The Postcolonial State and Civil War in Sudan: The Origins of Conflict in Darfur 9780755618972, 9781780760858

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The people who have made this book possible deserve more than the few brief words that I grant them here. Nonetheless, I will attempt to acknowledge those whose help, support and encouragement were instrumental in this study finding its way to publication. Penny Griffin, Geoffrey Hawker, Stephanie Lawson, Sarah Turner, Peter Vale, all those associated with the Macquarie University Centre for Middle East and North African Studies, and in particular Gennaro Gervasio, have my sincerest gratitude for their important involvement. Also, I would like to thank all the Sudanese I have met and debated with, whose insights have led me to a much deeper understanding of the crisis of the Sudanese state than I would have otherwise had. Maria Marsh from I.B. Tauris has patiently supported this project from the very start. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Rachael, and my parents, who have been my strongest supporters and to whom I am eternally grateful. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in the Journal of North African Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4 (December 2006), and material in Chapter 4 was published in Joseph Pugliese (ed.), Relational Dis/ locations: Mediterranean Cultures in Translocal and Transnational Contexts (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2010).

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PREFACE

In July 2011 the South Sudan proclaimed its independence, and the Republic of Sudan, which came into existence on 1 January 1956, is no more. What constituted the nature of that republic, and of the relations between its north and south, may now be considered a question for historians, but these questions are also deeply significant for anyone interested in what the future holds for the Sudan, now that what has been regarded as the most pressing division within that long-suffering country seems to have been resolved. In many ways, the events covered in this book follow the same chronology that has been used by others to analyse the origins of the conflicts between the north and the south. However, the story of Darfur differs in a number of key respects from that of southern Sudan, even if some of the similarities appear obvious. The differences are best understood as a result of the contrast between Darfur’s efforts to gain inclusion in the political, economic and social community of the Sudan, compared with the south’s determination to remain apart. Even today, as the south celebrates independence, the rebel leaders in Darfur seek greater involvement in government, and continue to struggle for acceptance as equals within the northern Sudan. When exploring the origins of the civil war, and the subsequent humanitarian crisis that erupted across Darfur in 2003, the starting point, at least in this study, is considered to be located in understanding the historical relationship between Darfur and the

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northern Sudanese ruling elite, an elite who have almost exclusively been drawn from Khartoum and its immediate surrounds. The central theme of this book, then, focuses on the struggle by the people of Darfur, with and against the elite in central Sudan, for a role in the administration of the state and for recognition as part of the Sudanese nation. This struggle began with the Turko-Egyptian conquest of Darfur in 1874, and despite a brief interlude of independence from 1885 until 1916, has remained the key to understanding the causes of the tensions that have brewed between Darfur’s marginalised communities and successive Sudanese governments. It was this historical struggle for recognition, which finally boiled over in the late 1990s. In this history of centre-vs.-periphery tensions there are some key stages beginning with the colonial period, and in particular with the period that saw the creation of the colonial state, which laid a certain foundation on which later struggles have played out. At independence, the post-colonial Sudanese state largely resembled the colonial state that preceded it. The second key period in the relationship between centre and periphery occurs with the rise and fall of the Sudanese developmental state. A decade of state (and nation) building in the 1970s ended in turmoil with the bankruptcy of the Sudanese economy, and most importantly, with the failure to resolve the contradictions of the Sudanese state to transform the power relations between the centre and peripheries within Sudan. The third period of significance for this story about the origins of the conflict in Darfur begins shortly after the fall of the developmental state and covers a decade of what might be referred to as the ‘Islamist project’ for Sudan. Despite promises by the Islamists that they would resolve the divisions and inequalities inherited from the past, a decade of Islamist rule saw only a heightening of the contradictions that had affected Sudan since independence. It was in the shadow of the Islamist project that the conflict in Darfur exploded. So, some 60 years after the end of colonialism, many of the contradictions and tensions that plagued Sudan at independence remain unresolved, even if the north-south conflict no longer occupies the central position in the Sudanese drama.

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The conflict between the north and the west (Darfur) is unlikely to be resolved by the act of separation in the same way as has the northsouth dilemma. Rather, solutions lie in rethinking the structure of the Sudanese state and resolving the crisis of political legitimacy that caused the rebellion in Darfur in the first place. However, to begin this task of rethinking, a deeper understanding of the power relations and structural issues at the heart of the tensions between north and west is required. This book devotes itself to this task, and in some way, it is hoped, will contribute to opening the space necessary for contemplating what can be done to overcome the political impasse that continues to forestall any prospect for lasting peace and stability in post-colonial Sudan. Noah Bassil Sydney.

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CHAPTER 1 THE NATIONAL ISL A MIC FRONT AND THE IMMEDIATE CAUSES OF CONFLICT IN DAR FUR

1.1

Introduction

This book explores the contradictions and tensions responsible for the outbreak of conflict in Sudan’s western province of Darfur. The construction of an inherently weak and unstable colonial state engendered the persistent failures of Sudanese politics that culminated in the coup of 1989, which in turn brought the National Salvation Government (later the National Islamic Front) to power.1 Up to this point, the Sudanese state had been many things: clientalistic, patrimonial, unstable, turbulent, and in the peripheries largely ‘absent’. However, when the National Islamic Front (NIF) came to power in 1989, the character of the state changed. The NIF transformed Sudan by plundering the wealth of the country, repressing civil society, imposing a narrow and intolerant Islamist dogmatism on every facet of state and society, and alienating Sudan’s Arab and African neighbours, as well as the world’s only superpower. This Islamist state waged a vicious war against its own people, not only in the well-documented north-south conflict, but also across the northern Sudan.

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The most prominent illustration of the NIF’s brutality was the way that it escalated the ongoing war in southern Sudan in a bid to impose its power over a region which, since independence, had largely been extraneous to the control of the state. A decade of NIF sponsored jihad against the southern Sudanese eventually failed, and after almost 50 years of warfare northern Sudan finally abandoned its claims on the south. In the end, the overtures of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese President, to end the war through negotiation resulted from an increasing fear that continuing the war in the south could threaten his hold on power in Khartoum. The south has now escaped the domination of the northern riverain elite, but it took secession and the declaration of a new state for this to happen. Other regions of Sudan have not been so fortunate. During the 1990s, the civil war in the south was the most prominent, but by no means the only struggle taking place in the country: the NIF leadership ruthlessly enforced domination on the main urban centres. The army and civil service were methodically purged of any secular elements, and civil society completely subjugated, or even destroyed, as Ann Moseley Lesch has illustrated in her view of the situation in Sudan in the 1990s.2 In the peripheries of the north, where the state had always been weak, the NIF worked to impose complete control over the northern Sudanese, and when this failed violence routinely ensued. Even before the conflict in Darfur became the subject of international headlines, the NIF had already employed the most brutal means to plunder and subdue two regions of the northern Sudan: the Nuba Mountains3 and the Red Sea Hills Province.4 This subjugation of the Nuba and the Beja of the Red Sea was only completed after a violent struggle that ended in the murder or displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. However, for a number of reasons subduing Darfur was a more difficult proposition. Initially, the regime was too weak to wage its struggle for domination on all fronts equally and in those early days after coming to power the war against the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLM) and the subjugation of Khartoum took priority, and in any event, the Fur and the Zaghawa proved to be key allies in the Islamisation and important areas for raising much needed troops. The regime’s perspective on Darfur at this time was in any case

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ambiguous, as the events following the failed attempt by the SPLM to establish a cell in the Fur heartland in 1992 illustrate. Additionally, the Muslim Brotherhood had since the 1970s been recruiting heavily among the people of the Darfur region. In 1995, the NIF made a move to consolidate its rule in Darfur by manipulating the tribal system and attempted to replace local NIF members with Islamists from the central Sudan. This resulted in an upsurge of resentment against the government, especially in Dar Masalit, and in rebellion. In many ways, the Masalit uprising was a precursor of things to come in Darfur. The move by the NIF to enforce its dominance over the whole of Darfur, by reorganising the provincial political structure and replacing Darfur’s local leadership with NIF appointments loyal only to President al-Bashir, created a significant backlash in the region. Al-Bashir undertook the reorganisation of the political structure and reshuffled key political appointments in Darfur in preparation for an impending showdown with Hasan al-Turabi and his strong supporter base among the western Sudanese. But this strategy backfired, and even if al-Bashir was in the event able to oust al-Turabi in an internal coup and to secure control of the national government for himself, a powerful challenge to his rule emerged from Darfur which led him to employ the most brutal means to subdue the region. The Darfur rebellion commenced in earnest in January 2003 when armed contingents of the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement attacked key military installations in and around El Fasher. Within a few months of the rebel attacks on the capital of Darfur, the region had come under attack from military and pro-government militias, and by the end of 2003 some reports were filtering out to the effect that government-sponsored militias were massacring civilians. A humanitarian disaster was under way. The NIF interventions in Darfur in the 1990s, whether through cultural and political means, or when that failed, employing brutal means, was an attempt by the rulers of Sudan to alter a historical pattern whereby, as Burr and O’Collins have argued, At no time in the last two hundred years has the central government of the Sudan – neither nineteenth-century Turks nor

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twentieth-century British and certainly not the independent Sudanese – actually governed Darfur . . . at no time have they rigorously administered, effectively controlled, or demonstrated the usual characteristics associated with governance, good or bad.5 While the expansion of the Sudanese state’s presence was evident in Darfur in the 1960s and 1970s, Burr and O’Collins’ proposition that Darfur has largely existed outside of central Sudanese control is an important theme developed throughout this book.

1.2

The Sudan: African microcosm or Arab malaise

Sudan, as it was before the creation on 9 July 2011 of a sovereign Republic of South Sudan, was often described as a microcosm of the African continent. Geographically, it was the largest country in Africa ranging from the arid Saharan expanse in the north of the continent to the deep jungles in the very heart of Africa. The Sudanese people themselves were said to epitomise the racial, ethnic and religious diversity of the African mosaic. Sudan also straddled the ever-shifting frontier between an Arabised and Islamised North Africa and subSaharan Africa.6 Sudan was a member of both the African Union and the Arab League7 reflecting, the fact that it was simultaneously situated in both ‘regions’. As a result of this straddling of two regions, the location of the Sudan in both popular and scholarly perspectives was not always clear. Today, the location of the South Sudan within subSaharan Africa is much clearer. While in many respects, for the north the ambiguity remains. Sudan has often been overlooked in studies of the Middle East, while sometimes studies of sub-Saharan Africa have included it, and at other times have not.8 Sudan, it seems, even in cases when it has been included in studies of Africa or of the Middle East, is treated as if it is an insignificant periphery.9 This locational ambiguity and ambivalence towards Sudan is not without relevance especially if it is believed that knowledge production is influenced by historically-

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defined power relations.10 The ambiguity is especially important, as in some way ‘our’ conceptualisation and understanding is always moulded by the wider regional studies within which countries that we study are placed. If there has been ambiguity regarding the location of the Sudan, then it can be said equal if not greater confusion exists in regards to where to situate Darfur. Its geographic location, at least historically, had been responsible for producing an area where a multicultural society emerged from centuries of cultural cross-fertilisation, as merchants, holy men, explorers, mercenaries and ‘slaves’, from the Mashreq, the Mahgreb and East, West and sub-Saharan Africa, crisscrossed the region. This created, what numerous people have described as a rich mosaic of hybrid cultures across the Sudan, and in Darfur this was especially evident as this process produced societies that were an amalgam – neither specifically African nor Arab – of the diversity of people that over time had traversed the Sahel.11 Since 2003, or maybe a little earlier, Darfur ceased to be a region of cultural crossover and connectivity, and has come to resemble the commonly-posited, postCold War ‘clash of civilisations’,12 as a brutal civil war raged, destroying lives, livelihoods and livestock, creating millions of refugees and threatening to engulf Chad, a country as troubled and unstable as Sudan. Today, instead of hybridism in Darfur, there is a tendency towards dichotomy, instead of cultural tolerance there are increasing racial and ethnic antagonisms, instead of peace there is war. The question of Arab racism plays a part in explaining the Darfur crisis. The extent that Arab supremacism in Darfur originated with policies of the state or as a result of local factors is disputed in recent scholarly accounts.13 But in either case, any explanation of causes must also examine much broader questions. Too often explanations of conflict in Darfur have relied on race and ethnicity as the source rather than the symptom, as explanatory, rather than, as Martin Doornbos argues, as what itself requires explanation.14 Understanding the role that race and ethnicity play is a complex question linked to broader political and historical issues and located within discussions of the colonial legacies, including formation and malformation of the state, and its development and underdevelopment. Additionally, wider

