Report 1941, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher (A) 4/23.

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courts, and that shartay Yusuf should pay up most of the past excessive fines’.128 Thus the newly fixed rules of so-called ‘customary law’ might be used as resources by local subjects to assert their own rights. Yet Boustead refused to entertain these demands, and supported Yusuf against the complaints of his people, revealing the continued tendency of authoritarian officials to protect authoritarian chiefs. The central Zalingei court also continued to function, though the question of its presidency was left open until a gathering of 1938, where Boustead consulted with the shartays. He reported that they said to him we are like cattle without a herdsman, going along independently each his separate way. We shall gain in strength if we join together under a head, but that head must be one of our own people whom we know and understand and can understand the talk of the poorest Fur as well as the foreign Arab and other strangers.129

In another note by Boustead he reported the same statement in significantly different words: ‘Let no one from Fasher, from the goz [central, eastern or southern Darfur], or from the River preside over our central court, but a Fur who knows us.’130 The accuracy of either of these statements cannot be guaranteed, but they are richly suggestive of ideas about legitimate paramount authority. Most obviously, they point to the importance of the idea that any leader should ‘know’ and be ‘known’ to the Fur. The leader should be able to deal with outsiders or ‘strangers’ and should be able to speak Arabic – but he should also speak Fur. This person should not come from the ‘River’ (the Nile Valley). Much of this can be read as a critique of Muhammad al-Fadl – the new court president should be what the Emir was not. Yet the second statement goes further in suggesting that even someone from El Fasher or the goz would be unsuitable: this person should, by implication, be from the western Fur dars. This sense of distinctive localism is not quite hinted at elsewhere in the documents – but it does fit with the deeper precolonial administrative history of the region under the overlordship of the dimangawi or aba diimang. This position had been abolished by the British when the maqdumate had been established in 1928 – the dimangawi appointed by the British in the first years of their rule had been a chronic alcoholic who had no hereditary claim to the office. Now they restored the role, appointing the leading member of the hereditary line of rulers in Dar Diima, the historical base of the dimangawi’s authority, a line which stretched back several centuries. In restoring this position, the British were arguably acting more in keeping with historical precedent than they had in creating the maqdumate. However, the shartay of Dar Kerne and the shartays of Jebel Marra all ‘expressed themselves anxious to come under the headship of the dimangawi’, despite the fact that the dimangawi had never overseen these territories under the Sultans. All the Fur shartays agreed this would ‘strengthen their position as a tribe and that they 128 Boustead,

Wind, p. 116. Boustead to Perham, 29 Apr. 1938, RHO MSS Perham 536/3. 130  Boustead, ‘Note on Emir Mohd Fadl’s regime as a NA’, MSS Perham 536/3. 129 

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would gain as a people by combining’.131 It is difficult to know whether a sense of growing tribal consciousness among the Fur was something imputed by Boustead into this situation, or whether a sense of ethnic consciousness – amongst the elite at least – really was growing in these years. Perhaps the willingness to come under the dimangawi suggested principally a desire to keep Boustead at one remove from the shartays’ own activities. However, whilst the pre-colonial dimangawi had been an autonomous ruler until the nineteenth century, under the British he was merely to act as a court president with a clearly defined and thus rather limited judicial role. Moreover, it is striking that, while Boustead added Fur agawid from the various dars of Zalingei, who would speak the language of the ‘poorest Fur’, to the membership of the central court, the old coterie of the Emir from Kosti also retained their positions. The ‘foreign’, ‘eastern’ element of the Emirate thus retained influence at the heart of the administration: these men were described by Boustead as ‘practiced and experienced old men with sound and balanced judgement’.132 The brother of Abd al-Hamid was appointed by Boustead as Vice-Dimingawi. The court therefore brought together both insiders and outsiders – perhaps the ‘foreign’ element of the court gave it the distance required to function as a neutral arbitrator of disputes and appeals. In any case appeals against the judgements of the shartays were once again more frequently brought to the central court after the appointment of the dimangawi: it is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the shartays also increasingly complained against the central courts’ jurisdiction.133 Despite these claims to be re-harnessing traditional authority to the rule of the state – and a more short-lived attempt to bring Zalingei under the orbit of the neighbouring magdumate of southern Darfur – the reality was that authority was ever more closely concentrated in the hands of the DC after 1937. 134 The Governor of Darfur wrote disapprovingly in 1938 that ‘Boustead is now virtually the Emir and setting up regional courts has necessitated an extra DC to check every decision.’135 Boustead himself later admitted that his apparent policy of devolution had required ‘more real work in supervision… than does direct administration’.136 When Boustead issued a series of standardized administrative instructions to the shartays in each of the Zalingei court centres, Ingleson expressed alarm that the ‘traditional’ leaders were simply becoming mouthpieces of Boustead himself. The instructions included details on how to deal with stray animals, how to list and collect tax, how to maintain court books, prepare cases, and how to collect fines 131 

DPMD April 1938, NRO CIVSEC (1)/57/10/37 Zalingei District Annual Report 1938, NRO Darfur 1/25/139. 133  Zalingei District Annual Report 1939, NRO Darfur 1/25/139. 134 Ibid. 135  Ingleson, Governor of Darfur, ‘Note on Dar Masalit’, 25 May 1939, NRO Darfur 1/34/173. 136  Zalingei District Annual Report 1947, NRO Darfur 2. D Fasher (A) 47/7/26. 132 

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and execute judgements. Boustead defended his action by stating that the shartays could not draw up administrative rules themselves ‘as [they are] probably insufficiently enlightened to do so.’137 Whilst the impact of such regulations may have been limited, Boustead’s tendency towards personal rule was clear. The degree to which the Zalingei court system depended on the presence of state agents in the region was exposed during World War II: after 1942 there was no British DC present in the district, as both Boustead and his ADC had joined the SDF’s war effort. Whilst the maqdum of southern Darfur was intended to make his own occasional treks in the district, the ineffectiveness of his authority was confirmed by the removal of Zalingei from his jurisdiction in 1944.138 When Boustead returned to the district in 1945 he noted a massive fall in the number of cases which the shartays’ courts heard – or, at least, that were recorded. In Dar Kulli, the shartay only held very ‘irregular’ court sittings late in the evening, and cases were heard outdoors rather than in the brick court house which Boustead had constructed. Likewise the Dar Kerne court had ‘fallen into disrepair and the court area was overgrown and unkempt’.139 There is little evidence about why this was the case, or how justice worked during these years: but the absence of the state clearly translated into a rapid erosion of the authority of the formal shartays courts, shifts in the spatial location of judicial process, and a drop in the recording of cases. This does not mean the shartays themselves lost authority – indeed they may have welcomed the increased autonomy which Boustead’s absence allowed – but it does mean that the courts themselves were seen as organs of the state, and perhaps were only effective when the authority of the state was visibly seen to support their judgements. Without government as the force standing behind them, the courts were much less effective or attractive for ordinary people – and shartays reverted to hearing cases in more informal settings, and without recording their judgements. After 1945, the courts appeared to revive with the return of Boustead – but this is a reminder of how fragile colonial authority (or hegemony) was.

CONCLUSION The history of Native Administration in western Darfur up to 1937 is a story of the way in which attempts by an under-resourced state to harness the traditional legitimacy of individuals associated with the pre-colonial state in Darfur instead created a culture of endemic extortion and oppression. Torture of ‘wrong-doers’ and violent raids in the name of tax collection were features of administration which characterized a particularly vicious form of ‘decentralised despotism’ in 137 

Boustead to Perham, 4 Apr. 1940, RHO MSS Perham 547/6. Newbold, Civil Secrtray, untitled note, 17 Oct. 1944,; Lampen, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, May 1944, NRO CIVSEC (2)1/1/3. 139  Zalingei District Annual Report 1945, NRO Darfur 6/2/6. 138 

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western Darfur. This culture of governance was excused by British officials with reference to a history of continuous extortion and oppression visited upon the Fur by their rulers, which in some sense was imagined to legitimize the everyday use of force by governors in the eyes of the governed. Yet as the first chapter of this book emphasized, people in Darfur had long expected that their rulers had the responsibility to limit the oppressions visited upon them by representatives of the state. The British further excused themselves from this responsibility by reference to the ‘passivity’ of the Fur, and their inability to communicate with government. But even the official record contains plenty of evidence of the ways in which the Fur staged resistance to the demands of their rulers – through migrations, through complaints presented to senior figures of authority whenever those figures presented themselves as available – and spoke the language of the people – and in 1927 through a minor but revealing violent rebellion. After 1937, and the downfall of the second Emir, court reforms and a more activist approach by Boustead as DC partially addressed the worst excesses of the system. These changes imposed limits on the authority of the shartays that were real enough to prompt complaint among these chiefs, and gave new opportunities for people to appeal against their chief and their judgement. Nonetheless, Boustead’s own personal rule remained characterized by considerable authoritarianism – court reforms were also about extending the authority of the state over local practices – and oppressive shartays could still obtain protection from government by building strong personal relations with the British ‘Emir’. We will see in the final chapter of this book that Boustead himself eventually came to be seen as a liability: his interventionist energy led to highly personalized developmentalist initiatives which increased the discontent of the Fur with colonial government, and further exposed the authoritarianism of colonial government. This chapter has focused exclusively on western Darfur on the grounds that the character of local politics was quite distinctive, and in part perhaps reflected a deeper history of association between shartays and state power here. The chapter has also argued that the creation of a regularized culture of extortion and torture was a distinctive feature of the colonial period, as shartays became ever less accountable to their subjects whilst also being granted a significant degree of free reign by a weak state that depended on their violence to function at all. Even if a varying degree of oppression had always been associated with government in Darfur, the unwillingness and inability to regulate abuses of authority likely put the British amongst the least effective rulers of western Darfur in the eyes of their subjects – their linguistic ignorance alone was surely a major hindrance to building legitimacy. But this analysis should not be taken as representative of the way Native Administration worked across all of Darfur. In the pastoralist peripheries of Darfur, which the next chapters of this book turn to, the story is quite different: firstly chieftaincy disputes – which often engaged the state in the terms of local debate – were much more frequent among

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pastoralist communities, and chiefs were more constrained by such dispute and contestation of their authority. But in pastoralist areas, the agenda of the state was also somewhat different to that in western Darfur. Here, the state confronted more mobile subjects, difficult to pin down to particular territories, and who defied the project of legibility which colonialism appeared to rest upon. As a result there is a significant history of efforts at the confinement of peoples in these areas, in which the direct violence of the state could be deployed against those defying colonial territorial restrictions. State violence was therefore not absent from the pastoralist peripheries – but pastoralist chiefs were somewhat less directly implicated in that violence than the shartays of Zalingei.

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4 Native Courts and Chieftaincy Disputes in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1937



‘Every Arab of these tribes considers himself fit to rule.’ G.D. Lampen, Memoirs, SAD 734/8/64.

In both northern and, particularly, southern Darfur, authority in precolonial pastoralist groups was significantly less centralized than under British (and indeed Turco-Egyptian) colonial rule. Centralized leadership in nomadic societies has been regarded as inherently unstable, often time-limited to deal with specific circumstances, and more limited in scope than in sedentary societies.1 Khazanov’s classic study of nomad societies outlines the various factors which bring about a demand for centralized leadership at specific points in time: …the need to allocate rationally key resources; the establishing and regularizing of routes of pastoral migrations… need for defence; the struggle for livestock, pasture and arable lands; migrations and wars; the desire of certain groups of nomads to subdue others; particularities of relations and interaction with the outside sedentary world. 2

Beyond Darfur, some nomadic societies across Sahelian Africa might have been governed by more institutionalized chiefs, but even here colonial rule brought significant change. Nicolaisen’s study of the Tuareg suggests that chiefs in this stratified pastoralist society had both judicial and military powers before French colonial rule. But he also shows that French rule led to the concentration of authority in the hands of individual chiefs over entire federations, whilst the leaders of other drum-groups within those federations faded into insignificance. 3 Similarly, Asad has demonstrated how the Awlad Fadlallah lineage became dominant among the Kababish of Kordofan province, neighbouring Darfur, during the colonial period, thanks to their close relationship with the state.4 In Darfur, Sharif Harir suggests that precolonial Zaghawa paramount chiefs were defined mainly by their role in providing defence 1 

A.M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Cambridge, 1984), p. 166. Ibid, p. 148. 3  J. Nicolaisen, Ecology and Culture of the Pastoral Tuareg (Copenhagen, 1963), pp. 398–401. 4 Asad, Kababish, pp. 157–79. 2 

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and security rather than by a judicial role or by the allocation of land. 5 These latter powers must have remained in the hands of individual clan leaders.6 Whilst there is little direct information on precolonial Baqqara shaykhs, in the absence of stable paramount chiefs, we might surmise that here too lineage or section leaders held a relatively broad range of responsibilities.7 Perhaps, as among the neighbouring Baqqara Humr in Kordofan, individual men rose to leadership of the tribe for brief periods of time and for specific purposes – particularly in times of conflict – but paramount leadership was never permanently institutionalized.8 Therefore colonial rule in Darfur, as elsewhere in Sahelian Africa, by creating or empowering paramount pastoralist chiefs, making them permanent salaried employees of the state and presidents of Native Courts, and giving them the power to allocate resources across the entire tribal dar, engaged in a significant restructuring of authority within these societies. Access to scarce resources of grazing and watering in the fragile environment of the Sahel was and is critical to the survival and reproduction of households: the power to allocate and protect rights to these resources is of equally critical importance to the authority of pastoralist leaders.9 The overall result of the colonial policy of Indirect Rule in Darfur was therefore a concentration and stabilization of authority in the hands of individual chiefs and their lineage: people were now more dependent on leaders outside their own section to guarantee access to scarce resources than they had been before, and were also – formally at least – subject to the judicial authority of these men. As we saw in Chapter 1, this process of centralization had begun under Turco-Egyptian rule, but under the British it was taken much further. However, this chapter takes this observation as a starting point rather than a key conclusion, and aims to investigate two further questions. First, by what means was limited consent to the rule of these newly empowered chiefs manufactured? Mamdani suggests that colonial chiefs did not need nor possess local legitimacy, because of their unconditional support from the state.10 But in vigorously competitive lineage-based societies as found in pastoralist Darfur, chiefs did have to perform at least partially according to the expectations of their people, as well as the expectations of officials: if they did not, their rivals would point to their failings to gain support for their own ambitions. Moreover, colonial officials were not entirely ignorant of the expectations that local populations had of those in authority, and were concerned that chiefs should fulfil these at least in part. A detailed account of one 5  S.A. Harir, ‘The politics of numbers: Mediatory leadership and the political process among the Beri Zaghawa of Sudan’, PhD thesis (Bergen, 1986), pp. 8. 6  Ibid, pp. 18–23, 84. 7  Cf. T. Asad, ‘Political inequality in the Kababish tribe’, in I. Cunnison and W. James (eds), Essays in Sudan Ethnography (London, 1972). 8  I. Cunnison, Baggara Arabs (Oxford, 1966). 9 Asad, Kababish, p. 157.  10 Mamdani, Citizen, pp. 53–4.

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of the most ‘successful’ of the Native Courts, that of the Rizayqat, and the chief who governed it is suggestive of what some of these expectations might be, and how, by performing to these, some degree of consent to the rule of centralized authority might be produced in particular contexts and spaces. Courts were not simply arenas for despotism: they were also sites of negotiation between ruler and ruled. Moreover, despite the appearance of concentration of power in the hands of the chief, the Native Court remained one of several avenues of available dispute resolution or judgement: authority remained more pluralistic than the formal structures of Native Administration would suggest, just as had been the case in precolonial Darfur. The second focus of the chapter is on the politics of protest and chieftaincy disputes: what happened when chiefs failed to adequately perform to the expectations either of government or their own subjects. Colonial chiefs were powerful, but the novelty of their powers, their closer association with government, and the persistence of inter and intra lineage competition in pastoralist societies also created inbuilt limits, hazards and dilemmas which not all chiefs could successfully navigate. If anything the empowering of individual leaders often increased rather than decreased the vigour of political competition within tribal units, as the spoils of leadership became that much greater. This was true of sub-chiefs as well as paramount leaders. One official noted that the 40–day life-span of a ‘kestrel’ in southern Darfur was ‘about the same length of time as a Baqqara umda [sub-chief] is left to flourish’.11 One of the last British DCs in Northern Darfur noted that in his district, ‘Certain conflicts which were probably resolvable, were not supposed to be resolved. I was told not to resolve them because their resolution was not desired by the majority of the communities in which they occurred.’12 Indeed, political competition has often been argued to be a necessary structural characteristic of nomadic pastoralist societies. Crucially, for the purposes of this book’s argument, such political competition was often expressed in the form of protest – in either public demonstration or written petition – that explicitly aimed to engage government in local politics. This sort of engagement is much more visible in the archival records covering pastoralist areas in Darfur than it is in sedentary western Darfur – the reasons for this include the lineage-based factionalism of the societies concerned, the relative novelty of the paramount chief’s role, and to some extent the greater accessibility of government among the societies concerned. Migration as a means of evading oppression was common in both pastoralist and sedentary areas, but this chapter aims to focus more specifically on strategies of protest which attempted to directly persuade government to depose a chief. Existing interpretations of the protests against chiefs arising from 11 

12 

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colonial policies of Indirect Rule have often emphasized the destabilizing effect these had on colonial authority, and the limits of colonial control that were exposed by such conflicts. For Spear, protests against chiefs in late colonial Tanganyika were ‘indirectly challenging colonial authority itself’.13 Yet Berry’s analysis of chieftaincy disputes in Asante notes that ‘both chiefs and commoners were as likely to appeal to the administration for support in their struggles with one another as to combine in opposition to colonial rule.’14 In the case of Darfur, protestors were more likely to appeal to the administration than to combine in opposition to colonial rule. Following the failures of early rebellions against government, the politically discontented chose to deal with the state in order to achieve their goals.15 The chapter also aims to investigate why some protestors were more successful than others – and argues that ultimately the survival of chiefs depended principally on their ability to create an impression of enjoying local legitimacy in the eyes of government officials. If officials were convinced of this, then severe oppression and illegal accumulation might be dismissed as incidental. In this sense, performances by chiefs on a stage they shared with officials were crucial. This chapter also argues that protest against chiefs, rather than subverting the system of Native Administration, actually reinforced its political hegemony in these societies in the great majority of cases. Protest was a form of negotiation between officials, chiefs and local people over the legitimacy of particular chiefs, but not a challenge to the institution of chieftaincy itself, or to the authority of the state. People demanded a different chief, or their own chief, within the existing administrative framework.16 Moreover, protest explicitly recognized the state’s authority to intervene in local politics – and demanded that intervention.

NATIVE COURTS AND JUDICIAL PLURALISM The institutionalization of judicial power among pastoralist chiefs began with the ‘Powers of Nomad Sheikhs Ordinance’ of 1922 which granted powers of fining to nomad chiefs sitting in majlis (council). In this system Darfur chiefs kept – or ‘ate’ – the fines they imposed: this was explicitly recognized by the administration as regular practice.17 13  T. Spear, Mountain Farmers: Moral economies of land and agricultural development (Oxford, 1997), p. 194. See also A.E. Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect rule in southeastern Nigeria (London, 1973). 14 Berry, Chiefs, p. 37. 15  D. Peterson, ‘Morality plays: marriage, church courts, and colonial agency in central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928’, American Historical Review, III (2006), p. 633. 16  A point that Berry also makes in Chiefs, p. 39. Demands for ‘their own chief’ refers to cases where groups were put under the authority of a chief from a dominant neighbouring group, and protested against this. 17  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 12 Jan. 1924, NRO CIVSEC 66/10/96.

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More formalized ‘Native Courts’ were actually established in Darfur from 1928 with the intention of regularizing and controlling chiefly power, and paying chiefs salaries instead of allowing them to ‘eat’ fines – although the pace at which such change came about varied considerably.18 Lampen, ADC for the Baqqara between 1927 and 1929, and ADC of Southern Darfur District between 1930 and 1932 (and the author of a particularly rich official and personal seam of documentary material), explained the intended impact of the new system: …cases should only be heard and fines awarded in open court at a fixed place and so far as possible at fixed times with named elders sitting with the nazir. This prevented the nazir holding private courts in their compounds with slaves to overawe the accused and parasites as elders.19

The Habbaniyya chief, al-Ghali Taj al-Din was previously known to assault complainants, witnesses and the accused when he heard cases in his own hosh (compound). The practice of ‘justice’ before 1928 in southern Darfur, by implication, sounds rather similar to that experienced in western Darfur up to at least the mid-1930s. Chiefs’ agents, often drawn from their own kinship groups, were also notorious for fining heavily and arbitrarily, rather like in Zalingei: one Baqqara section was fined 70 cows by a mandub for failing to hit water when digging a well. Lampen suggested that before 1928 nazirs wielded ‘powers far in excess of those they wielded before the arrival of the government, when in many cases their people would not have stood as much as we have made them endure at the hands of their leaders in recent years.’ He also suggested that in these years ‘the oppressed had given up complaining. A new DC tends to accept the absence of complaints and the assurance of the tribal heads that all is well as proof of the health of the Native Authority.’20 But, Lampen noted, it was common practice that chiefs left a part of any imposed fine uncollected: subsequently, if any complaint was made to the DC, then the rest of that fine was extracted as a punishment. This was a major disincentive to approach government.21 The courts established after 1928 were supposed to provide more effective regulation of chiefly power, although they also bestowed court presidents with new powers of imprisonment, contributing to the continued concentration of power in the chiefs’ hands. The degree of powers varied according to the perceived authority of chiefs, and their 18 

The full details of the roll-out of Native Courts can be accessed in a series of files NRO CIVSEC 1/20/60–68. The ‘eating’ of fines among some of the smaller groups in Southern Darfur remained recognized practice until the creation of small majlis courts for the minor tribal groupings in 1938. SDD Annual Report, NRO Darfur 1/25/139. 19  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/178. 20  G.D. Lampen, Report on Native Administration in Darfur, 21 Nov. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/65. 21 Ibid.

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closeness to the administration: the most respected got the greatest powers of imprisonment and fining. As more official, formalized institutions, the courts also signalled a growing association between the power of the state and the chief. Mamdani has interpreted these institutions as central to the ‘decentralised despotism’ of colonial chiefs.22 Yet examination of the most powerful of the courts in southern Darfur reveals a more ambiguous reality.23 Ibrahim Musa Madibbu, nazir of the Rizayqat, was the most powerful chief of the Baqqara, administering the biggest tribe in Southern Darfur. The British allowed him considerable autonomy, touring his dar less regularly than those of the neighbouring tribes. This favour was a legacy of the relationship Ibrahim’s father had established with the British before and during the conquest of Darfur. By the later 1920s Ibrahim appeared to dominate his court completely. He regularly overruled court elders on questions of legal precedent: the definition of the law was now concentrated in the chief’s hands.24 Lampen occasionally observed Ibrahim’s guards – ‘wearing cartridge bandoliers and carrying whips’ – leading away a protesting litigant.25 And the court was explicitly associated with the physical violence of the state – from the 1930s powers of flogging and whipping were delegated to Ibrahim’s court (and others in southern Darfur) as standard punishments, although it was always the DC who was called on to execute these.26 The state, in theory at least, reserved the use of direct physical violence to itself. But the authority of this apparently most despotic of courts depended on the participation of ordinary people in the performance of justice. Court proceedings functioned according to well understood procedural norms, in part reflecting Ibrahim’s control of the court theatre. ‘The petitioners sat in an orderly enough fashion in a big group and on seeing the present case was done with for the time being two or three would start up, and he who was beckoned by the nazir would come forward.’ But petitioners had agency within the court performance: they ‘told their tale: sometimes with great confidence and gesture, sometimes with downcast eyes and drawing in the sand or marking off their points therein and then rubbing the tale out with a palm as they concluded.’ The capacity to tell a good story was highly esteemed in Rizayqat society, and many petitioners showed great skill ‘in setting out a case’.27 Using a chief’s court was then not just an opportunity to resolve a dispute, but also a chance to demonstrate individual skills of 22 Mamdani,

Citizen. There are striking parallels in the evidence presented here about Dar Rizayqat to the arguments presented about chiefs’ courts in southern Sudan in the work of Cherry Leonardi. The analysis here is heavily influenced by Leonardi’s work: Dealing, and (with Nelson Leben Moro, Martina Santschi, and Deborah Isser) Local Justice in Southern Sudan (Washington, 2010). 24  Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/1/45. 25  Ibid., SAD 735/1/45. 26  Civil Secretary note, 11 March 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/67. See also Civil Secretary to Governor Darfur, 9 July 1932, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/65. 27  All quotes in this paragraph from Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/1/57. 23 

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oratory, skills which might enhance or assert one’s standing within the community. This was justice as public theatre: and via the acting out of procedural conventions by chief and litigant, this performance itself became part of the institutionalisation of chiefly authority. Yet whilst court performances appeared to be well choreographed, it is also clear that away from the formalized setting of the court Ibrahim Musa was harassed and berated by complainants who demanded that he settle their cases. People made their expectations of good chiefship very clearly known. Ibrahim Musa complained to Lampen that I have no peace in this tribe: I hear their cases till my heads grows dizzy when they come and shake me from my bed to hear their complaints… if I don’t settle their cases they stay and live on me for days and must drink tea and sugar and eat meat every day. I would be happier if I was a Rizeqi with no office and could mind my cattle. 28

This language reflects specifically Baqqara ideas about authority, in which there is a strong emphasis on how leaders suffer as well as benefit from their position.29 But these ideas expressed in conversation with the local official also fitted well with colonial conceptions of duty and sacrifice: the ‘white man’s burden’ which officials carried. Such conversations helped to construct a sense of affinity between chief and official, bolster the chief’s standing with the administration, and thus ultimately strengthen the security of his position. It is also important to note Ibrahim was expected to provide good hospitality for complainants, including sugar and tea: this was ‘most precious as it represented a cash purchase, not a present from the flock or grain store’. The provision of lavish hospitality was a key criteria by which chiefs were assessed locally, and therefore also by government: it helped Ibrahim Musa that the administration saw him as a ‘most generous man’. 30 This is a point to which we will have cause to return. The Rizayqat court in its first years appears to have been taken up with adultery and divorce cases brought by husbands – but also by wives and their families. 31 Gender relations appear to have been in flux in Dar Rizayqat just as they were in other parts of Sudan and across Africa more widely. Baqqara songs claimed women had become ‘loose livers’ under ‘the government’; this may express male discomfort with the growing economic independence of women who sold semn (clarified butter) at markets to eastern traders for cash, very much a commodity in its own right in Condominium Darfur. 32 Younger Baqqara men also brought cash back from periods of labour migration spent in the Gezira scheme in eastern Sudan. Baqqara courts might have been in part a tool for establishing gerontocratic control over young women’s and young men’s bodies and wealth in a time of economic change. As in western 28 

Ibid, SAD 734/8/25. For instance see Cunnison, Baggara, p. 152. 30  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/28. 31  Ibid., SAD 724/8/27. 32  Ibid., SAD 734/9/99. 29 

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Darfur, unmarried women were fined for becoming pregnant; here their lover was also fined double whatever was imposed on the woman. Ibrahim Musa said to Lampen, ’You have seen that all the cases concern women. The Arabs are thieves, not to be trusted with women, and no woman is faithful but through fear. They say “the ruler with no sting is no good” and I say the same of a husband.’33 But as already noted, women brought cases to court as well: for example, mothers of girls could win fines from the man who took their daughter’s virginity. 34 And despite the appearance of total control of proceedings by the nazir, Ibrahim Musa often delegated family disputes to a panel of his court elders, who were known to be particularly sympathetic to requests for divorces brought by women who had been beaten by their husbands. 35 The elders also often settled disputes informally, encouraging agreements between parties that obviated the need for fines. 36 The variable practice of the court – sometimes imposing punishments and sometimes encouraging consensual settlements in adultery or ‘seduction’ cases – seems to partially mirror the ambiguous expectations of those in authority more generally. Ibrahim’s words quoted above reveal something of these ambiguities: the idea that the ruler (and husband) should have a ‘sting’ (or a ‘thorn’) is one which other Baqqara chiefs also repeated – in other words rulers should embody firm masculine virtue. 37 This emphasis on discipline and coercion coexisted with the idea that the ruler should also show mercy and remit punishments; another well-known Baqqara saying was that ‘the ruler arrests in ignorance and releases in knowledge’. 38 One of the failings of colonial officials in the eyes of the Baqqara was the relative rarity of the remittance of sentences imposed in court. And chiefs were not necessarily always enthusiastic about using their powers of punishment against their people: when Ibrahim Musa was granted powers of imprisonment after 1928, ‘…he was much embarrassed the first time he sat with his new powers for he had never before sentenced anyone to imprisonment. He looked to me [Lampen] for confirmation of each sentence and finally said “You sit there giving me no help at all.”’39 These mixed expectations – of balancing force with clemency – presented challenges for chiefs. Nonetheless, the most striking feature of the Rizayqat court was the extent to which Ibrahim Musa’s judgement was in demand from his people. Lampen observed that nothing would ‘prevent the democratic Arab from calling [the nazir] Ibrahim without any added title of honour, and from demanding an audience at any time of day or night’. Ibrahim ‘did not spare himself in seeing 33 

Ibid., SAD 734/9/30. Ibid., SAD 734/9/78. 35  Ibid., SAD 735/1/45; 734/9/18. 36  Ibid,, SAD 734/9/28. 37  Ibid., SAD 734/9/57. 38  Ibid., SAD 734/10/173. These tensions were also navigated by the Sultans of Darfur who had to balance force with clemency. 39  Ibid., SAD 734/10/181. 34 

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cases… often till sunset he sat before his tent or beneath a tree and one by one the petitioners came forward.’40 Ibrahim told Lampen that any failure to hear cases easily led to accusations from his people that ‘the Nazir had become proud and would make himself Sultan’, suggesting a desire to withdraw from and sit above the affairs of his people.41 In this sense he had to sit in judgement if he was to maintain his legitimacy and authority: a real failing would have been not to settle cases.42 Complaints against those in the lower rungs of the tribal hierarchy could also be brought to Ibrahim’s court: in 1929 some Rizayqat women accused their shaykh of using a love charm against them, claiming ‘He is making us love him more and more; we feel it… But we hate him, we want to get rid of him, he is an oppressor, a zalim.’43 It was not only Lampen who was persuaded of Ibrahim’s ability as court president: officials throughout the colonial period noted Ibrahim’s ability to make decisions that his people perceived as just, and that he was ‘personally regarded as bakhit [a blessed man]’ by his subjects. Yet the attractiveness of Ibrahim’s court lay in more than just his own skills as a judge: it also perhaps came from its association with the power of government. In 1915, on the eve of colonial conquest, Ibrahim’s father had repeatedly pressed the British to send officers to Dar Rizayqat and do away with Ali Dinar. One Rizayqat explained this demand by suggesting that, in the context of the growing uncertainty around Ali Dinar’s rule, ‘the lack of real power in the background prevents the individual from even asserting his rights, and causes infinite disputes which cannot be definitely settled.’44 In contrast, the authority of Ibrahim’s court thirteen years later rested on its association with the state, the ‘power in the background’ which gave the court’s sanction its force and certainty. Yet despite the ‘awe’ which ordinary people seemed to feel for Ibrahim, and his association with the power of government, his behaviour was certainly subject to the scrutiny of his people, even to the point of potential ridicule.45 The Rizayqat had a position of shaykh al-taata (shaykh of fools) who fined anyone seen to have behaved foolishly: Ibrahim in 1928 was fined twice ‘for having a known thief as a groom who ran off with his donkey and for being persuaded to take down the grass roof of his house just before the rains by a thatcher who knew not how to thatch’.46 This, and more significantly the readiness of ordinary people to assail their chief to hear their case, suggests that Ibrahim ultimately inhabited the same moral universe as those he governed, even 40 

Ibid., SAD 734/8/28. Ibid., SAD 734/8/25. 42  Intriguingly, this was also true in some models of Sudanic kingship: Sultans of Sennar might be deposed for a failure to provide justice. Spaulding, Sennar, p. 62. 43  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/170. 44  Darfur Intelligence Report, 7 Nov. 1915, SAD Baring papers (uncatalogued). 45  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/21. 46  Ibid, SAD 734/9/4. 41 

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as he exercised wide-ranging authority derived from the state in court. In this sense, while Ibrahim in some ways embodied the state at a local level, he also retained some moral distance from it, a distance that tied him to those he ruled. Even the authority of the most successful chiefs and their courts therefore remained subject to local scrutiny. And not all courts were as popular or as ordered as Ibrahim Musa’s. When large numbers of Bani Halba moved away from their dar in the late 1930s, officials suggested that ‘the dilatory behaviour of the court mirrors the nazir’s own laziness and it has been responsible for a feeling of discontent and lack of respect for authority.’47 Of the Kalaka court in southern Darfur, which gathered together Habbaniyya, Fallata and Masalit, Lampen complained that the public ‘crowd in too close and interrupt too easily’.48 This court was known to be rather unruly, which itself reflected the broader chieftaincy politics of the area, especially among the Habbaniyya, in which sectional intrigue and protest were very common – Lampen’s successor commented of the court ‘that there seems to be nowhere in it the seeds of governance.’49 Yet it was also very well used and well attended – and the high levels of Habbaniyya migration out of their dar, characteristic of the early colonial period, seem to have declined after the foundation of the court. Not all chiefs wielded the powers of a formally instituted court. Notably the Zaghawa in northern Darfur remained subject to their shartays using the sulta powers granted them in the 1922 legislation until a Zaghawa court was finally established in 1938, though the Meidob pastoralists of the north came under a court much sooner.50 In southern Darfur the Ta’aisha, a smaller Baqqara group, remained similarly under the sulta powers of their nazir, whose judicial authority was by no means complete or despotic, until the creation of their own court in 1935.51 Ta’aisha women were perceived to be particularly assertive in claiming their rights and some women conducted their own defence in cases brought to the nazir. Lampen noted that the nazir Ali al-Sanussi ‘did not care to face Ta’aishi women and more than once asked me to take their cases off his hands.’52 Several other smaller tribes in southern Darfur – Birgid, Daju, and others – also remained under the sulta powers of their chiefs until 1938.53 The institutional landscape established by colonial rule was, therefore, very varied, and the establishment of formalized courts in some areas was an innovation only of the later 47 

DCSDD, Note on Beni Halba, 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. G.D. Lampen, Report on Native Administration in Darfur, 21 Nov. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/65. 49  Crawford diary, 10 Jan. 1933, SAD 502/5. 50  NDD Annual Report 1938, NRO Darfur 1/25/139; Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 June 1929, NRO CIVSEC 1/21/62. 51  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 May 1935, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/67. 52  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/19–20. 53  SDD Annual Report, 1938, NRO Darfur 1/25/139. 48 

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colonial period, demonstrating the persistence of ‘illegibility’ in local governance in Darfur. Even in the societies where courts were well established, alternative arenas existed for the settling of disputes: there was no chiefly monopoly on justice. Agawid and elders at a more local level continued to advise on or settle disputes that people did not want to bring to court: officials usually applauded the flexibility which such practices continued to afford people. Lampen wrote of the Baqqara …they by no means consider the court and the council their last resort in getting their rights. Consequently there is much of a schoolboy’s lighthearted love of an argument and the excitement of a tussle in their cases: they have their real life away from this, and in the rare cases where they consider themselves really badly treated they will move to the hospitality of a neighbouring tribe as a protest for a year or two, till soothed into returning. 54

This might be a somewhat idealized (and patronising) portrait of Baqqara life – particularly given the hostility of the colonial state to out-migration, as we will see in the next chapter – but it suggests something of the multiple arenas in which people pursued their cases, the resilience of pre-existing mechanisms of dispute resolution and the limits to chiefly despotism. Administrators in Darfur were more anxious about the rivalry between the officially sanctioned Mohammedan Law Courts – which represented the forces of orthodox sharia in the urban centres of Darfur – and the Native Courts themselves, which often wielded sharia powers. The MLC hierarchy had been established by the British in the early years of Condominium rule as a way to support orthodox Islam against the Mahdism preached by itinerant holy men: courts were staffed by qadis trained at Gordon College in Khartoum. Yet by the 1920s the rise of Native Administration led to a widespread reaction among British administrators against the courts, which were seen to embody the influence of the increasingly despised effendiyya class – formally educated Sudanese whose loyalty to the state was also believed to be suspect.55 In Darfur, this prejudice was justified with reference to the gap between the conventional sharia imposed by the MLC and the realities of a hybrid mix of sharia and customary law which characterized local legal cultures in Darfur. It was also certainly true that the MLCs used the Hanafi, rather than the Maliki, code – the latter being the local norm for sharia cases in Darfur.56 Officials also claimed that the MLC hierarchy would be less able to encourage informal compromises between disputants than would a local native court ‘with the knowledge of the 54 

Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/9/96. the MLCs and the campaign to undermine them see Daly, Empire, pp.  388–391; in Kordofan, Willis, Hukm, pp.  41–43; and A.A. Ibrahim, Manichean Delirium: Decolonizing the judiciary and Islamic renewal in the Sudan 1898–1985 (Leiden, 2008). 56  Campbell, DC NDD to Governor Darfur, 8 Apr. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 55 On

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inner histories of the parties’.57 But the fundamental concern was that the MLC hierarchy detracted from the authority of the newly instituted Native Courts. In particular the maa’zunin, the registrars of marriage and divorce who operated in rural areas as the representatives of the MLCs, were known to take on minor cases themselves – a role beyond what was officially sanctioned – and send major cases to the town qadi to be heard. One of these maa’zunin described his role as ‘preventing disobedience to the regulations’; an MLC inspector who visited Darfur described Native Administration as ‘retrogressive to a lower stage of civilisation’.58 Chiefs resented the MLCs – in one case there were four maa’zunin operating among one tribe – because of the competition they created with Native Courts. Rural people often obtained a summons to the qadi’s court as a way to force an informal settlement of their case out of the chief’s court, manipulating the preference of their opponents (which they probably shared) to keep their affairs distant from the more formal Islamic law of the towns. People were thus able to use institutional pluralism as a means to accelerate the informal resolution of disputes. In this context the precise character of the Native Courts’ authority remained somewhat opaque and subject to debate and negotiation: one party to a case in the late 1920s tried (unsuccessfully) to argue that the Native Court’s sharia powers meant that ‘all cases before the court should be seen by strict sharia law and that people who wished their cases seen according to local custom must go to the nazir outside the court.’59 Through the 1930s, officials increasingly ensured that Native Courts included Darfuri faqihs who sat as ulama members of the court.60 These men were seen as being more in tune with local norms and expectations than the MLC qadis. Guy Moore – DC in northern Darfur between 1932 and 1946, the longest any DC remained in a Darfur district – perhaps expressed the prejudice against the MLC hierarchy most clearly in his claim that a learned Darfuri holy man ‘naturally gets the respect and attention of chiefs while the Effendi dressed up as a Qadi can only command it.’61 In the larger courts a faqih (as in Dar Rizayqat or Kalaka) or a Native Administration qadi (as in Zalingei and Dar Masalit) ran their own panels, hearing sharia cases independently from the chiefs.62 The authority of individual chiefs was to some degree limited by these relatively autonomous Islamic holy men, who continued to be influential individuals in colonial Darfur just as they had been in the precolo57 

Lampen DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 29 Mar. 1931 ‘Native Administration and MLCs’, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 58  Lampen DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 29 Mar. 1931 ‘Native Administration and MLCs’, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64; Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 30 Apr. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 59  Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/4/52. 60  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 7 May 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64. 61  DPMD September 1937. 62  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 Apr. 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/22/64.

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nial period. The leading Habbaniyya faqih was said to have significant influence over the chief al-Ghali: he knew how ‘to flatter the Nazir and how to frighten the Nazir’.63 Alongside elders and holy men, colonial officials themselves remained in demand as sources of rulings and dispute resolution: this seems to have been much more the case in the pastoralist societies of northern and southern Darfur than in the Fur heartland, where language barriers, suspicion of the state and fear of chiefs kept people away from government. Moore noted that it was very common for people in northern Darfur to approach the markaz direct for a judgement, and suggested they were moved by the idea that to have a piece of paper from the DC before you open your case in front of the Native Authority will either work the oracle or act on that authority as a point in your favour. The multiplication of ‘Hakims’ unless they are working in close harmony, gives further chances for the nimble litigant unless the stages in the channel are strictly kept to.64

In other words, and to use an anachronistic phrase, people were ‘forum shopping’ – using all avenues available to achieve the best outcome for their dispute. This was not a novel development of the colonial period; rather there was considerable continuity with the judicial and institutional pluralism of precolonial Darfur, which the colonial project of Native Administration did not fully efface. People also seemed to have similar expectations of officials to those that they had of their chiefs, demanding an audience regardless of the rhythm of bureaucratic time. Lampen described how many petitioners would come to see him in the afternoons, to discuss matters which ‘could not be reached over the hustle and bustle of the office, but only after an introduction of several cups of syrupy tea.’ Indeed so many of these complainants came outside the hours of business, that Lampen had to ‘build a rest-house to lodge them at the side of my compound and even hire an ex-slave girl to cook for them.’65 As he admits, he had to ‘conform with ideas of Arab hospitality.’66 Lampen indeed also established a sizable herd of cattle, signifying his wealth in local terms, and thus demonstrating his capacity to fulfil the obligation of hospitality. This description of the demands of ordinary people on the ruler is of course strikingly similar to that given by Ibrahim Musa himself: to some extent, Lampen was the second chief – or ‘Sultan Southern Darfur’, as he said some Baqqara called him.67 Rulers had obligations to those over whom they wielded authority and the physical invasion of the markaz by petitioners and their expectation of hospitality was a powerful reminder of this element of reciprocity in power relations. Of course, these demands and performances constituted the very making of the 63 

Lampen memoirs, SAD 735/1/76. NDD Annual Report 1935, NRO Darfur 5/2/9. 65  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/67. 66  Ibid., SAD 735/1/72. 67  Ibid., SAD 734/10/123. 64 

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state’s authority, just as they made the authority of the chief: it might be surmised that officials consciously played on what they perceived to be the local expectations of the ruler in order to build their authority. Moore was also known as Sultan by many in northern Darfur, and was remembered decades later for his theatrical gestures of generosity– literally throwing money to the poor – as well as his rugged masculinity on trek, and, ‘above all’, his accessibility to those who wanted to bring cases to him.68 His virtues to a significant extent were also the virtues of a chief. Moore managed to construct an authority that combined the immense power of the invisible state with his own personal rule. As one informant later recalled, Moore ‘was a man who did not play. There were no bandits around when he was Sultan. It was the whip or the rope for anyone who was dishonest.’69 It was not just Moore who doled out violence to assert his authority: trek diaries of Lampen’s successor in Southern Darfur between 1932 and 1936, Crawford, reveal him flogging a man who refused to help put up a tent for him while on trek: he noted, ‘a little more of the rough stuff would do them all good.’70 Archival records do not contain much evidence of physical violence committed by chiefs in northern and southern Darfur; but some state officials were clearly unafraid to remind people of the force that lay behind their own rule. In this they also fitted into deeper models of political power, especially perhaps that of the precolonial magdums who had ruled the peripheries of the Sultanate with considerable autonomy and often considerable force. In summary, whilst chiefs might construct great personal authority in the setting of the Native Court, they also remained subject to the demands of their subjects – indeed their authority was constituted in their capacity to respond to these demands. And they remained one centre of dispute resolution in a pluralistic institutional landscape – to some extent both town-based qadis and touring officials were competitors for the sort of personalized authority that chiefs were trying to build. But these constraints on the chief have important implications for the long-term resilience of this novel innovation in the pastoralist societies of Darfur. The limits on the authority of chiefs prevented them from the grossest abuses characteristic of Native Administration in western Darfur, whilst simultaneously a canny chief might build a very durable authority in sometimes torturous and exhausting negotiation with his people. Daly emphasizes a history of corruption and failure in his take on Native Administration in Darfur – yet the account offered above suggests rather more that the policy might have some success where structures and individuals combined to produce interactive sites of engagement between rulers and ruled – in the Native Courts, and indeed in the markaz itself.71 Equally, however, not all chiefs were capable of meeting the dual expectations of both their own people and the government – and their position might become extremely vulner68 

M. Asher, In Search of the Forty Days Road (Harlow, 1984), p. 5.

70 

Crawford trek diaries, 20 Mar. 1935, SAD 502/8/47. Sorrow, p. 152.

69 Ibid.

71 Daly,

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able as a result. What is perhaps particularly revealing in such cases, where protestors approached government to depose their chiefs, is that the essential ideas of Native Administration (that there should be a chief who deals with government) remained intact – as did the authority of the state itself. Indeed it was the state which was perceived (rightly) to have the power to replace an inadequate leader. In this sense, and from the perspective of the state, protests against failing chiefs also revealed some of the underlying strengths of the system.

LANGUAGES OF PROTEST In 1917 Al Ghali Taj al-Din was made nazir of the Habbaniyya by the British administration: he had held this position for twelve years under Ali Dinar, before losing the Sultan’s favour in 1914. But on one of his first tours, the Governor of Darfur between 1917 and 1923, Savile, encountered a ‘considerable and very noisy faction of the tribe in determined opposition to the nazir’ gathered at Buram, the tribe’s headquarters. Three leaders of the protest jumped up at the Governor’s arrival and shouted ‘“Ghaali is not our nazir and we won’t have him”… With many interruptions from the malcontents I went on to explain… his power to oppress them would no longer exist under the Government, as he could only carry out Government orders, which were not oppressive’. Al-Ghali’s rivals were not fooled and continued to protest. Savile therefore asked if they were ‘prepared to defy the Government’. Their response was ‘We are under the Government, but we won’t have El Ghaali under any circumstances.’ This attempt to distinguish between loyalty to government and loyalty to chief was rejected by Savile, who proceeded to arrest the three leaders: loyalty to government and to the chief appointed by government was indivisible in his eyes. But Savile went on to assure the tribe that if El Ghali did oppress them ‘then they can appeal to the Inspector, and if that was not enough, then to Fasher directly.’ Nonetheless, he also reminded the protestors of the risks of complaint: Al-Ghali ‘was entitled to justice as much as any of them, and if anyone laid false accusations against him, that man would get very severely punished.’ The truth of this was illustrated the next morning when one of Al-Ghali’s enemies made public complaint against the nazir for extortion – Al-Ghali quickly brought two umdas (who were probably paid for this job by the nazir) to speak against the complainant. As the case collapsed, the complainant was given a month’s imprisonment by Savile. ‘That finally broke down the opposition to the nazir and by the next morning every shaykh in the tribe and every man who was there had sworn fealty to El Ghaali.’72 This story illustrates the intensity of competition for office in a pastoralist society from the very outset of colonial rule, in this case based 72  Saville, May 28 1917, report of a tour in Dar Rizeigat, Dar Habbania, Nyala, Zalingei and Kebkebia, SAD Baring papers (uncatalogued).

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on a history of rivalry between key sections of the tribe that had been running for at least forty years – it also demonstrates the risks involved for those who wished to destabilize the authority of men selected by the colonial state as their local allies. And it is worth remembering that most protests failed to dislodge chiefs from their positions of power. Nonetheless, in the case at hand, Savile’s confidence at having resolved the problem in one fell swoop was pure hubris – just two years later renewed protest would successfully force Al Ghali’s dismissal. Vigorous competition for office among the Habbaniyya would persist well into the 1920s, and would be revived again in the 1940s. Structural tensions between the leading sections of the tribe, whether explicitly pursued or temporarily submerged, were an underlying reality of Habbaniya politics throughout the colonial period. One official saw protest in Dar Habbaniyya as characterized by ‘the individual Habbani pushing himself forward simply to be known to Government’.73 People pursued their own political ambition by directing protest against incumbent chiefs to administrators: they worked to get the attention of government, not to keep it at bay. While political competition among the Habbaniyya was particularly notorious, more generally engagement with government officials in attempts to depose chiefs by the force of protest was very common in pastoralist societies. Such protest was rarely spontaneously produced from below: rather excluded local elites played a key role in mobilizing support, sometimes based on the grievances of ordinary people against illegitimate or oppressive chiefs. There were a number of grounds on which protestors could bring pressure on government to bear. Protestors were well aware of the inherent tensions in the chief’s position as intermediary between state and local society. They also knew that the state, in theory at least, presented itself as an upholder of colonial law. When criticizing the behaviour of chiefs some protestors appealed, in a clearly instrumental fashion, to colonial legalistic norms: Moore noted of the Meidobi elite that they were ‘quick to observe the opportunities afforded by the thorough dislike of the new Government for thieves, robbers and their harbourers’.74 The tendency of chiefs to ‘eat’ their people by the collection of extra-legal dues, fines and bribes formed the basis for many complaints to government – though such ‘eating’ may have had some sanction within Baqqara society. In neighbouring Kordofan, Ian Cunnison noted of the Baqqara Humr that bribery incurred no shame within Humr society but allegations of bribery were frequently made against leaders to get government attention.75 Such allegations could be very effective: Al-Ghali Taj al-Din was deposed in 1919 following significant mobilization by his sectional rivals. After investigation of their allegations, the inspector of Darfur suggested ‘the atmosphere of Buram is not that of the seat of a tribal leader but rather that of the headquarters of 73 

Baggara ADC to Governor, 12 Dec. 1926, NRO 2.D.Fasher 54/3/12. Moore, note on Jebel Meidob (nd), NRO CIVSEC (1)66/6/43. 75 Cunnison, Baggara, pp. 121, 146. 74 

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a flourishing business establishment.’ Rumours of an illegal ‘dungeon’ used by Al-Ghali and his involvement in slave dealing also aroused the government’s ire.76 It is very unlikely that slave dealing incurred significant moral shame within Baqqara society (slave-raiding had been a central economic activity for these peoples before the twentieth century, and slave-owning probably remained widespread) – but the involvement of a government appointed chief in such business was enough to ensure their sacking. Discontent among groups who perceived inter-tribal amalgamations as a loss of independence or an act of subordination to their rivals could result in vigorous protest.77 In southern Darfur one of the most controversial of these amalgamations was the subordination of the Ma’alia Arabs to the Rizayqat under the leadership of Ibrahim Musa. At one point over 150 hostile, armed Ma’alia met Ibrahim Musa as he attempted to enter their territory and forced him to turn away; subsequently the government placed them under the control of the Nyala District Court, removing Ibrahim Musa from this role.78 Moreover, as a matter of course, pastoralist ‘tribes’ themselves were, as political units, often an awkward amalgamation of relatively autonomous sections under the greatly increased judicial authority of a single paramount. Conflict within the Habbaniyya tribe between the dominant Ri’afa and Shibool sections over the occupancy of the paramountcy existed from the creation of the position under Turco-Egyptian rule and throughout the period of British administration.79 Lampen described the culture of political competition within the tribe in this way: …it is hardly an exaggeration to say that every shaykh was ambitious to take his umda’s place and every umda to take his nazir’s, if he could have done so. In practice this ambition resulted in two parties in every section, one anxious by any intrigue or lie to overthrow their shaykh or umda and the other his rather lukewarm supporters. The nazir held his position very largely by the threat that he would counter intrigue with intrigue and those shaykhs who did not support him found their tribesmen being secretly encouraged to revolt. 80

Such volatile politics resulted in very persistent dispute and protest among the Habbaniyya, but similar competition existed in most other pastoralist societies. This also perhaps helps to explain the relative (though not total) absence of the worst forms of abuse described in western Darfur in the pastoralist societies of the north and south, quoting from Lampen again: 76 

McNeill, Inspector SDD to Governor Darfur, 7 Dec. 1919; Savile, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 19 Feb. 1920, NRO 2. D. Fasher 54/3/12. 77  See ADC SDD to Governor 10 Apr. 1932, NRO CIVSEC 66/12/107 and Crawford diaries, SAD 502/5–7 passim. 78  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 2 July 1931, NRO CIVSEC 1/23/66. 79  See files NRO 2.D. Fasher (A) 54/3/12, 54/3/14 for extensive documentation of Habbaniyya disputes, some of which is discussed below. 80  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/9/122.

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A balance of power exists in all these tribes, and it is as well to prevent the ruling family crushing it out altogether…none of these Nazirs were single minded enough in their love for their peoples welfare, to be the worse for a restraining influence which the opposition provided.81

It is also significant that some of the most vociferous chieftaincy disputes were over the legitimacy of amalgamations that had been enacted by the Sultans themselves, often in the 19th century, and which were still contested. In 1940 leaders of a discontented lineage group of the Galla Zaghawa, the Genigergera, subordinated to the Galla shartays since the early 19th century, reasserted their independence by rioting in the shartay’s house and threatening him with a knife. They accused the shartay of illegally ‘eating’ their sheep, as they were ‘not his people’.82 The British thus sometimes inherited existing conflicts which their judicial and administrative empowerment of individual chiefs exacerbated. Chiefs were intended to be cultural intermediaries and translators between government and ‘tribal’ society: in official eyes they could not fulfil this function adequately if they did not share a common culture with their people. Protestors, well aware of this expectation, sometimes suggested that chiefs were oppressive because they were not really ‘of the people’. Complainants suggested that a Ta’aisha nazir, Zubayr Sam, ‘was not a Taaishi but half a Salami, a mule they called him in their fury.’83 Disputing a chief’s ethnic origins was a powerful tactic to use in front of government officials who placed tribal identities at the heart of their administration; it surely also demonstrated the importance of authentic local roots to people’s own ideas of chiefly legitimacy. 84 More generally, if chiefs appeared too close to the government and too distant from their people, then they could also lose support from below. The Fallata nazir of the 1920s, Abu Homeira, is today remembered as having been inaccessible and lazy, unsociable, stingy – all very great vices for a paramount nomad chief. But worst of all, whenever he had any problems he would run to talk to the British, rather than dealing with his own people.85 Sub-chiefs were perhaps particularly vulnerable to claims that they did not protect the interests of their people. This was because sub-chiefs were, by virtue of their position, closer to ordinary people than a paramount chief: to some extent indeed they functioned as a shield against the demands of the paramount, setting some limits to the authority of the nazir. One DC was told by a Rizayqat informant that umdas 81 

Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/179. Proceedings of the Zaghawa Court, 22 July 1940, NRO Darfur Kuttum A 41/3/9.’Separatist’ movements were by no means unknown under the Sultans either: see Kapteijns, Sudanic, p. 47. 83  Lampen diaries, SAD 739/9/44. 84  Zalingei Emirate Annual Report 1935, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/23/68 and H. Boustead, ‘Note on Emir Mohammed Fadl’s regime as a Native Administration’, RHO MSS Perham 547/5. 85  Interview with Fellata wakil nazir, Mukhtar Abdel Rahman, Khartoum, 12 Nov. 2008. 82 

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were most necessary because they acted as a buffer between the Nazir and the people – he said that a family like the Madibbus had blood feuds with many families and that umdas in a kind of way took the shock of such cases – as a rule the people were only interested in picking an umda who was kind to them.86

And importantly, while administrators officially appointed both paramount and most sub-chiefs, sub-chiefs were in practice often chosen by senior men of the section or clans whom they would be responsible for. Officials were often concerned to gauge local opinion when making appointments, even if they made their own priorities clear: they really did want these men to have some measure of local legitimacy. In Dar Anka, elders rejected a candidate for dimlij suggested by the DC: ‘they actually profess to mistrust Hamadan because he could read and write.’87 Perhaps his literacy might bring him into too close an association with the state. On another occasion a DC appointed a shaykh in Dar Artag ‘of whom I know nothing’ he admitted, but who was unanimously supported by elders.88 Sub-chiefs were especially at risk if they were perceived to have grown too close to a paramount chief himself seen as illegitimate or despotic. Zaghawa shaykhs in Dar Artag complained that their dimlij Osman Omar was ‘a sneak and is in malik Tahir’s [the paramount’s] pocket’. This particular language of protest did not, however, appeal to the government: Moore suggested of this critique that ‘I can well imagine that this is correct. Osman is an oily little man but he is also studiously correct as far as can be discovered in his official duties.’89 This particular protest was ignored. However, at other times the force of local protest prompted by similar concerns might make an unpopular sub-chief’s position untenable. Another Zaghawa sub-chief responsible for the Genigergera lasted five years before he was forced to resign by the pressure of protestors accusing him, interestingly, ‘of being the Government and the shartay’s man’.90 The government did not demand his reinstatement. British officials were also convinced of Darfur’s distinct identity from Khartoum, Omdurman and ‘the river’ (the Nile Valley). Leaders who appeared to be too obviously linked to this urban, sophisticated ‘eastern’ culture, struggled to gain the respect of colonial officials, and were easy prey for local rivals. The second Habbaniyya nazir of the colonial period, Mahmud Abu Saad, is worthy of detailed consideration in 86 

Crawford diaries, 23 Feb, 1933, SAD 502/5/51. This is consistent with Cunnison, Baggara, p.  194, where he also suggests that the key function of Humr sheikhs to their community was to advance capital in the form of cattle, and to ‘perhaps minimize the number of stock declared’ for the purposes of taxation. 87  Dupuis, Governor Darfur, Note on headship Dar Anka Zaghawa 2/4/29, NRO Darfur 31/164/13. 88  Evans, DC NDD to Governor Darfur, 27 Mar. 1923, ibid. 89  DC NDD Moore ‘Note on Dar Artag’ 1 July 1935, ibid. 90  Moore to Governor Note on Genigergera affairs 30 Sept. 1940, NRO Darfur Kuttum A 41/3/9.

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this respect. Mahmud was a member of the Ri’afa section of the tribe and had been paramount chief for some years under Turco-Egyptian rule. He had been forced east with many of his section under the Mahdiyya, and had become a mere shaykh of a town quarter. The British restored him to the nazirate in 1920, following successful renewed Ri’afa led protests against Al-Ghali’s oppressions. But in the later years of Mahmud’s rule, in the mid-1920s, tribal ‘discipline’ declined steeply, as shaykhs refused to produce tax, men for labour, or suspects for trial. Officials believed this disorder stemmed from Mahmud’s greater affinity with the culture of riverine Sudan than with the Habbaniyya of Darfur. The ADC Baqqara claimed the Habbaniya who had never left the dar credited Mahmud with ‘knowing how to talk to the government’, but that they also held him in contempt because of his association with ‘the river’.91 One official noted ‘his habits are sedentary… He appears to prefer the company of the Gellaba traders [Arabs from riverine Sudan] living at Buram to that of his own tribesmen.’92 Mahmud did not follow the nomadic patterns of movement of his people; he did not enjoy intimate talk with them. Surely then, officials thought, his knowledge of the people, knowledge upon which the colonial administration was completely dependent, was lacking. Just as problematically for Mahmud Abu Saad, the umdas who had been appointed at the nazir’s behest when he took up his position were ‘nearly all strangers from the river… eastern in mode of life and thought, not Habbani of the dar’.93 Additionally, Mahmud’s son had previously been employed as a murasla (messenger) in the Public Works Department in Khartoum. Officials said he had ‘brought his town bred manners and abuse with him and the people hate it.’94 The chief’s whole regime was then seen to be too distant from the people it governed to work effectively for the colonial state. Mahmud’s chiefship was thrown into crisis, in a manner rather similar to that seen under the second Emir of Zalingei: it was seen to be a foreign imposition rather than an ‘authentic’ local chieftaincy. But it is worth noting that many of Mahmud’s sectional constituency, the Ri’afa, had gone east to Omdurman during the Mahdiiya: the critique of ‘easternness’ was one made by Mahmud’s sectional rivals among the Shibool, who had remained in Darfur during the Mahdiya. Moreover in the 1920s, many Baqqara migrated east to the Gezira cotton scheme to earn cash; despite its image among officials as an isolated backwater, Darfur was never cut off from the rest of Sudan, especially the wealthier riverine heartlands.95 This did not damage the effectiveness of the critique of ‘easternness’ when put to officials, which played on colonial anxieties about the authenticity of chiefly authority, but it was perhaps not a critique which all Habbani would have endorsed. 91 

ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur, 12 Dec. 1926, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/12. Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, ibid. 93  ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur 14 Mar. 1925, ibid. 94  Dupuis, Deputy Governor Darfur to Governor Darfur, 4 Feb. 1925, ibid. 95  ADC Baggara to Governor, 14 Mar. 1925, NRO 2. D. Fasher 54/3/12. 92 

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Maybe more significantly, the richer men of the tribe complained that they were not entertained with ‘lashings of tea and sugar’.96 The ADC Baqqara again commented that the nazir’s niggardliness was just ‘good management in the east’.97 Mahmud was seen by government to be ‘too anxious to be a nazir after his conception of the qualities the Government seeks in nazirs’, and not enough in keeping with the expectations of his people.98 But stinginess was a severe failing among Baqqara chiefs, as it threatened the legitimacy of the chief among his sectional rivals, who only tolerated his rule in return for a share of the spoils of power: Lampen knew of three nazirs who paid large bribes to hakama, female praise singers, to stop them singing publicly of the chief’s stinginess for fear of its effects on their own authority.99 Again, among the neighbouring Humr, Cunnison found that the nazir’s key role was as ‘the ultimate dispensers of patronage’ – including the patronage of hospitality.100 The failure to fulfil such a role was potentially deadly for a chief: the intensity of the ‘politics of reputation’ was such that lampooning a chief for failing to fulfil their obligations of generosity was perhaps the most effective critique of chiefly leaders.101 Yet despite the lack of ‘tribal discipline’, and the claims that Mahmud was despised by his people, the ADC Baqqara made quite contradictory statements suggesting that the nazir was not unpopular among the mass of his people – perhaps precisely because of his reluctance to enforce the demands of the state. Ordinary Habbaniyya said to the ADC that Mahmud was ‘an easy ruler and does not oppress the poor’; he was known not to ‘eat’ his people.102 Habbaniyya elders, the agawaid as they were termed by officials, said that ‘we like Mahmud. He is so glahol’ – a word used to describe a horse that does not kick.103 Mahmud was perhaps not hated by ordinary people: this was an elite power struggle, based on the resentments of members of the Shibool section who felt excluded from their fair share of the proceeds of office, rather than a deep gulf between chief and subjects.104 Nonetheless, by playing on ideas of cultural difference and inauthenticity, Mahmud’s opponents had successfully undermined the nazir’s standing with the administration. Similarly, a concern about the Ta’aisha chief Ali Senussi for some officials was that he was ‘half a town dweller’, not a real nomad Baqqara: he had been an adviser to Ali Dinar, residing in El Fasher until 1916.105 His dress gave him away; he wore ‘loose leather top boots, a fashion imported 96 

Governor Darfur to ADC Baggara, 6 Sept. 1926, ibid. ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur, 12 Dec. 1926, ibid. 98  ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur, 14 Mar. 1925, ibid. 99  G.D. Lampen, ‘The Baggara Tribes of Darfur’, Sudan Notes and Records XVI (1933), p. 115. 100 Cunnison, Baggara, p. 194. 101 Glassman, Feasts. 102  ADC Baggara to Govenor Darfur, 9 July 1926, NRO 2. D. Fasher 54/3/12. 103  ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur, 12 Dec. 1926, ibid. 104 Ibid. 105  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/16. 97 

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by him from Fasher, and carrying a sword also a fashion not favoured by the spear carrying Baqqara.’106 Nonetheless, this performance of sophistication was surely a deliberate strategy. By presenting himself as connected to the wider world outside of Darfur, Ali demonstrated both to government and to their own people that they were able to deal with those outside forces, forces which were the objects of both desire and fear in local eyes. One shartay of the (sedentary Birgid) lived in ‘a house carved with drawings of modern inventions, trains, steamers, a steel girder bridge, a car, done by someone who had seen more of the world than these backwoodsmen, and all labelled for the spectator’s benefit.’107 This was a chief who wanted to show his understanding and mastery of the technology of colonialism, and who wanted to be associated explicitly with the wider world. Crucially he also wanted to interpret that wider world to his people – by labelling these alien inventions he positioned himself as an intermediary between rural Darfur and the mysterious innovations of an alien government. Indeed, the tendency by the government to criticize chiefs on such grounds rested on the idea that the ‘sophisticated’ culture of the town was somehow alien to the ‘rustic’ pastoralists of southern and northern Darfur. But ordinary Baqqara were known to refer to themselves as ‘mutamedinin’, or ‘townified’, because of their widespread consumption of relative luxuries such as tea, sugar and matches, bought with money.108 Markets also drew people to towns on a regular basis where these exchanges took place. Yet participation in the cash economy was also seen to be symptomatic of decline by some: as one man said, ‘the price of tea is running the Arab. Yes the price of a cow goes in tea each year and often more.’109 Tea was especially popular among the young, many of whom had been labour migrants: elders frowned on the use of money for tea which should instead be invested in cattle or at least a wife, and indebtedness because of an addiction to tea was said to be common.110 Unease with cash, commodities and towns – all of which many Baqqara demanded and experienced in their everyday lives – was real, at least among the elder generation.111 And to this extent, official fears that chiefs might lose legitimacy if they held too close an association with the world of the government might not be altogether unjustified. The language of protest and criticism of chiefs involved a significant overlap and borrowing between colonial and local discourses: officials were concerned about the ability of chiefs to fulfil their local obligations as the providers of hospitality, and whether chiefs too clearly embodied the ‘alien’ world of the government and the town; local critics 106 

Ibid, SAD 734/10/17. Ibid, SAD 734/10/194 108  Ibid, SAD 734/9/21 109 Ibid. 110  Ibid, SAD 734/9/40; Lampen, ‘Baggara’, p. 110. 111  This argument draws on Leonardi, Dealing, which elaborates similar points about moral discourse with greater empirical support in southern Sudan. 107 

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of chiefs impugned them on the grounds that they breached colonial law as well as their failure to meet local expectations. This was often a highly instrumentalized process, and there was, of course, never a complete convergence of colonial and local ideas on the morality of rule. Moreover, the sources used here – colonial records – provide only a limited window onto the local discourses of legitimacy. They may themselves misinterpret and mistranslate what appear to be points of discursive overlap. Nonetheless, the interaction of colonial and local discourses of legitimacy – perhaps producing what Pels calls a kind of ‘pidgin’ restricted (yet powerful) political language – does appear to have formed the discursive terrain on which colonial hegemony was manufactured.112

CHIEFS AS GATEKEEPERS: POLICING THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN STATE AND SOCIETY Whilst too much association with the world of the government might cause problems for a chief, equally he might be saved from vociferous rivals and protestors by a close relationship with administrators. Indeed, chiefs and protestors competed for the trust and attention of the DC to support their opposing positions. Chiefs therefore often tried to monopolize the DC’s attention when he was on tour, acting as exclusionary gatekeepers between local communities and the government. They also attempted to feed the administrator a partial view of local affairs that would reinforce their own position. Meanwhile, enemies of the chief attempted to get around the gate and establish direct communication with the men who had the power to depose a despised leader. Sometimes this might be achieved by personal, individual contact: at other times the public force of protest was needed to gain attention. Attempting to achieve political goals therefore depended on gaining access to state power – not retaining distance from it. Some chiefs were very skilled at limiting the interaction between administrators and their people. One of the reasons for Ibrahim Musa’s success as nazir of the Rizayqat was his capacity to keep officials away from his people: Lampen noted ‘an anxious desire to keep me from speaking to anyone whom he could not implicitly trust and I could see his eyes flash at anyone who dared to approach me save through him.’113 Lampen remarked on the particular difficulties involved in ‘getting news’ in Dar Rizayqat.114 And indeed, Ibrahim used language which distanced himself from his people in the eyes of the administrator: whilst he presented himself as personally honourable and trustworthy he did not hesitate to look down, with Lampen, on the Arabs 112 

Pels, P., ‘The pidginization of Luguru politics: administrative ethnography and the paradoxes of Indirect Rule’, American Ethnologist 23 (1996), pp. 738–61. 113  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/28. 114  Ibid., SAD 734/10/181.