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regional and international factors have also had a significant influence on Sudanese identities since independence and cannot be overlooked in any effort to come to a deeper understanding of the origins of conflict in Darfur. In this sense, race and ethnicity are but one part, and how large a part is a matter of dispute, of a much larger puzzle. The key to the puzzle, so to speak, revolves around the question of where to place ethnic and racial antagonisms in the equation when assessing the origins of the civil war in Darfur. In this regard, it can be said, that as far as the position taken in this book, race and ethnicity are central to the recent tragic events in Darfur, but any: Discussion of ethnicity per se does not make too much sense . . . as there is no way of establishing what orientation or underlying motive any ethnic consciousness-raising may have without first understanding the context of the social forces and the issues concerned.15 As Darfur has been intimately connected with, and also located within, a larger entity, any understanding of the conflict in Darfur cannot start and end with a focus only on where that conflict actually takes place. This would be true of almost all such events, and with little doubt this need for a broader context is true for understanding events in Darfur. While local actors are at the forefront of the fighting, and local issues are apparent in the rhetoric of the antagonists, there is a much wider national context and broader theoretical concepts through which the civil war in Darfur must be analysed and explained. If race and ethnicity have been overplayed in the small but growing literature that has emerged since 2003, it is also true that these analyses tend to isolate Darfur from the politics of the Sudan and from the wider politics of post-colonialism, the dar al-Islam, and indeed from contemporary global trends.16 To return to the question of location, Darfur has regularly been portrayed as a distant and forgotten corner of the world, as one writer argues, where ‘. . . [for] decades Darfur has been neglected by the forces of globalisation and development.’17 In fact, in contrast to this view and others like it, much evidence points to processes at work that have

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incorporated Darfur, however unevenly, into the international or global system. Darfur may be located in the centre of one of the least ‘developed’ areas of the world but since at least the seventeenth century, with the adoption of Islam by the Keira Sultanate the region has been increasingly shaped and reshaped by national and international forces. Analyses of conflict in Darfur have so far largely ignored the broader international historical context, but here it is argued, that to understand events there it is incumbent on any political analysis to examine issues such as the disintegration of the post-colonial state,18 the rise of new forms of Islamism, and the shifting fortunes of the Sudanese economy as a part (however peripheral) of the international economy. To end this section by coming (almost) full circle, if Sudan is a microcosm of Africa then any explanation of the civil war in Darfur must be grounded in the wider politics of the continent, and be contextualised within the broader trajectories of international politics, especially in the deep contemporary crisis of the post-colonial state.

1.3

The post-colonial state: the broader context

In order to understand the complex circumstances that led to conflict in the westernmost province of the Sudan, this book focuses attention on the instability of the post-colonial Sudanese state. Like other postcolonial states, Sudan was created by an act of colonial conquest.19 The character and impact of colonialism on state formation is disputed, but as Christopher Clapham explains in terms of Africa: One can, without straining generalization too far, broadly discern a “conventional” view of African politics which sees African states as essentially artificial and external creations, derived from an imposed European colonialism.20 In a similar manner to other colonies, both in Africa and elsewhere, the Sudanese political framework was largely shaped by the exigencies of control, which was first and foremost concerned with the question of how to preserve the power and further the geo-strategic and economic

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interests of the metropole. With this in mind, it is no surprise that colonial states were authoritarian, both in terms of suppressing political representation and in controlling the principal components of production: land, labour and capital. This authoritarianism masked the colonial state’s fundamental weaknesses, which were exposed by the world crisis of the 1930s and the 1940s, and even the best efforts of both British and French authorities to transform the colonial system at the end of the Second World War was unable to prevent the dismantling of the European colonial empires. When decolonisation spread in the post-war period, a wave of optimism swept across Asia and Africa as numerous new states emerged as independent actors on the international stage.21 Despite the initial confidence associated with the end of colonial rule, few post-colonial states have since managed to overcome the major structural weaknesses that they inherited on independence, namely underdeveloped state institutions and infrastructure, and a lack of political legitimacy. Much has also been made of the heterogeneity of identities and sub-national ethnic and trans-national religious affiliations within the majority of post-colonial states such as Sudan. However, as this book argues, the problem of national disunity is a direct result of the weakness of the post-colonial state, and a symptom of the failure of the nation-building projects such states have undertaken since independence. The conflict in Darfur represents only the most recent case of the breakdown of politics in Sudan, and even in terms of intensity, when civil war broke out in 2003 there was nothing particularly novel about the events that were unfolding in Darfur. Even before the declaration of its independence in 1956, Sudan was facing the threat of a revolt by soldiers from the southern regions of the country, and since that date the northern and southern Sudanese have been engaged in warfare for 38 of Sudan’s 53 years of self-rule. Nevertheless, even in this context of almost continual conflict, events in Darfur represented, in at least one notable way, a disjuncture with the past. When war broke out there, the long held belief of the homogeneity of the Muslim north was revealed to be an illusion. With Muslim unity in the Sudan now seen to be in disarray, Darfur’s conflict appeared to be fought along racial and ethnic lines. This façade, or illusion, only served to obscure the

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deeper structural and immediate political causes of the emergence of anti-government insurgency in Darfur. Also it is not to be forgotten that the racial and ethnic façade is one factor in the Darfur conflict, and it is one that itself has been shaped by the colonial and post-colonial political structure, and the weakness of the Sudanese state. From this perspective, what has unfolded in Darfur as a consequence of the crisis of the post-colonial Sudan can be seen as being emblematic of the problems facing many such postcolonial nations, and by examining the causes of conflict in the Darfur region this book can also contribute to a better understanding of colonial legacies and of their implications for the post-colonial condition.

1.4

The post-colonial state: theory and method

This book is a conventional political study, in the sense that conceptually the state is the key focus. While the actions of colonial and post-colonial governments, political parties and social movements figure prominently throughout, the state remains the central concept. Abdullahi Gallab, who has written an excellent study of the NIF in power in the Sudan, conceptualises the state as ‘. . . the overarching apparatus that includes the ideological, administrative, bureaucratic, legal, and security systems that act in certain degree of coherence to structure and administer relations within different levels of a particular territory.’22 Along with taking into account the state’s domestic power, there must be an appreciation of its role in interacting with external forces and the international system. It is these dual roles, as both a prism through which global pressures are refracted and as the arbiter of national politics, that make the state such a fundamentally important part of people’s lives.23 These roles are crucial for shaping domestic relations and the distribution of resources, both political and economic, in societies where poverty remains high and opportunities for self-help relatively scarce. The other reason for the attention placed here on the post-colonial state is that since the end of the Cold War, a number of post-colonial states have ceased to meet the requirements of statehood. Afghanistan,

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Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as three most notable examples, can be categorised in such terms, with porous borders, widespread civil conflict, high levels of foreign occupation or interference in domestic affairs, and governments that have little or no domestic or international legitimacy. At one time or another, other post-colonial states, most notably Liberia and Sierra Leone in Africa, Yemen and Iraq in the Middle East, and the Solomon Islands and Fiji in the Pacific, have also failed to meet the basic criteria of statehood and earned the marker of being, or bordering on being, failed. To what extent other countries, most notably those in Africa, have characteristics of failed states has been a topic of some debate since the 1980s. Pierre Englebert has contributed to this debate and has recently done so by arguing that the African post-colonial State, for example, is . . . a dubious community of heterogeneous and occasionally clashing linguistic, religious and ethnic identities; their claim to force is rarely effective and much less monopolistic; their frequent predatory nature fails the test of legitimacy; and their territoriality is generally at best hesitant and contested.24 Robert Jackson goes further by suggesting that most post-colonial states exist due to the stability of the international order established in the wake of the Second World War, rather than as a result of their competence, or just as importantly, as Samuel Makinda has shown, due to the international acceptance of state sovereignty which was enshrined in the code of conduct set up by the Organization of African Unity and the League of Arab States.25 The majority of post-colonial states, from Jackson’s perspective, rely on international rather than domestic legitimacy for their survival and are ‘failed’ or ‘quasi-‘ states with: . . . limited empirical statehood: their populations do not enjoy many of the advantages traditionally associated with independent statehood. Their governments [were] often deficient in the political will, institutional authority, and organized power to protect human rights or provide socioeconomic welfare.26

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Neither of the perspectives offered above provides the conceptual framework for interrogating the nature of the post-colonial Sudanese condition. Studies of ‘failed states’ have largely become a topic for security analysts, and, since 9/11, particularly embedded in studies of terrorism and counter-terrorism.27 In the field of African studies, it can be said that the literature on state failure occupies a central position, while in that of Middle East and North African studies the state has been overlooked, with many scholars concentrating on Islam, Arab political culture and the resource curse to explain the political dynamics of the countries of the region.28 It remains to be seen whether the popular uprisings that toppled Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben-Ali in January 2011, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak a month later and has brought to an end the 42 year rule of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi will engender a change in Middle East studies in a way that brings the state back into consideration. Other than Englebert and Jackson, a large number of scholars, covering a broad spectrum of ideas, have been involved in addressing questions related to the dysfunctionality of post-colonial politics and the problems of the post-colonial state. On the whole, most of the literature taking post-colonial states as its central concern agree that the vast majority are failing to meet the expectations of their citizens and to fulfil the undertakings made by the first generation of nationalist leaders – an undertaking that independence would bring political freedom and economic and social development, and restore pride in the diversity of national cultures and identities. It is also within this broader literature of the post-colonial condition that this study is located. There has also been a perennial failure of the Sudan’s post-independence political system which, when combined with an economic collapse in the 1980s has undermined the operational capacity of state institutions, especially in the peripheral regions such as Darfur.29 The lack of uniformity in the institutional capacity of the Sudanese state is one side of the problem, and while Sudan is not a ‘failed state’ as such, there are large parts of the country where the capacity of the state is particularly weak. In southern Sudan, before its separation, it can be argued that beyond repression and violence the Sudanese state barely existed. In Darfur, and more generally, ‘. . . the declining capacity of the

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state for development and fulfilment of the post-independence “social contract” . . . is one of the key issues for understanding the character of regime behaviour.’30 Shifting the focus of analysis from the local to the national level provides the present study with the framework necessary for explaining the events in Darfur as part of the further unravelling of the post-colonial nation-state,31 of which Sudan, it is argued, is one of the most salient examples.32 The crisis of the post-colonial state reflects the pressures which have emanated from the international sphere, including the impact of colonialism on Darfur. As a result of the need to transcend the immediate history and territorial borders of Darfur, this study employs a broad interdisciplinary methodology and an analytical framework that takes a historical approach within the context of successive internal and external socio-economic, political, economic and cultural crises. The complex nature of the causes of the Darfur conflict requires that an equally complex multi-dimensional approach be taken, including analysis of economic, political, cultural and environmental factors. The study aims to provide an understanding of the causes of the conflict within a framework that investigates the instability and disintegration of the Sudanese state by probing both the complexities of the colonial legacies in Sudanese politics and the intricacies of post-colonial Sudanese politics as shaped by international factors. While the study is cast in historical terms, it does not attempt to offer a complete history. History, to quote Peter Woodward, is the ‘backdrop not the substance’ of the study.33 Much of the analysis is drawn from secondary literature exploring Sudanese politics, literature that often makes no specific reference to Darfur.34 The analysis also draws upon the numerous scholarly works on the political, economic, cultural and environmental features of the Sudan. What becomes increasingly evident from reading these works is how marginal Darfur has been to the study of the Sudan. One of the significant elements of this book is to be found in the sustained and systematic manner that Darfur is re-integrated into the analysis of Sudan. The material utilised here has been selected for the insight it brings to the topic through the process of interpretation and reinterpretation. The synthesis of previously discrete studies offers an

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opportunity to reinterpret Sudanese politics in a way that highlights Darfur’s role in shaping national political institutions, decisions and events. It is through this approach that the present study aims to contribute to an understanding of the root causes of the war in Darfur. The book draws upon an established body of literature from which to recast the politics of the Sudan within the themes and conceptual approach that frame the study. In addition, some of the colonial and Sudanese government reports and publications have been read as primary evidence of the colonial and post-colonial attitudes towards issues of race, ethnicity and development in Sudan, and more specifically attitudes towards the people and the region of Darfur. My views have also been informed by discussions with Sudanese from all cultural backgrounds. Almost five years of consulting and engaging with Sudanese people has only reinforced my reading of the literature and my independent research to the effect that the conflict in Darfur is essentially political, and stems from a sense that the Khartoum government ceased to be a government for all northern Sudanese. Many of my Sudanese friends and informants, originally from Khartoum and others from elsewhere in the northern Sudan, have accepted that the grievances of the people of Darfur are legitimate and that the only acceptable future for the Sudan rests with the establishment of a government that is representative of the diversity characterising Sudan’s heterogeneous population. The crisis in Darfur was never only local, even in the 1980s, when it was a national and regional crisis in the making, nor in its presentday repercussions. In addition, many of the factors that contributed to the outbreak of hostilities are still evident in Sudanese politics, even though the north/south no longer reside within the boundaries of a single state. It is hoped that understanding the causes of the conflict in Darfur will provide useful insights for the future of that province and for resolving the ongoing political crisis in Sudan.