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who ‘are deceivers, twisters and like the wild beasts’.115 This latter phrase, widely used by ordinary Baqqara, locally expressed the necessity of evasion in order to resist the oppression of powerful rulers, but here fitted neatly with existing colonial prejudices about the character of local society: from being part of a popular discourse about how to cope with authority, it became part of an elite discourse which distanced the state and its allies from ordinary subjects. But chiefs could not always restrict contact between administrators and their people. One notable case of this was the notoriously oppressive nazir of the Ta’aisha, Zubayr Sam: Lampen reported that Zubayr took care to lodge me in his house where I should not hear much of his extortions and bullyings, but the Ta’aisha were not to be denied and lay in wait for me on my strolls out… He (Zubayr) was smooth-tongued and talked much to impress me, but his administration was really too corrupt to stand.116

Zubayr was at least smooth-tongued; being able to talk impressively with the DC could sometimes make the difference between retaining or losing one’s position. But some time after Lampen had heard these initial complaints, Zubayr came to Kubbe, the sub-district headquarters, where Lampen found him ‘shaking in fright: when I told him to precede me back to his dar he said he would be killed if he went back, so I took him with me.’ Upon return to Dar Ta’aisha, Lampen’s attention was occupied by a very successfully organized public protest against the nazir’s rule: A large crowd had gathered in the Nazir’s village to listen with obvious sympathy to the complaints of a few more vocal Ta’aishi. The complaints proceeded on two lines: definite complaints of criminal action, he had robbed persons taken into quarantine against relapsing fever, he had underlisted his tribe but collected a surplus on a private listing, his administration of justice was determined by bribery. Apart from these open complaints came a number of prominent men to see me secretly and protest against his selfish leadership of the tribe…117

Both personal and public protest was thus employed by those discontented with Zubayr’s authority. Sustained public protest also placed significant pressure on an official to depose a chief. In public the state was on show. Lampen sat for a week listening to complaints in Zubayr Sam’s village, where ‘rows upon rows of interested spectators watched the majlis [council] from neighbouring trees, drawing near and having to be expelled.’118 The audience was crucial: just as chiefs had to perform well in public courts, now Lampen had to perform well in response to the pressure of local complaints. His attempts to expel the audience perhaps reflected a desire to be free of obligations to subjects, to act as a disinterested arbiter: but the persistence of the audience’s 115 

Ibid., SAD 734/9/16. Ibid, SAD 734/8/40. 117  Ibid., SAD 739/9/44. 118  Ibid., SAD 734/9/45. 116 

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presence created an obligation that could not easily be denied. Zubayr Sam had to go. Chiefs therefore could not always succeed in policing the gate: state representatives were sometimes drawn, quite forcibly, into the dynamics of local protest. Officials were well aware that chiefs might try to conceal local politics and discontent from them: some, like Lampen, worked to establish direct contact with ordinary people regardless of the wishes of chiefs. But other more regularized methods of surveillance over local politics also existed. Annual ‘tribal gatherings’ were a regular feature of colonial administration in Darfur and elsewhere in Sudan, especially among nomadic societies. In the words of one official, these were ‘the only time when representatives of all sections of a tribe came together – to discuss differences, cases involving more than one section, to elect sheikhs and generally to act as a single tribe’.119 In theory these were disciplinary performances, which celebrated colonial order, the Pax Britannica and the cohesion of tribes under their chiefs. Gatherings were highly scripted performances which included mounted parades of tribesmen past the observing chiefs and officials as their centrepiece: at one meeting the men riding past were said to be ‘rather solemn and selfconscious’ under observation.120 As another official in neighbouring Kordofan put it, gatherings ‘improve tribal discipline more than anything can and necessitate constant obedience to the orders of nazirs, umdas and shaykhs in the presence of government officials.’121 One official described the ‘really wonderful panorama’ presented by the gathering: this was a way for officials to observe and inspect subjects who presented themselves in easily viewed, ordered lines.122 But the gatherings also echoed the precolonial precedent of the ‘festival of drums’ described in the first chapter of this book: the British were attempting to reproduce a recognizable performance of engagement between state and society, albeit now on a ‘tribal’ rather than Darfur-wide basis. This engagement presented the unusual opportunity for contact between ordinary people and high-level state officials, including the Governor of Darfur or sometimes even the Governor General of Sudan, as had also been the case in the precolonial festival. Protest or complaint against chiefs might be forcibly made to these powerful individuals, and alternative scripts, authored from below, brought to the occasion. Gatherings were therefore a time of tension and anxiety for chiefs: they were a test of their authority and control over their people. One of the key tests was whether or not chiefs could produce a large representative group of their own people. In 1928, just 119 

P.J. Sandison memoirs, SAD 691/5/134. Lampen memoirs., SAD 734/10/89. 121  Governor Kordofan to Civil Secretary, 21 Dec. 1920. NRO CIVSEC 68/2/4. 122  F.E. Baldry, ‘A Darfur tribal gathering’, SAD 646/8/68. This is also suggestive of Timothy Mitchell’s ‘enframing’, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, 1991), pp.  34–62. For more on gatherings in Kordofan see J. Willis, ‘Tribal gatherings: performing government in Condominium Sudan’, Past and Present 211, pp. 243–68. 120 

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after the subordination of the Ma’alia to the Rizayqat, the umda of the Ma’alia rode past the British alone: ‘his people had in anger refused to parade with him. A roar of laughter went up from the Arabs… “Oh homeless umda”, shouted one.’123 The Ma’alia had thus prevented their umda from adequately performing the script. This was part of the process of political communication which two years later secured the Ma’alia their own autonomous panel on the Rizayqat court led by a Ma’alia faqih. But absence was not the only way of making complaints against chiefs. When the chief of the Genigergera section of the Zaghawa in northern Darfur concealed a devastating occurrence of cattle plague in his territory, his people ‘threw the tails of their dead bulls at the Governor’ at the next gathering.124 And the unpopular, notoriously stingy chief of the Fallata, Abu al-Humeira, was deposed after his people approached the Governor at the 1928 gathering to complain against his rule. At one gathering a shaykh was murdered by a man who clearly wanted his act to be visible to all.125 When the Governor General attended the Baqqara horse shows in 1928 Lampen reported that the nazirs were troubled at his coming, and every malcontent in the tribe raised his head in hope and wondered if he dared rush in and shout for an audience, not ask for one, for he felt that his case would be prejudiced if the District Commissioner had a chance of stating the facts first. These feelings were a legacy from generation of Sultans and rulers who deposed rulers for a whim, or to show their power and while failing to maintain any reasonable level of justice would violently right some tiny wrong in an extravagant, spectacular but essentially unjust way.126

Whilst loaded with colonial stereotype, this account does nonetheless suggest the potential perceived value of direct contact with the ruler among the peoples of southern Darfur, and the way in which this drew on personalized modes of authority which had roots in precolonial Darfur. But the expectations of those courageous enough to approach the Governor General were rarely met, as they were directed to the standard bureaucratic process for complaints: ‘Amir el Numeir the deposed umda of a section of the Rizayqat was astonished and disconcerted when told by the Governor General that he could refer his case to me and to the Governor on appeal.’127 Tribal gatherings were important moments in the negotiation of the authority of both the chief and the state: people could vigorously demand that government take action against their chiefs, the representatives of government on the ground. But public protest alone might not be powerful enough to persuade officials that action needed to be taken. Administrators grew quickly familiar with and sceptical of some 123 

Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/9/48. ‘Note on the Genigergera’ Moore, DC NDD c.1940, NRO Darfur Kuttum A 41/3/9. 125  DPMD February 1937. 126  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/9. 127 Ibid. 124 

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of the more obviously scripted and performed forms of protest, just as they might be sceptical of the more obvious performances put on by chiefs. Lampen wrote: One of their methods of impressing the DC is for some opponent of a Shaykh or umda to stir up an um koaka or shouting party who come in a body and shout or swear they will not be under so and so. This may mean nothing except that the present ruler is stingy for which they will reject him at once, or it may mean that the Nazir is trying for a bribe to hold a Shaykh in office whom his people have rejected, or it may be some private ambition or enmity of the new candidate.128

Indeed, protestors might be paid to turn up by the ringleaders. For administrators who were aware of this, information given in an apparently intimate and personal setting might carry more weight than a public protest. For some administrators, talking to people they perceived as the ordinary zol, particularly whilst on trek, was a key part of effective intelligence gathering (and of fulfilling their fantasies of creating an intimate relationship with their subjects). People indeed came to seek them out. Lampen describes this in interesting terms: I had to fall back on incessant converse with high and low, for these babblers will sooner or later in conversation unburden their hearts, and with keeping my house open for guests and callers day and night I don’t think I ever refused to see a man, though he might come and wake me at night to speak to me in secret. To this I had to add a rule that the name of anyone giving me information in confidence was never disclosed and I never employed spies.129

Lampen believed that people were sharing intimate information with him by ‘unburdening their hearts’. But this sort of conversation was also, of course, an act with political implications: the mere fact of speaking with the administrator made this conversation a public act, even if it took place in ‘secret’, away from the eyes of the chief. Crawford, Lampen’s successor, noted the same tendency among the Baqqara, although he was also much less sympathetic to it I cannot get over the feeling that everywhere in the Baqqara there is a sort of hush hush feeling – people come up to you mysteriously when you are alone and ask you the most ordinary things – I am trying to make it quite clear to everyone that I do not use spies and I will not listen to tale bearers… I may have to resort to them but in the meantime heaven keep me from it.130

As this suggests, not all administrators were as open to the possibilities of chiefly dismissal as Lampen. Guy Moore was particularly impervious to the complaints of the Zaghawa of Northern Darfur. This was not, however, merely a matter of Moore’s own autocratic style: the Zaghawa were regarded by officials throughout the colonial period as a people inherently opposed to submitting to any authority. Their protests therefore often lacked credibility in official eyes. In 1935 the opposi128 

Ibid., SAD 734/10/167. Ibid., SAD 734/9/26. 130  Crawford diaries, 11 Jan. 1933, SAD 502/5. 129 

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tion of the Awlad Ali of the Artag Zaghawa against their dimlij (Osman Omar, mentioned above) became particularly forceful: the shaykhs of the section camped in the wadi bed in Kuttum for six weeks, coming to the markaz daily to make their complaints. But Moore was blithely unconcerned: ‘We would pass the time of day with them going to and from the office and exchange a little banter which always contained the very definite implication that this case was closed and that they were, presumably, simply amusing themselves in Kuttum.’ They left Kuttum briefly, only to return with thirty additional agawid to camp once more in the wadi. Moore drily wished them luck ‘should the wadi… suddenly spate.’ The protest was dismissed as simply an expression of the ‘independent and defiant attitude’ of Osman’s people, and their ‘notorious reputation as bad hats’.131 Peoples who were thought to be particularly troublesome, like the Zaghawa, had a difficult job to convince the administration of their cause. Officials were not waiting for protestors to invite them to depose chiefs: they had to be convinced, through a process of hard bargaining, that there was no other option. This was a tense and uneasy negotiation between state and society, which sometimes ended with no discernible benefit to protestors themselves. In particular, officials became more reluctant to sack senior chiefs once they made them the presidents of formally constituted Native Courts. The persistence of appeals to the state’s authority even beyond this point is thus even more striking: and from the 1940s they would gain a more sympathetic audience, as we will see.

RELATIONS BETWEEN CHIEFS AND OFFICIALS IN TIMES OF PROTEST It is especially clear that protestors always struggled to make headway when chiefs had maintained powerful personal bonds with administrators: strong elite relationships could trump the enforcement of colonial legal norms, or satisfying the demands of ‘separatist’ movements. But to retain credibility with the administration, chiefs had to observe certain conventions and norms in their dealings with officials – and with their subjects. Despite his general scepticism towards protest, Moore removed the unpopular chief of the Artag Zaghawa, malik Tahir Nurein, in 1936 in part because he was ‘impossible in majlis­ – shouting and exciteable like any jahil [ignorant person] and usually tipsy’. The same chief had ordered the beating of two elders in a ‘fit of passion’, an action which ‘no respectable chief would contemplate’.132 Cultivating a good image in the eyes of the local administration, observing certain unwritten conventions, was thus crucial if a chief was to survive the protests of his subjects. Moore also noted that Nurein was a Fur ‘whose 131 

132 

Moore note on Dar Artag, 1 July 1935, NRO Darfur 1/31/164/13. Moore note on Dar Artag unrest, 27 Mar. 1936, NRO Darfur 1/34/164/13.

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customary method and outlook differ’ from the Zaghawa: more specifically (and perhaps importantly) his court had showed favouritism towards Fur over Zaghawa in cases of inter-tribal disputes.133 Personal failings and ethnic bias combined to seal Nurein’s fate. Earlier we saw that the perceived distance between Mahmud Abu Saad of the Habbaniyya and his people, had made this chief vulnerable to protest. But just as importantly, Mahmud made social blunders which ignored the conventions governing the interactions between administrators and chiefs. One report mentioned that Mahmud did not ‘meet us properly, but strolled forward like a Jallabi [riverine trader] shortly before we dismounted.’134 The use of the Jallabi comparison is revealing: Mahmud’s behaviour reinforced the official’s sense that he was distant from his people because he was disrespectful of the conventions that governed interactions between chief and official. Jallaba were frequently insulted by the Baqqara as exploitative strangers, and the comparison implicitly questioned the chief’s legitimacy: an authentic chief would have more respect for the propriety of interaction with government. During another encounter with the ADC, Mahmud ‘tried to bribe me with a horse of his (it’s a good one which I’ve had my eye on)… I told the old shit to go away and rest. It just shows the sort of man he is.’135 Whilst he had cleverly noticed the ADC eyeing this particular animal, Mahmud’s rather heavy-handed attempt to establish a reciprocal relationship by the use of gift-giving backfired, being seen simply as a ‘bribe’ in the context of colonial legal norms. And more generally, Mahmud did not create any sense of intimacy or trust with officials: one official, in his dealings with Mahmud, found himself ‘confronted with a cold wall of ice beyond which I cannot penetrate’.136 The district staff therefore finally recommended his dismissal, though Mahmud died before the administration could agree on his being sacked. His successor, Al-Ghali Taj al-Din (restored once more to office), could not have been more different. While ‘a most outrageous zalim [oppressor]’, Al-Ghali now remained in his role for fifteen years, despite persistent and forceful complaints.137 Why did the local administration back him for so long even with clear evidence of wrongdoing? In part, this was because Al-Ghali was restored at a moment when the government was moving towards a more clearly regularized policy of support for chiefs via the creation of formalized Native Courts: Al-Ghali played a leading role in the Kalaka court of southern Darfur from its creation in 1928. But a large part of Al-Ghali’s success lay in forming good relations with officials: immediately before he gained office, reports noted he was ‘honest, loyal, hospitable and above all a Man’.138 References to Al-Ghali’s manliness and virility abounded: one official simply wrote 133 

DPMD NDD September 1937 ADC Baggara to Governor, 9 July 1926, NRO 2.D Fasher 54/3/12. 135  ADC Baggara to Governor Darfur, 14 July 1925, ibid. 136  DCSDD to Governor, 12 Oct. 1926, ibid. 137 McNeill, Inspector SDD to Governor Darfur, 1 Oct. 1919, ibid. 138  Bence-Pembroke, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 17 Nov. 1926, ibid. 134 

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of him ‘he is a MAN’.139 Recalling Moore’s carefully cultivated image of masculinity, it seems that officials and chiefs played on one another’s ideas of manliness and virility to assert their suitability to lead. Doing so created a common bond across the colonizer-colonized divide. Al-Ghali was also a good talker: with Lampen, Al-Ghali delighted in performing histories of the tribe: he ‘led the conversation: his memory and diction were both imperfect, but he leavened his speech with every variety of onomatopoeic noise’.140 He also took every opportunity to verbally counter the protestors who assailed officials in Dar Habbaniyya: Genabek [your honour] do not listen to the talk of the people. The Habbaniyya are all liars, intriguers, jealous and like the beasts of the field when men drive them. They may say I eat them, but if I take no dues from them nor fine them they will not fear me. The ruler who has no thorn is of no avail, unless I prick them they will become disobedient.141

Al-Ghali played on the perception that Dar Habbaniya was a viper’s nest of political intrigue: the Habbaniya were seen in a rather similar light to the Zaghawa, and protest was never seen as worth taking purely at face value. But Al-Ghali also convinced officials that he had the best interests of his people at heart. While ‘oppressive’, Al-Ghali was also ‘open-handed’, in contrast to other Baqqara chiefs who the administration sacked, he redistributed the wealth that he ‘ate’ from his people among the tribe’s elite.142 This surely took the edge off the opposition of rival sections to his rule.143 Lampen’s successor in southern Darfur wrote of Al-Ghali that he ‘impresses one in his way… a nice old bloke, full of fun but no princeling like Ibrahim Musa. We shall never get very far with him. Seems to be much more matey and beloved of his people than IM – has probably more of the common touch.’144 Al-Ghali really had managed his image very successfully, and his generosity was a major asset both among Habbaniyya elites and the administration. So if chiefs were able to maintain the DC’s favour, by behaving in accordance with certain conventions, and indeed by projecting the image of a certain affinity with their people, they could get away with a great deal. And if, as seems to have been the case with Al-Ghali, chiefs were able to keep potential enemies happy by generous distribution of the spoils of ‘eating’, then popular discontent with ‘oppression’ might never be mobilized to a sufficient extent to cause real problems for a chief. Nonetheless, when officials had their attention drawn to activities which obviously contravened colonial legal norms, it was difficult for them to simply do nothing. Sometimes punishments were imposed 139 

DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 22 Jan. 1927, ibid. Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/9/56. 141  Ibid., SAD 734/9/57. 142  Dupuis, Deputy Governor Darfur to Governor Darfur, 4 Feb. 1925, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/12. 143  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/10/4. 144  Crawford diaries, 8 Jan. 1933, SAD 502/5 140 

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even on chiefs to whom officials were personally close, which stopped short of outright dismissal, but which nonetheless limited their freedom of action and damaged their prestige. The Habbaniyya named the day when Lampen imprisoned several of Al Ghali’s agents and relatives for ‘fining without authority’ as ‘Yom El Akhdar’ (the green day).145 Green is closely associated with Islam and peace in Sudan: the Habbaniyya perhaps saw Lampen’s actions as contributing to a restoration of moral order. Even Moore put Malik Muhammadayn of the Zaghawa of Dar Tuar, the most powerful of the Zaghawa chiefs, in prison for short periods when he was found to be involved in camel raids – or ‘theft’ as the state defined it – although it seems likely that both sides accepted this was part of a performance that they had to keep up. Harir suggests in this case that Muhammadayn’s acceptance of these sentences perhaps also bolstered, rather than weakened, his authority: by accepting the short terms without complaint he was respected by his people for playing ‘his role as shield’.146 The importance of camel raiding in nomadic societies, especially for young men, meant this was a crucial area of economic and social life for the chief to protect from the interference of the colonial state. It was only in the later years of colonial rule in Darfur, from the 1940s, that chiefs really became vulnerable to demands by officials that they abide by the legal norms of government itself.

CIRCUMVENTING HIERARCHY: AUDIENCES AND PETITIONS Whilst district commissioners were often the initial focal point for local protest, local elites did not hesitate to engage with government at all levels to pursue their political agendas. Darfuris were very much aware that even the most powerful of administrators, including ‘Sultan’ Moore, still had a place in the hierarchy of government and that even their authority was not unchecked. Their means of addressing government combined both formal written petitions and complaints, and more private face-to-face appeals to an individual’s sense of justice and personal obligation. Formal and informal, bureaucratic and personal styles of politics combined. Darfuris thus asserted a right to be heard by the government, even in Khartoum, and, despite the frequent fruitlessness of their efforts, in doing so they ‘contracted’ with colonial power.147 Moreover, they often tried to circumvent the official hierarchies which attempted to constrain and channel engagement between rulers and ruled, in favour of direct approaches to the individuals who wielded the most power in Darfur, or even Sudan as a whole. In such cases, Darfuris employed ‘the classic political ploy of the discontented client… to call in a more powerful patron’.148 In this sense, again, the idea that Darfur remained a land apart cannot really be sustained in terms of the polit145 

Lampen diaries, SAD 734/10/182. p. 112. 147  Peterson, ‘Plays’, p. 1009. 148 Glassman, Feasts, p. 111. 146 Harir, Numbers,

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ical imagination of the regional elite. Local concerns were paramount – but these might be pursued via engagement with much wider networks of power and authority. We have already seen that in the course of tribal gatherings attended by the Governor of Darfur or more rarely the Governor General, the discontented might attempt to circumvent the hierarchical obstacles to gain direct, unmediated contact with the ruler. Other official visits might also present opportunities for such contact: protestors in 1930s Northern Darfur were canny enough to target action at the Kuttum markaz at the time of a visit from the Governor of Darfur and the Civil Secretary.149 The Governor gave these protestors a personal audience, and was indeed persuaded that the dimlij they wanted sacked ‘no longer represents the people’, and recommended that Moore allow them to choose a replacement.150 But protest directed at the Governor General was also embarrassing to the provincial administration, and was therefore a high-risk activity. On one occasion, women of a particularly discontented lineage rioted before the northern maqdumate court house when the Governor General visited. Guy Moore noted that it was done with true Zaghawa skill and reminded one suddenly of the old suffragette days. Only 6 of them; they rushed at the court from six different directions screaming at the top of their voices. It was some minutes before they could be collared and bundled into the lock up. They fought well.151

The court simply imposed short imprisonment terms on the women for their protest: the northern chiefs had wanted the women flogged, although officials refused this. Nonetheless the women achieved their objective of commuting the sentence of imprisonment imposed on a male relative to a dia (bloodwealth) payment: and Moore was nearly sacked for allowing the fracas to have developed.152 Complainants did not necessarily wait for senior officials to come to them. In the course of chieftaincy disputes, personal journeys from rural Darfur to El Fasher and Khartoum by leading figures of sections protesting the chiefship were not uncommon. On at least one occasion, the Governor of Darfur, visited while sitting at El Fasher, was offered a camel as a gift before being confronted with complaints about an oppressive chief.153 In 1928 the Civil Secretary received a personal visit from malik Abdullahi of the Turrti section of the Meidob in Khartoum, who had persuaded him that the neighbouring Urrti section should have their own chief back and run their own affairs.154 149 

DC NDD Moore ‘Note on Dar Artag’ 1 July 1935, NRO Darfur 31/164/13. Dupuis, Governor Darfur to DC NDD, 4 July 1935, ibid. 151  DPMD February 1938, NRO Darfur 5/4/13. 152  Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Private Secretary, 24 Mar. 1938, NRO Darfur 1/31/164/13; Moore to Henderson, 5 Jan. 1951, SAD 659/8/34. 153  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 154  Civil Secretary to Governor Darfur, 5 July 1928. NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 150 

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So personal contact was often an important means by which protestors gained support from more remote political figures beyond the DC. But there was also a fairly consistent commitment to making protest in the form of written petitions, directed both to El Fasher and Khartoum. Members of a particular Zaghawa lineage group, the Awlad Maneis, wrote repeatedly to officials in Fasher and Khartoum between 1932 and 1939 making escalating complaints against malik Muhammadayn of Dar Tuar based on events that had occurred in 1932: the final petition that was preserved in the archive claimed that the malik had chained them up, tied them to a tree, and had his slaves urinate on them for nine days.155 The brothers were consistently dismissed by the administration as being ‘of a town type [that] had read in the east’.156 Leading members of the family at one point stayed with Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi in Omdurman whilst they wrote out petitions to ‘the secretary for Native Affairs’ (this ended up in the Civil Secretary’s hands) and the Governor General.157 Written communication between local chiefs and rulers went back to the days of the Sultan: local elites drew on this deeper history of dealing with government in their attempts to influence colonial officials.158 These particular petitions were fruitless efforts for the Awlad Maneis, but in the later years of colonial rule, petitioners were more likely to meet a sympathetic audience, as a new emphasis on representative and upright government afforded new opportunities to protestors. Finally, it is worth noting that whilst most forms of protest after the risings of 1921 and 1927 accepted and tried to shape the ultimate authority of the state rather than rebel against it, there was one case slightly more ambiguous in character. Disputes over paramount leadership among the Meidob camel nomads of northern Darfur present the only case of chieftaincy protest after 1927 that the administration feared might have spilled into open rebellion. More clearly, Meidobi politics also reminds us of the existence of a competitor to the hakuma as a ruling authority in the political imagination of Darfuris – Sayyid abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi – which suggests the limits of colonial hegemony. These distinctive features make Meidobi politics worth separate distinctive consideration. The Meidob inhabited a remote mountainous area of northern Darfur, only visited twice a year by the British in the 1920s. Their various sections occupied their own well fields (which functioned as centres for communal grazing and watering), and were in many ways quite separate from one another: a central massif clearly divided the territory of the two largest sections of the people, the 155 

The series of complaints is collected in NRO Darfur 1/31/164/13. DPMD March 1938, NRO CIVSEC 57/4/15. 157  Alawma petition to ‘HE The Secretary for Native Affairs’, 31 Jan. 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1)66/12/108. Governor Kordofan to Governor Darfur 11 Nov. 1923; Director of Intelligence to Governor Darfur, 24 Nov. 1923, NRO Darfur 31/164/13. 158  O’Fahey, Land, p. 22. 156 

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Shelkota and Urrti. Despite these divisions, paramount chieftaincy among the Meidob had existed well before the arrival of the British. The Sultans had enjoyed a considerable degree of influence over the occupancy of this role, which was the object of competition between the Shelkota and Urrti.159 During the reign of Ali Dinar it appears that both the Shelkota and Urrti had their own maliks.160 When the British conquered the region, Mansur Suleiman remained head of the Urrti, and Jami Kheir, chief of the Shelkota since the days of the Mahdiyya, continued in his position.161 Competition between the two was fierce, but Mansur fell from favour in 1923 after he was found to have protected two of his nephews involved in the enslavement of a Berti girl.162 Jami was subsequently made chief of all the Meidob. This immediately sparked a plot to see the chief deposed. In 1923 rumours that the Urrti might attack the Shelkota led Jami to arm himself with eighty rifles: the Turrti malik then informed the British that Jami was holding unlicensed rifles and hiding stolen camels in his house. The British indeed found this to be the case, but also realized the nature of the plot, and took no action against Jami.163 The presence of the ‘stolen’ camels also suggests that – in return for a cut of the profits – the Meidobi chief offered protection to young Mediob men who still participated in camel raids. The state did not find it necessary to pursue this issue, implicitly recognizing the impossibility of suppressing such ‘illegal’ practices. While most of the Urrti appeared to subsequently acquiesce in Jami’s rule, the leading Urrti family – the Teukeddi – remained firm opponents of the malik. This lineage repeatedly refused to pay taxation to the malik, finally prompting a visit from the DC of Northern Darfur, Cumming, in 1928, accompanied by Muhammad Sayyah, the son of (the now elderly) Jami. The Teukeddi were understood to have ‘considered themselves wronged by the government’ but in a message sent to Cumming before his arrival, stated they would pay their taxes directly to the Governor of Darfur.164 Initially, then, they asserted their loyalty to government, if not to Jami. But Cumming refused this, insisting on obedience to Jami. Upon arrival in the Jebel, Cumming set up camp. During the night, ‘about sixty or seventy people mounted a hill in front of my tent and held a combined and ostentatious prayer-meeting after which, as I now learn, they all swore that if I tried to arrest anyone, they would kill Sayyah and myself.’165 The next day Cumming met 150 armed Teukeddi men in majlis but was unable to find any way to 159 

G.D. Lampen, A short account of Meidob, SNR XI, 1928, Report by Cumming on the agitation for independence by the Teukeddi Urrti in 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. 161 Ibid. 162  Moore, note on Jebel Meidob (n.d.), NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. 163  Arkell note on Jebel Meidob, 9 July 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. 164  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 165  Cumming, quoted in ibid. 160 

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compromise with their demands. Feeling that the Teukeddi had adopted a ‘threatening attitude’, he quickly withdrew.166 Cumming was especially anxious because of the Urrti’s reputation for ‘fanatical Mahdism’.167 Cumming believed two-thirds of the Urrti carried the ratib (the Mahdi’s prayer book). The Meidob were perhaps particularly well connected to Omdurman, where they drove their camels for sale, and it does seem that some Urrti leaders, at least, maintained closer links with Mahdist elites in Omdurman than many other Darfuri peoples.168 But the key issue at stake was a desire for ‘complete independence’ from Jami and the reinstatement of Mansur Suleiman:169 the Civil Secretary noted ‘their Mahdism is probably irrelevant’.170 Strikingly, rather than further threats of violence, and somewhat dispelling their reputation as isolated fanatics, the Urrti’s next tactic was to make a formal petition to advance their cause, sending a large deputation to El Fasher to present the Governor of Darfur with their demands in writing.171 By now, however, the provincial administration was somewhat spooked, and an infantry platoon, together with a strong police party was sent to make a ‘display of force’ in Jabal Meidob in July 1928.172 The Teukeddi were given a demonstration of the machine guns. A target was set up on the mountain-side: after a speech by Cumming, ‘the two machine guns fired past the flank of the assembled gathering which were then escorted to view the target.’173 Such demonstrations were not unknown elsewhere in Darfur – in southern Darfur in the 1930s some minor discontent among the Qimr of that area was greeted by a very similar ‘demonstration’, including the escorting of the audience to see the damage done by the machine guns.174 In southern Darfur such a display was explicitly intended as a deterrent against any repeat of the Nyala rising – among the Meidob it seems to have similarly been used as a warning against further disobedience, especially religiously inspired violence. Following this latest event, nine Teukeddi ‘ringleaders’ were also arrested. But the government did compromise with local feeling: it agreed to restore Mansur Suleiman as malik, although he was explicitly subordinated to Jami Kheir.175 Later that year, Jami’s son, Muhammad 166 Ibid.

167  Report by Cumming on the agitation for independence by the Teukeddi Urrti in 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. 168 Ibid. 169  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 July 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 170  Civil Secretary to Sudan Agent, 30 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 171  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 172  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 23 June 1928; Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 26 June 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 173  Report by Cumming on the agitation for independence by the Teukeddi Urrti in 1928, NRO CIVSEC (1) 66/6/43. 174  W. Luce diary, 29 Nov. 1934–1 Dec. 1934, SAD 829/12. 175  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 20 July 1928, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43.

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Sayyah, (in disregard of local matrilineal inheritance norms) took the position of malik over the Meidob.176 This arrangement seemed stable for a time, but in 1930 a Native Court for the Meidob was established under the presidency of Muhammad Sayyah. Mansur refused to sit with the court, and struggled to collect taxes among the Urrti. In 1935 a new crisis was sparked in Jabal Meidob. Troop reductions in El Fasher apparently sparked rumours of the government’s downfall – a visiting faqih was reported to have said that Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi had seized power in Khartoum. (There was simultaneous unrest among the Bani Husayn of northern Darfur against their shaykh, suggesting a wider circulation of these rumours.) In this context, Mansur’s attempt to collect taxes from the Urrti prompted leading members of the Teukeddi lineage to leave Darfur and join Sayyid Abd al-Rahman in Omdurman. Mansur Suleiman spent four days prevaricating, then finally decided to go to Omdurman to join his lineage.177 Colonial officials suggested he had been encouraged to do so by his wife, ‘a politically minded young person who rode last year in the tribal parade dressed as a man immediately behind the malik’.178 Colonial misogyny aside, it is striking that the Mahdist leader remained a powerful alternative pole of authority that inspired the loyalty of some Meidob elites. Mansur was subsequently dismissed and exiled to El Fasher. But in 1940 his successor as malik of the Urrti, who at first had appeared much more pliable, ignored a summons to attend the court or produce camels stolen from the Kababish. Investigations found that news of the Second World War had been discussed as an opportunity for the Urrti to ‘obtain their share of the rule in the Jebel by force if necessary’, and the malik had come under pressure to cease cooperation with Sayyah and the government. The malik was dismissed and replaced.179 But periodic migrations of disgruntled Urrti to Aba Island continued. In 1949 the government arranged for a wakil of SAR to visit Jebel Meidob and instruct the Urrti to stay where they were in response to the latest runaway.180 This of course also shows that, whatever the hopes of the Urrti, SAR was in fact hardly an enemy of colonial government: as early as 1926 he had been knighted, and rather than a consistent ideological opponent of the British, functioned as an on-off ally of the state.

CONCLUSION The Darfuri elite’s political imagination was not circumscribed by dar, district or provincial boundaries. The barely suppressed loyalty to the son of the Mahdi among the Meidob that was far more powerful 176 

Cumming to Governor Darfur, 10 Oct. 1928, NRO CIVSEC 866/6/43. Moore DC NDD, ‘Note on Jebel Meidob’ (n.d.), NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 178  Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 18 Apr. 1936, NRO CIVSEC 66/6/43. 179  DPMD 1940, NRO CIVSEC (1)57/12/43. 180  NDD Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29. 177 

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than any public protestations of loyalty to government reminds us of the limits to colonial hegemony – the state could not suppress ways of imagining political (and religious) community beyond that of tribe. But the actions of protestors – even the most vociferous – also demonstrate that state actors at all levels, despite their biases and remoteness, were imagined to have a determining role in the resolution of local chieftaincy disputes. This is perhaps unsurprising given the long involvement of the precolonial Sultanate in the chieftaincy politics of even its most remote peripheries. In demanding that officials resolve disputes, protestors were implicitly acknowledging the state’s authority in this sphere. Indeed, the colonial state’s authority in Darfur was very much built and sustained in pastoralist societies by involvement in chieftaincy disputes: this was one of the few areas of life in which the state was in demand. But it was accessed not simply as a remote abstract institution, but as a hierarchy of individuals, each of whom could be won over to a particular cause. The state was therefore imagined as a system, but not a system which was simply above or detached from the dynamics and demands of local politics. Personal relationships and personal influence were key to the outcomes of local disputes. Rulers were imagined to have obligations to those they ruled. It appears that following the failures of the early rebellions of colonial Darfur, protestors saw little use in challenging the authority of the state. Whilst we might allow for the existence of an ‘off-stage’ discourse which secretly challenged the government’s authority, and which only momentarily appears in the archive in the form of premature and over-optimistic hopes of the colonial state’s downfall at moments of apparent weakness, the public protest examined here generally attempted to influence the state rather than overthrow it.181 In the Nyala rising of 1921, rebels had attacked the district headquarters with the intent of destroying it altogether and killing state officials. In contrast, protestors recognized the markaz – or indeed the Governor General’s palace – as a centre of authority to target with petitions, not guns or spears. In Berry’s discussion of similar local disputes in colonial Africa, she quotes a Gold Coast official who stated that ‘as a result of the system of indirect rule in vogue it is extremely unlikely that any riot or disturbance should be directed against Government authorities. What disturbances occur are invariably in the nature of “faction fights.”’182 As this suggests – and as was also the case in Darfur – chieftaincy disputes were actually a useful tool in the construction of state authority. By allowing the discontented to assert their demands and to sometimes reassert the meaningfulness of marginalized group identities, it allowed the oxygen of political expression into the potentially despotic and airless system of Native Administration. Colonial and local political discourse interacted and overlapped in the making of a common 181 

182 

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For ‘off-stage’ politics see Feierman, Intellectuals, p. 23. Berry, ‘Hegemony’, p. 335.

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‘pidgin’ which formed the basis for restricted yet significant engagement between state and society that in turn formed the basis for an equally restricted yet significant colonial hegemony. The endless focus on chieftaincy politics created a hegemonic system of local governance: individual chiefs could be opposed by appeals to the state, but with the aim only of replacing that individual, not to fundamentally challenge the institutionalized authority of chieftaincy, or that of the state.

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5 Defining Territories, Policing Movement and the Limits of Legibility in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1950

‘…the more one lives in this place the more one realises that you can’t contain any certain people in any certain spot’. Crawford (DC SDD) diaries, November 1933, SAD 502/7/14

The colonial project in Africa might be seen as centred on the creation of boundaries, both spatial and social – imposing a project of state ‘legibility’ on illegible and complex social realities.1 In Darfur, the most obvious manifestation of this was in attempts to enforce a correspondence between ethnicity and territory – the idea that each tribe had its own territory, or dar, within which it had primary rights to land – and, significantly, that people should, broadly speaking, remain in their dar under the control of their chief. This had implications for all the peoples of the region – and as noted in previous chapters, experiments in creating clear territorial boundaries between ethnic dars were sometimes implicated in rebellion and conflict. Mamdani has located the roots of recent conflict in this colonial policy of the ethnicisation of land rights, arguing that the British destroyed the Sultans’ hakura system (which had emphasized the rights of favoured individuals to land granted them by the ruler) and ‘retribalised’ Darfur by emphasizing collective, ethnically defined land rights. This is something of a simplification – for one thing, hakura grants sometimes recognized ethnically or collectively based rights to land, rather than individual holdings.2 Moreover, the British were forced to live with the continued claims of hakura estate holders to control access to their estates, even as they regarded such claims as a disruption to their tidy model of tribal territories. To this extent, colonial policy again failed to make uniform a landscape of plural, overlapping rights to land.3 1 

This of course draws on James Scott’s broader analysis of the modern state in Seeing like a State (Yale, 1994). 2  This is suggested by La Rue, Khabir, p. 11. 3  Reports suggest that as late as 1954 individual hakura holders in central and eastern Darfur – where the hakura systems had been most thoroughly imposed – were still collecting dues from people wanting to cultivate on their estates. NDD Annual Report 1953/4, NRO 2.D Fasher A 47/9/34. In Dar Masalit, despite the theoretical abolition of the hakura system established by the Masalit sultans in 1921, estate-holders continued to collect taxation and ‘eat’ the people without effective control by government. Kapteijns, Mahdist, p. 219.

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Conversely, the hakura system under the Sultans had always been limited in its reach, and the idea of collective dars was certainly no novelty among the pastoralist populations of northern and southern Darfur, regions which the hakura system had only very partially penetrated.4 Nonetheless the distinctively colonial idea that tribes should remain within their dars, so that chiefs could control their people, was of particular significance for pastoralist populations. Their livelihoods depended on mobility which often involved movement out of their own dars and into the dars of other ethnic groups. A wider narrative in African studies suggests that colonial states across the continent were intolerant of such movement and imposed damaging and restrictive boundaries on pastoralist peoples, amounting to a ‘shrinking pastoralist space’.5 Such an analysis at first sight also appears to be applicable to Darfur. British administrators in Darfur were not altogether unsympathetic to the needs of pastoralists to access seasonal water and grazing; but they found it difficult to distinguish such movement from what might become longer-term movements of people across dar, district, or even state boundaries. Such migration was – often correctly – seen by government to be a rejection of a chief’s authority: migrants might thus also evade taxation, and even the control of any court or chief. Voting with one’s feet was one of the most important means of ensuring chiefly accountability. But colonial efforts to prevent or reverse flows of people which upset the correspondence between ethnicity and territory undermined such mechanisms of accountability. Attempts to impose this policy – as described in this chapter – resemble attempts at collective imprisonment within ethnic dars. Yet as we will also see, these efforts were sometimes half-hearted and usually far from successful: the limits on the resources available to the state meant that some degree of illegibility and disruption to the neat tribal maps of colonial imagination had to be accepted by government. To this extent, some Darfuris successfully resisted the efforts of the state to restrict their autonomy, and, whilst the state might sporadically use considerable violence in an attempt to enforce its project of legibility, that project also remained incomplete. Official concerns with policing territorial boundaries and confining people within their own dar were also often bound up with concerns about the livelihood strategies which peoples were pursuing. The peoples 4 

Kapteijns’ work similarly emphasizes the importance of pre-colonial communal dars among the sedentary Masalit. Mahdist, pp. 40–41. 5  J. Abbink, ‘The shrinking cultural and political space of East African pastoral societies’, Nordic Journal of African Studies, 6 (1997), p. 1. See also D. Hodgson, Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, ethnicity and the cultural politics of Maasai development (Bloomington, 2001), esp. pp. 49–55; R. Waller, ‘Pastoral poverty in historical perspective’, in D.M. Anderson and V. Broch-Due (eds) The Poor are not Us (Oxford, 1999), p. 40; P. Boilley, ‘Administrative confinements and confinements of exile: the reclusion of nomads in the Sahara’, in F. Bernault (ed.), Prison, pp.  224–6; D. Anderson, Eroding the Commons: The politics of ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890–1963 (Oxford, 2002).

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considered here in depth – the Bani Halba of southern Darfur and the Northern Rizayqat of central and northern Darfur – were not even close to being pure pastoralists. Cattle or camel herding was one livelihood strategy among several, usually combined with crop cultivation. The Northern Rizayqat by the 1920s had largely abandoned nomadic pastoralism altogether in northern Darfur, having become more sedentary herders and wage-labourers around El Fasher, probably as an adaptive strategy to the great drought and famine of 1913–1914.6 Yet rational adaption to changed circumstances created a degree of illegibility which officials found difficult to tolerate. Attempts at confinement were also intended to push these peoples down more unambiguous, less flexible livelihood routes – although the preferences of officials for either sedentary farming or nomadic herding varied according to the individuals and context concerned. Fears about ‘detribalization’ lurked behind a vigorously expressed official distaste for urban living in the case of the Northern Rizayqat which prompted efforts to recreate a nomadic pastoralist culture; equally a reversion to ‘backward’ nomadism on the part of the Bani Halba was undesirable for officials who preferred this people to settle down and thus become more ‘civilized’ – and crucially, more amenable to government control. Colonial officials were policing livelihood strategies which challenged their notions of tribal identities and their territorial basis. But there is also another layer of complexity to consider in this story. We are not looking at a simple clash of cultures – that of European boundaries and rigidity and Darfuri fluidity, adaptability and mobility – or indeed a narrative of colonial domination and local resistance. The archival record also shows that officials themselves did not always believe that a completely ‘legible’ social and territorial landscape was necessarily a desirable outcome of their own policy. State officials were always suspicious of the effects of modernity on the societies they governed: and for some of them these effects included the enforcement of territorial boundaries and control on the movements of peoples, especially pastoralists. Lampen suggested that migration was ‘a dangerous safety valve to close, until we can be sure that [the Baqqara] will obtain justice from his own Nazir.’7 Whilst the dominant discourse of government was hostile to movement and migration between dars, individual administrators did not always act in accordance with that rhetoric: Crawford’s words, quoted above, also suggest a resignation to the limits of colonial power. Yet if state officials were sometimes uncertain of the merits of imposing territoriality, Darfuri elites often did their best to reassure administrators of the merits of such a policy. Chiefs were interested in protecting their own rights to collect dues from ‘strangers’ accessing the resources of their dar, or maintaining their base of tax-paying subjects: as a result they sometimes pushed more vigorously for the 6  7 

De Waal, Famine, pp. 64–5. Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/1/193.

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clear territorial definition of ethnic dars than officials themselves. This was more obvious among sedentary chiefs before the 1940s but pastoralist chiefs would also adopt the discourse of territoriality later in the colonial period, as we will see in the next chapter. This demonstrates, again, that state power was channelled in particular directions by the initiative of local actors. It also shows that colonial officials were not alone in their desire to impose legible territorial boundaries on the mixed and mobile populations they governed.

CONFINING AND REGENERATING ‘NOMADS’ The Bani Halba In southern Darfur, the Bani Halba people, cattle pastoralists who had been the target of massive government livestock raids in the first years of British rule, turned more to sedentary cultivation in the region during the 1920s. But as the tribe managed to re-stock their herds from the late 1920s, seasonal migratory patterns also revived. In particular the Bani Halba were drawn to the Wadi Azum, a major waterway on the border between Fur and Masalit cultivators in western Darfur; others went even further west to cross the border into French Equatorial Africa. Although this migration appears to have been primarily motivated by access to water and grazing, and remains a key aspect of seasonal grazing movements to the present day, a growing number of Bani Halba stayed in these western areas without ever returning to their dar.8 Some suggested to the British that this was due to the oppressions of their chief who ‘taxed lightly the man with plenty and stinging the man who has little’.9 In the reforms of the late 1920s the Bani Halba chief had been given his own court; yet this remained unpopular over the next decade.10 In other words, this western movement was interpreted by government as a form of ‘migration as revolt’ and a classic example of the nomad’s desire to avoid any form of control. The revival of livelihoods based exclusively on herding was also seen as a ‘retrograde step, away from the desired aim of mixed farming’ by officials who had hoped to move the Bani Halba along what they imagined as an ‘evolutionary’ path towards a more sedentary existence.11 For the Bani Halba themselves, living in close contact with Fur or Masalit cultivators allowed the revival of strategies of livelihood complementarity that had long served them well: Bani Halba exchanged milk from their cattle for grain from local cultivators; the manure of their cattle was also of value for Fur cultivators.12 The British interpreted this complementarity as symptomatic of stubborn nomad laziness. But the relationship between these groups was very close: villages around the border area were popu8 

DCSDD to Governor Darfur, 3 Aug. 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. Ingleson to Nightingale, 2 Nov. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2.  10  DCSDD to Governor Darfur, 3 Aug. 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 11 Ibid. 12  DCSDD, Note on Beni Halba, 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2 9 

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lated by a mix of Bani Halba and Fur, who had often intermarried over a long period of time, challenging the racialized ethnic categorizations of colonial officials. In the late 1930s and early 1940s the British attempted to collect and return some of these migrants who had moved away from Dar Bani Halba. Lengthy lists of named migrants, organized by the shaykh they belonged to, together with the numbers of animals they possessed and the value in taxation they represented were constructed from 1939 onwards. 13 These lists were shared with administrators in western Darfur and French Equatorial Africa as part of the effort to round up and return migrants and were authored by the chiefs and sub-chiefs who had lost subjects over the course of the 1930s. This documentation is clear evidence both of the drive for ‘legibility’ by the state, as well as its dependence on enthusiastic local elites to make this project a reality. Yet the enforcement of a policy of return was highly problematic. The numbers of those involved, and in many cases the substantial time they had lived away from southern Darfur, was thought to make it impractical to attempt to return all migrants. Accordingly the administration also decided in 1939 that all those who had lived in western Darfur or in FEA since before 1935 should be allowed to stay where they were.14 In other words, the British partly accepted the fragmentation of the tribe and the realities with which they were dealing. The mess – the ‘illegibility’ – caused by the movement of these people would have to be lived with. It would surely have been impossible to accurately categorize pre-1935 and post-1935 migrants: when a similar time-specific policy was introduced to police Fur movement into southern Darfur, one official noted it merely prompted chiefs to encourage migrants to obfuscate about when they had arrived in the chief’s dar.15 The fact that so many migrants remained where they were meant that in the following years there was a continuing ‘nucleus for runaways’ to join in these western territories.16 Even where the state attempted to round up and return Beni Halba migrants, it faced quite severe obstacles to success: migrants were often warned of operations to round them up by the local chiefs to whom they were paying tribute or dues in the western territories.17 It was not in the interest of these chiefs, who benefitted from a growing tribute-paying client base, to cooperate with measures to return migrants to their allotted territory. Indeed officials believed that one of the chiefs in French territory, the Sultan of Dar Sila, had invited the migrants into his territory, promising them exemption from government taxation for three years.18 Similarly, in Dar Masalit, despite repeated requests and 13  DCSDD to DC Zalingei, Resident Geneina, 6 Mar. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 14  DC SDD to Governor Darfur, March 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 15  Crawford diaries, 29 Jan. 1933, SAD 502/5/41. 16  DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 31 Mar. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 17  Ingleson, Governor Darfur to DC SDD, 29 Apr. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 18  Statement of Adam El Nagi, quoted in Governor Darfur to DC SDD 2 Nov. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2.

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meetings between the Masalit Sultan, the Bani Halba nazir, and British officials, the Sultan managed to stall any attempt to recover migrants from his territory. The issue rumbled on for over a decade: when agents of the Bani Halba nazir arrived in Dar Masalit in 1950 to round up migrants, Endoka claimed that all they had all moved across the border to French Equatorial Africa.19 None of this is to claim that coercive policies of return had no impact on ordinary people. Indeed it is in these incomplete attempts at exercising state power that the continued direct violence of the state was most obviously in evidence, even in the supposedly most stable years of British administration in Darfur. British officials launched what they explicitly described as ‘raids’ against Bani Halba migrants: the ADC of Zalingei district in 1940 seized one-fifth of the herds held by the Bani Halba residing in his district, and also took numerous female hostages to ensure the migrants would return to southern Darfur. This ADC, Owen, explicitly mentioned that his intention was to give the migrants ‘a most healthy fear of Zalingei district’.20 In other words, the violence of the state was still being used to intimidate peoples into submission in a way not dissimilar from that seen in the early years of colonialism examined in earlier chapters. Nor might the experience of violence cease upon compliance with colonial directives. The story of one returnee who was repatriated to Dar Bani Halba and immediately tied up and beaten by his umda – who then also seized all the man’s animals – was well known and widely repeated among the Bani Halba migrants.21 This account of the alarm of colonial officials over the migration of peoples, the use of violence in an attempt to return or prevent such migration, yet also a rapid recognition of the impossibility of long-term success in these goals could be repeated for many other cases in Darfur. While the material here focuses on the 1930s and 40s, and the lists of names are perhaps indicative of a growing drive to bureaucratic legibility in these years, attempts at rounding up and returning migrants appear throughout the colonial period. Migrants from French Equatorial Africa were sometimes the targets of mounted infantry companies in northern Darfur; in 1929 migrant villages in western Darfur were burnt down by soldiers and police, and returnees were ‘roped or put in shaibas’ (forked tree trunks fixed around the neck as a restraint, which had also been used in slave raids during the sultanic era).22 Yet a few years later a DC declared himself defeated by the ingenuity of migrants in evading capture and suggested the state’s efforts in this regard to be fruitless: he was ‘taking a well-earned holiday’ from chasing migrants.23 Regular 19 

DC SDD to Resident Geneina, 26 Dec. 1950, NRO Darfur 7/3/8. Owen, ADC Zalingei to DC SDD 24 July 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 21  Governor Darfur to DC SDD 29 Apr. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher 26/1/2. 22  Evans, Resident Dar Masalit to Governor Darfur, 12 June 1929, NRO Darfur 3/1/5; Grigg, Resident Zalingei to Governor Darfur, 7 Jan 1929, NRO 2. D.Fasher (A) 59/3/8. 23  Broadbent, Resident Dar Masalit to Chef Dar Sila, 1 Apr. 1933, NRO Darfur 3/1/5. 20 

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cross-border movement persisted, despite the use of state violence to intimidate local populations. Similarly, the competition between chiefs for the loyalty of tributeor tax-paying subjects in an under-populated environment is a theme which recurs again and again in colonial records. Where chiefs lost out-migrants they appealed to the state to fulfil its duty to return them, and sometimes used violence themselves against those who were evading their authority: there are particularly ugly stories of attacks and massacres perpetrated by chiefs from French territory against those moving into Darfur.24 Yet the same individuals might actively appeal to potential migrants from other areas to move into their own territory, frequently offering relief from government taxation in favour of the payment of ‘customary’ dues directly to the chief. As one chief put it in conversation with an official: ‘If people come to you from another place, it is customary in Darfur that for two or three years you ask them to pay nothing.’25 In short, whilst government sometimes attempted to vigorously impose a policy of territorial confinement on local populations, it did not have the resources to ever complete such a project. Moreover, the sheer ethnic heterogeneity of Darfur made a mockery of any clear correspondence between territory and ethnicity. Peoples were indeed ‘scattered’ and usually lived in ethnically heterogeneous settlements, in which inter-marriage was the norm. Movement and shifting identities defied the tidiness of ‘tribal maps’ drawn up by officials.

The Northern Rizayqat Perhaps an even more revealing example of the limits of the state’s capacity to impose an equivalence between ethnicity and territory, or even to impose institutions of ‘Native Administration’ at all, is that of the Northern Rizayqat abbala (camel-herding Arab pastoralists). Colonial government repeatedly attempted to unify and confine parts of this group within a defined territory and under chiefly leadership in a coercive manner; it repeatedly failed in these attempts. Officials faced a particular obstacle in the environmental fragility of northern Darfur, where efforts to confine the Northern Rizayqat were periodically attempted. The failure of northern grazing in years of repeatedly low levels of rainfall made inhabiting the north economically irrational for the Northern Rizayqat, whatever romantic officials attached to the idea of the nomadic lifestyle might have imagined. Looking forward to the contemporary crisis in Darfur, the Northern Rizayqat have been very prominent members of the various incarnations of the militias used by the Government of Sudan to terrorize populations labelled as rebellious. Mamdani and others have pointed out that the Northern Rizayqat have been easy to mobilize because they are so marginalized within the system of Native Administration and land tenure bequeathed by the British, lacking their own dar or paramount 24 

Statement of M. A. Effendi Abdel Radi, 8 Mar. 1924, NRO 2. D. Fasher (A) 59/3/7. 25  Crawford diaries, 28 Nov. 1933, SAD 502/7/17.

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chieftaincy.26 Yet that marginalization, real as it is, is the mark of the failure of attempts by colonial government to incorporate the Northern Rizayqat into their mechanisms of rule, rather than the intended exclusion of that people from colonial institutions. The history of attempts to impose legible administrative categories onto the Northern Rizayqat also demonstrates how personalized the agendas of the colonial state might be: here, Guy Moore, one of the most autonomous and the longest-serving of district administrators in Darfur (DC of Northern Darfur from 1932 to 1946), pursued his own personal mission to revitalize the culture and social health of the Northern Rizayqat, via attempts at their partial unification on a tribal and territorial basis. Again, given the very obvious ambition to use the techniques of categorization and control on this population, the failure of these techniques is even more striking. This case study also reveals uncertainty within the state over how administrative units should be defined: were ‘tribal’ or ‘territorial’ units most useful? Periodic shifts in policy towards the Northern Rizayqat which prioritized one or the other of these categorizations reveal a lack of clarity over how best to achieve the goals of ‘legibility’. Moreover, officials soon recognized that the Northern Rizayqat might not constitute a viable single administrative unit, and tried to define and control lineage sections rather than the tribe as a whole. Yet these smaller sectional divisions were equally difficult to define or confine; repeated attempts at closer and more precise categorization broke down in the face of continued local complexity and illegibility that subverted colonial agendas of control. Despite their contemporary characterization as camel nomads who belonged in northern Darfur, in the early colonial period the Northern Rizayqat mainly resided in the Central District of Darfur and were not very nomadic in habits, rather like the Bani Halba. 27 Their movement southwards was probably an adaptive response to the great drought and famine of 1913–1914: years of scarcity in Darfur’s arid north have repeatedly driven southward migrations by pastoralists throughout Darfur’s modern history. Attempts to amalgamate them with the Rizayqat of Southern Darfur under the chieftaincy of Ibrahim Musa Madibbu collapsed after four years in 1929, largely because of the strained relationship between Ibrahim and his wakil or agent among the Northern Rizayqat. Instead, the administration made their first attempt at creating a paramount chieftaincy among the Northern Rizayqat, to be led by the head of the Mahriyya section, Mahdi Hassaballah. Officials believed this would bring ‘better organization and discipline’ among the ‘very independent’ sections of the tribe, which was now brought under the jurisdic26 Mamdani, Saviors, pp. 167–168; Young, H., A.M. Osman, A.M. Abusinn, M. Asher, O. Egemi, Livelihoods, Power and Choice: The vulnerability of the Northern Rizeigat, Darfur, Sudan (Feinstein International Center, 2009). 27  Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 19 June 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/21/62.

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tion of Northern Darfur District. 28 Yet three years later, officials in northern Darfur complained of the impossibility of ‘trekking among and getting to know’ the ‘scattered’ Northern Rizayqat; unsurprisingly given that most of the so-called tribe resided in central or western Darfur, and were not interested in moving back to a north beset by repeated droughts in the early 1930s. 29 By 1934 the nazirate had been abolished: Mahdi Hassaballah was reduced to the leadership only of the minority of his own Mahriyya section who resided in Northern Darfur. 30 The rest of the Mahriyya – and the other Rizayqat sections – would be governed by shaykhs who lived among them in central Darfur in what was later described by Moore (who oversaw these changes), as the creation of a ‘territorial system as opposed to tribal amalgamation’. 31 His counterpart in central Darfur noted that it was …increasingly clear that the taxation and administration of widely scattered tribes can only be carried out satisfactorily on a local territorial basis, and that attempts to concentrate such tribes or to expel them from established settlements are almost bound to end in failure. 32

Yet Moore rapidly became an opponent of his own policy. His discomfort with the presence of Northern Rizayqat outside of northern Darfur was clear: he suggested that their movement to central and south-western Darfur was evidence of ‘degeneracy’. Southwards movement was ‘the natural orientation of debased Arab stock whose eyes are turned towards the succulent easy life of the western wadis bartering their milk etc with the Fur and Masalit rather than facing the risks and harder existence of the jizzu [northern desert grazing]’. 33 For Moore, the abandonment of the noble nomadic life was of great concern: exactly the reverse of the attitude shown by officials in southern Darfur towards the return of the Bani Halba to their nomadic ways, yet similarly blind to the underlying rationality of the behaviour of people finding the best way to maintain a stable livelihood. But whilst in the Bani Halba case the concern with livelihood and civilization seemed an overlay to more fundamental concerns about administrative legibility, in Moore’s imagination – and policy – the issue of culture and ‘degeneracy’ seemed to wield its own peculiar significance. The fact that Rizayqat Arabs were getting ‘mixed up’ with Fur and Masalit was not just a problem for effective, ‘tribal’ administration, but was also a tendency which had a ‘profound effect on their [the Rizayqat’s] manners and customs’. Moore bemoaned the way in which Rizayqat men increasingly ‘carried loads for the cultivators among whom they lived or occasionally further 28 

Dupuis, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 30 Dec. 1929, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/21/63. 29  NDD Annual Report 1932, NRO Darfur 5/3/11. 30  NDD Annual Report 1934, Ibid. 31  NDD Annual Report 1939, NRO Darfur 1/25/140. 32  DPMD March 1934, NRO Darfur 1/27/143 33  NDD Annual Report 1939, NRO Darfur 5/3/11.

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afield for merchants’, rather than tending to their ‘deteriorating’ herds. But most alarming in Moore’s imagination was the tendency of the Rizayqat to settle in or around towns – or ‘fleshpots’ as he described them. Moore was disturbed by the tendency of Rizayqat men to enter a wage labour economy, and, like many colonial officials, he viewed urban spaces as centres of moral degeneracy. As a result, Moore made it his personal mission to save the Northern Rizayqat from ‘the fate of so many others whom laissez faire has allowed to abandon the life of their ancestors and be seduced by appearances of easy living into the orbit of false Economic Gods’. 34 In other words, Moore wanted to restore the nomadic pastoralist way of life among the Northern Rizayqat. This agenda seems strikingly at odds with conventional narratives about the state’s preference for settling nomads and dealing with sedentary populations, and reminds us of the significance of individual officials in shaping colonial policy. It is worth noting in this regard that Moore had served with John Glubb in the deserts of Iraq, where he had – according to colleagues – ‘dressed as an Arab and lived as one’. 35 Moore was a romantic enthusiast for Arab nomadism. There was a complication in his scheme however. Some of the Rizayqat sections had become predominantly cattle herders, whilst others were mainly camel herders. Ecological conditions in northern Darfur were not favourable to cattle herding; Moore therefore decided that cattle herding sections should be allowed to remain in central Darfur, and continue a largely sedentary existence. But, suspicious of the lack of tribal controls over those who would remain around El Fasher in particular, Moore wanted to make it necessary for members of these sections to carry individual identity papers showing which shaykh and district they paid tax to. They should be dealt with, he believed, as ‘individuals’, living a ‘non-tribal existence’: the logic of tribe, he suggested, should be abandoned, in favour of even closer, more modern forms of surveillance and control.36 The DC of Central Darfur rejected these proposals out of hand, suggesting cattle-herding sections were perfectly well enough controlled without adding bureaucratic burdens to his work and the lives of subjects. 37 Bureaucratic legibility was rejected in favour of continued reliance on chiefs and their own personal relations with their subjects. Camel herders were, however, to be moved back to their place of origin in northern Darfur. And in 1941 province police ‘assisted’ the Mahriyya and Jalul sections – defined as camel herders by Moore – to move back to northern Darfur, even as at the same time unprecedented numbers of Zaghawa camel herders were migrating in the opposite direction to escape failed grazing in the north. As was often the case, 34 

The above all from NDD Annual Report 1941, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A)4/23. Thesiger, The Life of my Choice (London, 1987), p. 241; P. Satia, Spies in Arabia (Oxford, 2008), pp. 116–17; C.A. Lea (ed. M. Daly), On Trek in Kordofan (Oxford, 1994), p. 221. 36  Moore, DC NDD to DC SDD and DC CDD, 11 Nov. 1940, NRO Darfur 7/3/9. 37  DC SDD to DC NDD, 28 Nov. 1940, NRO Darfur 7/3/9. 35  W.

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these coercive operations only had limited success: most people escaped further southwards having been warned of the police’s arrival. 38 And the attempt to split the Northern Rizayqat on the basis of an equation between livelihood and sectional affiliation also failed. Many cattle herders were included among those who were moved north; equally many camel herders remained around El Fasher. 39 Indeed most of the Northern Rizayqat owned both kinds of animal: those who kept mainly camels still held cattle as a regular source of milk; cattle herders likewise used camels for the transport of gum or crops for sale. The reality of mixed herds therefore defeated this crude attempt to impose simple categorization on a complex livelihood mosaic.40 Among those who were resettled to northern Darfur, Moore suggested a generational split existed in terms of their views on their return. The older men applauded a return to Tribal Council in which, for the first time in years, they met again in council and at each other’s fire. The younger generation were frankly hostile to a life which offered more work than play and to conditions which appeared so bleak; failure of all grazing… added to their horror of the scene… it has been necessary to keep their camps under supervision to prevent them breaking back South.41

Behind the patronizing tone, and assertions of youthful idleness, the essence of this is perfectly plausible. After all, it was the elder generation who went on to dominate the Native Court established in 1945 to manage the affairs of the sections relocated to northern Darfur. And given that many of the younger generation may well have been born close to El Fasher, and have grown up in an urban, wage economy, it seems likely that only the use of state coercion could keep them confined to the alien northern district. However, in subsequent years when the gizzu repeatedly failed, very large numbers of people moved south, regardless of theoretical restrictions on their doing so.42 Colonial coercion could not compete with environmental realities that made camel nomadism in northern Darfur an increasingly difficult livelihood to pursue. Annual reports through the 1940s repeatedly note the southward movement of nomads – Zaghawa as well as Rizayqat – in years of poor rainfall in northern Darfur, and indicated such movement was inevitable and should not be prevented. The elders and shaykhs who led the court complained frequently about the difficulties of holding the tribe together in such circumstances, arguing that remaining camel herders around Fasher should be rounded up and brought north. Thus, local elites became more invested in the project of legibility than state officials themselves.43 38 

NDD Annual Report 1941, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher(A) 47/4/23. DCSDD to DC NDD 30 Jan. 1943, NRO Darfur 7/3/9. 40 Summary of a discussion between ADC NDD and ADC Baggara, 18 Jan. 1948, NRO Darfur 7/3/9. 41  NDD Annual Report 1941, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher(A) 47/4/23. 42  NDD Annual Report 1947, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher(A) 47/7/26; NDD Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher(A) 47/6/29. 43  DC NDD to DC CDD, 19 July 1948, NRO Darfur Kuttum 41/5/15 39 

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By 1950 the Northern Rizayqat court was dismantled: the leadership of the court under its Mahriyya president had produced resentment among other Rizayqat sections – notably the numerous and wealthy Um Jalul clan of the Mahamid section – but it also seems clear that more generally the attempt to hold nomads in a territory subject to extremely unpredictable grazing had met with persistent resistance.44 Drought and famine in 1949 cemented this ‘scattering’ and the failure of deep bore-well exploration in the same year confirmed the difficulties of living in the region. Even court members themselves were not attending court sessions by 1949.45 The Northern Rizayqat that remained in northern Darfur were finally subordinated to other territorial courts created by the British in that district.46 But their marginalization within the Native Administration structure was not an outcome planned by the British: rather it reflected the continuing failure of colonial attempts at administrative unification and territorialization of the Northern Rizayqat. The marginality of these people in recent years is, therefore, a clear manifestation of the limits of the colonial state’s ability to impose legibility on local societies, even where its attempts to do so were vigorously pursued. These outcomes were also the product of continued uncertainty as to the most appropriate categories and distinctions to apply to the realities of complex local social and economic associations and livelihoods: an uncertainty which impeded the formulation of consistent policy. Though the attainment of a legible social landscape was sometimes thought to be worth the use of significant coercion or violence, administrators were unable to ever impose the congruence between territory and ethnic identity which their colourful tribal maps imagined. Moreover, moving beyond the case studies examined here, it should be emphasized that administrators in Darfur did not necessarily believe the imposition of fixed territorial boundaries between tribes was a desirable way to govern the diverse and mobile populations they governed. This was particularly the case in areas inhabited by mobile pastoralists in the south and north of Darfur. While the administration clearly believed most tribes had their own territory or dar within which they had primary rights to access land, it was not necessarily committed to the unambiguous definition of the precise limits of these territories.