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CHAPTER 2 BEYOND M AINSTR EA M R EPR ESENTATIONS OF THE CONFLICT IN DAR FUR: BR INGING THE STATE BACK IN

2.1 Introduction Much has been written about Darfur since the civil war in that part of Africa made international headlines in 2004. Some of the analyses have helped us to formulate a better understanding of the region, and of the various issues and events preceding the outbreak of the conflict. Other commentaries have been less useful, mainly because they have distracted readers from key issues by focusing attention on the racial, ethnic or tribal dimensions of the conflict ignoring the deeper origins of war and rebellion. As Terry Eagleton explains, this is a common problem associated with both the social sciences and popular perspectives since the end of the Cold War, where there has been an inflation of, . . . the significance of ‘culture’ in human affairs while marginalising the issues that really count in the production of misery, including the unjust consequences of certain trade regimes, militarism and the like. And whereas class struggle is now ‘embarrassingly passé’, the affirmation of cultural identity remains in

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vogue even when it gives the illusion that the ‘ethnically marginalized’ occupying the lowest socio-economic strata are actually the victims of culture wars rather than capitalist economic forces.1 Many explanations of the conflict in Darfur have fallen into Eagleton’s trap by relying on cultural differences to explain conflict, while the structural weakness of the state and the political and economic dynamics are either ignored or reduced to examples of ‘culture wars’. In this study, culture is understood as a factor in understanding the character of the conflict, and cultural differences are taken to be symptoms of inequality and exclusion. Approaching the conflict in Darfur from the perspective of a struggle within Sudan for equality and inclusion provides two clear benefits. First, it allows for the politics of Darfur to be considered as a component of the larger politics of Sudan, and not apart from it, as has been the case for much of the twentieth century. Secondly, identities, whether religious, racial, ethnic or tribal, become variables that can be explored within the context of political, economic and environmental changes in Sudan, and in the Middle East and Africa and also in the wider world. Before turning to the approach, and the wider implications, taken in this study, the following section is a brief exposition of the way events in Darfur have too often been framed, and the impact of this on the explanations of the origins of the conflict as they have often been presented.2

2.2 Genocide, the War on Terror and the framing of the Darfur conflict On the eve of the commemorations marking the ten-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, news of another acute humanitarian crisis trickled out via the international media. It seemed, unbeknownst to most international commentators, that in the western Sudanese province of Darfur, an anti-government rebellion launched a year earlier had escalated into an intense civil war. As world leaders, including the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and US President George W. Bush, were promising never to allow genocide and crimes against humanity

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to once again take place, reports were beginning to circulate about a situation in western Sudan where thousands of civilians were being murdered and hundreds of thousands more displaced. The UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Sudan, Mukesh Kapila, provided the first report of disturbing events in the far west of the country on 26 March 2004. In an interview on the BBC’s Africa News Service, Kapila compared these events to the Rwandan genocide of a decade earlier: The only difference between Rwanda and Darfur is the numbers involved of dead, tortured, and raped . . . This is ethnic cleansing, this is the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, and I don’t know why the world is not doing more about it.3 It is easy to comprehend how Kapila’s reports, released at that particular moment, were entangled with the memories of the genocide in Rwanda and how this coincidence played some part in shaping the way that the press and media viewed the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Darfur. The first major US publication to pick up on the story of Darfur was the New York Times. Within a week of Kapila’s BBC interview, Nicholas Kristof had published two lead articles in the NYT describing the humanitarian crisis.4 Two of the world’s most influential news services had now run stories describing a case of genocide taking place in Africa, and with Rwanda’s gruesome history firmly in people’s minds, Darfur was thrust into the international limelight. Kristof’s exposé was timely, but in a number of ways his initial description of the conflict as ‘. . . a campaign of murder, rape and pillage by Sudan’s Arab rulers that has forced 700,000 black African Sudanese to flee their villages’,5 translated into an easy-to-market explanation that was (to say the least) crude, and more importantly, also mostly inaccurate. Kristof’s haste and clumsiness with the facts contributed to the formation of a popular misperception of Darfur which even today, some eight years later, has yet to be corrected.6 The public perception of Darfur tends to still focus on the genocidal intent of Darfur’s Arab tribes,7 backed by an Arab Sudanese government, to eliminate Darfur’s helpless Black African farmers.8

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The Arab versus African dimension of the conflict in Darfur has certainly been at the very centre of the mainstream media’s representation of events, a view dominated by the post-9/11 vilification of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Muslims’ in the age of the ‘war on terror’,9 as well as an older colonial discourse of Africans as helpless, child-like and in constant need of Western philanthropy.10 That Africa, and for that matter the Middle East, have been misrepresented as static and bereft of internal historical dynamism has been exposed by numerous excellent scholarly works in recent decades.11 Darfur immediately entered this imaginary without reflection, and repeatedly the region was portrayed through a lens coloured by the intersection of the discourses mentioned above. Darfur became a region that was peopled by defenceless primitive Black African tribal villagers who were being massacred by hordes of marauding Arab ‘fanatics’ on horseback. It was a case of Tarzan’s Africa meeting Lawrence of Arabia’s lawless Arabs in the twenty-first century. Essentialised representations of ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’ have played an important part in shifting the focus away from alternative explanations, either by repeating the simplistic view that the conflict is principally racial and ethnic in nature or by forcing scholars always to address the question of why the conflict should not be viewed from such a one-dimensional and uncritical perspective. In either case, analyses tend to reify racial, ethnic and tribal identities as the central question of Darfur. As well as the older discourses, perceptions of the conflict in Darfur could not escape comparisons with the north-south civil war that had dominated news on Sudan for decades. That conflict had been widely portrayed as one fought between easily distinguishable and inherently hostile Arabs and Africans. Despite, the nuances of the north-south relationship that had been revealed by numerous studies, the notion that the north and south were reducible to clearly distinguished Arab and African identities was deeply entrenched in the popular consciousness. Just as the shapers of popular knowledge repeatedly brushed the scholarly explanations of the north-south conflict aside, Darfur’s complex history and politics were ignored in the race for the simplest or most politically expedient story of the violence overtaking that little-known region. This is why few in the West stopped to examine the situation in Darfur before placing it within

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the same north-south, Arab-African, Muslim-Christian framework that for so long had shaped perceptions of Sudan’s north-south conflict. Thus Darfur not only became ‘Rwanda in slow motion’12 but ‘southern Sudan speeded-up’.13 Darfur, seen as a case of on-going genocide, has also served the agenda of those supporting US interventionism, of one kind or another, including Harvard professor – and former foreign-affairs advisor to Barack Obama – Samantha Power. Power repeatedly wrote and lectured to the effect that an international effort was urgently needed to end the genocide in Darfur.14 In her advocacy of Darfur, she often referred to the past failure of the international community to prevent genocide in Rwanda. In doing so, Power worked within the prism of the popular view that the violence in Darfur was the result of a particular racial group acting to exterminate another.15 She largely ignored the complex political dimensions of the conflict and posed very little serious reflection on the causes of the conflict. While Power is neither a scholar of Sudanese politics or history, nor an analyst of the causes of conflict in Africa or the Greater Middle East, her unreflective representations of the conflict in Darfur have made their way into both popular perceptions and scholarly approaches to these topics. The problems that such scholarly shorthand creates are clear when all too often subsequent works repeat Power’s claims without effort to substantiate or critically reflect on them. In effect, despite conducting no independent research on Sudan or sustained investigation of the origins of the conflict, Power became an authority on Darfur. Over time, due to the position that Power held, both as an academic and as a political actor in the US, her views were widely circulated and amplified by a media searching for sound bites and superficialities to explain a complicated reality. Our collective understanding of the origins of the conflict in Darfur certainly suffered from this trend. While most academic studies of Darfur have shown an awareness of the complexity of identities in the region and treated any notion that the hostilities resulted from historic ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ antagonisms as problematic, others have not. Usman A. Tar, for example, in his study of the conflict in Darfur, argues that the causes can be located in ‘. . . the cumulative aftermaths of ages of conflict and confrontation

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between rival ethnic, religious and socio-economic groups in Western Sudan.’16 Tar’s analysis suffers as a result of this reliance on so-called historical tribal antagonisms and his work is not alone in this respect. Even though, many scholars have addressed the ‘constructedness’ of race, tribe and ethnicity and the complexities of the politics of identity in the Sudanese context, there still remains a trace of the cultural reductionism that Terry Eagleton warned against. The present author takes Eagleton’s warning about the way that cultural reductionism has infected the social sciences very seriously, and in examining the origins of a conflict which has had a huge human toll this study moves beyond both ‘culture’ and identity’, instead adopting a perspective that sees issues of race, ethnicity/tribalism and religion as representing one dimension of the struggle for access to, and control over, the Sudanese state. A second, but no less important, purpose of this book is to situate the explanation for the Darfur conflict in the much deeper crisis of the post-colonial state, of which, it is argued, the Sudan is an emblematic case.

2.3

Conceptualising the conflict in Darfur

As already argued, despite numerous efforts to dislodge the ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ representations of the Darfur conflict in both academic and popular literature, race and ethnicity still dominates descriptions of the antagonists. The scholarly material that engages with the fluidity and malleability of identities in the Darfur region goes some way to rescuing the narrative from cultural reductionism by demonstrating the ‘construction’ of racial and ethnic groups and the complexity of identity markers in the region. Nonetheless, there remain conceptual problems with the use of analytical categories such as ‘Arab’ and ‘African’, even when they are recognised as constructed. First, ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ have become reified as static categories and accepted as clearly definable boundaries between groups, even if is recognised that this has occurred through a process of historical formulation. There has been a widespread acceptance of these two descriptors in terms of racial and ethnic difference, as Western academic social science has described them, leading to a failure to conceptualise and

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problematise the meanings attributed to ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ by the people of Darfur and Sudan. For example, Ali Mazrui explains that in the historical relationship that was formed out of Islamic expansion, principally by Arab conquest, trade and migration across Africa, racial categories did not exist as they do today. According to Mazrui the ‘. . . term “Sudan”, meaning “Black ones”, carries no pejorative implications. That is why Africa’s largest country in territory (capital Khartoum) still proudly calls itself “Sudan” . . .’17 That these identities may carry meanings different to what is commonly held today is evident from a closer look at the usage of the term Arab during the pre-colonial period in Darfur. In this regard, R.S. O’Fahey explains that in the documents left by the Keira Sultanate often two conflicting meanings of the term ‘Arab’ are present. In some cases, O’Fahey suggests, ‘Arab’ was used to indicate genealogy, i.e. someone descended from ethnic Arabs, while at other times, O’Fahey argues, it is used by members of the Keira court to deride a person or group of people seen as uncivilised and uncouth.18 This suggests there should be a general wariness about ascribing identities such as Arab and African or assuming that the terms have universal meaning. Identities are complex notions to the say the least, and made all the more difficult to define because broad ethnic categories such as ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ are never fixed by space or time. Secondly, there is a widely-held assumption that the construction of identities in Darfur occurred prior to the outbreak of the present conflict. Sharif Harir’s study of the violence that ravaged Darfur in 1987–89 has been taken to illustrate that the ‘Arab’/’African’ dichotomy came into existence in the 1980s, pre-dating the outbreak of hostilities in 2003.19 But implicit in Harir’s representation of the events is that an ‘African’ identity was introduced into the Darfur region at a time when social relations were being overturned by drought and violence. This acceptance of the argument that identities were irrevocably reshaped by the dramatic changes the region experienced in the 1980s is important for a number of related reasons. First, despite awareness that identity formation was a reaction to political and economic changes taking place in the region, few analysts have asked how changes to the political and economic conditions from the 1980s onwards impacted on identities in the region.20 In particular, a number of the analyses of