THE LIMITS OF LEGIBILITY: INTER-ETHNIC RELATIONS AND TRIBAL BOUNDARIES Officials were well aware of the difficulties inherent in pursuing a policy of territorial confinement to its fullest extent. Writing about the border between Darfur and French Equatorial Africa in 1944, Moore noted that the ‘exact boundary cannot be made clear to graziers who 44 

NDD Annual Report 1950, NRO 2 D Fasher A 47/8/31. NDD Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29. 46  NDD Annual Report 1950, NRO 2 D Fasher A 47/8/31. 45 

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can only recognise definite points and not imaginary lines drawn on the map’.47 This anticipates current academic awareness of the way in which pastoralist conceptions of territory are often oriented around particular resources (water points or drought-refuge pasture) rather than along strict perimeter lines. More broadly, officials also often argued that the imposition of ‘arbitrary’ demarcated boundaries by the government might increase rather than reduce inter-group tensions, and should only be carried out as a ‘last resort’ where disputes became intractable.48 Early colonial administrators had believed in the utility of borders ‘very clearly defined on the ground’ as a tool for resolving disputes:49 but the experience of rebellion at Nyala and Zalingei rapidly persuaded most officials that the opposite was the case. Administrators had often acted less as neutral arbiters of local disputes than as the advocates of particular local interests. Officials therefore increasingly believed that whilst populations should in general terms be confined to tribal territories, such territories should perhaps not be defined too closely at their margins. This was a particularly important point in areas where different peoples shared access to important livelihood resources, be those water points or good grazing lands. If such resources were defined unambiguously as belonging to one particular ethnic group, the potential for the exclusion of their neighbours might enflame local inter-ethnic relationships with the potential for dangerous local conflict. This was especially true in areas where nomad and sedentary peoples lived side by side: Lampen noted ‘We have really upset the balance of things by making boundaries between nomadic and sedentary tribes. The nomads often over-grazed the lands beyond the cultivation from which a boundary now gives the sedentaries grounds for excluding them.’50 Clearly, then, in some cases the damage had already been done: more exclusive conceptions of group rights had created hostilities between neighbours. But officials also left many boundaries undefined, for just the reasons advanced above. The provincial border between Kordofan and Darfur was an example of an area where it was thought ‘undesirable to align boundaries’ in what was a ‘grazing ground for Darfur and Kordofan nomadic tribes’.51 In 1925 an official noted that the only fixed boundary around the dar of the Habbaniyya of southern Darfur was where they neighboured the Masalit – the border which had been revised and fixed following the Nyala rising. It was thought best to avoid delimiting the other Habbaniyya boundaries: the official noted that when the matter of setting fixed boundaries was raised, it was ‘capable of raising great 47 

Moore, DC NDD to Governor 18 May 1944, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 59/3/9. Nightingale, DC SDD, Note on Fujagh inter-district meeting, 4 Oct. 1938, NRO Darfur 7/3/10. 49  Davies cited in Resident Dar Masalit to Governor Darfur, 1 Feb. 1933, NRO 2. Darfur Masalit 6/1/1. 50  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/8/42. 51  ‘Narrative of proceedings: NDD and EDD district boundary’, 1938, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/5/27. 48 

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feeling between rival parties’.52 Nearly 25 years later, a boundary dispute between Habbaniyya and Rizayqat chiefs in 1949 was sparked by the expansion of Habbaniyya settlements in the border zone between the two people. Their nazirs agreed that there had never been a complete official boundary drawn up between them. Even then, the DC at the time was reluctant to mark the boundary too clearly, stating that ‘I think the days of “DCs’ boundaries” are passed and do more harm than good.’53 Some officials also favoured the maintenance or creation of a no-man’s land of forest or ‘uninhabited bush’ between different groups to prevent the possibility of conflict, preferring the existence of an ambiguous buffer zone to absolute lines of division.54 This uncertainty over the value of precise legible solutions to administrative problems was perhaps at its clearest along Darfur’s southern frontier with Northern Bahr al-Ghazal, where the Rizayqat and Malual Dinka shared access to the Bahr al-Arab or Kiir river as a crucial seasonal water and grazing resource. Whilst officials in Northern Bahr al-Ghazal consistently pushed for a precise definition of Malual grazing rights in this shared zone, often demanding a clearly delineated boundary between areas to be used by each group, Darfur administrators preferred more flexible arrangements. Lampen argued that ‘free intercourse’ was ‘better security against serious fighting than a hard and fast boundary’, and suggested that such interaction was more desirable ‘even at the risk of an occasional homicide, or fracas, rather than to have to police a boundary’.55 This in part reflected the way in which administrators preferred to back the interests of their key ally, Ibrahim Musa, in southern Darfur, but it is also characteristic of a cadre of state officials who were suspicious of many of the tools of bureaucratic modernity – not just education or economic development, but even the project of legibility to which the state appeared to be so dedicated. Administrators in Darfur generally had limited ambitions: to raise taxes and preserve their own definition of law and order. Whilst, as we have seen, they might use vigorous and crushing force to achieve those goals where necessary, they were also keen to avoid the costs and dangers of the necessity of close policing of local affairs. In this regard, they were particularly alert to the importance of maintaining stable inter-ethnic relations, and they saw chiefs as having a crucial role in this area. Regular meetings between the chiefs of neighbouring peoples were seen to be the most effective way to promote local stability, rather than the clear definition of territorial boundaries. Such meetings also often involved administrators of different districts or even provinces. It 52 

ADC Baggara to DC SDD, 11 May 1925, NRO 54/3/12. de Bunsen note on Habbania-Rizeigat boundary dispute, 6 June 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher 8/1/6. 54  ‘Narrative of proceedings: NDD-EDD district boundary’, 1938, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/5/27. 55  Lampen, DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 6 Nov. 1930; Lampen, DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 2. Feb. 1931, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 8/1/2. 53 

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was important that state representatives were seen to be co-operating with one another and were above local rivalries: that they create the ‘state effect’ of distance and neutrality on which their imagined right to govern was in part based. Officials across the Darfur-Kordofan boundary, which theoretically separated several pastoralist communities on either side, described the meetings between chiefs on either side as a ‘friendly party’ hosted by the government, to ‘give the tribal leaders a chance of talking about current news and problems’. The idea was to create informal ties of friendship (‘muhanna’) that would last regardless of government edict, and limit the potential for violence which continuing inter-ethnic, cross-border camel raids had the potential to ignite.56 Such meetings were also intended to show ‘the government was one’ and to demonstrate the ‘absolute impossibility of playing off any one administration against the other’.57 On the Rizayqat-Malual border mentioned above, the same strategy was used, with annual meetings taking place to make grazing arrangements and settle disputes that had arisen between the two groups. Yet, as I have shown at more length elsewhere, state officials at these meetings often failed to perform a united role. Rather, they often split against one another along the boundary lines: Darfur officials took the side of the Rizayqat and Bahr el-Ghazal officials the side of the Malual in disputes over marriage and territory.58 On the Darfur and Kordofan boundary, officials acknowledged that despite their best efforts, they were ‘thought necessarily prejudiced in favour of their own sides’.59 Chiefs were very capable at pulling on imagined ties of obligation between themselves and officials in order to ensure administrators supported their interests against those of neighbouring groups across the border. Indeed, that was the proper role of the leader: in the context of inter-district relations, the expectation of the official was that he should protect ‘his’ people, just as he should hear their appeals and complaints. Officials were well aware of the tendency for chiefs to push for their own interests to be supported by the state: as one put it, ‘I often wonder whether a good deal of the feeling existing between certain tribes is not due to the fact that each side has one eye on its DC to see how far he is going to support their exorbitant demands.’60 Similarly, officials often believed boundary disputes were driven by the rivalries between neighbouring chiefs rather than being popular disputes over territory: as one DC put it, ‘the actual boundary being of such subsidiary importance, we shall take no further notice of it and concentrate entirely on 56 

DPMD October 1933, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/1/3. DC Central and East Darfur to Governor Darfur, 21 Oct. 1935, ibid. 58  See C. Vaughan, ‘The Rizeigat-Malual borderland during the Condominium: the limits of legibility’, in C. Vaughan, M. Schomerus, and L. De Vries, (eds), The Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in contemporary and historical perspectives (New York, 2013). 59  Central District Monthly Diary, October 1933, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/1/3. 60  DPMD September 1934, NDD, SAD 659/4/124. 57 

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a “sulh” [peace] between the two nazirs’.61 Inter-group conflict could be avoided by concentrating on the personal relations between the chiefs, rather than by imposing inflexible boundaries on mobile pastoralist peoples. This emphasizes the commonly held official preference for personalized rather than bureaucratic forms and practices of authority. It also suggests a suspicion of how useful clearly defined territorial boundaries really were. Yet, as this analysis has already hinted, chiefs were often keener on the creation of clear territorial boundaries than were state officials: clear boundaries could be used by local elites to assert or defend exclusive rights to territory and resources. This was particularly important in areas where the changing colonial economy had given certain resources a new kind of value. A border dispute between the (sedentary) Berti and Birgid in 1929 was driven by the growing significance of the gum tapping industry in central Darfur. A particularly dense stretch of forest was under dispute, both because of its growing economic potential to those involved in gum tapping and perhaps even more importantly because of the ‘customary’ right of chiefs to charge dues on those accessing the gum within what was defined as their territory. 62 The definition of such rights here, and elsewhere in Darfur, created significant incentives for chiefs to stake out their claims to territory. We will see in the next chapter that this became especially significant in the later years of colonial ‘developmentalism’ in pastoralist areas. In such disputes, the colonial logic of the map was easily appropriated by chiefs concerned to stake out their claims: one demanded that the DC provide each rival in a dispute with ‘a sketch in his hand showing his boundaries’, demanding a legible state-imposed resolution to a local dispute.63 Elites valued the permanence of written records of territorial claims sanctioned by the state: at one dispute, an official was struck to see ‘both sides dive into pockets and bring out carefully folded papers’, which recorded earlier colonial rulings on the boundary: these must have been ambiguous enough to provide ammunition for both parties to the dispute.64 The importance of paper records goes back to the days of the Sultanate, when Sultanic grants of land were carefully defined in written charters.65 But despite this vigorous defence of local claims, it also seems clear that chiefs often found it politic to allow the state to make the final decisions in boundary settlements: one official noted of a boundary 61 

Sherman, DC SDD report on Habbania-Rizeigat boundary dispute, 3 Jan. 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher 54/3/14; de Bunsen n-ote on Habbania-Rizeigat boundary dispute, 6 June 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher 8/1/6. 62  Evans, ‘Note on Fasher-Mellit boundary settlement’, 24 Dec. 1929, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 8/1/5. This was also true in neighbouring Kordofan. See M. Babiker, ‘Land tenure in Kordofan’, in Stainsen and Kevane, Kordofan, pp. 197–222. 63  President of Mellit Court to DC NDD, 30 Nov. 1936, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 8/1/5. 64  Note on Tissoma-Burush boundary dispute, 30 Oct. 1931, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/5/27. 65  O’Fahey, Land, p. 9.

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demarcation between Northern and Eastern Darfur that the chiefs ‘preferred the DCs to find the line, while they discussed the issues with the interested parties at the night halts’.66 In other words, chiefs did not want to take the blame for an unfavourable outcome: the ‘great feeling’ that boundary disputes could create might be directed against them as well as it might be against government. Border disputes, by implication, were sometimes surely driven by popular tensions over ownership of and access to livelihood resources, as much as by the ambitions of chiefs. In such cases chiefs did their best to influence officials to take their sides in disputes, and maximize their chances of gaining exclusive rights to territory or resources in the final settlement. Indeed, the very principle of privileging the rights of ‘native’, first-comer ethnic populations within territory defined as their own was not one simply imposed by the state. Only months after the occupation of Darfur, the province governor, while on tour, was approached by representatives of the Ma’alia of southern Darfur who claimed the whole country in which any Ma’alia had lived at any time, and were out to prohibit the development of this country except by people who were willing to pay heavy dues to them for the right to do so. I made every endeavour… to make them understand that the country belonged to the Government and not to them at all; but that where any of them opened wells and established villages and cleared and cultivated land and made gum gardens, the Government was prepared to acknowledge their claims to such wells and to such ground and such gum gardens as were necessary for the inhabitants of those villages… They wanted to be allowed to take ‘awaid’ [dues] from some Birgid and other tribes who had settled in Ma’alia country during Ali Dinar’s reign, when they themselves had deserted the land and settled in Kordofan. This I declined to allow.67

Dupuis found himself fighting against vociferous claims for exclusive rights to land on the part of the Ma’alia, who clearly understood – but also overestimated – the enthusiasm of a new government for delineating tribal territories.

CONCLUSION In the final analysis then, the politics of creating territorial boundaries between peoples – and the very idea of ethnicizing rights to land – in Darfur was a process which state and local actors both promoted and constrained at different times in different places, depending on the interests of those involved. The project of ‘legibility’ did form a central logic of colonial power in Darfur: and this could involve the ruthless use of state violence against ordinary people who moved out of what were now defined as their dars. The violence and coercion that remained 66 

NDD and E Darfur district boundary: narrative of proceedings, 1938, NRO 2. D. Fasher 54/5/27. 67  Saville, Report of a tour in Dar Rizeigat, Dar Habbania, Nyala, Zalingei and Kebkebia May 28th 1917, SAD Baring papers (uncatalogued).

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essential to the colonial project well into its ‘mature’ period should not, therefore, be underestimated – yet nor should it blind us to the continued limits to the effectiveness of colonial power. People refused to submit to the logic of tribal territoriality; they continued to move to pursue their livelihoods or evade oppressive leaders, actively evading state authority in order to do so. Government officials themselves were sometimes sceptical of the utility of pushing agendas of territorial definition to their fullest: some degree of illegibility at the borders between ethnic groups and territories was often favoured as a means of limiting the explosive potential for conflict which tensions over livelihood resources contained. The project of legibility therefore remained incomplete in both conception and implementation in colonial Darfur. On the other hand the local agents of the colonial state – Darfuri chiefs – also pushed for closer definitions of territory where they believed their own interests were best served by carving out exclusive claims to economically valuable resources. The fact that chiefs also wanted officials to take responsibility for the final outcomes of such processes suggests that popular sentiment was also engaged in the logics of territorial disputes and resource competition – sentiment which chiefs wished to be shielded from. The logic of territoriality was not simply one imposed by an alien state on mobile populations who knew no borders; it was a logic that was some to degree negotiated and shaped by interactions between state and local actors on the ground.

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6 Late Colonialism in Darfur: Local Government, Development and National Politics, 1937–1956

At first glance, the much discussed ‘second colonial occupation’ – whereby after World War II Britain invested unprecedented levels of resources and manpower into development efforts across its African empire – appears to have passed Darfur by altogether.1 Martin Daly has convincingly evidenced Darfur’s relative ‘underdevelopment’ compared to wealthier regions of Sudan, and has shown that the province was in some respects even worse served than the ‘famously neglected south’ in terms of development.2 British officials, administrative or technical, remained very few in number in Darfur, and the provision of services compared to other regions was extremely limited. Yet a focus on relative under-development, and the fatal economic and political marginalization of Darfur as a result, obscures ways in which the ambitions of officials – and chiefs – in Darfur did shift in important ways in these years. Development in the sense of large-scale economic and social ‘modernization’ was clearly not on the agenda, but the administration was interested in bringing about a degree of change which it could itself control and direct. Educational, health and livelihood provisions were all increased in this period, together with efforts to encourage more commercial agriculture and sale of cattle. All this was symptomatic of a broader concern common across colonial Africa to re-legitimize empire in the post-war world by providing economic and social goods to imperial subjects, whilst simultaneously boosting the economic value of the colonies to their imperial masters. 3 Alongside this increased concern with economic and social development ran reforms which claimed to liberalize local politics. From 1937, the Sudan Government had officially recognized the necessity of creating local level administrative structures within which educated Sudanese could take a representative role: legislation allowed for the creation of partially elected councils in urban areas, and for nominated councils in rural areas. It was hoped such accommodation of the 1  D. Low and J. Lonsdale, ‘Introduction’, in D. Low and A. Smith (eds), The Oxford History of East Africa (Oxford, 1976), pp. 12–16. 2 Daly, Sorrow, p. 137. 3 Cooper, Africa since 1940 (Cambridge, 2004) provides a concise, authoritative discussion of this period, pp. 20–65.

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ambitions of the educated would defuse political tensions that might otherwise undermine imperial control. The new structures were also intended as a means of ensuring that ‘traditional’ leaders and the newly educated might cooperate as partners rather than rivals: Douglas Newbold, Civil Secretary of Sudan in the late 1930s hoped that ‘under the ample folds of [Local Government’s] respectable cloak, the sons of sheikhs and the sons of effendia could lie down together.’4 In this sense, despite claims in some scholarship that the advent of Local Government heralded a major ‘theoretical reorientation’ in the Sudan Government’s administrative policy, it is clear that councils were intended to preserve and re-legitimize the authority of chiefs in the new setting of councils.5 And in Darfur, the only educated people were younger chiefs or the sons of chiefs: to adapt Newbold, in Darfur the effendiyya were the sons of shaykhs. The significance of the shift to local government councils in Darfur lies rather in the increasing bureaucratization and regulation that it imposed on chiefs. Indeed, the state’s understanding of the role of chiefs shifted considerably in this period: having been imagined as guardians of stability, they were re-invented as agents of change directed by the colonial state. Chiefs were the enforcers and champions of the state’s economic and social development efforts. They were meant to embody new standards of probity in governance as understood by central government, as well as joining together with their erstwhile rivals as neighbourly collaborators in the state’s project of ‘local government’. All this also meant that chiefs in these years became ever more obviously servants of the state bureaucracy, and sometimes more distant from their own people; some of them also failed to keep up with the changing expectations of government, and lost their power as a result. These changes were symptoms of a more general tendency towards the centralization of power in the hands of the state, a tendency which ran directly contrary to a rhetoric of decentralization and liberalization prevalent in these years. The creation of elected district councils in Darfur (and elsewhere in Sudan), which officials claimed to embody the democratizing impulses of the late colonial state was in fact the next step in the bureaucratization of chiefly leadership, and the centralization of authority in the hands of an increasingly technocratic central government apparatus. Yet while councils were intended as vehicles for the re-education of chiefs in the arts of bureaucracy and inter-ethnic solidarity, they principally became arenas for the expression of growing inter-ethnic competition in this period, or ‘political tribalism’ as Lonsdale termed it.6 The new resources offered by government prompted explicit competition between chiefs in the new arenas of governance to ensure their own 4 

Newbold note, February 1939, in Henderson, Making, 509. Daly, Imperial Sudan: The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934–56 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 37. 6  J. Lonsdale, ‘Moral ethnicity & political tribalism’ in P. Kaarsholm & J. Hultin (eds) Inventions & Boundaries: Historical & anthropological approaches to ethnicity & nationalism (IDS Roskilde Occasional Paper 11, 1994), pp. 131–50. 5 M.W.

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people secured as great a share of council developmental expenditure as possible. The role of chiefs as crucial intermediaries with government was thus reinforced by this sort of competition: and whilst their linkage to the state became ever more clear in this period, downward accountability to their people in various kinds of resource competition (including in the context of multiplying territorial disputes) was simultaneously maintained and reinforced. These years also saw the surprisingly rapid triumph of a narrowly based, Nile Valley nationalist elite in the game of anti-colonial politics. The course of Sudan’s decolonization initially seems to confirm Darfur’s subordination and marginalization within the emergent nationalist political field; yet the patterns of success and failure in the eventual national elections of 1953 in Darfur also reaffirmed the importance of local connections and legitimacy in making or breaking political ambitions. The Darfuri political field did not simply remain ‘local’ in these years; but it is clear that people also expected their representatives to act as champions of local interests in national arenas. These expectations of leaders – who came to include MPs as well as chiefs in their number – and particularly their capacity for successful intermediation, continued to shape political authority in the region until independence. The rapid moves towards Sudanese independence in the 1950s heralded an end-of- hierarchy moment in Darfuri politics – when the fragile hegemony of the colonial state could finally be challenged. This was demonstrated not simply through the performance of elections, but was also manifested in a growing number of confrontations between local people and the state, and between local populations themselves. As the stability of the power behind the chiefs, police and administrators was brought into question, so people’s readiness to channel their political behaviour into courses defined by the state came into question. Darfur did not experience any major political convulsion at independence from British rule comparable to the violent regime transitions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the region: political and religious energy was largely funnelled into the ballot box. Nonetheless, the end of colonial rule bequeathed to Darfur an environment of increasing inter-tribal competition, combined with relative under-development: a deeply undesirable combination.

CHANGING EXPECTATIONS OF THE CHIEFS – ‘MODERN TENDENCIES’ AND ‘REACTIONARY DIE-HARDS’ Although the goals of the administration changed in these years, chiefs played as central a role in government plans as they had ever done. The administration believed that if they were to encourage change in the everyday livelihood and personal practices of ordinary people, chiefs would have to change first: in the hierarchical (and supposedly stagnant and conservative) societies that officials

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governed, they believed the impetus from change could only come from above. Best documented are the efforts of Hugh Boustead from the late 1930s in western Darfur to harness the agricultural potential of the region to developmentalist priorities. Fur chiefs were always the first to be encouraged to plant cash crops, drought or locust-resistant food crops, and other produce with the aim of encouraging a more varied and nutritious diet. The dimangawi as the pre-eminent chief of the region, was the first to plant cassava at Boustead’s encouragement; his enthusiasm was said to have ‘fired many of the outside shartays to follow his example’.7 At a district gathering in 1940, shartays were taken to the markaz garden and shown how to graft oranges and grapefruits, apparently generating ‘great enthusiasm’. 8 Schools that educated the sons of shartays were also centres for change: a new school garden was established in Zalingei in 1940 which made groups of boys joint partners in an allotment.9 Boustead felt that such ‘propaganda’ was highly effective. But the most obvious outcome of all this (as was often the case in attempts at agricultural development in colonial Africa) was to reinforce the privileged access that chiefs enjoyed to the resources of the state, and to shore up their position within local societies. Reports repeatedly noted the new levels of wealth enjoyed by shartays who had managed to plant large cultivations of citrus fruit or tobacco (which became a key cash crop export for Darfur in the 1940s): they also suggested that some chiefs used their profits to relegitimate their authority, extending their generosity to ordinary people, although others became preoccupied with extending their own wealth at the expense of their judicial and administrative roles.10 Boustead also pursued a project of improving personal and communal hygiene among the Fur. Whilst new dispensaries were established in these years, the ever-pinched administration convinced itself that the key to improving the health of the Fur was ‘combating ignorance and dirty habits… Prevention is better than cure and cheaper’.11 Again, chiefs, their sons and elders were the key targets for propaganda: the province’s assistant Medical Officer lectured shartays and elders at the Zalingei gathering of 1938 on sanitation and health, and on a weekly basis he lectured to the sons of the shartays at the Zalingei school. Schoolboys were subjected to daily ‘bathing parades’ to inspect their cleanliness. 12 The results of Boustead’s pet projects are difficult to measure. The widespread up-take of tobacco as a profitable cash crop for ordinary people – to the extent that Fur labour migration eastwards temporarily collapsed during boom years for tobacco – is the only clear example of 7 

WDDMD January 1941, NRO Darfur 6/3/8 DPMD March 1940, NRO CIVSEC 1/57/12/43. 9  WDD Annual Report 1940, NRO 2 D/Fasher (A) 4/22. 10  Ibid. WDD Annual Report 1943–44, NRO Darfur 47/5/24. 11  WDD Annual Report 1940, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher (A) 4/22. 12  WDD Annual Report 1938, NRO Darfur 1/25/139. 8 

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developmentalist success in western Darfur.13 What is more striking is that chiefs were now judged by their capacity and determination to embody the new ethos and practices of the state. Chiefs in western Darfur were praised for the quality and cleanliness of their gardens, houses or villages, or criticized for their failings in these respects.14 From being guardians of ‘tradition’ (or abusive extorters and torturers), chiefs were re-invented by officials as the agents, enforcers and embodiments of developmentalism in western Darfur, and more widely throughout the province. 15 As government re-imagined the role of the chief, so new chiefs emerged to fulfil those expectations. Officials increasingly favoured younger, educated leaders who were able to perform more convincingly in line with the new priorities of the government. This meant that the late colonial period was also a time of flux in the personnel of the chieftaincy elite, as older, less educated chiefs who had successfully operated for years in the indeterminate world of Native Administration came unstuck. Government education in Darfur had always been a commodity explicitly limited to the sons of chiefs, but even such a limited degree of educational provision required careful management by the state. Officials had worked to encourage sympathy between an elder generation increasingly defined by their ‘illiteracy’ and a younger generation with substantial experience of the schoolroom. Chiefs’ sons were not thought to be candidates for education at Gordon College: when Sultan Endoka of Dar Masalit once proposed to stretch the norms and send his sons to Gordon College in Khartoum to be trained as qadis, his request was turned down as potentially creating a wedge between his sons who would become ‘effendi princes’ and the ‘people of the dar’.16 Even education at the intermediate school in neighbouring Kordofan province (which a significant number of chiefs’ sons did attend) carried risks: one boy was ‘led astray’ by a job with Imperial Airways which offered ‘drink, women and cards at request’.17 Some officials believed that the education of chiefs’ sons at the elementary school at El Fasher (‘as in the days of Ali Dinar’ according to Boustead) was likely the most healthy option: this would create a coherent provincial elite bound together in ties of ‘friendship’ which would promote peaceful and ordered inter-tribal relations, unsullied by nationalist political leanings or the corruption of the ‘modern’ world.18 Even in 1941 a local government course run for young Darfuri chiefs (demonstrating the increasing bureaucratization of the role) was still held in El Fasher: it was ‘hoped that contact with their 13 

Boustead’s authoritarian approach to preventing tree-burning also earned him rebukes from his superiors after it provoked inter-group violence at a local level. Ingleson, Governor Darfur, note 10 Apr. 1939, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/2/7. 14  Zalingei District Annual Report 1938, NRO Darfur 1/25/139; Zalingei District Annual Report 1940, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher(A) 4/22. 15  See Harir, Numbers, pp. 40, 156 on Zaghawa chiefs. 16  Dar Masalit Annual Report 1925/6, NRO CIVSEC (1)1/18/58. 17  NDD Annual Report 1945, NRO Darfur 5/2/10. 18  RGG 1938.

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peers from all over the province may help them to acquire a broader and less provincial outlook’ – yet clearly provincialism was exactly what was being encouraged. 19 In the later decades of colonial rule, some officials encouraged chiefs to imagine Darfur’s future in an independent Sudan. Boustead in particular was active in painting a picture of the future to the shartays in which ‘your sons will be the donkeys and the eastern Arabs will ride on them’.20 Some chiefs of the elder generation were notoriously sceptical of schooling and colonial medicine – yet by the 1940s even these men sent their sons to school and encouraged them to get work as teachers, dispensers and policemen. In these years chiefs’ sons in western Darfur were trained together with police NCOs, assisting in the management of road and well-building, and reinforcing their ongoing connection with the coercive capacities of the state. 21 Finally, one of the shartays’ sons was sent to Gordon College at Boustead’s urging, despite his complaints of oppression: he went on to study in England and Germany, and returned to act as Minister of Labour in Sudan’s second parliamentary regime in 1966.22 One of Ibrahim Musa’s sons was also sent to Gordon College in the 1940s.23 Yet these were exceptional cases: in educational terms the provincial elite remained just that. Nonetheless, this limited educational profile was deemed desirable among officials who were increasingly concerned with enforcing bureaucratic regularity and uniformity on the behaviour of chiefs and their courts even in remote Darfur – a concern which challenged established leaders. The growing interest of central government in local irregularities was manifested in the willingness of the Civil Secretary’s office in Khartoum to override the support of the provincial administration for two of the biggest chiefs of the region, who were long seen as exemplars of the chiefly ethos: we will examine their downfall in more detail as revealing of the shifts in government priorities and the challenges this posed to the chieftaincy elite. The eldest sons of these men benefitted from the downfall of their fathers, but on coming to power they had to face the resentment and mistrust of older, ‘illiterate’ chiefs in their districts, internal sectional rivalries, and indeed the ambivalence of some colonial officials themselves towards educated chiefs. Thus, even as the colonial state attempted to encourage the unity of the provincial chieftaincy elite, divisions actually widened among these men. The first case under examination is the dismissal of Al-Ghali Taj al-Din from the nazirate of the Habbaniyya, and his replacement by his son Ali. Al-Ghali’s downfall emerged out of allegations of bribery and illegal dues collecting made from 1940 that were nothing out of the ordinary during 19 

Zalingei District Annual Report 1941, NRO Darfur 2.D.Fasher (A) 4/23. p. 119. 21  WDD Handbook, NRO 6/6/17. 22 Boustead, Wind, p. 176. 23  Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 25 May 1942, NRO CIVSEC (1)66/12/107. 20 Boustead, Wind,

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his fifteen year career as nazir. What had changed was the response of the administration – and indeed, Al-Ghali’s fellow chiefs – to these allegations. For one thing, Al-Ghali’s rivals among the Baqqara of southern Darfur demanded that the new Baqqara Combined Court, also established in 1940, deal with these allegations. The Combined Court was an attempt to encourage unity and consolidation among the Baqqara of southern Darfur, with an eye to possible future amalgamations in the sphere of local government. Yet here it became a vehicle for the pursuit of local rivalries (as would the district councils that the British also set up in these years). In court, Al-Ghali ‘tried to bluster but was sat on by the assembled nazirs’. He confessed his wrongdoings in public before his fellows, each of whom was probably involved in similar activities. This was a public performance of vice and virtue, where wrongdoers and upright chiefs were visibly separated. The Ta’aisha nazir, Ali Senussi, took the opportunity to ‘lecture’ Al-Ghali ‘on the indignity of a big nazir taking bribes… and the shame they all felt in being associated with him on a court, because of his behaviour’.24 Nonetheless, the court decided merely to impose a fine on Al-Ghali.25 The Baqqara chiefs persuaded the DC not to refer the case any higher up the administrative hierarchy. This was simultaneously humiliation and protection. But in 1942 a renewed case against Al-Ghali was brought to the court, during which he ‘burst into a rage against the other nazirs and declared that he meant to eat his own Dar whatever they or I [the DC] tried to do to stop him. He also told me that he could not live on his pay and that all nazirs eat their dar.’ 26 There was probably truth in this defence, but the other nazirs, of course, gave it no public credence. They now suggested that Al-Ghali have his nahas withdrawn as ‘the severest shock that can be administered to the nazir personally’ – a proposal that was supported by the DC and even the Governor.27 However, it was the intervention of the Civil Secretary that brought about Al-Ghali’s actual downfall: he commented that the other chiefs were clearly too ready to go easy on Al-Ghali’s misdeeds and expressed his dissatisfaction that Al-Ghali’s offences had been kept out of reports addressed to him. He argued that the nazir should abdicate or be deposed.28 At the DC’s behest, Al-Ghali offered his resignation in October 1942 and died the same month.29 Thus the attempt by Baqqara chiefs to keep this issue for resolution at a local level, stopping short of Al-Ghali’s deposition – which the DC and later even the Governor also appear to have conspired in for a time – eventually collapsed in the face of central government scrutiny. 24 

ADC Baggara ‘Habbania follies‘, 15 Dec. 1940, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14.

25 Ibid.

26  ADC Baggara, ‘Report on Habbania Affairs’, June 1942, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 27  Ingleson, Governor Darfur to Civil Secretary, 22 June 1942, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 28  Civil Secretary to Governor Darfur, 1 July 1942, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 29  DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 15 July 1942 and 21 Oct. 1942, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14.

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Al-Ghali’s successor was his educated son, Ali. The relationship between father and son had not been an easy one in Al-Ghaali’s lifetime. Ali had been the nazir’s key wakil (deputy) from 1933, but Al-Ghaali had frequently encouraged rivalries between Ali and his other sons, and ‘reversed his orders and judgements on every occasion’.30 When Ali finally came to power he gave ‘assurances in detail’ to Habbaniyya elites in council ‘that he would abandon his father’s despotic methods in favour of those of modern times’.31 It was indeed perhaps just such change that brought Ali into conflict with both Habbaniyya elites and the older Baqqara chiefs – and with his DC. The DC reprimanded Ali in 1943 for his ‘failure to show proper respect for men of position in all tribes who were his seniors in years and his direct interventions in affairs of his own tribe which he should have dealt with in consultation with his omdas’.32 We might speculate that in fact Ali’s ’modern’ methods included a failure to distribute what Lampen (now Governor) described as the ‘emoluments’ which Habbaniyya elites expected from their nazir. Certainly, the DC was uneasy with the cultural gulf which he believed Ali’s education had opened up between him and his people, expressing enduring colonial fears and anxieties about the inauthenticity – and therefore illegitimacy – of the local agents of the state: His building of a four-roomed red brick house, his interest in wireless, newspaper, books, his manners towards his elders are all out of place in a young nazir of a Baqqara tribe and he has not the sense to realize the gap they make between him and his followers. 33

However, despite repeated conflict between Ali and umdas from the rival Riafa section of the tribe, the argument for ultimately supporting Ali against his umdas was clearly expressed by the ADC Baqqara: ‘…we are aiming at a more modern form of government and should hesitate before sacrificing an intelligent hereditary head with modern tendencies to five die-hard reactionaries who certainly lack them’. 34 The goals of the state had changed: and Ali was the man who was able to perform to these new expectations. A similar process unfolded in northern Darfur with the downfall of Malik Muhammadayn Adam Sabi of the Tuar Zaghawa, president of the Zaghawa Court which had finally been established in 1938. This was a similar experiment to that of the Baqqara Combined Court, and it placed Muhammadayn firmly in the ascendancy over the formerly autonomous chiefs of other Zaghawa sections. But Muhammadayn’s downfall in 1949, and his replacement by his son, Ali Muhammadayn, reveals much about wider changes in government attitudes towards the Native Courts. 30 

DC Baggara report on Habbania affairs June 1942, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 31  DCSDD to Governor, 1 Feb. 45, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 32 Ibid. 33  DCSDD to Governor 5 Apr. 1945, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 34  DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 3 June 1945, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14.

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From the later 1930s, chiefs were increasingly expected to behave as good bureaucrats, enforcing colonial law as well as local custom, and following good practice and procedure in their courts, especially in the keeping of court records. The provincial administration may have rejected ideas floated by central government of codifying customary law across the province or circulating the Sudan penal code among the Native Courts, arguing instead for the benefits of continued flexibility in local practice, but there was a definite tendency in its decisions towards the greater regularization of Native Courts in the final years of colonial rule. 35 Procedural irregularities increasingly irritated central government bureaucrats, who extended their influence into local affairs, even as local officials remained attached to the relative illegibility of Native Administration: as late as 1953 a central government report complained that DCs in Darfur continued to be ‘careless in their checking of court records’. 36 But as well as process, there were also concerns about the substance of the law enforced in the courts. The long-established antipathy of the MLC hierarchy towards the hearing of sharia cases by Native Courts took on new dimensions in the later years of colonial rule. The Darfur province council – comprised largely of chiefly elites and government officials, and a sop to post-war ideas of representative government – repeatedly discussed points of conflict between sharia and customary law from the 1940s. Here, tribal leaders rhetorically accepted the need to follow more orthodox practice in personal law. 37 Even Lampen suggested that ‘in the long run we cannot have two personal laws in one Islamic community… tribal law must alter.’38 An MLC-run school to train ulama (legal scholars) for the Native Courts was established in El Fasher in 1944, and in 1948 MLC inspectors ‘visited areas where personal law is unorthodox and even subversive of public security and justice, and by their instruction did much to eradicate undesirable customs.’39 This seems optimistic: it is doubtful that customary practice was changed at any speed in these years. Henderson, the penultimate British governor of Darfur, continued to argue that custom remained a useful means of modifying the harsher aspects of sharia and should not be suppressed: only gradual change was possible.40 Yet the gradual shift towards favouring the greater uniformity of sharia had its parallel in changing attitudes towards specific categories of crime. Camel ‘theft’ – or raiding – in northern Darfur is a particularly notable example. 35 Lampen,

Governor Darfur to Legal Secretary, 4 Oct. 1948, NRO Darfur 6/7/18. 36  Haig Chief Inspector Judicial Local Government Branch to Civil Secretary, 5 Jan 1953, NRO Darfur 6/7/19. 37  For example see RFACS 1947. 38  G.D. Lampen, Governor Darfur, Handing-over notes, 1948, SAD 731/2/75. 39  RFACS 1944. 40  Henderson, Governor Darfur to Legal Secretary, 8 Nov. 1949; Lampen, Governor Darfur to Legal Secretary, 4 Oct. 1948, NRO Darfur 6/7/18.

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Whilst raiding for camels had been defined as criminal activity from the first years of colonial rule, it is also clear that chiefs had kept these practices outside the purview of state control, and that officials had turned a blind eye to the practices of the chiefs in turn. Camel raids were long-established means of young men attaining adulthood – they could use captured animals to pay bridewealth – and functioned to redistribute wealth among pastoralist societies: chiefs also often took their cut of successful raids. Chiefs were surely also involved in the mediation of conflicts between groups provoked by this raiding. Given these facts, it is hardly surprising that chiefs did not bring many cases to court, and when they did, often imposed relatively light fines instead of the prison sentences that were formally expected. This was particularly true in Dar Zaghawa in the days of ‘Sultan Moore’s’ rule. As noted above, Moore occasionally imprisoned Muhammadayn for involvement in camel theft in the late 1930s and 1940s, although this was something of a performance.41 But by the late 1940s, Muhammadayn’s hold on power was weakening thanks to the renewed force of local protests. It was his involvement in camel theft, combined with his poor performance as a bureaucrat in his own court that would eventually seal his fate. A new sectional movement for independence from Muhammadayn’s rule emerged among the Awlad Diggayn lineage of the Zaghawa in the mid-1940s. The response of the provincial administration to the protest was initially draconian. Moore enthusiastically imprisoned Diggayn protestors, whose response was to declare that they were ‘ready to fill the prisons till no Diggayn is left outside to be ruled by the malik.’42 Military exercises were carried out in northern Darfur as a reminder of the state’s capacity for violence. But the Diggayn were masters of the petition: they simultaneously targeted the North Darfur District Council, the Governor of Darfur, the Civil Secretary, and Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi in their protest against Muhammadayn’s oppressions.43 SAR sent an agent to Darfur to mediate in the dispute, suggesting his growing political ambitions in post-war Darfur. But it was the Civil Secretary who forced the administration to seek a settlement between the Diggayn and Muhammadayn. Senior officials, perhaps increasingly uneasy of the security of their own authority in the post-war climate, decided it was too dangerous to give indefinite support to Muhammadayn against protestors. Lampen, as Governor, supported this: It is not conceivable that the government could use force to compel a united section of 800–1000 men to use a court, and a bad court at that, which they were determined not to use… The Awlad Diggayn at present protest their loyalty to the government… respect for government is a most valuable thing and provided the essential demands of government are fulfilled nothing should be done to link our authority to unessentials.44 41 Harir, Numbers,

p. 112 Ibid, p. 98. 43  Ibid, pp. 100–101. 44  Lampen, April 1948, quoted in Ibid., p. 107. 42 

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The Diggayn were given their own basi, although this man was still subordinated to the court run by Muhammadayn. Unsurprisingly, trouble persisted. While the Awlad Diggayn had not managed to achieve independence, their protest did prompt the new DC in northern Darfur, AES Charles, who succeeded Guy Moore in 1946, to launch a full investigation into the affairs of the Zaghawa court, which the Diggayn refused to use. A case was easily built for Muhammadayn’s dismissal, based less on the complaints of the Diggayn than on the failure of his own court to operate within the norms now expected by government. Charles had no desire to protect Muhammadayn in the manner that Moore had provided for so long. His report noted the following failings: a) Some cases are tried without the legal minimum number of members present b) Seals of members present are not always fixed to the record c) The court register is badly kept d) Many cases are left unfinished e) Negligence of animal theft i.e. the accused is sometimes released before a case is completed; the accused on bail often fail to re-appear and no action is taken to enforce guarantees.45 The last of these was perhaps the most significant, particularly as it was found that Muhammadayn himself took a cut of successful raids as the price for not investigating cases in court. Charles suggested it was Muhammadayn’s ‘tragedy that he could not move with the times or rule by any other methods than those of unfettered autocracy’.46 Indeed, the expectations and language of government had shifted: the new bureaucratic priorities of the state and its intolerance for local norms that clashed with the state’s conception of law had combined against Muhammadayn. The old chief was dismissed and succeeded by his son, Ali Muhammadayn in 1949. Like Ali al-Ghali, the young man rapidly made enemies among his fellows due to the firmness with which he implemented colonial regulations. He had acted as Court Clerk for his father from 1938 and Court Treasurer from 1943. Upon coming to power in 1949 after his father’s deposition Ali Muhammadayn rapidly cleared up tax arrears, reorganized the court registers and started passing heavy sentences upon camel thieves: the latter in particular cannot have been a popular course of action.47 Zaghawa village shaykhs later commented that until Ali came to power ‘it was not known in Dar Zaghawa that animal theft and abetment or screening of it were crimes.’ 48 Ali even burnt down sacred trees that were believed to be 45 

Charles, DCNDD to Governor 2 July 1949, NRO Darfur Kuttum A (41)/2/8.

47 

NDD Annual Report, 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/6/29. NDD Annual Report 1950–1951, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/8/31.

46 Ibid. 48 

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sapping water from newly dug wells, despite the reluctance of local elders to do so.49 Ali’s disregard for local norms threatened other Zaghawa chiefs who did not comply so fully with colonial expectations. In the course of the protracted dispute between Muhammadayn and the Awlad Diggayn, other Zaghawa chiefs had stood firmly alongside the malik and against the dangerous domino effect of further separatist movements threatening their own authority. Indeed, they had urged the administration (unsuccessfully) to use troops to put down the unrest.50 After Muhammadayn’s dismissal in 1949, they publicly supported the administration’s action, although privately they sent Muhammadayn letters ‘of condolence in which they have said they will petition the Governor to restore him’. This ambivalence was related to their mistrust of Ali. The ADC of Northern Darfur suggested there was a popular perception that Muhammadayn was a ‘great thief but he still helped everyone… Anybody who came to him in trouble received grain, animals and money.’ Muhammadayn was a good patron to his clients. In contrast, Ali was ‘mean and stingy… he will not support people, he does not help thieves, but rather jails them’.51 By 1949 all this resulted in a petition authored from the chiefs of Northern Darfur in support of Muhammadayn’s restoration and sent to the Darfur Province Council, which spelt out the reasons for their dislike of Ali. The authors wrote that while ‘we all know [Muhammadayn] is a thief and a bad character’, his removal had been caused by ‘the hostility of his son Ali who for many years has worked against him’. Their protest was thus principally against ‘Ali being appointed as his successor. This policy affects us all (the disloyal son being backed by Government against his father).’52 This was very suggestive of generational tension among the chieftaincy elite of northern Darfur more generally. In another letter, echoing the ultimately protective strategy of the Baqqara nazirs towards Al-Ghali Taj al-Din, chiefs asserted the Tuar were ‘quite content’ with Muhammadayn, and suggested that if he was guilty of any crime, his fellow chiefs should punish him, but he should then be restored. 53 But when the DC explained to the chiefs that Muhammadayn had been dismissed not because of his son or the agitation of the Awlad Diggayn, but rather because of his own peculation, the chiefs dropped their protest. 54 There was no way to convince the administration that such ‘corruption’ was acceptable any more. 49 

El Tigani Mustafa Mohamed-Salih, Social Stratification among the Zaghawa Muslim Community in the Sudan (MPhil St Andrews 1988), p. 37. 50 Harir, Numbers, p. 104. 51  ADC NDD, Note on local views of Mohammedein, 18 Sept. 1949, NRO Darfur Kuttum A (41)2/8. 52  File note of petition, 12 Oct. 1949, ibid. 53  Letter from ‘Kings of Northern Darfur’ to DC NDD (date unknown, c.1949), quoted in Harir, Numbers, p. 294. 54 Harir, Numbers, p. 117.

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Officials were well aware of the damage that chiefs’ strict adherence to colonial law and regulations did to their own local legitimacy: but their concerns about Ali Muhammadayn were more muted than they had been just a few years before when Ali al-Ghaali had come to power. Ali Muhammadayn’s ruthless approach to imprisoning camel thieves was believed to lead to a decline in camel raiding: we can only speculate on the effects on local societies. But DCs contentedly noted that ‘as one drives into Um Buru by night herds of camels are to be seen grazing two and three miles outside the village without guard.’55 Increasingly, other northern chiefs were also judged on their capacity to similarly deal with camel theft: the Meidob court was praised for its effectiveness in this regard, while in 1951 the Zayyadiyya chief, Jizzu Idris, resigned following the unsurprising revelation that he, like Muhammadayn, fined rather than imprisoned offenders, and acquitted people where evidence showed them to be guilty.56 Chiefs were meant to embody the increasing legalism and bureaucratic face of the colonial state: despite qualms among the provincial administration, the trend of these years seems to have clearly been towards attempts at imposing regularity and uniformity on the behaviour of an elite that remained very diverse. It is also worth noting that just as the chieftaincy elite changed in character in these years, so did that of the British provincial administration. It was no coincidence that Muhammadayn only became vulnerable to attack following the departure of Guy Moore from Northern Darfur. After his retirement and Muhammadayn’s subsequent downfall Moore (now living with his mother but still writing to the new governor of Darfur, KDDH Henderson) suggested, perhaps only part tongue in cheek, that Muhammadayn might be recalled as ‘Sultan’ as an antidote to the democratic changes of the time. In another letter he commented that the Meidob malik should be made King of Sudan ‘and me his Prime Minister. We would soon put all the Political conundrums straight and put down any effendi risings.’57 Soon after Moore’s retirement, Hugh Boustead’s tenure in western Darfur also came to an end in 1948. Just as the administration’s expectations of its chiefs was shifting, so was its expectations of the DC. Both Moore and Boustead had famously ruled their districts as virtual personal fiefdoms, and their style of rule – both of them also military men – was increasingly at odds with the technocratic priorities of the administration. A report of 1947 mentions the appearance of posters in El Fasher ‘blackguarding’ Boustead and calling on ‘citizens’ to rise against the government.58 Boustead’s making of western Darfur into his own personal developmentalist fiefdom thus appears to have made him one of the earliest targets of anti-colonial politics in Darfur, his autocratic style sitting uneasily with the new 55 

NDD Annual Report 1950–1951, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/8/31. NDD Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29NDD Annual Report 1950– 1951, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/8/31. 57  Moore to Henderson, 12 Mar. 1952 and 11 Feb. 1953, SAD 659/8/120, 171. 58  CDD Annual Report 1947, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/7/26. 56 

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’representative’ rhetoric of the Sudan Government after World War II. Indeed, it seems the end of both Boustead and Moore’s tenures were somewhat forced upon them by a modernizing administration. Lampen suggested just before Moore’s resignation that his ‘temper seems to be becoming more uncertain, the people there [in northern Darfur] are definitely afraid of him’.59 The continued use of shaibas – forked tree trunks fixed around the neck as a restraint, also used in slave raids in the days of the Sultanate – on suspected criminals in western Darfur under Boustead’s watch also shocked local government inspectors in the 1940s.60 Lampen later wrote privately that he had been determined that both men ‘should go when they did and I realized that they would both leave an awful aftermath to be cleared up’.61 By the later 1940s the days of personal rule by chiefs or officials were – in theory at least – coming to an end. Elected councils were to replace ‘unfettered autocracy’ with modern procedures and orderly debate. District councils for each of Darfur’s administrative divisions were to bring tribal elites together in spaces that would build order and consensus, contribute to wider definitions of communal solidarity beyond tribal lines, and train people in the arts of democracy – or at least, that was the official rhetoric of the state. In the same breath as criticizing Moore’s authoritarian style, Lampen suggested that in Northern Darfur ‘we won’t let it swing too far the other way. They are, and must remain, feudal up there for some years.’62 Political reforms at the local level were, in fact, hardly radical in intent.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT, DEVELOPMENT AND INTER-ETHNIC COMPETITION In Darfur, local councils were established from 1944 in ‘embryonic form’ in each of the administrative districts, but legal recognition of their existence took several more years in all cases. The establishment of councils caused some anxiety among the nazirs: Ibrahim Musa on a trip to Khartoum in 1946 read official recommendations on local government, and got the impression that the councils might start dismissing nazirs at will. He visited the Civil Secretary, James Robertson, to discuss these concerns.63 His key worry was whether ‘anyone [is] to come between me and the DC?’ – itself testament to Ibrahim’s continued desire to monopolize access to government, as he had so successfully done for over two decades in Dar Rizayqat.64 Robertson reassured Ibrahim that his role was secure. Apparently Ibrahim was also pleased that a British DC would remain chairman of the South 59 

Lampen to Robertson, 16 Nov. 1945, SAD 526/15. Report by Inspector Native Courts 13 Mar. 1948, NRO Darfur 6/7/18. 61  Lampen to Roberston, 1950, SAD 659/8/21. 62 Ibid. 63  CAG Wallis to Civil Secretary, 30 Nov. 1946, SAD 524/4/17. 64  Lampen to Robertson, 21 Dec. 1946, SAD 524/4. 60 

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Darfur council, and not any member of a new ‘effendi unit of government’ – the first Sudanese ADC had recently been appointed in southern Darfur, much to Ibrahim’s dislike.65 The existing order was clearly what the nazir wanted to preserve. Indeed, it was intended from the outset that the councils in Darfur would work ‘through regional or tribal administrations’ at a sub-district level. A 1945 report argued that ‘tribalism will remain for many years the rock on which must rest the executive side of local government. The functions of tribal authorities will remain much as they are at present.’66 Some councils appointed executive officers [EOs] to supervise each of the regional or tribal units within the district in an apparent move towards further centralization of local administration – in western Darfur, whilst shartays were left ‘free to carry out their tribal and judicial function’ EOs dealt with ‘modern development projects’.67 But EOs were usually appointed from among the sons of the existing chieftaincy elite – the ‘traditional’ and the ‘bureaucratic’ elite were rather indistinguishable.68 Council administration therefore reinforced the dominance of chiefly families within the new apparatus of administration. They also overlapped with the Native Courts system to a very great extent, despite the administration’s intention to separate executive and judicial powers. In the first eight years of its running, Northern Darfur’s RDC also functioned as the supreme court of appeal within the district: its building was ‘often surrounded by a mob of vociferous mazalim’, testament to the continued and insistent demand by ordinary people that elites settle their disputes and hear their complaints. The DC wrote in irritation in 1949 that ‘petitioners imagine the NDD council takes place in order that their cases may be heard and they cannot understand that the Council’s primary task is to sit as a council to discuss affairs of the district.’69 Nonetheless, the key change that local government was intended to bring was in the character of chiefly leadership, and the definition of political communities. In council, chiefs were intended to act in statesmanlike fashion, putting personal and tribal interest aside, in favour of the interests of the district as a whole. Councils were conceived as disciplinary institutions for the re-education of chiefs. One report noted a perceptible improvement in inter-tribal relations in Northern Darfur when its District Council was created: ‘the procedure of council discussions and the value of orderly debate was previously unknown to the majority of its members.’ 70 Rational bureaucractic process would gradually submerge irrational tribal rivalries – so colonial logic went. But the primary irony of this period is that inter-ethnic tensions were more often enflamed than they were cooled within the 65 

CAG Wallis to Civil Secretary, 30 Nov. 1946, SAD 524/4/17. RFACS 1945. 67  RFACS 1948. 68 Boustead, Wind, p. 119. 69  NDD Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29. 70  Annual Report Northern Darfur District 1945, NRO Darfur 5/2/10. 66 

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council setting. To understand why, we must return to the theme of development. While the development agenda in Darfur was limited in scope, it did include the building of new hafirs (water-yards, designed to store rain-water for communal use) and wells which were of significant value for the pursuit of everyday livelihoods. These new well-centres also became administrative and economic centres – nodes of development, just as court centres had been in western Darfur – because water drew people into these spaces. Schools, dispensaries and markets were all established around wells.71 Such resources were allocated via councils to particular local communities: bringing a water-yard and its associated benefits back to one’s clients was an important role for chiefs to fulfil, and so the competition between the leaders of ethnic groups for this improvement sharpened in the setting of the inter-ethnic local councils. The DC of Southern Darfur reported that Local Government was ‘the name given to the umbrella covering tribalism’, remarking that ‘to obtain approval for a new school is regarded by one tribal leader as a personal triumph over another who failed.’72 When nazir Ali al-Ghali suggested the building of a school and dispensary for the Habbaniyya in the centre of a disputed border between his tribe and the Rizayqat there was a ‘commotion’ in council and ‘heated words’ between Ali and Ibrahim Musa.73 This competition for resources might be read solely as a scramble for prestige vis-à-vis one’s fellows among an intensely competitive chieftaincy elite, but such prestige only had meaning because of some degree of continued downward accountability among those chiefs. When the first school for girls was opened in El Fasher in 1939, demand for places swamped their availability: ‘the school board was almost mobbed by a surging crowd of excited parents; while many of the disappointed ones besieged the markaz with petitions, and the sub-mamur had to be sent to clear others away from the school precincts.’74 While this case was exceptional – it was the only centre for girls’ education in the province, located in its major urban space – the language of the ‘surging crowd’ and ‘siege’ also demonstrates the intensity of demand that might be aroused for the new resources of government. Chiefs were well aware of such expectations from below, and eager not to fall behind their fellows. Despite the claim of the state that it wanted to promote unity, DCs actually played on these rivalries between chiefs in order to ensure compliance with government agendas. For example, in an unsettled northern Darfur in 1951, the DC decided that areas which paid taxes promptly and co-operated with quarantines against the spread of cerebo-spinal meningitis would be prioritized for council development projects.75 71 

RFACS 1948. Southern Darfur District Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29. 73  Sherman report on Habbnia-Rizeigat boundary dispute, 3 Jan. 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. 74  DPMD November 1939, NRO CIVSEC (1)57/10/38. 75  NDD Annual Report 1950/1, NRO 2.D Fasher A 47/8/31. 72 

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In the context of this competition for resources of the state, the definition of ethnic territories also took on a new importance. Darfur’s Governor observed of the various councils that ‘(tribal) boundaries are more interesting matters to discuss than district development.’76 But it was precisely development – even on the limited scale seen here – that gave boundaries a new importance. Water resources were key. Lampen’s papers discussed the great fragility of water supplies in southern Darfur in the 1920s: ‘These people live ever on the edge of what appears to us a drought… so few are the well fields that one feels that a small increase in the dessication of the country would cause a panic.’77 Accordingly, when new wells or hafirs – extremely valuable resources in such an environment – were constructed close to inter-ethnic boundary zones in the 1940s, rival local elites demanded they be recognized as lying in their own territory, despite the fact that all well users would have to pay cash to the government in order to access these new resources. In one case, Fallata and Gimr both laid claim to a well built at Dabanga in southern Darfur: the administration decided that both peoples would contribute labour to the well’s construction, and that it would be known as a government well belonging to neither party. In another dispute between Berti and Zayyadiyya in northern Darfur over a well at Mujamid, the DC reminded the chiefs of both peoples that they belonged to a single court area and they had a ‘duty’ to ‘co-operate as partners’ in managing the well’s usage.78 In other contexts, it was the very absence of new wells that sharpened inter-tribal competition in the context of other developmental initiatives. Wide-ranging cattle vaccination programmes meant that herd sizes in southern Darfur in particular increased at a rapid pace through the 1940s, as did export demand and prices for these animals. A 1943 report of a dispute over grazing between Fallata and Habbaniyya noted that ‘the cattle of both tribes have increased and their increased monetary value has caused feelings about them to be high.’ 79 However, significant resources for hafir-digging allocated to the province in 1947 that might have provided water for growing herds were diverted elsewhere. 80 Increased competition for grazing was the result of the lack of sufficient investment, expressed principally in proliferating boundary disputes. An exhausted DC complained in 1948 that ‘every month produces its own boundary dispute’:81 the next year’s report suggested, ‘the peace of southern district was threatened by unnecessary and vexatious boundary disputes between Habbaniyya and Rizayqat, Habbaniyya and Beigo, and Ta’aisha and Qimr, which…absorbed a great deal of administra76  Lampen, Governor Darfur to DCs Darfur, ‘Note on Local Government’, 28 Oct 1948, NRO Darfur 6/7/18. 77  Lampen memoirs, SAD 734/9/10. 78  Annual Report 1949, NRO Darfur 47/6/29. 79  DPMD June 1943, NRO CIVSEC (1)57/18/68. 80  RFACS 1950–1 81  DPMD May 1948, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/11/41.

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tive time’. 82 Despite the impatient tone of official reports, heightened inter-ethnic tension over land was the entirely predictable product of an incoherent colonial policy which refused to allocate sufficient resources to ensure the sustainability of the economic growth that it promoted in southern Darfur. Disputes over grazing easily turned violent: in 1944 it was remarked that fights between Bani Halba and Fallata ‘have become numerous enough to require special measures’. 83 Growing inter-ethnic competition thus contradicts optimistic colonial claims to have consistently imposed a Pax Britannica in Darfur, even in these years when the violence of the state and its representatives appears to have receded. However, government continued to play a crucial role as an outside force capable of settling such local disputes. The Habbaniyya-Rizayqat dispute was referred by the DC to the district council in 1949, but the council members – chary of alienating either Ali al-Ghali or Ibrahim Musa – called on the DC to make a ruling.84 Yet officials themselves might be impugned for bias in their judgements: unhappy with one such decision, Ali al-Ghali complained in writing to the Governor of the DC’s bias towards the long-established government ally, Ibrahim Musa, and publicly claimed that the Governor of Darfur had not approved the DC’s hukm.85 This cleverly played on the idea that the autonomy of the DC was itself receding in these years of increasing centralization. Territorial disputes were increasingly difficult for the local administration to settle. Nonetheless, Ali’s appeals to the Governor demonstrated the continued expectation that government should settle these disputes. In the context of increasing competition over land, the state also became more involved in the control of regular grazing migrations across district and province lines. Of course, state involvement in these movements was not new – but the level of bureaucratization in the management of movement was stepped up in these later years of rule. Most notably, Kababish migrations from Kordofan into Darfur by 1953 were much more rigidly policed – infringements of agreed grazing routes would be punishable by fine. 86 The Governor of Darfur vetoed a plan for councils to create local orders to embody grazing arrangements, on the grounds that continued flexibility in arrangements was necessary to respond to environmental changes or variability in rainfall – ‘the substitution of orders for agreements 82 

RFACS 1949. DPMD September 1944, NRO CIVSEC 57/21/79. 84  Sherman report on Habbania-Rizeigat boundary dispute, 3 Jan. 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/3/14. Also see Lea, Trek, pp. 26, 31 for the demand by Kababish and Nuba leaders in neighbouring Kordofan that the ADC should set the boundary between them, whilst refusing to send representatives themselves to do this: the Nuba sheikh expressed his desire to avoid any quarrel with Ali el Tom. 85  Nazir Ali el Ghaali to Governor Darfur, 7 May 1949; DC SDD to Governor Darfur, 3 June 1949, NRO 2.D.Fasher 8/1/6. 86  Record of an inter-province meeting at Um Kedada, 16–18 Mar. 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/1/3. 83 

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is anathema to Arabs’. 87 Yet annual meetings between Darfur tribes and the Kababish changed in meaning in these years – whereas previously these had been occasions for chiefs to deal with one another and settle inter-tribal tensions with only limited involvement from state officials, now meetings became the forum for government officials to announce punishments for infringements of the grazing regulations – in 1954 sixty-four of these fines were doled out and imposed on the offending tribes as a whole. 88 Collective punishment remained a key means of ensuring tribal discipline in Darfur even as Sudanese self-government was achieved.

PROTEST AND REPRESSION Growing local tensions within tribal units as well as between them was sparked by the re-arrangement of administrative hierarchies, as well as by the advent of developmentalism: the impoverished north saw an upswing in local tension in the 1950s despite the very limited scale of development in this region. As mentioned above, local government rested on the idea of the amalgamation of existing Native Administration units into a single council. In Northern Darfur, among the notoriously ‘uncontrollable’ Zaghawa, it also involved the further ‘rationalization’ and bureaucratization of existing small administrative units. In this process many minor dimlijs lost their positions, as the numerous dimlijias were amalgamated into umudiyas. Moreover, the state attempted to engineer a generational shift in the character of umdas, as many existing dimlijs were barred from standing for selection ‘on account of their previous records’.89 The subordination of one lineage section to the umda of another and the exclusion of dimlijs who represented the old ‘illiterate’ generation caused predictable resentment. Many Zaghawa shaykhs refused to submit taxation lists in 1950 ‘on the grounds that their claims for umdas have not been recognised’.90 One report described ‘a bevy of disappointed claimants to umdas’ posts hanging around the markaz with their followers, presenting sheaves of petitions’.91 In the last years of the Condominium, as nationalist politics grew more prominent, colonial officials believed such protest was increasingly straying beyond discontent with particular chiefs and becoming increasingly active opposition to the state. Government reports increasingly expressed fears about the ‘far from satisfactory’ character of tribal security in northern Darfur in which crises ‘occur all too frequently’.92 87 

Henderson to DC EDD, 3 May 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/1/3. Record of an inter-province meeting at Um Gozein, 27–30 Jan. 1954, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 54/1/3. 89  NDD Annual Report 1950/1, NRO 2.D Fasher A 47/8/31. 90 Ibid. 91  NDD Annual Report 1951/2, NRO 2.D Fasher A (47)8/32. 92  NDD Annual Report 1952, NRO 2.D Fasher A (47)9/33 1952/3 88 

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One official suggested that what an earlier Governor-General had called the ‘septic germs of modernity’, in the form of nationalist discourse, had infected Darfur: the tribes had ‘suddenly discovered the word hurriya (freedom) and are determined to misinterpret it to the best advantage: No kings, no taxes, no imperialist exploitation, no any damn thing.’93 By 1953 sectional protest for independence in northern Darfur included armed demonstration at police posts and even the stabbing of one policeman; another policeman was also stabbed during efforts to round up road labour.94 The provincial administration took no chances in these years: uncooperative shaykhs were imprisoned, temporary police posts were established in Dar Galla, Dar Artag and Dar Inga, and any sections that refused to list for taxation were listed three times as heavily for their disobedience.95 So, whilst the administration was increasingly unwilling to support ‘corrupt’ chiefs against the protests of their own people, it was, also increasingly unwilling to countenance protests that it saw as direct disobedience of the state’s authority. Riots in El Fasher in 1952 exacerbated this growing anxiety in government. While participants in the riots were dismissed as an ‘ignorant mob’, vulnerable to the manipulation of a ‘trained agitator’, including many who were said to be part of the ‘large migrant thieving population of El Fasher’, their gestures of resistance were alarming enough. Demonstrators threw stones at the DC and police officers in the market, and crowds eventually managed to launch an attack on the Fasher markaz, reminiscent – on a much smaller scale – of earlier anti-colonial revolt. Tear gas and a police baton charge was used to put down the riot, and the next day two ringleaders – Fallata who had studied at El Azhar – were arrested. A large crowd subsequently gathered to demand the release of these men: telephone cables were cut and the British flag flown at the governor’s office was destroyed. The administration backed down, releasing the ringleaders, but quickly the Western Arab Corps that were usually stationed at El Fasher – which had been away from the city on manoeuvres – returned, and rifles were distributed to the police. Fifty-three demonstrators, men and women, were subsequently convicted of rioting and the ringleaders were given heavy sentences.96 Analysis of the riot’s causes suggested the ringleaders had spread rumours of the government’s imminent departure, which appeared credible both generally and particularly at a moment when both the WAC and the province Governor were absent from El Fasher. More importantly, there was widespread discontent with the tobacco royalty charged by government: tobacco was still a major cash crop for the region. The royalty had been set at a very substantial 50 per cent of the value of tobacco exported from the province, providing a significant 93 

Balfour-Paul to Henderson, 7 May 1954, SAD 659/8. NDD Annual Report 1953/4, WDD Annual Report 1953/4, NRO 2.D Fasher A (47)/9/34 95  NDD Annual Report 1950/1, NRO 2.D Fasher A 47/8/31. 96  DPMD February 1952, NRO Darfur 47/14/48. 94 

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revenue stream for central government. Subsequently this was reduced to 30 per cent; local councils were to keep a third of this, to address the grievance that Khartoum was sucking resources out of Darfur. The riots harked back to an earlier period of anti-colonial violence, though on a much smaller scale. They were similarly motivated by specific material grievances linked to broader political agendas and similarly interpreted by government as the work of dangerous agitators, though these were now the ‘student class’ rather than millenarian faqihs. But the real threat to colonial government in Darfur lay not in such episodes of local resistance so much as in the ballot box which absorbed the political energies of the province. For the really significant leaders of anti-colonial politics, their success would be assured not by violent overthrow of the state, but rather by their inheritance of the state apparatus. By channelling political energy into the process of democratic election in 1953, nationalist elites actually maintained the hegemony of the Sudanese state and its institutional forms in Darfur, although that state would now be run by a Sudanese rather than British elite. Colonial hegemony in Darfur was coming to an end; but the hegemony of the state that colonialism had created remained.

NATIONAL POLITICS AND THE 1953 ELECTIONS IN DARFUR Sudan rushed to independence a mere eleven years after World War II, making it the first British-governed territory south of the Sahara to attain independence. The reason for the rapid pace of this change lay in the opportunity which Anglo-Egyptian political competition presented to Sudanese nationalists. Egypt’s claim to sovereignty in Sudan was revived in post-war negotiations with the British, who then tactically invoked the principle of self-determination for the Sudanese against Egyptian ambitions. From then on, the British and Egyptians were locked in a struggle for the support of Sudanese nationalists, who were themselves divided on the issue of their support or opposition to Sudanese union with Egypt. Each of the two leading nationalist factions also leant on the support of opposing religious leaders within Sudan to deliver mass support for their political programme. On the one hand, pro-Egyptian Unionists drew on support from the Khatmiyya sufis led by Ali al-Mirghani, while the Umma, who campaigned for ‘the Sudan for the Sudanese’, drew on the support of Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and his Ansar sect. In the story of national independence, Darfur has usually attracted little attention: the convoluted and well-documented political events at the centre have been the main focus of scholarship. Even where Darfur has been acknowledged to be ‘unavoidably caught up’ in nationalist politics, it has still been seen as a largely insignificant backwater, ‘ill prepared’ for the national political game, and easily ‘exploited’ by more ‘sophisticated’ easterners.97 97 Daly,

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Sorrow, pp. 171–2.