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the origins of the conflict in Darfur have ignored the effect of the rise of the NIF and the subsequent power struggle within the ruling junta on identities in Darfur. These studies have assumed that the identity reformulation that occurred in the 1980s are sufficient for explaining the motivations or the character of the actors involved in the violence that erupted in 2003. A closer look at this issue may suggest that the situation is more complex. Karen Willemse’s study of gender and Islam, conducted in the 1990s in the town of Kabkibiya, due west of Darfur’s capital El Fasher, appears to challenge the notion of the existence of deep racial and ethnic divisions between the diverse population that inhabited Kabkibiya at the time.21 If anything, Willemse’s study found that the people she observed and interviewed in the town, regardless of the racial or ethnic identities they subjectively held, coexisted peacefully, often working together to face the challenges of living in a part of the world where a lack of employment and government services created demanding conditions. Willemse’s study also suggests that varying levels of support or opposition toward the Islamist government and the Islamisation policies it was forcing on the population. All in all, Willemse’s enlightened and enlightening research presents a picture of Darfur somewhat different to that in the academic work based on Harir’s analysis of racial and ethnic identities in the region during the late 1980s. It is not that Harir’s insights are inaccurate or lack acumen; in fact the opposite is the case. Rather, the problem that has arisen from this, is that a number of works have concluded that the identity formation and struggle that Harir described as having taken place in the 1980s offer an understanding of the group identities as they existed in Darfur at the time of the outbreak of animosities in 2003. As a result, the impact of the coming to power of the NIF in 1989 have either been overlooked or dismissed by many analyses. This means that analysts have on the whole, failed to examine the different political alignments that were consequently formed between the NIF and various actors and communities in Darfur. For example, there are strong indications that many of Darfur’s so-called ‘Africans’ embraced the government’s Islamist project of the 1990s in the hope of building what they believed would become a unified and reinvigorated Islamic

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state.22 As a part of this project, many of Sudan’s minorities believed the Islamist promise that Muslim identity would erase the inequalities that had become for many, inside and outside Sudan, a characteristic of the country’s system. The failure of the Islamist state to live up to these expectations may be seen as one cause of the realignments that occurred in Darfur in the late 1990s. Other political shifts occurred due to retribalisation and from the struggle for power within the NIF between supporters of President Omar al- Bashir and the prominent Hasan al-Turabi. Studies that have failed to assess the impact of these significant political events amidst a decade of Islamist government only present only a partial understanding of the causes of the conflict that broke out in 2003.23 Following from this point, it is clear that the dominant portrayal of the different groups in Darfur have been in terms of ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ identities, even though the NIF has emphasised the Islamic character of Sudan since 1989. The question of why rebels and janjawiid chose to emphasise ethnic and racial identities above religious, regional or national ones requires some level of explanation, apart from simple adherence to a putative ‘Arab’ or ‘African’ identity. It cannot merely be assumed that actors choose such distinctions, nor that they accept these distinctions when entering into political struggles, a point that Gunnar Haaland makes in relation to the different ethnic groups in Darfur, which he argues ‘. . . do not in themselves constitute corporate groups that act as “players” in the political “game” ’.24 Rather for Haaland, racial or ethnic identities that become politicised do so under pressure, and always in relation to other such identities. In many ways, racial and ethnic identities are markers of political struggles and provide guidance as to where cleavages exist. The question that remains is why such cleavages occur, and under what conditions do they become animated.

2.4 Post-colonialism and the context of international politics With decolonisation came opportunities for and threats to sovereignty in an international system dominated on the one hand by the US and on the other by the Soviet Union. The former colonies were thrown

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into a fractious and competitive international environment, with few resources and little diplomatic experience. The Cold War was far from ‘cold’ in the Third World, where the conflict between the US and Soviet Union was played out. In Latin America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa local conflicts for power were inflamed by the geo-political interests of the superpowers, which readily provided their Third World allies with sophisticated weaponry, logistical assistance and financial aid. Although we can agree with Makinda and Clapham, two long-time scholars of international relations, that the superpowers’ involvement in the Third World was more complex than simply external manipulation of internal or regional politics, the impact of the Americans’ and Soviets’ involvement was disastrous.25 Today, the weapons they provided are responsible for the majority of violent fatalities in the former Third World. It is remarkable that some 20 years after it ended, the Cold War continues to take lives in the poorest countries of the world.26 The Cold War and international alliances provided Third World governments, including some of the most heinous regimes, with the financial support and the international legitimacy necessary to survive. The long reign of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaïre is just one example of a dictator benefiting from being a partisan of the US in the Cold War conflict.27 Another beneficiary of such largesse was the Sudanese dictator Ja’afar Nimeri, whose support for the pro-Western forces fighting Ethiopia’s Marxist government, and also for the anti-Libyan armies in Chad, earned Sudan leniency from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and substantial US military aid in its own war against the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. The economic crisis of the 1970s, followed by structural-adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, placed further pressure on countries struggling from the dual demands of failing efforts at state- and nation-building. That Third World states, in almost every case, failed to construct viable institutional structures or social policies, or to invent a cohesive national identity, is not surprising in retrospect, even if the ensuing crisis was precipitated by the policies and actions of the most powerful actors in the international system, including the former colonial powers, the superpowers and IFIs, and

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the reactions and responses to those policies by post-colonial regimes. In the case of Africa, the crisis seems to be most acute and Sudan was one of the worst examples of the economic crisis that befell African states during the ‘lost-decade’. As one long-time scholar of African political economy has argued, In sum, what turned the crisis of Sub-Saharan Africa into tragedy, with disastrous consequences not only for the welfare of the people but also for their status in the world at large, was the region’s economic collapse of the 1980s.28 Walter Rodney adds, that to answer the question of what precipitated the African economic collapse just described, . . . one needs to know why it is that Africa has realized so little of its natural potential, and also one needs to know why so much of its present wealth goes to non-Africans who reside for the most part outside of the continent.29 Rodney places the African crisis in the context of the structural impediments that post-colonial states inherited from the colonial period and the failure of the state-building project of the 1960s and 1970s, which left many such countries indebted, and dependent on primary production in an increasingly competitive international environment. Debt, structural adjustment and the corruption that followed extinguished any meaningful efforts in state-building and left people everywhere to largely fend for themselves. With African states under financial strain and increasingly estranged from everyday affairs, people began to search for other forms of protection and, as John L. Comaroff argues, identities were reshaped by the new political and economic realities, since, Nothing is as likely to ensure that humans will assert (or invent) their differences than being made aware . . . of the indifference of the state to their predicament . . . Nor is it hard to understand why, when faced with such indifference, subordinate groups

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should stress their cultural distinctiveness in agitating against disempowerment.30 In the way just described, ethnic, racial and religious conflict in postcolonial settings, such as that occurring in Darfur becomes a symptom of a much larger international trend. The resurgence of racial and ethnic politics, whether in Darfur or elsewhere, far from being tribal atavism is a contemporary reaction to the disintegration of the postcolonial State. While much could be said on this topic, it is suffice to say at this moment, that this theme will be developed in subsequent chapters with Sudan, and more specifically Darfur, as the focus.

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CHAPTER 3 THE R ISE AND DEMISE OF THE KEIR A SULTANATE AND THE FOR M ATION OF SUDAN1

3.1

Introduction

Introducing Darfur is a difficult task. One problem, among many, is the question of where to begin writing a relevant history of the region. People have inhabited Darfur for at least two millennia, with Islamic influences apparent in the archaeological evidence from about 1000 years ago.2 Timothy Insoll identifies two dynasties that ruled Darfur from the Middle Ages onwards:3 the Daju from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, followed by the Tunjur from then until some time in the late sixteenth or seventeenth century. The Tunjur were followed in turn by a Fur dynasty, which emerged from the mountainous Jebel Marra region of central Darfur, and established the Keira Sultanate at some point around the mid-seventeenth century. For three hundred years the Keira expanded, consolidated and developed control over much of what today is modern Darfur. As for the precise date and event that led to the foundation of the Keira Sultanate, there is disagreement and uncertainty. After assessing the records of Fur chroniclers and of travellers who had visited the Sultanate, R.S. O’Fahey, whose work forms the most comprehensive

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historical record of the Keira Sultanate, has argued with ‘some confidence’ that its establishment dates from about the 1650s.4 The first Sultan, Sulayman Solungdungo (Fur, ‘of Arab, or reddish complexion’) rose to prominence by marrying into the Fur royal family.5 This precolonial history is rich and illuminating, but the question arises of where the past becomes relevant for an understanding of contemporary events. The colonial period provides a dividing line between Sudan as defined by its contemporary borders and power structure and the pre-colonial bilad al-Sudan, which comprised a number of independent polities, including acephalous societies, confederations of ethnic groups, kingdoms and centralised states such as the Keira Sultanate. But even if the colonial period defined the contours of modern Sudan, there is much to be learned from exploring the political, economic and cultural attributes of the pre-colonial state, as Peter Ekeh suggests: ‘Modern African politics are in a large measure a product of the colonial experience. Pre-colonial political structures were important in determining the response of various traditional political structures to colonial intervention.’6 Besides, showing the relevance of the past to contemporary events is always a somewhat arbitrary process, and it would seem that the history of the Keira period is a useful starting point for this study, for a number of reasons. First, the era of the Sultanate corresponds with the Islamisation and Arabisation of Darfur. Secondly, the present-day human geography of the region, of which much has been made, evolved during the reign of the Keira Sultans. Thirdly, it was during the second half of the era attributed to the Keira that Darfur was drawn into the politics of the eastern Sahel, which is key to understanding the present predicament of the region. Along with the question of ‘when’ one also has to deal with the difficulty of where to locate the study. Darfur is easy enough to find on the map – the region is the size of France. It not only shares borders with three other Sudanese provinces, Kordofan, Bahr a-Ghazal and Northern State, but also with three (or four if you include the newly formed Republic of the South Sudan) neighbouring countries: a long border with Chad to the west, Libya to the north and the

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Central African Republic to the south. Yet the map only tells part of the story, and other information is vital for understanding who the people of Darfur are and why there is conflict in the region today. Darfur sits at the crossroads of Africa, and has done so for centuries. Contemporary borders allude to a self-contained and separate region, but the opposite has been historically true. This chapter engages deeply with the way that Darfur was integrated into Islamic, African and international affairs, for it is the regional and international location of Darfur that helps to explain the events that have overtaken it in recent years. In addition, a number of common misperceptions of Darfur can also be addressed by examining the history of the region prior to colonial conquest. First, that Darfur was not anarchic – rather, the Sultanate ruled Darfur with many of the institutions and tools common to other absolute monarchies. Secondly, as mentioned above, Darfur was not isolated from the outside world but increasingly integrated into the dar al-Islam, and thus connected to other African Islamic states and societies, to Bornu-Kanem in the west, Tunis and Tripoli in the north, and Egypt in the east and north-east. Examining the rich history of Darfur’s relations with neighbouring states is important for dealing with a common misperception, namely that the region has withstood change for centuries. Thirdly, depictions of recent events in Darfur tend to presume that it has had no history beyond an endless cycle of violence between unchanging nomads and stagnant communities of subsistence farmers. Yet, there is a history of expansion, state-building and Islamisation which propelled the region into the politics of the Egyptian and British empires in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finally, an examination of how Darfur came to be a part of Sudan is important for forming an understanding of colonialism in the region and crucial for explaining the environment on which colonial Sudan was developed.

3.2 Darfur: the land and its people Darfur is comprised of three distinct environmental regions in which different, yet complementary, patterns of subsistence are still practised.