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Yet from the years of World War II onwards, the eyes of the Darfur chieftaincy elite appear to have been increasingly turned towards the opportunities presented by the national stage, even if the appeal of Sudanese ‘nationalism’ among that elite is difficult to measure. Indeed, moves to more representative national politics after World War II created new opportunities for the provincial elite, just as the advent of Local Government had also created a new stage where they could perform. Members of the territorial Legislative Assembly created in 1948 were elected indirectly by provincial ‘colleges’ of notables. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the Darfuri representatives thus elected were either chiefs themselves (including Ibrahim Musa Madibbu) or members of ‘traditional’ elite families: a son of Ali Dinar was among those elected, despite (or perhaps because of) the administration’s refusal to give anything but very limited authority to Ali Dinar’s children after 1916.98 Even before 1945, chiefs were increasingly preoccupied with their place in administrative and political structures and hierarchies beyond the boundaries of Darfur: the ‘extraversion’ of their political orientation became ever more obvious. As World War II dawned, the leading chiefs of Darfur made demonstrative gestures of support for the colonial government, offering to contribute money, men and sometimes their own sons towards the war effort. Officials believed this indicated the extent to which these men ‘identify themselves with the Government and its cause’.99 But such contributions also afforded chiefs a chance to perform on a wider stage than they had previously inhabited: in 1940 ‘the Baqqara nazirs assembled at Buram were listening to the radio when the announcement of the Rizayqat gift to War Effort Funds was made. They were profoundly impressed that such gifts should be heard of in England and actually announced to the world.’100 Ibrahim Musa was awarded an OBE in 1942 in recognition of this support.101 More significantly, ambitious chiefs grew ever more involved in political events in Khartoum, causing officials to bemoan their inattention to the local matters which were believed to be the proper sphere of chiefly interests. The DC of southern Darfur in the 1940s complained that the young Habbaniyya chief, Ali al-Ghali, should focus more on the affairs of the district ‘instead of standing for the Legislative Assembly, dabbling in high politics in Khartoum and spending money extravagantly in the process’.102 Yet government itself was encouraging chiefs to see themselves as part of a wider imperial order beyond the boundaries of Darfur: in 1950 the dimangawi and the shartay of Dar Lewing had visited Khartoum for the grand imperial pageantry of King’s Day: officials reported with satisfaction that on their return there were ‘circles of Fur elders around them hearing their tales of the “3 Towns” and the 98 

Ibid., p 157. DPMD November 1939, NRO CIVSEC (1)/57/10/38. 100  DPMD October 1940, NRO CIVSEC (1)/57/12/43. 101  DPMD December 1942, NRO CIVSEC (1)57/17/64. 102  Lampen, Governor Darfur, Handing-over notes 1948, SAD 731/2/52. 99 

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miraculous air trip they managed to do.’103 Officials hoped that chiefs would remain their staunch allies in the face of rising nationalist challenge; that they would remain largely passive, awe-struck observers of imperial grandeur rather than ambitious men who would contest British interests. The formation of the bizarrely named Socialist Republican Party in 1951, engineered by the British themselves, was intended to harness what was imagined to be the loyalty of those rural tribal leaders. The programme of the party was to support the British until Sudan was ready for self-government: it was hoped this would divert from the initiative Sudanese nationalists had already seized in the political process. Darfur was imagined to be a natural base of support for such an agenda: it was expected that rural tribesmen would follow the lead of their chiefs. The SRP certainly did draw on the well-established anti-Mahdism among some of Darfur’s chiefly elite – the ‘republicanism’ of the party was directed against the potential for a Mahdist monarchy. Chiefs perceived a considerable threat to their own authority in the growing confidence of SAR and his agents mobilizing political support in Darfur: Mahdists now operated with official sanction right under the noses of the chiefs. Ibrahim Musa, in conversation with the Civil Secretary in 1946, had already made known his distaste for the prospect of the Egyptians, SAR or the effendiyya ruling Sudan, and in particular ‘his dislike of SAR’s agents and blamed me for letting them come. I told him that if they upset tribal discipline or did down the nas, he could punish them or have them out of the dar.’104 It is unsurprising that Ibrahim Musa became the key financial backer of the SRP. The Rizayqat nazir was not alone in his fears. In the build-up to the 1953 elections new hazards emerged for chiefs on the wrong side of the electoral battle and sectarian divide. Some chiefs in Darfur were explicitly associated with the Tiganiyya sect rather than the Ansar. The Bani Husayn nazir was one of these: when he nominated his son as a candidate for the NUP, Ansar agents agitated against him in his dar and disrupted his collection of taxes.105 In southern Darfur, an umda who stood for the SRP alerted the government to Ansar drilling in the district in 1953: this was one of a few occasions in what was otherwise an ‘orderly’ campaign in Darfur when British officials were sufficiently disconcerted to arrest Mahdist agents. 106 The umda had been motivated by the way the Umma’s chief local agent had incited disobedience against the umda and had started to build a new mosque in the umda’s own village to rival the existing holy space. Yet the Umma might work in alliance with local chiefs where their religious loyalties were well placed, in an echo of the pragmatic alliances of the days of the Mahdiyya: there was certainly now no ideo103 

DPMD December 1950, NRO 2.D. Fasher 47/12/44. Robertson to Lampen 4 Dec. 1946, SAD 524/4. 105  NDD Annual Report, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/9/34. 106  Rowley (Governor) to KDDH, 1 Nov. 1953, SAD 659/8/192; DPMD March 1952, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. 104 

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logical objection to working with ‘traditional’ leaders. Almost all the umdas of the Berti and Zayyadiyya in Northern Darfur joined the Umma party in 1952. The Berti malik at Mellit, where over 1,000 supporters greeted SAR on a 1952 visit, was the president of the local Umma party branch.107 Much depended on the pattern of local sectarian loyalties, although parties also played on ideas of pre-colonial legitimacy. In El Fasher the Umma persuaded the malik of the town court, descended from Ali Dinar’s chief minister, to stand for them as ‘the most likely person to win the seat for them’.108 In Zalingei they ran with a son of Ali Dinar, though he made little headway among the local population, perhaps reflecting negative local memories of the father’s reign.109 Most interestingly, nationalist politics might also be directly drawn into the existing local politics of chieftaincy rivalries. The long-running struggle by the Urrti section of the Meidob for ‘independence’ from their malik had already engaged SAR in its earlier stages: and after voting was complete in northern Darfur in November 1953, the Urrti umda proclaimed the Mahdi’s rule over Sudan, and instructed a crowd of 200 people to disobey their malik, whilst the umda travelled to Omdurman to (unsuccessfully) obtain a grant of Urrti independence from SAR.110 In Western Darfur, in contrast, most of the shartays supported the NUP, the party that campaigned for union between Sudan and Egypt, and which tarred the Umma as collaborators with the British. One shartay, Ahmed Shatta in Dar Tebella, was elected as an NUP member in 1953: in theory he should have given up his position as chief, but the DC allowed him to keep this role too, to avoid potential ‘plotting’ and instability that might result from Shatta’s dismissal.111 Shatta, with the connivance of the state, successfully bridged the national and local stages. The election results demonstrated that despite Darfur’s reputation as a stronghold of Mahdism, the realities of political loyalties were more mixed, partly because of local sectarian variety. The governor of Darfur noted the elections in Fasher had turned into ‘a religious appeal’ as the Tijani imam of the El Fasher mosque stood for the NUP against the malik nominated by the Umma – the malik’s victory eventually depended on around a hundred votes.112 Only six out of eleven seats across Darfur were finally won by the Umma (the SRP won just one, the NUP two, and independent candidates won two more). But the local reputations of those standing for election also played a crucial role in electoral fortunes. One report from northern Darfur in 1953 noted that whilst the traditional elite took a notable interest in national politics as potential candidates, more generally, people saw political parties as potential allies in local disputes over chieftaincy 107 

NDDMD Jan/Feb 1952, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. Rowley, Governor Darfur to Henderson, 1 Nov. 1953, SAD 659/8/192. 109  Rowley, Governor Darfur to Henderson, 15 Dec. 1953, SAD 659/8/200. 110  DPMD November 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. 111  WDD Annual Report 1953/4, NRO 2.D Fasher A (47)/9/34. 112 Ibid. 108 

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and territory.113 In other words, just as colonial officials had been seen as potentially valuable supporters in local political struggles, now the rising nationalist organizations took on a similar appeal as a potential resource to be moulded by local agency. The breadth of such sentiment is difficult to measure, but its reality seems perfectly plausible. This also suggests both why the established ‘traditional’ elite would try to gain a voice in these new networks of power, and why they would often be favoured by voters: they were people who had some roots in local society, who knew how to deal with government, and could therefore effectively represent local interests in the national sphere. As Willis has speculated, perhaps people believed they were voting for intermediaries with government, rather than government itself.114 Just as chiefs had competed for resources from the local government budget, MPs would now serve as representatives competing for resources and support from central government. Indeed, eight out of Darfur’s eleven elected MPs were either figures of ‘traditional’ authority or had close kinship ties to leading ‘traditional’ families.115 Moreover, the old critique of ‘easternness’ which had often been levelled against appointed chiefs in the past, may now also have been applied to candidates standing for election. Indeed the Governor of Darfur noted ‘the strong objection of the local people to accept dictation from Khartoum so that the press now complains that the new parliament will be a parliament of no-ones’.116 SAR’s son, Siddiq al-Mahdi, touring Darfur in the expectation of mass support, was greeted at Um Kedada in the east of the province by a ‘hostile demonstration which insisted on nominating their own Umma candidates’.117 A candidate imported into Dar Masalit by the NUP from outside the region was crushed by the umda of El Geneina, who was the nominee of the Sultan: eastern party agents had decided to actively campaign against the Sultan, a strategy which appears to have completely backfired.118 In Dar Rizayqat, the Umma came out worse in an attempt to force Ibrahim Musa to make his own relative stand as an Umma candidate instead of for the SRP: Siddiq al-Mahdi subsequently asked the electoral commission to remove Ibrahim Musa from his dar during the election on the grounds that his presence would make a fair election impossible. But the British Governor of Darfur failed to pass the commission’s instructions on to the DC of Southern Darfur and a rival Umma candidate from Khartoum who had been nominated at the last minute was also withdrawn by the party. Ibrahim Musa’s brothers chased this man from the dar with shotguns, and Ibrahim Musa’s nominee 113 

NDD Annual Report 1952/3, NRO 2.D Fasher A (47)9/33 1952/3. Justin Willis ‘“A Model of its Kind”: Representation and performance in the Sudan self-government election of 1953’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 35 (2007), 497. 115 Daly, Sorrow, p. 175. 116  Rowley, Governor Darfur to Henderson, 1 Nov. 1953, SAD 659/8/192. 117  Rowley, Governor Darfur to Henderson, 15 Dec. 1953, SAD 659/8/200. 118  Dar Masalit Monthly Diary October 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. 114 

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was returned unopposed.119 Local elites were therefore well able to defend their own autonomy in the face of attempts at domination by the riverine political elites, sometimes with the assistance of British officials who subverted electoral process in favour of supporting their local allies. And whilst traditional elites were increasingly outward facing, their influence in national elections reflected their continued ability to mobilize local support.

CONCLUSION Just as the colonial state’s ambitions in Darfur were enlarged, so its hegemony was undermined. During the campaign for the 1953 election the last British governor of Darfur, woke one morning to find …5000 Ansar from the countryside milling around in the streets meeting Sayyid Sadiq. Having made him send them home I asked him whether the time had come for the last European Governor of Darfur to emulate the first and spend ten years in captivity in the Mahdi’s camp. He laughed and said I would be well cared for.120

Whilst a light-hearted exchange, the invasion of rural peoples into colonial, urban space did symbolize rather well the end of colonial hegemony in Darfur. This was a process that had been set off by developments in high politics between Britain and Egypt, but which had played out in distinctive ways in Darfur. The local sphere remained of crucial importance in the dynamics of nationalist politics on the ground. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the obviously weakening grip of the colonial state on power made it possible for protestors and discontented subjects to more violently demonstrate the limits of their respect for the colonial apparatus; in turn, the colonial state was itself ever more ready to use its tools of coercion against protest that was now viewed more readily as a security threat to the state’s authority. Meanwhile local conflict among ethnic groups also rose, as competition over natural and developmental resources sharpened tensions among the various populations of the province. But outright rebellion and conflict was avoided, even at this dangerous end-of-hierarchy moment, which had previously spelled the likelihood of great violence in earlier periods of Darfur’s history. Rather, British officials congratulated themselves on the orderly and celebratory channeling of political energy into electoral performance: ‘the play was acted in highly unfettered spirits’, said one official of elections in Dar Masalit.121 As Justin Willis has pointed out, the process of voting across Sudan was one organized and controlled by the state administration: and by their participation in this process people submitted themselves to the ordering ambitions of the state in a new context.122 Earlier celebrations 119 

Rowley, Governor Darfur to Henderson, 15 Dec. 1953, SAD 659/8/200.

121 

DPMD November 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. Willis, ‘Model’, p. 490.

120 Ibid. 122 

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of the self-government agreement of 1953 were similarly peaceful and ordered: in Zalingei ‘the speeches and slogans conformed to the spirit of the day, “Unity, Organisation and Work”.’123 In this sense, whilst colonial hegemony was undone, the hegemony of the state – still fragile though it might be – remained, with nationalist politicians stepping into the shoes of colonial officials as a potential resource in local politics, as well as potentially unwelcome intruders. The end of colonial rule therefore did not signify a complete transformation in the way people expected politics and government to function. Whilst some may have expected some sort of dividend from independence, politics was still viewed through an essentially local prism. Those elevated to new positions of authority and representation were largely drawn from the chieftaincy families of Darfur – representing the increasingly educated face of that elite – and represented an extension of that elite’s sphere of action into the national centre of politics. Whilst their subsequent marginalization after independence is well documented, this does not detract from the point that the increasingly extraverted and educated chieftaincy elite were now able to perform on much larger stages than they had even ten years before independence. The growing expectation of their subjects for the various developmental ‘goods’ brought by late colonialism seems unlikely to have diminished after independence. A presence in Khartoum was presumably thought to be a useful asset in that struggle for resources, though the capacity of Darfuri representatives to secure resources for their home region remained, in fact, extremely limited. The impact this had on the legitimacy of the traditional elite requires a separate study. But one might say that whilst Darfuri culture took some decades to ‘become Sudanese’, the politics of Darfur was inextricably entwined with the politics of Sudan as a whole by independence.124 123 

DPMD February 1953, NRO 2.D.Fasher (A) 47/14/48. P. Doornbos, ‘On becoming Sudanese’ in T. Barnett and A. Abdelkarim (eds), Sudan: State, capital and transformation (London, 1988), pp. 99–120. 124 

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Conclusion: State Formation,Violence and Conflict in Historical Perspective

Most previous accounts of Darfur’s history under British rule have emphasized the limits of the colonial state’s ambitions and resources, and concentrated on the legacy of ‘underdevelopment’ which colonial rule bequeathed at independence.1 Whilst accepting that the state was limited in scale and ambition in Darfur, this volume has shown colonial government to have played a significant role in re-casting the character of local authority.2 To a very significant extent this was achieved by the direct use – or alternatively the licensing – of violence at a local level in attempts to coerce people into obedience with the various projects of the state. But the state was also formed in processes of local engagement. Officials were often in demand among local elites, and sometimes among ordinary people, to intervene in the local politics of chieftaincy and territory: indeed they were often pulled into disputes by the force of local initiative. This demand for and recognition of the state’s authority to adjudicate in these cases perhaps reflected Darfur’s long experience of interactions between a relatively centralized form of authority and diverse local societies. The Darfur Sultanate had also exerted only a limited amount of power: its authority in its peripheries was far less regularized than that of its British colonial successor. And yet, as demonstrated in Chapter 1, the sultans intervened in the politics of these peripheral zones: the precolonial state had the capacity to appoint and depose chiefs well outside of the ‘core’ area of its power. Local elites were perhaps always outward-facing, or ‘extraverted’ in Bayart’s phrase, seeking external patronage and support to reinforce their own political position within their community.3 In the late colonial period, this became increasingly obvious as developmental resources and political representation in new institutions intensified competition between these local elites for access to the various expanded resources of the state. 1 Daly,

Sorrow, p. 160, O’Fahey, Sultanate, p. 299; Prunier, Darfur, p. 26. Sorrow, briefly mentions the state’s role in managing inter-tribal relations, pp. 130–132 and 153, but does not discuss chieftaincy disputes. Mamdani in Saviors has remarkably little to say about the actual practices of colonial administration in Darfur, especially given the centrality of the colonial period to his overall argument. 3 Bayart, The State in Africa, pp. 20–32. 2 Daly,

198

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The present study has suggested that this sort of interaction and even interdependence between state and local politics was, as Berry puts it, at the ‘core of the colonial political process’.4 Work by Jocelyn Alexander on the politics of land in Zimbabwe has focussed on the state’s ‘engagement with colonial “subjects”, through which institutions were built, consent gained, and power given effect. It is in local struggles over power and authority that states must take root.’5 The politics of local chieftaincy and territory described here appear to have facilitated much the same process: the state itself was made in and shaped by these processes. But what sort of state was created in Darfur? Chabal and Daloz have argued that colonial states were far from Weberian ideal types. Rather they imposed a mere veneer of rule-bound formality over the real political world of informal networks and arbitrary practices of colonial rule. Firstly, Chabal and Daloz suggest, Indirect Rule itself relied on local patrimonialism: chiefs used their recognized public role for private ends, and distributed patronage to their personal supporters. Officials turned a blind eye to these practices and colluded in the persistence of ‘informal’ forms of local administration, outside the bureaucratic control of the state. Secondly, officials themselves behaved in an arbitrary and independent manner: they were not consistently controlled by the state, and possessed considerable personal autonomy.6 This was not a rule-bound, bureaucratic culture of authority. The highly personalized ways in which authority was practised and represented, and the ways in which illegality came to define the very character of state authority in parts of Darfur, seem to support such arguments. It might be argued that the culture of authority produced locally in Condominium Darfur (and elsewhere in Sudan) laid the ground for the often observed neo-patrimonialism of the postcolonial Sudanese state.7 Yet, as Erdmann and Engel have pointed out, the particular analytical value of the term neo-patrimonialism lies in its suggestion of a genuine interpenetration between patrimonial and bureaucratic modes of rule. The term does not suggest that the state is a mere facade.8 Indeed, alongside the arbitrary violence and extortion described in western Darfur, this analysis has also focused closely on the ways that bureaucratic hierarchies and legal norms did matter to the way in which the state was locally constructed, and to the way people engaged with its authority. The colonial state was not simply a state of exception. In the course of chieftaincy and boundary disputes, local elites could appeal beyond the DC to individuals located higher up in colonial government, sometimes in attempts to overturn local rulings. And DC’s were sometimes 4 Berry, Chiefs,

p. 37. Land, p. 5. 6  Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works, pp. 9–11. 7 De Waal, War, p.  23; P. Woodward, Sudan, 1898–1989: The Unstable State (Boulder, 1990). 8  G. Erdmann and U. Engel, ‘Neopatrimonialism revisited – beyond a catch-all concept’, GIGA Working Paper 16, Hamburg, 2006., p. 19. 5 Alexander,

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overruled by their superiors, occasionally in response to such demands from below: bureaucratic chains of command did matter. The nature of the state system was thus easily grasped by local elites who drew on multiple sources of state patronage to support their own agendas. Moreover, the legal discourse of the state could also be a discursive resource for local people. Those who protested against abuse at the hands of their chief could use rhetoric that focused on the breach of rules and norms set by the state: chiefs could be accused of settling disputes out of court or imposing personal ‘taxation’. Legal norms became particularly relevant in the final decades of colonial rule as central government became more concerned with bureaucratizing the role of the chief, even as chiefs attempted to adapt once more to the state’s shifting agendas and hierarchies in order to maximize their own authority. The case of Darfur thus provides empirical historical evidence to reinforce the view that ‘the historical root of neopatrimonial rule in Africa is the colonial legacy’ and that the colonial state was ‘hybrid… a mixture of patrimonial and legal-rational domination’.9 So the state and its institutions could be manifested, imagined and used in a variety of different forms, from the highly personalized quasi-Sultanic model of authority, to the more abstract rules and norms associated with bureaucratic institutions. This pluralistic imagining of the state demonstrates the flaws of ideas which imply the capacity of power to produce a coherent, totalizing projection of its own character. Mitchell’s idea of the ‘state effect’ – which marks off the state as an ‘inert structure’ distinct from individuals and society – is worth applying to colonial authority in Darfur: certainly the administration attempted at times to produce such an effect.10 However, as Mariane Ferme has argued, state effects are never consistently achieved over time and space. Administrators in Darfur often explicitly aligned themselves with particular local chiefs, frequently defending the interests of these elites against their local rivals, and sometimes giving rise to claims of ‘bias’ and partiality especially where rivalries crossed administrative boundaries. Officials were therefore pursuing contradictory agendas: to be personal supporters of their key local allies, perhaps even to appear as recognizable, personal authorities in local terms, whilst simultaneously trying to embody the essentially impersonal, external, ‘containing’ aspects of state power. Such contradictions ensured the colonial state in Darfur was manifested locally as a complex mix of the familiar and alien.11 Despite the degree of novelty in local authority structures and practices which ‘Native Administration’ created and licenced, expectations of the ruler – to support local allies but also to regulate the behaviour of local state agents – remained rather similar to those held by subjects in precolonial Darfur. Those men who dominated chieftaincy structures in colonial Darfur also had considerable experience of working with state struc9 

Ibid., p. 19 and Bayart, The State in Africa, p. 265. Mitchell, ‘State’, p. 93. 11  Spear, ‘Limits’ 10 

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tures to gain advantage and support for their own ambitions. Colonial authority in Darfur needs to be understood not as a rupture with the precolonial past, as Mamdani would have it, but rather as a dialogic process where precolonial and colonial cultures of authority variously conflicted, coexisted and combined. Moreover, the notable emphasis on the spectacular (public demonstrations of machine gunfire, the exhibiting of the heads of vanquished enemies on poles, the enactment of tribal gatherings) suggests a regime that partially relied on what appear in a Foucauldian schema to be premodern practices of governance, but one which combined these with more distinctively modern techniques of ‘legibility’ (tribal maps, taxation lists, court records), attempting to reduce complex social realities to manageable units of administration.12 This was, in numerous ways, a hybrid state. Accounts of the Condominium period in Sudan have generally emphasized the distance between state and society, and local perceptions of the colonial state as alien and often extractive. Such perceptions were indeed surely common in Darfur. But more recently, Cherry Leonardi’s work on South Sudan has highlighted the way in which ordinary people have often sought to tap into the state’s power in their everyday lives.13 Although the nature of the evidence examined here focuses rather more on chiefs and their local rivals for office than it does on ordinary people, the ways in which those engaged in chieftaincy politics appealed to and manipulated the state’s authority suggest conclusions similar to those reached in Leonardi’s work. The findings here (and in South Sudan) suggest ways in which the classic core-periphery model of Sudanese politics requires qualification and nuance, certainly when viewed from the periphery inwards. It is also significant that some of the key concepts of the colonial project of legibility – notably the idea of bounded ethnic territories – were seized on more enthusiastically by local elites than colonial officials themselves. Chiefs wished to maximize the potential to collect ‘customary’ dues from rival groups, as well as protect resources for their own people, whilst officials were often concerned that fixed boundaries might raise the likelihood of local conflict. In this context chiefs sometimes became ‘more state than the state’ in their outlook, and as the association between state agendas and chiefly practice grew ever closer in the final years of colonial rule, the distinction between state and non-state became ever more blurred in the person of the chief.14 One of the key legacies of colonial rule in Darfur was the definite empowerment of an elite of chiefs and their families who would go on to provide many of the leading figures in post-colonial Darfuri politics; men who interme12 For spectacle and colonialism see B. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, practices, politics (London, 1997), p. 162; for ‘legibility’, Scott, Seeing, pp. 2–3. 13  Willis, ‘Hukm’, ‘Gatherings’; Leonardi, ‘Violence’, Knowing, Dealing. 14  This phrase is the title of Dereje Feyissa’s stimulating chapter in D. Feyissa and M.V. Hoehne (eds), Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa (Oxford, 2010), pp. 27–44.

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diated between the Khartoum government and the region of Darfur on the basis of their relatively superior education, traditional prestige, and skill in managing the ambitions and agendas of the state. Darfur’s political elite was made by association with government: the outlook they acquired in this period was rather similar to that of the state which had empowered them. While this volume supports Peterson’s view that Africans ‘contracted’ with colonialism to achieve their own goals, ‘shaping [colonialism’s] hold’ on the complex political life of Darfur’s diverse societies, it also emphasizes the way in which the exercise of local agency ultimately reinforced the authority of the state.15 To borrow Peterson’s emphasis on the importance of theatrical agency, Darfuris understood that by playing their roles in colonial fantasies of legitimacy, appealing to officials’ sense of justice, they implicated obligations on their rulers as patrons, and could influence their behaviour. But it was the same appeals to the state in the contexts of chieftaincy or territorial disputes that worked to create a limited, political colonial hegemony in Darfur: and those appeals often did not influence government as hoped.16 Perhaps local actors did not fully appreciate that by contracting with colonialism in this limited way, they were opening opportunities for the state to further insist on obedience to its own conceptions of order and legitimate authority. By independence, the tentacular reach of bureaucratic control had been extended considerably further into systems of local authority than any Darfuri might have feared possible in 1916: dealing with government had not contracted its purview.

Colonial hegemony in Darfur? Historians of empire have generally engaged with debates about hegemony in fairly broad cultural terms. Ian Copland argues that the British Raj could not fulfil its hegemonic aspirations in India, emphasizing the failure of colonial education to dislodge pre-existing worldviews.17 The Comaroffs take a quite different view of the effects of missionary enterprise among the Tswana, emphasizing that despite intense local contestation of missionary cultural impositions, the forms of the European worldview were ‘authoritatively inscribed on the African landscape.’ Both these accounts point to colonialism as a cultural project. This current volume has also suggested the ways in which colonial administration was itself sometimes a cross-cultural encounter: yet it has made no attempt to define a similar ‘colonisation of 15 

D. Peterson, ‘Morality plays: marriage, church courts, and colonial agency in central Tanganyika, ca. 1876–1928,’ American Historical Review, 111 (2006), p. 983. 16  cf. Berry, Chiefs, pp. 37–9. 17  Copland, I., ‘The limits of hegemony: elite responses to nineteenth-century imperial and missionary acculturation strategies in India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49 (2007), pp. 637–65. Comaroff, J.L., and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 1: Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), p. 18.

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consciousness’ in Darfur.18 This is because of the limited agenda of the provincial administration: even when attempts were made to change African livelihoods and personal practice, these remained very limited in scope and scale.19 Education was limited almost exclusively to the sons of the chiefly elite: and if there was a ‘colonisation of consciousness’ it can only be said to have reached that elite. Signs of the adoption of colonial ideology beyond the chiefly elite are difficult to find: even the reformist projects of the late colonial state were targeted primarily at reshaping the practices and ethos of the chiefs more than ordinary people. Yet, in a more narrow sense, colonial authority does appear to have had a hegemonic political hold in Darfur. This was not true everywhere at all times: early colonial rule was characterized by frequent recourse to spectacular violence, and western Darfur, until at least 1937, remained an example of what Ranajit Guha terms ‘domination without hegemony’, where the force of the state and its representatives demanded obedience without obtaining consent.20 Even here, however, local expectations that government should regulate the behaviour of chiefs provided an opportunity for officials who were able and willing to engage with those expectations to work their way into a more negotiated form of authoritarian rule. It was yet more obvious in northern and southern Darfur that whilst state and subjects remained culturally distant, they were nonetheless often engaged in considerable political interaction and negotiation. Whilst the continued visible presence of the coercive tools of state power existed throughout the region, it is important to remember that consent to rule is always extracted rather than freely given. The argument here, then, is that chieftaincy and territorial politics provided a field upon which the colonial state could engage with its subjects: in chieftaincy politics, in particular, the state long had an important legitimating role in many areas of Darfur. In this respect, it is worth noting that Gramsci saw hegemony as dependent ‘on the incorporation and transformation of ideas and practices belonging to those who are dominated’: hegemony never rests solely on the imposition of ideology from above.21 Episodes of dispute within communities over the behaviour or legitimacy of their leaders reinforced an overall hegemonic political discourse that both linked and separated chieftaincy and state power. While the legitimate occupancy of chiefly office might be at issue, the underlying authority of both chieftaincy and the state was certainly not.22 18 

For the idea of the ‘colonisation of consciousness’ see the Comaroffs, Revelation, p. 4. 19 Daly, Sorrow, pp. 162–71. 20  Guha, R., Dominance without Hegemony: History and power in colonial India (Cambridge, 1997). 21  A. Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 1998), p. 31. 22  As Glassman notes, hegemonic ideas ‘shape the questions to be asked and the issues to be debated’: in Darfur these were focused after 1921 largely on the proper behaviour of chieftaincy elites. J. Glassman, Feasts, p. 17. Feierman also

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The Comaroffs emphasize that a hegemonic world view rarely supplants everything which existed before its dominance: that other ideologies constantly threaten to contest its dominance, and therefore it is constantly being remade. Hegemony is ‘always uncertain, realized through the balancing of competing forces’: crucially, it is a process more than a ‘thing’, perhaps much like the state itself.23 This uncertainty – even fragility – was certainly present in Darfur. The continued resonance of Mahdist ideology was particularly obvious in inspiring early anti-colonial uprising, but we have also seen that the son of the Mahdi remained a point of appeal in the chieftaincy politics of northern Darfur in particular, apparently as an alternative to government authority. Nonetheless, appeals to Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi were often made in tandem with appeals to central government in Khartoum – the perceived authority of one did not preclude the perceived authority of the other. After 1921 the threat that Mahdist ideology might seriously contest the dominance of the state became rather remote: SAR himself was ultimately incorporated by the logic of state hegemony, functioning as an on-off ally of the British. Eventually he competed in the largely orderly transfer of power from colonial to Sudanese nationalist elites described in Chapter 6. In Darfur, hints that chieftaincy politics might segue into anti-colonial rebellion remained just that. It is nonetheless notable that outright rebellion in the early years of colonial rule, and particularly vigorous protest in the later years, was mobilized at times when the coercive apparatus of government was weakened – or when rumours of the government’s imminent fall influenced the chances taken by local agitators. The recurrent anxiety of colonial officials to effectively display the force of the state was therefore perhaps not simply the product of neurotic anxiety, but also the reality that the willingness of people to engage with government depended on their perception of its strength and coercive potential. This reminds us that the consent extracted from the ruled is always underpinned by the coercive potential of the state, which is a ‘necessary though not sufficient’ condition of hegemony.24 The final years of colonial rule in Darfur seemed particularly hazardous to the state’s hegemony, as the unravelling of British authority at the centre threatened to spiral out into Darfur (and surely other provinces of Sudan). But the paradox of these years is that even as colonial hegemony came undone, the hegemony of the state itself was reinforced. New ways of accessing and competing for new resources (contd)

discusses the enduring focus on chieftaincy politics in local debate, although his view of ‘off-stage discourse’, informed by his own deep local knowledge of the Shambaa, enriches his work in a way this study cannot match. See Feierman, Intellectuals pp. 17, 39. Berry also acknowledges the usefulness of these local debates to the maintenance of overall colonial authority: Chiefs, pp. 37. 23  Comaroff and Comaroff, Revelation, pp. 20, 25. Copland, ‘Limits’, p. 639. 24  For hegemony as process see Comaroff and Comaroff, Revelation, pp. 20, 25; for consent as extracted see Copland, ‘Limits’, pp. 637–9.

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available from the state created new grounds for greater engagement between the local and national spheres of political life. Ultimately, the orderly process of the 1953 elections and Darfur’s continued unity with postcolonial Sudan demonstrates that the period of colonial rule had succeeded in producing the fragile hegemony of the Sudanese state in Darfur. That hegemony was partly based on the region’s precolonial experience of statehood, but also on the specific history and experiences of the colonial period. By independence (as Asad has also argued for the Kababish of Kordofan), the Sudanese state had become ‘part of the natural order of things’ for the peoples of Darfur – as indeed had chieftaincy, and its ambivalent association with government.25 The incorporation of the region by the British in 1916 did not signify the end of a relatively autonomous local field of politics, but it did create a lasting union with Sudan which even in the awful events of the last decade has never looked likely to come completely undone. The endurance of this novel union is based not just on the state’s control of the means of coercion, but also on the way the state has been a usable resource in local politics: a set of people and processes that might be well turned to local advantage if correctly approached. Even in the briefer, earlier periods of Turco-Egyptian and Mahdist rule from ‘the river’, alien, predatory states had been seen in a similar fashion. In this sense, despite the spatial shift in the centres of power brought about by colonialism, the overall story here is one of continuity: a set of centuries-old yet always changing, unequal interactions between a state attempting to dominate its subjects, and people, especially local elites, trying to negotiate their way around that state in order to maximize and preserve their own autonomy and influence. The disasters of recent years might seem to challenge the durability of such an analysis, but two points are worth bearing in mind here. First, even recent rebellion has been directed towards renegotiating the relationship of Darfuris with the Sudanese state rather then sundering the relationship altogether. Not all Darfur’s rebel leaders have links to chieftaincy families, but they share that elite’s inclination and preference for influence at the heart of state power. Notably the Justice and Equality Movement – perhaps the most effective of Darfur’s rebel movements – was in part the product of factional struggle within the Islamist regime in Khartoum. It also represented the particular ambitions of the Zaghawa Kobbe of northern Darfur. Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the movement till his death in 2011, and his brother Gibril, who took on Khalil’s mantle, are descended from Kobbe chiefs (or sultans, as they are known); Khalil had served at state ministerial level but had never secured a bigger role in Khartoum. Any prospect of a new independence for Darfur, whilst perhaps having some appeal in some quarters, is an idea that no significant rebel leader has ever been committed to. Instead, rebel leaders have followed a path well-trod by chiefs and their families 25  T. Asad, ‘Political inequality in the Kababish tribe’, in I. Cunnison and W. James (eds), Essays in Sudan Ethnography (London, 1972), p. 141.