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In the north, there is a large area of semi-desert, occupied by groups which have predominately engaged in camel-based pastoralism7 and are primarily nomadic; these are known locally as Jamal (Arabic, ‘camel’). Gradually, as one moves south, the land becomes suitable for agricultural farming; with annual rainfall in this central zone exceeding 60 centimetres, it is where the sedentary rain-fed cultivators are located. Further south again is a wetter zone, where rainfall can reach 90 centimetres and where ‘cattle nomads’ (Arabic Baggara), are numerous, having existed semi-autonomously under the authority of the rulers in Darfur for many centuries. Sharif Harir describes the dominant forms of production in each of the climatic zones as follows: The central parts are dominated by farming communities, which produce the staple crop dukhun, i.e. bulrush millet, the southern parts by nomadic and semi-nomadic Baggara cattle herders, and the northern parts by camel herders. However, these systems are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, most of the production systems can be characterized as agro-pastoralists.8 That the Darfur region is characterised by a series of intersecting and overlapping lines of ethnic group interaction and economic production is a recurrent theme in the literature on Darfur, as O’Fahey and Spaulding point out: These geographically-defined patterns of subsistence do not correspond to any simple ethnic or linguistic boundaries, thus both Arabic and non-Arabic speaking peoples are to be found in all three zones, although Arabic speakers tend to dominate numerically in the camel and cattle nomad zones. Nor are the zones rigidly divided; the Fur (sedentary)/Bani Halba (cattle nomad) frontier along the Wadi Azum in western Darfur is stable, although there is considerable movement of Fur across the frontier for economic reasons. 9 Also, the literature on Darfur places an emphasis on the complexity of the ethnic and linguistic topography of human society in Darfur.

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Ethnicity, language, kinship and patterns of subsistence fail to fit into neatly defined categories. Unlike the tendency of colonial ethnography to privilege maps of Africa that neatly sub-divided regions into separate ‘tribes’, later anthropological work on the social groups that inhabit Darfur has clearly illustrated how complex and rich is the ethnic map of Darfur.10 An understanding of the overlapping and incongruous boundaries of ethnic groups, modes of production and kinship ties is suggestive of a historical tendency in the region towards group interdependence and symbiosis. The common translation of Darfur from the Arabic as ‘homeland of the Fur’ obscures the ethnic complexity of the region. The Fur as an ethnic group occupied a central position in the formation and expansion of the state in Darfur, but: ‘[As] the sultanate grew outwards and away from the Fur homelands . . . the distinction between Fur and nonFur blurred as the demands of the sultans fell upon all impartially.’11 In addition, the ethnic mosaic was further complicated by migratory movements, some temporary, such as the criss-crossing of Darfur by traders and pilgrims, and some more permanent. In fact, it is well established that ‘. . . by the eighteenth century most of the traders in the Dar Fur/Kordofan region and as far west as Wadai were Arabised Nubian Muslims from the Nile, mainly Ja’aliyin and Danaqla . . .’12 So, to complicate matters even further, the people that brought the Arab influences into Darfur were themselves Arabised. While the ethnic and cultural complexity of Darfur is far from insignificant, the more important theme for the moment is that of the assimilation of outsiders and the integration into the social structure of diverse groups by the Keira Sultanate.

3.3

The Keira Sultanate: at ‘the crossroads of Africa’

A.B. Theobald, writing in the 1960s, argued that it was actually the isolation of Darfur due to geography that contributed to its success and its ability to maintain a long history of independence. According to Theobald’s account, Darfur was inaccessible from the northern deserts, and in the south the existence of the tsetse fly created an impenetrable barrier to man and beast. In the east, a natural defensive line formed

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by extensive sand-hills (qoz) prevented the frequent traversing of this terrain by foreigners.13 However, historical evidence, as already noted, suggests that the contrary was the case. Theobald fails to account for the expansion of transcontinental trade that linked the east to the west and to North Africa, as well as the trade in the late Middle Ages that brought central African goods, especially slaves and ostrich feathers, to the Mediterranean.14 The region of Darfur is located at the crossroads between East and West Africa and for this reason can be seen as a ‘melting pot’ of diverse ethnicities and cultures. Darfur has been the stage on which travellers across the Sahel have interacted for centuries. The result of this travel and trade across Darfur from people originating in areas to its west and from the consistent ‘Arab’ movements from east and north has resulted in the formation of hybrid cultures across the region. While Darfur has traditionally been influenced by western African societies it has also over time become increasingly drawn to affairs to its east. Due to its location, Darfur has been, and remains, an important ‘watershed’ between East and West Africa and between sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. James Morton describes Darfur as: . . . a frontier between the ‘desert and the sown’; between the world of the nomad, who moves over a landscape with his animals and does not change it, and the world of the cultivator, whose activities inevitably lead to a permanent change in the shape of the land.’15 Also, the northern boundary of Darfur extends into the Sahara, which, while an imposing barrier, was still regularly traversed by merchants and Muslim holy men who brought Darfur into contact with the Maghreb. To Darfur’s south, the Keira Sultanate proffered goods for trade by sending raiding parties to the regions inhabited by non-Muslim communities. Darfur’s complexities as a cultural and economic watershed are important for developing an understanding of the social and political formations that evolved over time to accommodate both diversity and change.

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In earlier times, Muslims from West Africa travelling to Mecca for the sacred pilgrimage passed through the vast area of the Keira Sultanate on their way east, and those that successfully traversed the Sahel and the Levant to Arabia and back would pass through Darfur as part of their return journey.16 According to the map of the overland route, provided by J.S. Birks, West African pilgrims travelled through western Darfur, in particular through the south-west and across the traditional lands of the Rezeigat; ‘[T]his overland route has an important political, social, and economic impact on the societies through which the pilgrims pass.’17 Travellers and merchants from the east and north were also regular visitors to Darfur, and the history of the Keira Sultanate is replete with examples of Muslims crossing its lands and settling in the region under the auspices of the Sultan, leading to the gradual Islamisation of the region.18 Through extensive research into the decrees of the Sultanate, O’Fahey has documented land grants and judicial proceedings showing that the Sultan regularly integrated strangers into the kingdom.19 This characterised not only the Sultanate proper, but was common practice in the Sahelian region. The acceptance and accommodation of travellers across the Sahel served an important purpose for the Sultanate: as its organisational structure expanded, the Sultanate benefited politically and economically from incorporating outsiders who were literate, educated in Islamic law and dependent on the Sultan for their place in Darfuri society. This capacity for integration was not limited to the ruling strata, but occurred at numerous layers throughout Darfuri society. The Baggara of southern Darfur and Kordofan demonstrated an equivalent willingness to integrate and assimilate non-Baggara into their social structure. Ian Cunnison’s influential anthropological study of the Baggara explores, in some considerable detail, this tendency towards incorporating ‘strangers’; he describes the employment of Dinka herdsmen to tend the cattle of wealthy Baggara as an example of a temporary relationship between the Baggara and outsiders.20 In addition, Cunnison also provides evidence that total integration of outsiders was possible through intermarriage, which led to the acceptance and unreserved inclusion of Dinka, Nuba, Fur and other non-Baggara into

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Baggara society. Slaves also could become members of Baggara society, as Cunnison explains: At any time a slave could be freed by being declared freed by his owner. A slave was his owners ‘son’; a freed slave (atig) became a ‘brother’ . . . Once liberated, a male slave and his offspring were Arabs and full members of the surra and tribe.21 The most important point to note here is that regardless of the ethnic origins of the freed slave, the Baggara not only incorporated the new member into the social system but also totally assimilated the former slave into their culture. Frequent intermarriages combined with the assimilation of slaves illustrate the fluidity and flexibility of ethnic identities in the region. These examples emphasise that the tendency towards assimilation was a common trait evident amongst the people of Darfur during the Keira period.

3.4 Islam and the Keira Sultanate: assimilation and integration in Darfur through Islamisation Islam is a vitally important factor in understanding Darfuri society and the place of Darfur in the wider regional context.22 O’Fahey emphasises that the relationship between politics and religion in Darfur is one of religious subordination to the state, except for ‘times of stress or political upheaval’, when the religious leadership are able to exercise greatest authority.23 Islam has played an important role in the history of Darfur as a corollary of state-building and for defining identity in the region. There is a comprehensive literature attesting to the formation of Islamic societies in Africa out of the continual interaction between Islamic practices and beliefs, and those that existed in Africa prior to the introduction of Islam. This needs no rehearsal here.24 In these studies, the recurring theme has been the way that Islam coalesced with the traditional beliefs and practices to form many distinctive forms of African Islam. The history of Islam in Darfur is no exception to this rule – in fact, when assessed against the broader pattern

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of Islamisation in Africa it seems that Darfur is an archetype of this historical process.25 Darfur’s experience in terms of the spread of Islam shared numerous similarities with the pattern across much of West Africa and down the East African coast. One of the key elements of this expansion was that Islam spread gradually and more peacefully in Africa than elsewhere, as I.R Lapidus summarises in his excellent study of Islam: Whereas Islamic societies in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent were established by conquest and ordered by states, Islam in Africa was diffused by the migration of Muslim merchants, teachers and settlers.26 In Darfur, it was the royal family who first adopted Islam; again, as Lapidus and others have noted, it was not uncommon for Islam to be established among the rulers before diffusion through the rest of society. In time, the ruling elite of Darfur also embraced Islam, probably finding that there were clear advantages for those who practised the same religion as the Keira royalty. The spread beyond the ruling elite seems to have been more gradual as evidence points to a longer process of diffusion with many groups in Darfur only adopting Islam in the late eighteenth century and, according to some sources, it was possibly not until the nineteenth century before Islam developed into the religion of rulers and ruled alike.27 Dating the arrival of Islam to the Darfur region is difficult. The British colonial historian Arthur Robinson held that the first Arab tribes arrived in Darfur as far back as 641A.D.28 Ali Mazrui claims that the traditions that exist among groups in the region suggest a migration from Arabia into eastern Africa shortly after the death of the prophet Mohammed.29 The likelihood of Arab migrants travelling westward across the Sudan from the seventh and eight centuries is compelling; and reverse travel towards Arabia across Darfur occurred at least by the thirteenth century, as Islamic states took root in West Africa. There is even a probability that Muslim pilgrims from West Africa, undertaking the Hajj to Mecca, crossed Darfur even earlier. As

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a result of the early migration of Arabs from the east and the pilgrimage trail that passed either through or near Darfur from the west, the peoples of Darfur were more than likely exposed to Islam before the establishment of the Keira Sultanate. O’Fahey’s argument that the Sultanate was a revival of earlier Islamic states in Darfur, most notably the Tunjur and the Daju,30 points to Islamic influence in Darfur from the early Middle Ages at least, if not from an even earlier time. Thus, the relatively delayed expansion of Islam into this region is surprising, considering that Darfur lay at the crossroads between Islamic West Africa and the Arab east. Once adopted as the religion of state and not just the religion of the elite, Islamisation in Darfur was accelerated by deliberate state policy, and consolidated by assimilating itinerant holy men into the government apparatus, often with dual authority over religious and government affairs in the areas to which they were assigned.31 As a result, the Keira Sultanate was transformed both by the influence of Islam and by the accompanying spread of Arabic language and culture. Despite a deliberate government policy to encourage Islamic practices in Darfur, O’Fahey remarks that: The Islamization of the peoples of Darfur was a very uneven process . . . From nominal conversion, via the insinuation of Islamic practices or interpretations into traditional beliefs, to an acceptance of Islamic/Arabic culture represents an almost infinite gradation . . . 32 This uneven expansion of Islam – with its complementary Arabic language and culture – into Darfur can be explained in terms of a common pattern of Islamisation in Africa; the indigenisation or ‘Africanisation’ of Islam. Indigenous beliefs and customs, the historical context, so to say, in which Muslim preachers and teachers found themselves, had a profound affect on the Islamic culture that eventuated. Darfur was no different in this regard, with Islam during the era of the Sultanate remaining profoundly influenced by pre-Islamic indigenous beliefs and customs.33 Even so, the transformative influence of the Islamic push into Darfur cannot be underestimated.