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in their long-running efforts to maximize their own authority within the structures established by the state. Over time, some members of the traditional elite families in Darfur have moved back and forth between association with government or rebels in attempts to augment their own influence – and sometimes have blurred rebel and state affiliation in their own person as a means of achieving these goals. Notably, Tijani Sese, a member of the family of the dimangawi in Zalingwei district – chiefs who trace their inherited authority back deep into the history of the Darfur Sultanate – served as Governor of Darfur between 1986– 1989, and more recently headed both the rebel Liberation and Justice Movement between 2010 and 2015, and the Darfur Regional Authority from 2011.26 Analysts have also suggested that the expectation of many people who have experienced the violence of recent years is that the state should play some role in restoring order in the region – even though the state has been the principal agent of disorder in recent years.27 This apparent contradiction is no contradiction at all; rather it reflects a deep history of interaction with a form of state power at once ruthlessly predatory and dependent on local accommodation and negotiation. The Sudanese state, even as its control of Darfur has been increasingly challenged, remains a crucial point of reference in the politics of the region. This brings us to a more explicit discussion of the relationship between the colonial history discussed in this volume and the more recent events of the Darfur conflict.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE DARFUR CONFLICT North Darfur in the present day presents an increasingly challenging ecological and economic environment for its inhabitants, on the edge of a desert that has slowly extended its grip southwards over the course of the 20th century. Conflict and drought over the last few decades have challenged even the most resilient livelihood strategies to maintain the survival of the local population. But in March 2012, the land seemed to offer up a precious new opportunity. Gold was discovered in the area of Jabal Amer, a territory which fell within the dar (ethnic territory) of the Bani Husayn people, one of Darfur’s several Arab populations. Artisanal production sprang up very quickly, and attracted thousands of migrants, many of them from neighbouring Chad. As the customary ‘owners’ of the land which had been defined as their dar by the British in the 1930s, Bani Husayn elites were able to control the award of licences and charged fees of access to these artisans, providing a valuable source of rents which were retained locally. 28 But the control of the mines was also attractive to other actors. In January 2013 Northern Rizayqat Arabs, affiliated with the Sudan 26 

De Waal, ‘Turbulent’, pp. 22–3. J. Tubiana, V. Tanner, M.A. Abdul-Jalil, Peacemaking, p. 85. 28  O. Ismail and A. Kumar, Darfur’s Gold Rush (Enough Project, 2013), p. 7. 27 

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Government’s Border Guards – in theory ex-janjawid militias integrated into the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), in practice a ramshackle organization of poorly controlled armed groups – fought fierce battles with the Bani Husayn for control of the mines. Over the next months, around 500 people died and up to 100,000 were displaced. The conflict was often reported internationally as ‘tribal violence’: local peoples fighting in one of their age-old local squabbles.29 Yet the violence coincided with a push by the Sudanese government, reeling from the loss of oil revenues in the wake of South Sudan’s secession, to exert control over the licensing and export of gold more generally across the country. Only a week before conflict erupted, Sudan’s Minister for Mining had visited the area, and met with North Darfur’s state ministers to discuss measures to guarantee central government control over gold production and export. Indeed, in 2012, Jabal Amer produced one-third of Sudan’s total gold. 30 Local people claimed that the Northern Rizayqat had used arms and vehicles in their attacks that could only be obtained from SAF. The Sudanese military of course denied involvement, and continued to describe the conflict as ‘tribal violence’. This was a well-established tactic used by government to disavow its very real responsibility for crimes against humanity (or genocide, depending on one’s take) in Darfur since 2003. A reconciliation agreement signed between the groups in summer 2013 with the encouragement and mediation of government only provided further support for the idea that the underlying cause of the violence was a resource grab by government: the agreement provided for a government takeover of mining at Jabal Amer.31 However, international agencies keen to lay responsibility for the conflict at Khartoum’s door also showed some confusion as to the drivers of violence in Darfur. An Amnesty report demanded that the government should ensure that its ‘security officers… are not involved in any further attacks’. 32 Yet the government’s relationship with the so-called ‘Border Guards’ (most recently re-branded Rapid Support Forces) has been rather fraught for some years now, given the sporadic payment of salaries and provision of arms and fuel to their ex-allies. It is by no means obvious that these militias should be described as ‘security officers’, or that they answer to government. As violence continued between Northern Rizayqat and Bani Husayn into mid-2013, it became ever clearer that government was no longer in control of the situation. Their supposed ‘allies’ had in effect taken on their own agenda separate from that of the state, whilst simultaneously demanding the 29  For instance, ‘More aid reaches displaced in Darfur’s Jebel Amir’, Sudan Tribune 22 Feb. 2013, http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article45607 30  Ismail and Kumar, Rush, p. 5. 31  ‘Abbala-Beni Hussein treaty ‘good for North Darfur agriculture’, 30 July 2013, http://www.radiodabanga.org/node/54063 32  ‘Darfur: Government forces involved in gold mine attacks’, Amnesty International, 30 Jan. 2013, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/darfurgovernment-forces-involved-gold-mine-attacks-2013–01–30–0

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state’s support. As Rizyqat forces surrounded the Bani Husayn town of Al Sareif, their spokesman threatened to ‘join the rebel movements, or build our own rebel movement’ if the government did not intervene to solve the local problems – presumably in line with the interests of the same forces attacking Al Sareif. The same man was dismissive of government-sponsored efforts at local reconciliation, describing these as corrosive, asserting that ‘they shouldn’t start something that will disappear one hour later, that is only to the benefit of the government’. 33 Indeed the deal mentioned above did not hold, and the crisis was eventually settled not by government, but by Musa Hilal, a prominent Northern Rizayqat (Mahamid section) chief and ex-janjawid leader who brokered a deal between Northern Rizayqat and Bani Husayn in a major reconciliation conference later that year. Hilal, from acting as the government’s chief ally in Darfur, subsequently adopted a position of opposition to Khartoum. In early 2014 he repulsed government troops attempting to take control of Jabal Amer, and expelled the local government commissioner. Hilal became the de facto ruler of large areas of Northern Darfur, establishing administrative authority under the auspices of what he called the Sudanese Awakening Revolutionary Council, based primarily on his control of a personal militia of several thousand fighters, including many ex-janjawid. 34 The crisis in North Darfur of 2013 looks rather different from the peak of inter-ethnic violence of 2003–4: this was violence between two Arab groups in northern Darfur in which racial identities or ideologies did not play any significant role. However, there are also many parallels with that earlier experience, such as government instigation of militia violence against civilians, inciting local competition over valuable resources, and attempting to frame that violence as the expression of intractable tribal rivalries. There is also another often overlooked feature to reckon with: the tendency for violence and conflict to acquire its own dynamic once instigated by government. This now appears increasingly obvious to analysts of present-day Darfur, yet it was a point not driven home enough in earlier analyses of the mass violence of 2003–4. The repeated failure of government to end large-scale violence in areas of Darfur might result from a lack of intent or a lack of capacity or both. The point here is that violence is not simply driven by government agendas, but also by local dynamics and prerogatives. Whilst state-level prerogatives are crucial in the analysis of what might be framed as ‘local conflicts’ by a government eager to evade punitive sanctions, the Sudan Government is no longer (if it ever was) an omniscient, mastermind villain in Darfur. It is crucial to understand that state and local agendas interact: the 33 

Hussein Ahmed, quoted in ‘Abbala tribe ultimatum to Sudan government: Intervene or we’re out’, Radio Dabanga, 25 Jun. 2013, https://www. radiodabanga.org/node/52310 34  J. Tubiana, ‘Out for blood and gold in Sudan’, May 1 2014, Foreign Affairs http://www.foreignaffairs.com/features/letters-from/out-for-gold-andblood-in-sudan

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state may be key in triggering conflict, but it is no by means able to determine its outcomes. The literature on the Darfur crisis has, reasonably enough, been keen to emphasize the responsibility of the state for the massive death and displacement endured by the peoples of Darfur over the last decade and beyond. The political prerogative of this literature has been to dispute claims made by Khartoum of the sort already mentioned – that conflict was simply predictable tribal violence without a wider political dimension – and to expose the role of government in both mobilizing militias and participating in violence against civilians. This is, it might be argued, simply the product of responsible scholarship. Yet the conflict in Darfur has mutated rapidly, and from an early emphasis on government counter-insurgency tactics and the rise of a racist Arab supremacist ideology, international reports have increasingly emphasized the significance of local agendas in driving violence. 35 Conflict between different Arab groups – such as the Bani Husayn–Northern Rizayqat fighting discussed earlier – and between different non-Arab groups in Darfur has increasingly demanded an analytical move away from a focus on racist ideology imposed on Darfuris by nefarious outsiders, and towards the significance of local grievances that are felt towards neighbours, rebels, government or all of these groups, in motivating participation in collective violence. Khartoum’s ultimately pragmatic agendas of control and extraction remain highly significant in mobilizing violence at particular moments, often by appealing to those grievances: but the government does not control or dictate Darfuri politics. One might turn this perspective on its head and argue that government agendas have in fact often been co-opted by local groups who have accepted arms, supplies and money in order to pursue rivalries against rivals or to maximize individual accumulation and status. Equally, it is also notable that some local elites stood aside from direct participation in the 2003–4 state-instigated violence, judging that their best interests were not served by alignment with the agenda of the state. 36 Further, in more recent years, some senior figures in the ex-janjawid militias have identified a common sense of marginalization with those they at first viewed as enemies, even as others continue to work with government in the Rapid Support Forces.37 As ever, local actors have made their own decisions as to how far to engage with government agendas, and when to step back from them, making these judgements based on astute calculations of their own political interests. Musa Hilai’s establishment of a quasi-independent fiefdom in northern Darfur is the most striking example of the tendency towards opposition among erstwhile allies of government, and apparently the 35 

Notably reports commissioned by the Small Arms Survey: J. Flint, The Other War: Inter-Arab conflict in Darfur (Geneva, 2010); C. Gramizzi and J. Tubiana, Forgotten Darfur: Old tactics and new players (Geneva, 2012) 36 Daly, Sorrow, p. 299. 37  A.J. Fadul and V. Tanner, ‘Darfur after Abuja: a view from the ground’, in De Waal War (Harvard, 2007), pp. 296–8.

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most challenging to the authority of the state. Yet Hilal’s goals are ultimately about renegotiating his relationship with the state, albeit from the strongest position possible – one Darfuri incisively asserted that Hilal was ‘not ready to turn against the government. What he wants is power and development for his community.’38 To this extent, Hilal fits well with models of chiefly leadership that go back to the late colonial period at least. Indeed, his formal political demands include the appointment of a Darfuri as First Vice-President of Sudan, and it is reported that he covets official state recognition as governor of North Darfur: his goals are representation and influence in government, not a broader based transformation of the state, whatever his rhetoric. 39 There is then a deep irony here: even as Hilal and other rebels have contributed to the practical disintegration of the state’s authority in Darfur, their political imagination remains circumscribed by the opportunities and resources the state represents. So, even as the practical hegemony of the state has been dismantled, the idea of the state retains its hegemonic hold in the definition of local ambitions. The resilience of the idea of the state in contexts of apparent complete collapse in its authority has been noted elsewhere in Africa, not only among those who seek power via violence, but also among ordinary people who continue to participate in the everyday performance of statehood.40 It has also been reported that Khartoum’s recent promises to address Hilal’s demands led him to use his militias to mobilize voters coercively behind the NCP and Bashir in the performative elections of April 2015: in this moment at least Hilal became an ally in Khartoum’s attempts to reclaim the hegemony of the state in Darfur. Bargaining between centre and periphery – and the crucial importance of local intermediaries with government – clearly remains critical to state formation in the region. The argument to be made here, therefore, is that there is rather little in the essential dynamics of the disorder and low-level conflict in Darfur over the last few years that is altogether new. There is no precedent for the scale of violence experienced during 2003–4: the conflict has, of course, been caused and made possible by distinctive developments of the last few decades in Darfur, Sudan and north-central Africa. But the interplay between state and local agendas in shaping patterns of violence and politics on the ground is crucial to understanding the history of Darfur in general, especially the history of state formation in the region. The events of recent years must be placed within that broader historical context. Rather than a product of ‘state failure’, the recent history of Darfur might be seen as one phase in a continuing, non-linear process of state formation – and perhaps de-formation – in which the state’s control of local politics and violence remains uncer38 

Tubiana, ‘Blood and Gold’. Sudan Democracy First Group, Musa Hilal’s ‘Awakening’: The Government of Sudan’s Worst Nightmare, 19 Apr. 2015. 40  T. Rayemaekers, ‘Who Calls the Congo’, 10 Aug. 2010, https://rubeneberlein. wordpress.com/2009/08/10/who-calls-the-congo-a-response-to-herbst-andmills/ 39 

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tain and in constant need of re-making. The contrast of the state of today with the final years of colonialism – in which bureaucratic and developmental agendas were increasingly elaborated, if still in relatively uncertain form – is of course extremely striking; the fragile hegemony of the state might appear to have been demolished. But as noted above, the Sudanese state remains a crucial point of reference in the politics of Darfur’s conflicts, and despite its recent terrifying manifestations, its various resources and opportunities remain the object of competition and desire. This enduring complexity in the character and visions of the state is perhaps the chief legacy of the long and turbulent history of state formation in Darfur offered by this volume.

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Index

Abd al-Hamid Ibrahim, 68, 93–101, 103, 111 Abd al-Karim, 38 Abd al-Mula Dukhan, 51 Abd al-Rahman (Sultan of Darfur, 1787–1803), 25–6 Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, Sayyid (SAR), 77, 147, 150, 180, 191, 193–5, 204 Abdullahi Muhammad (Khalifa), 44, 46–7 Abdullahi Suheini, 70 Abu Homeira, 132 Adam Tamim, 67 Adam Taw, 65 agawid (elders), 68, 103, 107, 111, 125, 142 Ahmed Bukr (Sultan of Darfur), 37 Al-Azhar, 25, 100, 190 Ali al-Ghali, 176, 178, 188, 192 Ali al-Sanussi, 124, 135, 177 Ali al-Tom, 59, 62–4, 188 n.84 Ali Bakhit, 92 Ali Dinar Zakariya Muhammad  (Sultan of Darfur 1898–1916), 93–5 defeat by British, 58–62, 64–7,  123 fate of sons, 94 n.55, 192, 194 linkages with British rule, 71,  73–4, 85, 90, 129, 135, 148, 169, 175 reign, 49–56, 68, 74, 83, 104 n.   104

Ali Muhammadayn, 181–3 Ansar, 191, 193 Apter, Andrew, 28 Arabic language, 20, 51, 84, 88, 102, 110 Asad, Talal, 87, 115, 205 Awlad Diggayn, 180–2 Bahr al-Arab, 61, 166 Bahr al-Din Abbakr Ismail (Endoka), 158, 175 Bahr al-Ghazal, 3, 40–41, 95, 166–7 Bani Halba, 16, 23–4, 42, 45, 51–2,   65, 69, 86, 188 migration of, 124, 155–8 Bani Husayn, 150, 193, 206–9 Bayart, J.F., 198 Beigo, 45, 187 Bence-Pembroke, R.A., 83, 85, 92 Berry, S., 82, 151, 199, 204 n.22 Berti, 15, 17, 30, 36–8, 45, 47, 63, 67, 168, 187, 194 Birgid, 34, 45, 65, 84, 124, 136, 168–9 Bishara Wad Abdullahi, 52 ‘Border Guards’, 207 boundaries (inter-ethnic territorial), 72, 164–9, 186–9 Boustead, Hugh, 106–13, 174–6, 183–4 Buram, 85, 129–30, 134, 192 Cairo, 25, 41, 58, 94, 100

225

*Darfur Master.indb 225

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226

Index

Chabal, P., 199 Chad 16, 64–5, 69, 91, 206 chiefs, 10–14, 15, see also   dimangawi, dimlij, maqdum, nazir, shartay, shaykh, umda changing role in late colonial   period, 172–186, 191–197 shaping the state, 3, 7, 15 and protest against, 107–10,   117–18, 129–52, 180, 182, 189 and state violence, 9, 91, 96–7,   105–6, 108, 112–14, 119 Comaroff, Jean and John, 202, 204 Copland, I., 202 courts (Native Courts), 11, 41,  85–6 changing functions in late colonial period, 177–81, 183,   185, 187 in pastoralist Darfur, 115–29,   140, 142–4, 150, 156, 163–4 in western Darfur, 90, 96–7,   99–101, 104, 107–13 Crawford, W.F, 84–5, 128, 141, 153, 155

Dar Turra, 51, 96 Dar Wona, 33 Darfur Regional Authority, 206 development, 171–5, 186–8 De Waal, Alex, 11, 20 n.3 dimangawi, abo diimang, 29, 50, 110–11, 174, 192, 206 dimlijs, 12, during the Sultanate, 32, 34, 38,   40, 50 during colonial period, 104, 133,   142, 146, 189 Dinka, 8, 84, 95, 166 Diraige, Ahmad Ibrahim, 13 n.36 Dosa wad Ferti, 65 Dupuis, C.G., 96, 169

El Fasher, 7, 16, 41–2, 46, 94, 175,   179, 186, 194 during colonial conquest, 61,   63, 66–7 perception of its cultural  distance from rural life, 110, 135–6, 155, 162–3 troop reductions prompting   unrest, 150, 190 as centre for petitioning and Daju, 16, 22, 37, 84, 91, 124  protest, 129, 146–7, 149, 183. Daloz, J.P., 199 190 Daly, Martin 11, 41, 56 n.1, 58, as pre-colonial capital 27, 33–4, 67–8, 128, 171, 198 n.2   46, 49, 71, 76 dar (territory, land), 12, 16, 30, 35, election 1953, 193–6 42, 91, 107, 109, 116, 124, 153–6, Emirate of Zalingei, 93–108 159, 164, 169, 206; see also Engel, U., 199–200 migration Erdmann, G., 199–200 Dar Anka, 133 Ewald, Janet, 6 n.15, 10, 21 n.4, 44, Dar Artag, 133, 142, 190 54 n.174 Dar Beira, 31 Dar Diima, 30, 110 faqih/fuqara (holy man/men), Dar Fia, 32 involvement in rebellion, 75, Dar Galla, 38, 132, 190   77–8, 91–3, 150, 191 Dar Guldo, 107–9 role in Native Administration, Dar Kerne, 32, 98, 110, 112   126–7, 140 Dar Kobe, 37–8, 65, 205 in pre-colonial Darfur, 33, 48 Dar Kulli, 112 Fallata 16, 42, 73–4, 77–8, 85–6, Dar Lewing, 107–9, 192 124, 132, 140, 187–8, 190 Dar Sila, 40, 51, 157 Fartit, 23 Dar Tebella, 22, 105, 194 Ferme, M., 200

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festivals colonial ‘tribal gatherings’,   139–40 pre-colonial ‘festival of drums’,   27–8 French Equatorial Africa, 16, 156–8, 164 Fur, 16–18, 29, 31, 33, 37, 48, 78,   142–3, 156–7, 161, 192 experience of colonial rule,   87–114, 174–5 identity, 22–3, 30, 102, 110–11 state-building, 20, 30 Geneina, 92, 195 Genigergera, 132–3, 140 al-Ghali Taj al-Din, 52, 119, 127,   129–31, 134, 143–5 downfall, 176–8 Gillan, J.A., 69, 89 Glassman, Jonathon, 7, 203 n.22 Glubb, John, 162 Gordon, Charles, 42–3, 57, 71 n.72, 96 n.65 Gordon College, 125, 175–6 Guha, R., 203 Gura’an, 65 Habbaniyya, 16, 42, 45–6, 54, 85,   119, 124, 127, 192 chieftaincy politics among,   129–31, 133–5, 143–5, 176–8 territorial politics, 165–6,  186–8 and role in rebellion and  repression of, 1921, 72, 74–6, 78 Haaland, G., 23 Hajjam Hasab Allah, 43 hakura (estate), 29, 33–5, 40, 49, 153–4 Hamar, 62–3 Hamidia, 96, 102 Harir, Sharif, 14, 115 Hawawir, 64 Henderson, K.D.D., 179, 183 Herbst, Jeffrey, 19, 40 Hilal, Musa, 208–10

*Darfur Master.indb 227

Holy, L., 37 Hotiyya, 95 Humr, 62, 116, 130, 133 n.86, 135 Ibrahim Abd al-Bari, 100 Ibrahim Qarad (Sultan of Darfur 1873–4), 41. Ibrahim Wad Abukr Abd al-Rahman, 73 Ingleson, P., 83–4, 111 Iraq, 162 Irayqat, 38, 51 Islam, 21, 23–4, 29, 31, 33–4, 39, 44, 49, 58, 70, 97, 125–6, 145, 179 see also sharia Ismail Abd al-Nabi, 48 Jabal Amer, 206–8 Jabal Marra, 16, 22, 30, 61, 89, 96, 174 Jami Khir, 46–7, 148–149 janjawid, 57, 207–9 Jizzu Idris, 183 Johnson, Douglas, 8, 16, 57 Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), 205 Kababish, 53, 59, 115, 150, 188–9,   205 involvement in conquest of   Darfur, 61–5 Kalaka, 78, 85–6, 124, 126, 143 Kapteijns, L., 45, 73, 77 Kawahla, 62–3 Kebkebia, 75 Keen, M.F.A., 87–8, 104–5 Keira dynasty, 17, 20, 22–3, 29, 41, 49, 81, 94, 101 Kelly, R.J.V., 60–4, 66–7 Khalil Ibrahim, 205 Khartoum, 7, 17, 44, 53, 105, 150,  191 petitions to government in,   145–7, 204 regime and contemporary  conflict in Darfur, 3–4, 11, 205, 207–10

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Index

relations of Darfur chiefs with,  13, 145–6, 176, 184, 192, 195, 197, 202 and perceived cultural  difference to Darfur, 1, 7, 125, 133–4, 175, 195 Khazanov, AM, 41, 115 Kobbei, 27 Kordofan, 9, 25, 67, 94, 115–16,   130, 139, 169, 175, 205 border with Darfur, 59, 61–3,   165, 167, 188 Kosti, 94, 98, 100–2, 104, 111 Lampen, Graham Dudley, 18 perceptions of Darfur, 1–2, 84,   187 on Baqqara Native Courts,   119–20, 122, 124–5 on Baqqara chiefs and  chieftaincy politics, 119–25, 127, 131–2, 135, 137–41, 144–5, 178, 180 on the character of colonial  administration, 14, 105–6, 127, 141, 179, 184 on tribal boundaries and   migrations, 155, 165–6 La Rue, G.M., 35 law, see also courts,  Mohammadan Law Courts, sharia and extra-legal governance,   14–15, 75 use of against chiefs, 14–15,  71, 109–10, 130–1, 138, 177, 179–181 legibility, 4, 9, 153–70, 201 Leonardi, Cherry, 109, 120 n.23, 136 n.111, 201 Liberation and Justice Movement, 206 Local Government, 171–2, 184–6 Lugard, F., 74 n.88, 82 Ma’alia, 24, 131, 140, 169 MacMichael, H.A., 1 n.2, 60, 63–4, 68–9, 85, 93

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Madibbu Ali, 42, 45–6 Madibbu, Ibrahim Musa, 2, 131, 144, 160, 176, 186, 188 and alliance with British, 60,  75, 120, 137–8, 166, 184–5, 188, 192–3, 195–6 and elections of 1953, 193,  195–6 and Rizayqat Native Court,   120–4 Maffey, J., 81 Mahdi (Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah), 44 Mahdism marginalization of by British,   125 significance in Darfur  chieftaincy and electoral politics, 147, 149–50, 193–4, 204 and rebellion against   government, 49, 70, 77–8,  91 Mahdiyya, 43–9, 57. 73 n.83, 74,   104 n.104 and chieftaincy politics 18, 22,   43–9, 50–1, 53, 134, 148, 193 Mahmud Abu Saad, 46, 72, 74, 133–4, 143 Mahmud Wad Bahr, 48 majlis (tribal council), 87, 118, 119 n.18, 138, 142, 148 Mamdani, Mahmood 5, 14, 48,   159, 201 and chieftaincy, 12–13, 87, 90,   116, 120 and ‘detribalisation’/  ‘retribalisation’ of Darfur, 3, 20, 35, 53, 153 Mansur Sulayman, 46–7, 148–50 maqdum pre-colonial, 39–40, 48, 50–1,   77 colonial revival, 93–96, 110,   112, 146 Masalit 16, 23, 40, 69, 85–6, 91–2,  105, 124, 126, 154 n.4, 161, 165

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Index 229

involvement in rebellion of   1921, 71–8 Sultanate of Dar Masalit, 26  n.29, 27 n.36, 43, 48, 102, 153 n.3, 156–8, 175, 195–6 McNeill, T., 70–2, 76 Meidob 15, 36, 46–7, 63, 70, 124, 130, 146, 147–51, 183, 194 Mellit, 66–7, 194 migration as resistance, 26, 91, 107, 124–5,   150, 154–6 labour, 104, 121, 134, 174 pastoral, 154–6, 188–9 policing of, 153–164, 188–9 Missiriyya 45, 62, 95 Mitchell, T., 200 Mohammadan Law Courts (MLCs), 125–6, 179 Moore, Guy, 14, 126–8, 144–5, 180, approach taken to protest 130,   133, 141–3, 146, 180, 183–4 approach to nomadism 160–164 Morton, James, 10 Muhammad al-Fadl (Sultan of Darfur, 1803–38), 24, 26, 38, 49, 93 n.53. Muhammad al-Fadl (Second Emir of Zalingei), 100–3, 105–8, 110 Muhammad Sayyah, 148, 150 Muhammad Tayrab (Sultan of Darfur 1752–86), 25, 37 Muhammad Yambar, 37 Muhammadayn Adam Sebi, 145, 147, 178, 180–3 Musa Madibbu, 52, 60–1 Mustafa Galgham, 71 Nachtigal, Gustav, 24, 26 n.30, 27–8, 36, 39 nahas (copper kettle-drums), 36–7, 39, 52, 177 National Unionist Party (NUP), 191, 193–5 Native Administration (Indirect Rule), 10–14, 18, 41, 68, 80–152, 159–164, 179, 189, 200 Nicolaisen, J., 115

*Darfur Master.indb 229

Nigeria, 82 Northern Rizayqat, 15, 155, 159–64, 206–9 Nuba, 6 n.15, 8, 10, 33 n.64, 46, 58, 188 n.84 Nuer, 8–9 Nyala, 70–4, 76, 85–6, 131, 165 O’Fahey, R.S., 16, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29–30, 33–7, 39–40, 48–9, 54. Omdurman, 44, 46, 48–9, 51, 133–4, 147, 149–150, 194 Ottoman Empire, 2, 59, 64 see also Turco-Egyptian rule petitions, 145–7, 149, 151, 180, 182, 186, 189 Peterson, D., 202 Prunier, Gerard, 11 Qimr, 16, 48, 69, 149, 187 racial thought, 83–8 Rizayqat, 2, 15, 16, 75, 84, 131–2,  137, 140, 160, see also Northern Rizayqat alliance with British on   invasion of Darfur, 60–1 militia violence 43 native court 120–3, 126 origins of chieftaincy 36, 42 relations with Darfur Sultans,   36, 40, 42, 52 relations with Mahdist   rebellion and state 44–6 territorial disputes 166–7,  186–8 Roberston, James, 184 Sandison, 98–9, 102 Sarsfield-Hall, E.G., 70 Savile, R.V., 59, 129–30 Scott, James C., 4–5 Sennar, 21 n.4, 22, 26 n.31, 34 n.63, 123 n.42 sharia, 23, 90, 100, 125–6, 179, see also Mohammedan Law Courts (MLCs)

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Index

shartays, 12–13 during the Sultanate, 30–5, 38,   46, 47, 50–1, 81 during the colonial period, in western Darfur, 87–114,    173–6, 185, 192, 194 in northern Darfur, 124,    132–3, 136 shaykhs, 12, 36, 60, 77, 89, 92–3, 103–4, 123, 129, 131, 133–4, 140–2, 157, 161–3, 181, 189–90 Siddiq al-Mahdi, 195 Slatin, Rudolf von, 43, 45, 57 Socialist Republican Party (SRP), 193–5 Spear, T., 80, 118 Stoler, Ann, 15 Sulayman bin Ahmed, 34 Sultanate of Darfur, 20–42, 49–56 conquest of by Anglo-Egyptian   forces, 58–67 influence on British ‘Native   Administration’ policy, 5–6, 53–4, 68, 81–3, 85–6, 87–8, 110, 132 establishment of Zalingei    Emirate, 93–6, 98–101 influence on Turco-Egyptian   administration, 41–2 influence on Mahdist   administration, 46–7, 49 influence on local perceptions  of colonial officials and government, 14, 77, 127–8, 140, 151, 200 morality of rule in, 24–7, 104 and chieftaincy politics, 18, 147.   198 in the ‘Fur heartland’, 12,    29–35, 50–51, 81, 87–8 in the pastoralist peripheries,   13, 35–40, 51–2, 81, 129, 132, 148, 151 and Islam, 21, 23–4, 29, 31, 33,   39, 49 and long-distance trade, 2, 23 and non-Islamic spiritual  authority, 21, 23, 31–3, 38–9,

*Darfur Master.indb 230

49–50 and repression of resistance,  23–4, 36, 40, 49, 51–2, 57, 74, 76 and state ritual 27–8 Symes, Stewart, 106 Ta’aisha ,16, 42, 46–7, 124, 132, 135, 138, 177, 187 Ta’alba, 95 Tahir Nurein, 133, 142 Taqali, 6 n.15, 10, 21 n.4, 22, 33 n.64, 41 n.107, 44, 45 n.131, 48 n.144 Tarjam, 86 Theobald, A.B., 53, 56 n.1, 58 Tijani Sese, 13 n. 36, 206 Tiganiyya, 193–74 al-Tunisi, Muhammad Umar, 24–6, 36 Turco-Egyptian rule (1874–1885),   54, 57, 205 and chieftaincy politics, 18, 22,   40–7, 49–51, 115–16, 131, 134 Umar Lel (Sultan of Darfur, 1730–9), 25 Umma (political party), 191, 193–5 umdas, 12, 71, 73, 77, 85–6, 93,   158, 178, 189, involvement in 1953 election,   193–5 vulnerability to protest and  factional struggle, 117, 131–4, 140–1 ‘Uqayl al-Janqawi, 42, 45 Uthman Adam Jano, 48 violence colonialism and contemporary   conflict, 4, 56–7, 206–11 conquest and ‘pacification’, 8–9,   56–79, 93 inter-ethnic, 63–5, 74, 180, 188 resistance to colonial rule, 70–3,   91–3, 148–9, 189–91

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spectacle and technology, 66–7,   74–6, 78–9, 89, 93, 149, 201 and practices of chiefs, 9, 91,   96–7, 105–6, 108, 112–14, 119 and the Mahdist state, 46–7, 54,   57 and the Sultanate, 23–7, 36, 40,   52, 54, 57, 74, 76 and state policing of migration   158–9, 162–3 as administration, 9, 69, 89,  96–7, 103, 105–6, 108, 112–14, 119, 128 use of local militias by the  state, 4, 8, 43, 45, 56–7, 60–6, 74 Wadi Azum, 156 Wadi Khaddai, 72

*Darfur Master.indb 231

Willis, J., 58, 195–6. Wingate, F.R., 50, 58–68, 93 Yusuf Abdullah, 107–10 Zaghawa, 15, 17, 36, 45, 47, 65,   162–3, 205 colonial chieftaincy politics,  68, 87, 124, 132–3, 140–2, 145–7, 178, 180–2, 189 pre-colonial chieftaincy, 37–9,   48, 115–16 Zayyadiyya, 15, 36, 183, 187, 194 al-Zubayr Rahman Mansur, 36, 41–2, 45, 46 Zubayr Sam, 132, 138–9 zulm (oppression), 25, 27, 71, 123, 143, 185

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*Darfur Master.indb 232

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EASTERN AFRICAN STUDIES These titles published in the United States and Canada by Ohio University Press

Revealing Prophets Edited by DAVID M. ANDERSON & DOUGLAS H. JOHNSON East African Expressions of Chistianity Edited by THOMAS SPEAR & ISARIA N. KIMAMBO The Poor Are Not Us Edited by DAVID M. ANDERSON & VIGDIS BROCH-DUE Potent Brews JUSTIN WILLIS Swahili Origins JAMES DE VERE ALLEN Being Maasai Edited by THOMAS SPEAR & RICHARD WALLER Jua Kali Kerya KENNETH KING Control & Crisis in Colonial Kenya BRUCE BERMAN Unhappy Valley Book One: State & Class Book Two: Violence & Ethnicity BRUCE BERMAN & JOHN LONSDALE Mau Mau from Below GREET KERSHAW The Mau Mau War in Perspective FRANK FUREDI Squatters & the Roots of Mau Mau 1905-63 TABITHA KANOGO Economic & Social Origins of Mau Mau 1945-53 DAVID W. THROUP Multi-Party Politics in Kenya DAVID W. THROUP & CHARLES HORNSBY Empire State-Building JOANNA LEWIS Decolonization & Independence in Kenya 1940-93 Edited by B.A. OGOT & WILLIAM R. OCHIENG’ Eroding the Commons DAVID ANDERSON Penetration & Protest in Tanzania ISARIA N. KIMAMBO Custodians of the Land Edited by GREGORY MADDOX, JAMES L. GIBLIN & ISARIA N. KIMAMBO Education in the Development of Tanzania 1919-1990 LENE BUCHERT

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The Second Economy in Tanzania T.L. MALIYAMKONO & M.S.D. BAGACHWA Ecology Control & Economic Development in East African History HELGE KJEKSHUS Siaya DAVID WILLIAM COHEN & E.S. ATIENO ODHIAMBO Uganda Now • Changing Uganda Developing Uganda • From Chaos to Order • Religion & Politics in East Africa Edited by HOLGER BERNT HANSEN & MICHAEL TWADDLE Kakungulu & the Creation of Uganda 1868-1928 MICHAEL TWADDLE Controlling Anger SUZETTE HEALD Kampala Women Getting By SANDRA WALLMAN Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda RICHARD J. REID Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits HEIKE BEHREND Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar ABDUL SHERIFF Zanzibar Under Colonial Rule Edited by ABDUL SHERIFF & ED FERGUSON The History & Conservation of Zanzibar Stone Town Edited by ABDUL SHERIFF Pastimes & Politics LAURA FAIR Ethnicity & Conflict in the Horn of Africa Edited by KATSUYOSHI FUKUI & JOHN MARKAKIS Conflict, Age & Power in North East Africa Edited by EISEI KURIMOTO & SIMON SIMONSE Propery Rights & Political Development in Ethiopia & Eritrea SANDRA FULLERTON JOIREMAN Revolution & Religion in Ethiopia ØYVIND M. EIDE Brothers at War TEKESTE NEGASH & KJETIL TRONVOLL From Guerrillas to Government DAVID POOL Mau Mau & Nationhood Edited by E.S. ATIENO ODHIAMBO & JOHN LONSDALE

A History of Modern Ethiopia, 1855-1991(2nd edn) BAHRU ZEWDE Pioneers of Change in Ethiopia BAHRU ZEWDE Remapping Ethiopia Edited by W. JAMES, D. DONHAM, E. KURIMOTO & A. TRIULZI Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia Edited by DONALD L. DONHAM & WENDY JAMES A Modern History of the Somali (4th edn) I.M. LEWIS Islands of Intensive Agriculture in East Africa Edited by MATS WIDGREN & JOHN E.G. SUTTON Leaf of Allah EZEKIEL GEBISSA Dhows & the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar 1860-1970 ERIK GILBERT African Womanhood in Colonial Kerya TABITHA KANOGO African Underclass ANDREW BURTON In Search of a Nation Edited by GREGORY H. MADDOX & JAMES L. GIBLIN A History of the Excluded JAMES L. GIBLIN Black Poachers, White Hunters EDWARD I. STEINHART Ethnic Federalism DAVID TURTON Crisis & Decline in Bunyoro SHANE DOYLE Emancipation without Abolition in German East Africa JAN-GEORG DEUTSCH Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda 1900-2003 GRACE BANTEBYA KYOMUHENDO & MARJORIE KENISTON McINTOSH Cultivating Success in Uganda GRACE CARSWELL War in Pre-Colonial Eastern Africa RICHARD REID Slavery in the Great Lakes Region of East Africa Edited by HENRI MÉDARD & SHANE DOYLE The Benefits of Famine DAVID KEEN

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Darfur_PPC_24mm v9_B+B 25/08/2015 16:39 Page 1

Cover photograph: Horseman charge at a tribal gathering in Umm Gozein, North Darfur, c.1940, AWM Disney, AWM Disney, Sudan Archive, Durham 717/12/6 (reproduced by permission of Durham University Library)

JAMES CURREY an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com www.jamescurrey.com

ISBN 978-1-84701-111-4

9 781847 011114

COLONIAL VIOLENCE, SULTANIC LEGACIES & LOCAL POLITICS, 1916–1956

Chris Vaughan is currently Lecturer in African History at Liverpool John Moores University. Previously, he taught at the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Liverpool and Edinburgh. He is co-editor (with Lotje De Vries and Mareike Schomerus) of The Borderlands of South Sudan.

Darfur

This work engages with a fundamental question in the study of African history and politics: to what extent did the colonial state re-define the character of local politics in the societies it governed? Existing scholarship on Darfur under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1916–1956) has suggested that colonial governance here represented either straightforward continuity or utterly transformative change from the region's deep history of independent statehood under the Darfur Sultanate. Chris Vaughan argues that neither view is adequate: he shows that British rule bequeathed a culture of governance to Darfur which often rested on state coercion and violence, but which was also influenced by enduring local conceptions of the relationship between ruler and ruled, and the agendas of local actors. Contemporary conflict and politics in the region must be understood in the context of this deeper history of interaction between state and local agendas in shaping everyday realities of power and governance.

VAUGHAN

‘…a nuanced analysis of the ambiguities of the imposition of state control in Darfur, of resistance and accommodation by indigenous authorities to incorporation into the state at various levels, and how the state and state actors were also transformed through that incorporation.’ – Douglas H. Johnson, author of The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars

Chris Vaughan

Darfur COLONIAL VIOLENCE, SULTANIC LEGACIES & LOCAL POLITICS, 1916–1956