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As noted, O’Fahey in particular has argued that at the beginning of the eighteenth century Islamic culture had yet to heavily influence the lives of the majority of the subjects of the Keira Sultanate. Nonetheless, Islam was important as it was a key component of the development of a centralised state bureaucracy, a legal code, a state ideology, and a basis on which diplomatic relations with neighbours could be undertaken. Islam and Arabic, through the literacy, learning and linkages beyond Darfur that it facilitated, provided the basis on which the Keira state was able to develop the institutions and norms on which, it seems, a highly efficient Islamic state was established. By the nineteenth century, even if Islamic practices in rural areas remained rudimentary, Darfur was a part of the dar al-Islam, and through trade, formal diplomatic exchanges with other Islamic states, and participation in the universal practices of Islam such as the Hajj and the sending of Darfuri students to Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the Keira Sultans consolidated Darfur’s connections with the wider Islamic world. In this way, Islam was a key part of the state building that accompanied the consolidation of the Keira Sultanate as the definitive political entity in Darfur. Islam also played an important role in promoting interdependence and cooperation through greater cultural assimilation of the disparate groups attached to the Sultanate. With respect to this point, Muddathir ‘Abd al-Rahim may be overstating the unity that resulted from the spread of Islam when he argues that Islam erased differences between the diverse social groups of the Northern Sudan.34 Nevertheless, his main point has merit. Islam, the chief motive force behind Arabisation, also cut across tribal frontiers and with strong emphasis on the brotherhood of all Muslims, irrespective of racial or linguistic differences cemented the Arabized sections of the population . . . uniting them with those sections of the populations who accepted Islam but were not likewise Arabized . . . 35 Islam may, as ‘Abd al-Rahman argues, have been the basis for the ruling power’s fostering of a shared culture, which it needed for further

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consolidating its rule over a region of great diversity and political decentralisation. But Islam did not necessarily erase other differences – whether political, geographical or material – as more recent events in Sudan will illustrate. That said, it must be noted that Islam was a part of the process of nation-building in Darfur that pre-dated the colonial and post-colonial political systems of more recent times.

3.5 The expansion of the Keira Sultanate: slave-trading and state-building The geographical expansion of the Keira Sultanate was inextricably linked to its increasing role as a key regional trader of slaves. 36 Longdistance trade was a central component of the success of the Sultanate, influencing the composition and politics of the government and its administration in a number of ways. First, slave-raiding necessitated the establishment and maintenance of a large and well-equipped military. This was not uncommon in Africa and, as Cooper points out slave-raiding ‘. . . is a very special sort of economic enterprise. Slaving is essentially stealing, but it is a social act-requiring military organisation to work on a significant scale.’37 Protecting its ill-gotten gains was a major consideration for the Sultanate which found its source of slave and other goods situated on the other side of the lands inhabited by the largely uncooperative and independent Baggara. Only the Sultanate possessed the means to maintain a military force large enough to ensure the protection of the bounty as it travelled through the lands of the Baggara and this meant that the slave trade, and the substantial revenues that accrued from it, was centrally coordinated and controlled by the state. Secondly, with the Sultanate’s interests so heavily invested in trade, and especially the slave trade, it was necessary to protect the long north-east trade routes to Egypt which the caravans of goods traversed. In particular, the famous darb al-arba’in (the ‘40-day road’) from Darfur to Egypt passed through regions beyond the control of the Keira Sultanate. To assure valuable goods were not lost, the Sultan endeavoured to further extend and the boundaries of the kingdom into the semi-arid and arid north and there consolidate them. With

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the expansion of their army, the Keira were able to conquer the surrounding regions and secure the northern and eastern borders, bringing disparate groups inhabiting the northern frontiers under direct political control. The result was the creation of a variegated ‘ethnic’ kingdom stretching from west of the Jebel Marra mountains north to the southerly limits of the Sahara, and eventually also encompassing Kordofan in the east.38 As mentioned, to the south of the Sultanate, were areas outside its direct control. It seems that the south remained unconquered despite the best efforts of successive Keira Sultans to subdue the Baggara. However, it can be construed that the considerable military strength of the Sultanate forced the Baggara into a more conciliatory position towards their more powerful neighbour as time passed. As the interests of both Keira and Baggara converged, and seemed to expand over time, there is evidence that a relationship formed that allowed mutually beneficial exchanges to develop.39 One of the chief methods of consolidating this relationship was by the marriage of prominent Keira and Baggara.40 With the geographical expansion of the Sultanate beyond the Jebel Marra came the relocation of the Sultan’s capital, from deep within Fur territory to an area bordering the lands of the Zaghawa, Beni Helba and other groups whose contribution became increasingly central to the success of the Sultanate. According to Sharif Harir, the Keira recognised the multi-ethnic identity of the Sultanate and endeavoured to assimilate other ethnic groups into the state: As the Sultanate gradually extended itself from the Jebel Marra massif, the vehicle for which had been a combination of affinal ties in which women crossed ethnic borders in marriages and thus cemented relations with the rulers and predatory expansion by military force, the Fur sultans brought into their orbit, as tributaries as well as incorporated territories, other ethnic groups.41 Also, the geography of the slave-trade affected the regional alignment of the Sultanate. The Keira initially focused on diplomatic

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relations with their western neighbour Wadai. But over time, as trade expanded – especially the lucrative relations with Egyptian merchants – the Sultanate redirected its diplomatic focus to the north and the east. The redirection of the Keira’s attention coincided with a time of political disarray in the east and this proved an opportune time for the Sultanate to expand its control over the lands between itself and the Nile. With this expansion, the power of Darfur reached its apogee as Kordofan was conquered in 1784–85 by the armies of Sultan Muhammad Tayrab.42 He led an invading army comprising his elite heavy cavalry, lightly-armoured horsemen drawn from the Baggara, a lightly-armed contingent of slaves, and detachments from vassals who owed allegiance or tribute to the Sultan. The ethnic mix of the army was emblematic of the diversity of Darfur, and its size symbolic of the power that the Sultan possessed. The Sultan’s army defeated the forces of the Sultan Hāshim, the Musabba’at ruler of Kordofan. With Kordofan now a part of the Sultanate, Muhammad Tayrab then set his sights on the territories of the Funj, located on the Nile. The invasion was abandoned with the death of the elderly Sultan at Omdurman (or possibly at Shendi), as each of those who aspired to inherit the Sultan’s title hastened back to Darfur to rally support in preparation for the struggle for the throne.43 If not for that untimely death, Darfur may have ruled the lands from west of El Fasher to present day Khartoum and may have been the dominant power on the Nile at the time of the Turko-Egyptian conquest. However, this was not to be and the power of the Keira remained firmly grounded in Darfur.

3.6 Trade and power: the pre-colonial economy of Darfur In the 1790s, the English traveller W.G Browne was the first European to publish an account of the Keira Sultanate. Browne’s account reveals that merchants from territories as far afield as Egypt, Tunis, Tripoli, Dongola, Nubia and Kordofan regularly visited Darfur.44 The most famous and the most lucrative trade route originating in Darfur was

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the aptly named darb al-arba’in (the 40-day road) which, as the name suggests, was a 40-day trip from Darfur to the markets of Egypt. The importance of this trade should not be underestimated as by ‘the mid19th century the sultanate supplied Egypt with 25% of its imports . . .’45 The extent of Darfur’s repute for providing slaves reached Napoleon Bonaparte, during his occupation of Alexandria and Cairo in 1798. At the time, Bonaparte is reported to have sent a request to the Keira Sultan ‘Abd al-Rahman for ‘. . . 2,000 black slaves over sixteen years old, strong and vigorous.’46 Under the Ottomans, and possibly even earlier, black slaves had been prized by the Egyptians, but in the nineteenth century they became even more valuable, as the Egyptian Khedive Muhammad ‘Ali (1769–1849) embarked on his modernisation programme. This programme included an increase in the size of the military, and the establishment of numerous labour-intensive agricultural and industrial projects, which together created a greater demand for slave labour.47 Other than slaves, goods such as ivory, tamarind, rhinoceros horn and ostrich feathers were also increasingly sought after as European markets for exotic goods expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In return, the Sultanate imported spices, soap, fine cloth, jewellery and military equipment.48 And while Egypt was an important source of consumer goods and arms, it was also the ‘highway for the transmission of books, students and scholars travelling in both ways.’49 Regardless of the demand in Egypt and other North African kingdoms for luxury goods such as ostrich feathers and ivory, it was only the Sultanate’s capacity to continue to deliver a large number of slaves that ensured Darfur remained an important part of African trade into the nineteenth century. The early years of the nineteenth century were a period of strength for Darfur as strong trade relations with Egypt, control over Kordofan and a weakened Funj state in the east provided the conditions for the pre-eminence of the Keira Sultanate in the eastern Sahel. The level of trade between Darfur and its northern neighbours is difficult to estimate, but Browne believes that the Sultan’s caravans carried ‘an annual total of over’ £100,000-worth of goods to Egypt.50 This wealth allowed the Sultanate to equip and sustain a large standing army comprising

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both heavily-armoured horseman, known as fursan (Arabic, ‘knights’), and lightly-armed slaves.51 As importantly, this wealth allowed the Sultan to build and maintain a large civil administration under his authority. One of the results of the state control over long-distance trade was that it prevented the emergence of an independent merchant class as well as allowing the Sultanate to maintain independence from estate-holders and the aristocracy more generally. It was due to the wealth that accrued from dominating trade that allowed the Sultans to centralise state power so effectively. Another of the fundamentals on which the stability and success of the Sultanate was based was its control over the land-tenure system, known locally as hakura.52 The basic elements of the hakura system resemble, in some notable ways, the feudal system of Europe, with land titles granted by the Keira Sultans to members of the royal family and aristocracy. O’Fahey has cautioned against viewing hakura in this way, even if the system in Darfur possessed some similarities with feudalism in Europe, preferring to see it as a system which evolved to meet the particular needs of the Sultanate’s expansion and dominion over diverse communities across Darfur. The extent that hakura differed from European feudalism is a matter of debate but in relation to who controlled land it could be said the situation in Darfur resembled feudalism when land holdings, . . . were never freehold or in any way absolute in any AngloAmerican legal sense. All such grants were given and could be taken away at the behest of the sultan; eminent domain applied in Darfur as elsewhere. The sultan was the state.53 Hakura, thus, operated on the basis of communal tenure, with access to the land allocated to a designated group. Usufructury land-use fell to individual members of the community, who would be expected to cultivate the land or it would be considered unoccupied and free for reallocation.54 Sedentary groups, especially those located in the heartland of the Sultanate benefited most from the hakura system. However, as O’Fahey explains, this was not designed as a system to advantage one or some ethnic groups over others. Rather it was a necessary

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component of state-building and ensuring the loyalty of the population to the Sultanate and as a way of effectively managing human and natural resources and of preventing disputes over land. Pastoral groups were also included within this system and it appears that land management accorded nomadic groups access and protections as well. In addition, the Sultan’s absolute control of land allocations provided him with the leverage necessary to control the aristocracy. Successive Sultans utilised that control to sanction or eradicate real or potential political opponents, and to consolidate alliances with leading notables. Land was a powerful mechanism of control, which successive Sultans employed to their advantage. Interestingly, there is also evidence that the system of land control in Darfur changed as time progressed. As the Sultanate’s power waned in the late nineteenth century its ability to control land allocations seems to have weakened. According to Alex de Waal, hakura had evolved into a system of freehold tenure at the time of the colonial conquest of Darfur, where land had become ‘a valuable commodity and hakura owners were wealthy and prestigious.’55 Thus, ownership and control over land had changed from earlier times and rather than it being unchanged traditional practice as commonly assumed, it was the colonial government that resumed the practice of basing tenure on usufruct land-rights assigned to tribal chiefs. This is another example why it is a mistake to view the hakura system, or any other aspect of Darfur, as somehow static. The local economy also benefited from the stability that came from the integration of diverse groups into the Sultanate. The economic ties forged between camel nomads and sedentary farmers were particularly important for maintaining balance in the region. Haaland’s study of ethnicity in Darfur illustrated that the patterns of interdependence in Darfur between nomadic groups and sedentary-farming communities were extensive and that these groups had once forged strong ties across extremely fluid ethnic boundaries.56 In the examination of ethnicity by the eminent anthropologist F. Barth, he found that, Perhaps the most striking case is that from Darfur provided by Haaland which shows members of the hoe-agricultural Fur

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of the Sudan changing their identity to that of nomadic cattle Arabs. This process is conditional on a very specific economic circumstance: the absence of investment opportunities for capital in the village economy of the Fur in contrast to the possibilities among the nomads.57 Ian Cunnison’s study, mentioned earlier, also identified the extent of coexistence and cooperation between sedentary-farming communities and nomadic groups, which he defined as symbiotic.58 One salient example of this symbiosis at work was the relationship formed between Darfur’s camel herders and sedentary-farming communities. Cunnison described how during the dry season the camel herders travelled south in search of water and pastures. He further explained how over time, the farming communities and the nomads developed robust patterns of cooperation based on economic needs. The farmers allowed the nomad’s animals to graze on the weeds and grasses found in the fallow fields and provided access to water, and in exchange the animals manured the fields. According to Cunnison, the owners of the animals would barter meat and milk products for grain and vegetables thus further cementing the relationship between farmers and pastoralists. While the bonds between the different economic communities in Darfur, formed out of the economic interdependence and intermarriage facilitated by the Sultanate were strong, disputes over access to land and water did arise. This is clear from judicial and other records, now available, dating from the time of the Keira59, which as much as anything else, illustrate that a strong centralised juridical authority was crucial for maintaining stability and security in the region: a fact which should not be lost in relation to the origins of the current conflict in Darfur.

3.7

The decline and conquest of the Keira Sultanate

The Keira Sultanate’s dominance of the eastern Sudan lasted until the Egyptian expansion into Africa brought a stronger power into the region. In the early part of the 1820s, the Egyptian ruler Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha, driven by promises of riches and resources to be found

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elsewhere in Africa, sent his son Isma’il Pasha to conquer the bilad al-Sudan.60 In quick succession, Isma’il conquered both Dongola and Sennar and was in control of the Funj Sultanate by June 1821.61 However, the conquest of Darfur was not as simple a matter as the subjugation of the Nilotic Sudan. Darfur’s location some 700 miles to the west of Sennar was one reason why it proved a greater challenge than the Funj. Even if Darfur was not conquered by Isma’il’s forces, it didn’t entirely escape the Egyptian expansion into the bilad al-Sudan at this time. Soon after his initial successes in the Sudan, Isma’il divided his armies and sent an expeditionary force with 3000–4000 troops to conquer Darfur.62 On hearing of the invasion, the Sultan Muhammad al-Fadl (1803–38/39) dispatched his troops to join with a force organised by the governor of Kordofan, the Maqdum Musallim, to face the invaders. The two armies met at Bara in eastern Kordofan, where the superior fire-power of the Ottoman forces crushed the Sultan’s army. Muhammad al-Fadl sent a second army to face the invaders, but Kordafan was lost when that army was similarly destroyed. Despite these victories, and the occupation of Kordofan, Darfur for at least 50 years remained beyond the reach of Turko-Egyptian conquest, even after the region was assigned to Muhammad Ali Pasha by the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Majid.63 The loss of the Kordofan region to the Turko-Egyptian invaders was a setback from which the Sultanate never fully recovered, and which over time seriously weakened the state.64 Not only had the Sultanate lost control of a vast area, and of the wealth and military manpower it contributed, but also for the first time in Darfur’s modern history a more powerful neighbour threatened its position as the dominant political and military entity in the region. Not long after the Turko-Egyptian expansion into Sudan, Darfur’s trade with Egypt in products procured from sub-Saharan Africa came under direct threat from the stronger forces of the invaders. Some blame for the deterioration of trade relations with Egypt rests with the Sultan, who retaliated to the defeat at Bara by denying Egyptian merchants access to markets in Darfur, so that by the late 1830s it was being reported that caravans from Darfur had all but stopped travelling to

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Egypt.65 When this policy was eventually reversed and trade recommenced, the Sultanate was no longer able to supply Egyptian markets in the same way as it had before the Turko-Egyptian expansion into areas formerly dominated by the Sultanate. As it turned out, the intrusion of a foreign power into its area of influence came about as a result of the ambitions of the Ja’ali merchant al-Zubayr Rahman Mansour, rather than the direct actions of the Egyptian Khedive. By the 1870s al-Zubayr had created for himself a massive slave empire that stretched from present-day South Sudan into what are today Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic. Al-Zubayr’s slave-raiding initially relied on securing the help and expertise of the Baggara from southern Kordofan and Darfur. However, this alliance was short-lived, as al-Zubayr’s ambitions to secure the entire trade for himself forced him to abandon the Baggara.66 In 1874, al-Zubayr began his campaign by conquering the Baggara, before turning his attention to the Keira Sultanate. The Baggara may have been difficult opponents, but al-Zubayr must have realised that the size and military might of the Keira Sultanate was another matter altogether, and to help him overrun Darfur he enlisted the aid of the governor of Kordofan, Isma’il Ayyub Pasha. When the armies finally met at the Battle of Manawashi in southern Darfur during October 1874, the Sultan Ibrahim and his elder brother were both killed as the Sultan’s heavily-armed knights and spear-carrying infantry were obliterated by al-Zubayr’s rifle-bearing bazingers.67 Al-Zubayr’s justification for invading Darfur is said to have been due to his belief that it was his Muslim responsibility to eliminate the distorted Islamic practices typical of the region by incorporating it into the dar al-Islam of the Ottoman Empire.68 Whether al-Zubayr believed in the religious mission he described or not, the final incorporation of Darfur into the Empire was in no way incidental to Turko-Egyptian plans, as shown by the request by Muhammad ‘Ali for a ferman in 1841. As it turned out, despite Al-Zubayr’s efforts, he never ruled Darfur. For a nervous Egyptian Khedive promptly recalled him to Cairo, fearing al-Zubayr’s growing power had become a danger he could not ignore.

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3.8 The Turko-Egyptian occupation, 1874–98 As history often shows, the ease with which a people are conquered does not necessarily translate into a trouble-free occupation. In this regard the Turko-Egyptian administration was no different, and ran into a number of problems in trying to rule over Darfur. Generally speaking, a lack of legitimacy combined with the continued existence of heirs to the throne of the Sultanate would have been enough to ensure that the Turko-Egyptian rulers struggled to enforce their control. However, in this case, their situation became even more difficult, as an economic crisis in Cairo translated into political turmoil and resulted in the Anglo-French intervention of 1876. With few resources and very little legitimacy, governing any region, let alone one in constant revolt, proved impossible. Turko-Egyptian authority in Darfur at the best of times was very restricted – most likely, Theobald remarks, to not much more than El Fasher.69 Due to the widespread lawlessness and anarchy, this period is still known in Darfur, as the ‘years of banditry.’70 It seems that Darfur experienced the most negative affects of poor administration at a time when the Turko-Egyptian government in Cairo was collapsing under the pressure of a huge foreign debt and the Anglo-French violation of Egyptian sovereignty. It is important to place the Turko-Egyptian rule over Sudan in the context of Egypt’s growing economic indebtedness to Britain and France, and the political instability that economic problems caused for successive Egyptian rulers, from the 1840s onwards.71 While the period of Turko-Egyptian domination of Sudan was depicted as a period of severe economic decline and famine by colonial historians,72 there is a now a body of revisionist history that questions the accuracy of the British portrayal of the Turko-Egyptian administration as an era only of brutality and ruin.73 Undoubtedly, there was maladministration and the forced extraction of resources from the local people, but overall the economic performance and the development of the Sudanese regions under TurkoEgyptian rule varied. Muhammad ‘Ali’s expectations that the lands of Sudan would provide a cheap source of gold and labour from which he

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could finance the expansion of his military proved to be a huge miscalculation. The result of his endeavour proved disappointing: rather than finding that wealth, ‘. . . the whole of the Turkiyya witnessed attempts by Egypt to make its southern Empire profitable.’74 Turko-Egyptian expansion into Sudan led to an increase in the gum trade, live cattle exports and the sale of hides. In addition, the introduction of cash crops such as sugar, coffee and indigo stimulated the economy in certain areas. The failure of industrialisation projects was somewhat mitigated by the successful expansion of the export trade in gum arabic. As British and French influence in Egypt increased during the 1800s, European merchant capital began to take an interest in Turko-Egyptian Sudan. In 1843, the last state monopoly in Sudan was abolished, under pressure from Britain. Trade expanded so that by ‘. . . 1879 annual exports from Suakin had a declared value of £E254, 000 and in 1880 some 758 vessels were said to have called.’75 Alongside the Turko-Egyptian administration’s efforts at economic development in Sudan, infrastructural projects were inaugurated, including the construction of the telegraph, which by 1880 extended to some 3000 miles of line. There was an expansion of the land along the Nile under cultivation which led to a greater quantity of agricultural produce available for sale at markets. Trade led to the expansion of the port at Suakin and loading stations were constructed along the Nile to support the transportation of goods from Sudan to Egypt.76 All together, these statistics point to a more complex assessment of Turko-Egyptian rule over the Sudanese region than the onedimensional depictions relayed by colonial historians, who focused on slavery and taxation to compose a very negative depiction of the Turko-Egyptian period. British designs for Sudan and late-nineteenthcentury Victorian egoism, combined with the British belief in the ‘white man’s burden’, ensured the Turko-Egyptian period received only the harshest assessment from historians. The stimulation of trade and limited development are part of the assessment of the Turko-Egyptian legacy in Sudan, but are less significant for understanding Darfur’s experience under foreign rule which occurred at a time of impending political crisis in Egypt and the weakening of the Turko-Egyptian hold on Sudan.

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3.9 The defeat of the Turko-Egyptian regime: the Mahdiyya in Darfur General Charles George Gordon, whose death at Khartoum in 1885 forms the basis of an entire mythology concerning the savagery and fanaticism of Mahdism, went to Darfur in 1878, as Governor-General of the Turko-Egyptian Sudanese Administration, to quell a serious uprising. Gordon was unable to restore order in Darfur before he was summoned to face equally serious disturbances in the east of the Turko-Egyptian Sudan.77 Events rapidly overtook him, and before long not even the hero of Changzhou was able to prevent the overthrow of Turko-Egyptian rule in Sudan. The causes of the Mahdist revolt remain the subject of ongoing debate.78 The long-held consensus has viewed the events as a widespread rebellion in reaction to Turko-Egyptian exploitation exacerbated by Sudanese opposition to the crusade against slavery. General Gordon himself took a similar view; while at Cairo en route to Khartoum he said he was ‘convinced that it is an entire mistake to regard the Mahdi as in any sense a religious leader: he personifies popular discontent.’79 The religious dimension to the uprising cannot be completely dismissed, in the way that Gordon did, as it was the strength of their faith in the Mahdi that inspired so many people from Darfur and elsewhere in northern Sudan to join the rebellion. Nevertheless, some level of popular discontent with the Turko-Egyptian rulers cannot be ruled out either, as Samir Amin explains: ‘The Mahdist revolt, 1881–98, was a rebellion of those oppressed . . . the people of the village communities, the slave-peasants of the estates and the craftsmen, slavers and beggars of the market towns.’80 The intensity of the rebellion across the Sudan emphasised the discontent felt in those areas that had come under the domination of the Turko-Egyptian regime. As mentioned, it was the Mahdist movement’s Islamic character that proved so powerful in mobilising and uniting the various groups across a region of such great diversity. Yet, in the historical context, it is difficult to disconnect the analysis of the Turko-Egyptian politico-economic system in Sudan from the debt crisis that gripped Egypt in the 1870s.81 The impressive industrialisation

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project that had been undertaken by Muhammad ‘Ali in the first half of the nineteenth century came undone in the following half, as Egyptian debt to British and French creditors provided the basis, if not the motive, for British interference in and control of Egypt.82 Markets were opened to cheaper British manufactures, and the Egyptian economy was forced to reorient itself towards the production and export of cotton to service the textile factories of Lancashire.83 To meet the accrued debts, the Egyptian Khedive turned to harsh taxation and the exploitation of labour and natural resources. But pressure on the administration of Sudan to extract more taxation was one side of the Turko-Egyptian legacy; the other was that the fiscal problems faced by the rulers prevented the continuation of the economic development commenced in the first half of the nineteenth century. Projects such as the Egyptian-Sudan railway, the telegraph lines linking Egypt with Sudan, the nascent industrialisation and the expansion of agricultural production were curtailed as funds dried up, leaving the Sudanese to the oppression and exploitation of the Turko-Egyptians’ state, without any tangible benefits. In Darfur, where revolts had been commonplace, little prompting was needed to bring the entire region over to the Mahdi. When news reached Darfur that the British officer William Hicks and his entire army had been annihilated at Shaykan, just south of El Obeid in Kordofan, the Turko-Egyptian governor of Darfur, the Austrian Rudolph Slatin, promptly submitted to a subordinate of his, Muhammad Khalid, who happened to be a cousin of the Mahdi.84 With the vast and populous western provinces secure, the Mahdi and his army of Ansar (Arabic: ‘followers’, ‘supporters’) overran the entire country, rapidly reducing the foreign presence to a small force holding out in Khartoum under Gordon’s leadership. Even this remnant of the Turko-Egyptian African force was destroyed when Khartoum fell to the Mahdi’s forces in the early hours of 26 January 1885.85 Not long after he had led his forces into Khartoum the Mahdi died; he was succeeded by the ‘Abdallahi ibn Muhammad of the Ta’aisha group from southern Darfur.86 With the death of the Mahdi, the ideology behind the movement was replaced by practical considerations grounded in the consolidation

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of power. The change in leadership was not an upheaval, for as Holt and Daly argue, even before the death of the Mahdi ‘. . . a large part of the substance of power was already held by the Khalifa ‘Abdallahi’.87 Holt and Daly also explain the transition from the Mahdiyya to the Khalifat as ‘. . . the passing of the Mahdist theocracy and the creation of a personal rule exercised through a bureaucracy, largely composed of Sudanese civil servants inherited from the Turko-Egyptian regime.’88 Despite this shift from expansion to consolidation, the Mahdist state found itself facing enemies from all directions. The Mahdists held successive campaigns, against the Turko-Egyptian forces in 1885–87, rebels from Darfur in 1887–89, the Italians in 1893–94, the Belgians in 1894 and the Anglo-Egyptian invaders in 1895. This continuous condition of war played a large part in determining the political and economic structure of the Mahdist state. Norman O’Neill explains that it was the military requirements of the state which took priority and as a result, . . . increased trade, prompted by a war economy that had stimulated the manufacture of gun-powder and cartridges, boots, shoes and clothing . . . in addition to spears, swords and saddles, did serve to transform relations of the production, and led to the introduction of a national currency.89 If warfare had some positive effect on the development of a manufacturing sector in Sudan, it severely debilitated the rural areas. The combined ravages of the Mahdist uprising and the heavy taxation of the last years under Turko-Egyptian rule had seriously impacted on the economy. The end of the uprising should have provided the respite needed for the Sudanese peasantry to return to their fields and rebuild the shattered rural economy; instead, more warfare only served to force already weary peasants into further military service, depriving agriculture of labour at a crucial juncture. In Darfur, the situation was even more dire. Rebellion and unrest against what was perceived as foreign rule brought further insecurity to the region. The stationing of 36,000 Maydiyya soldiers in Darfur to deal with a succession of rebellions only added to the pressure on

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the food supply during this period. Ultimately, the region paid the cost of garrisoning such a large force. Lidwiens Kaptejins remarks that the impact on Darfur was oppressive as soldiers ‘. . . ate, drank, wore or stole’ everything they could find.90 The result was the outbreak of severe famines which even today are remembered as a period of ruin, and in the folklore of the people of Darfur the ‘famine of 1888–92 [remains] possibly the worst ever’.91 This severe famine corresponded with a major uprising in Darfur. In 1887, Yusuf Ibrahim, a son of the last Sultan of Darfur, rose up in rebellion against the Khalifat. The rebellion forced the Khalifa to transfer forces to Darfur to deal with the uprising, which wasn’t finally defeated until almost a year after it had broken out. Another more dangerous revolt was led by a faki, Abu Jammayza, who was originally from Dar Masalit, west of El Fasher.92 The ‘shadow sultan’ Abu’l- Khayrat promptly attached himself and his supporters to the movement, and the combined forces of disaffected groups from Darfur won two notable victories against the Khalifat. However, the death of Abu Jammayza from smallpox deprived the advancing army of its spiritual leader, and on 22 February 1989 the rebellion was defeated just outside El Fasher. Rebellions continued to flare up with regularity, but the death of Abu Jammayza and the defeat of the movement he inspired was the last significant threat to the Khalifa’s rule in Darfur. Theobald argues that, whilst the defeat of the Abu Jammayza revolt brought ‘some peace’ to the central parts of Darfur, the north, south and west remained autonomous areas beyond the Khalifat’s authority.93 The Khalifat failed to create the legitimacy or popular support in Darfur that had characterised the rule of the Keira Sultans. Even 25 years of foreign rule failed to extinguish the memory of the Sultanate or the loyalty that was felt towards it. When Sudanese elites mythologise the Mahdiyya movement as the first nationalist movement in modern Sudanese history, they tend to ignore that there were repeated struggles in Darfur for a return to independent rule. The rapid dissolution of the Mahdiyya, and the restoration of the Sultanate, provides further evidence that, at least in Darfur, there was little if any in the way of Sudanese nationalist sentiment in the late nineteenth century.

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The restitution of the Sultanate under ‘Ali Dinar and the British conquest of the Sultanate

In 1898, Anglo-Egyptian ambitions for the conquest of the Sudan excluded Darfur. The invaders, under the leadership of the Sirdar Herbert Kitchener, occupied Khartoum and Omdurman, and extended their control further south along the Nile into the regions occupied by the Nuer, Shilluk, Dinka and other southern groups. To the west of Khartoum, El Obeid was occupied, and for the time being the boundary separating Kordofan from Darfur became the westernmost point of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. At this initial stage of British expansion into the Sudan, Darfur was distant and unimportant, and thus fell beyond Kitchener’s mandate. When the question of Darfur was first raised by Kitchener’s successor, the British Consul-General in Egypt, Lord Cromer made it very clear that the conquest of Darfur was unwarranted because ‘. . . the administration of Darfur from Khartoum would be costly, useless and inefficient . . .’94 At this time, it is clear that British interests were principally concerned with the security of the Nile and especially aimed at preventing French expansion into the southern Sudan. In terms of British geo-strategic policy, Darfur was considered of no importance in relation to either of these goals. With the Anglo-Egyptian victory at Omdurman, the Mahdist state crumbled, and in Darfur it took little time for the Keira Sultanate to re-establish itself. ‘Ali Dinar became Sultan in 1898, but little is known of his life before he ascended to the throne. What is better known is that once he returned to El Fasher he had little trouble in restoring the authority of the Sultanate over the territories it had formerly ruled, and all the evidence points to the first decade of ‘Ali Dinar’s reign passing with few serious difficulties, until the French encroachment in 1909. One small issue that caused Dinar some unease was the independence of the Baggara in the southern borderlands of Darfur. On numerous occasions, Dinar ordered his military to punish them, but the military proved unable to subjugate them completely.95 The Baggara were a nuisance, but in no sense endangered the Sultanate in the same way as the French conquest in 1909

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of Wadai and the minor border kingdoms of Dar Tama, Dar Masalit, Dar Gimr and Dar Sila.96 The French conquest of these smaller border kingdoms was illustrative of the effect that the European scramble for Africa had on the alignments and affiliations that had evolved over time. The peoples of Tama, Masalit, Gimr and Sila had occupied the territory between Wadai and Darfur and had formed kinship relations through intermarriage with the ruling families from both of the Sultanates. These smaller Sultanates concluded different treaties of rights and obligations with the larger and more powerful Sultanates that flanked them. The French conquest placed these smaller kingdoms within the newly formed colonial state known as the French Soudan effectively severing the relations that had tied this region together. ‘Ali Dinar disputed the French annexation of these territories, and sought British intervention to force the French to relinquish their recent conquests. Subsequently, the British and French, who by this time had become allies in Europe, agreed to discuss the issues raised by Dinar, but the British prevented him from sending a representative to speak on his behalf. Similarly, the French denied the peoples they had conquered a right to be represented at the negotiations, scheduled for August 1914. Events intervened to postpone the meetings on the future of these disputed territories, and by the time that Dinar’s claims could have been heard, the British had killed him and Darfur had been incorporated into Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The issue of the boundary between Darfur and the French Soudan waited another 20 years before being decided.

3.11

The final stand of the last Keira Sultan

The outbreak of the First World War precipitated a change in the relationship between the British and the Sultan of Darfur. Holt and Daly offer a perspective that places the responsibility for the British decision to invade Darfur on ‘Ali Dinar: With the Anglo-French alliance in the First World War, ‘Ali Dinar’s posture towards the Sudan Government became more

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belligerent, and the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the war and the consequent deposition by the British of the Egyptian khedive, convinced ‘Ali Dinar that he must join the jihad against the infidel Europeans.97 But, the records, some of which Holt and Daly rely on provide a basis for interpreting events differently. With the outbreak of the First World War, it seems that Dinar sensed the threat of a British invasion and on 6 December 1914 sent a clear message to Wingate designed to alleviate any British fears that Darfur would act to destabilise the region. The message stated: ‘We have received your letters of 12 November, 1914, the first of which says that war has broken out between you and the Turks . . . we are not interested in the war and what is happening in it.’98 In May 1915 Wingate replied to ‘Ali Dinar with assurances that the British had no intention of invading Darfur. Initial exchanges between Darfur and Khartoum suggested that the war would not dramatically alter the existing relationship. However, only two months later, on 11 July, Wingate announced a change in policy, deciding that it was inevitable that the British would have to act – to conquer Darfur and incorporate it into Sudan. One possible precipitant for this change of mind was not Dinar, but Wingate’s fears of a further French advance into Darfur.99 Looking back on the events as they occurred almost a century ago, it seems just as likely that Dinar was not the aggressor but reacting to provocation originating within the borders of the Condominium. The provocateurs were a nomadic tribe known as the Kabbabish. This tribe was located in northern Kordofan yet they had regularly crossed into Darfur as part of their nomadic cycle. In the time of the Sultanate, their actions were regulated by the state, and they passed through Darfur with little trouble. With the arrival of the Condominium, however, they soon realised that a new set of power relations existed in the region, and that this could be put to use for their benefit. The Kabbabish, ‘comparatively few in number and poor in animals’, had traditionally ended their journey in Darfur peacefully, but with the changes that resulted from new regional power relations

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began to mount raids for livestock and food, because they understood that the border prevented ‘Ali Dinar’s troops from pursuing them.100 Dinar’s protestations to Wingate to force the Kabbabish to cease these illegal activities fell on deaf ears. ‘Ali Dinar’s trusted general, Khalil ‘Abd ar-Rahman was determined to take matters into his own hands, and pursued the intruders into British-controlled Kordofan. On one occasion in 1915, the Darfuri pursuit of the fleeing nomads into Kordofan almost caused a major incident with the Anglo-Egyptian administration, and in the following year, when another such incident occurred, Wingate proclaimed it time to bring Dinar to heel. The actual reasons for Wingate’s decision to conquer Darfur may be uncertain but his public justification for launching an invasion, as so often happens, was based on security concerns. Lieutenant-Colonel V.P Kelly was entrusted with the conquest of Darfur. Before setting off, the British prepared the ground by seeking to enlist the support of Darfur’s nomadic herders against Dinar; and the Baggara needed very little persuasion to join the offensive. Most other groups were not so persuaded, however, and sent troops to help in the Sultanate’s defence against the invaders. With this loyal response, ‘Ali Dinar was able to muster a force twice the size of his adversary’s, with 800 regular cavalry and 3000 regular infantry.101 Kelly’s main concern, it seemed, was not the strength of his enemy, but the shortage of water over the vast terrain to be traversed by the Anglo-Sudanese army before it could reach El Fasher and come face to face with Dinar’s forces. Kelly and his troops reached the outskirts of the town in May 1916 without having had to fight a major action. ‘Ali Dinar concentrated his troops there and on 23 May the two armies met in a battle that left the Sultanate’s forces in disarray. Dinar fled and Kelly entered El Fasher to claim Darfur for the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. On 5 November of the same year, ‘Ali Dinar was located in western Darfur by an expeditionary force commanded by a Major Huddleston, and after a short skirmish was shot dead. The death of Dinar and the occupation of El Fasher signalled the passing of the Keira Sultanate and the demise of the independent state of Darfur. At this moment, modern Sudan as it has come to be known was established.

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Conclusion

The scramble for Africa which commenced in earnest in 1885 had spared Darfur until 1916, but in the shadow of the First World War the ambitions of the Sudanese governor for just one more piece of territory ensured the end of independence for Darfur, and the passing of the Keira Sultanate also marked the end of 300 years of state-building there. The fortunes of Darfur were now tied to Khartoum, and to London and Cairo, in a more pervasive way than ever before. On occupying Darfur, British civil officials accompanying the army found to their surprise that Darfur was not a state in anarchy. What became clear, even if not widely known, was that Wingate’s denunciations of ‘Ali Dinar’s government as brutal and backward were an unfair misrepresentation, invented to provide additional justification for the invasion. British administrator H.A. MacMichael arrived in El Fasher in 1917, shortly after the conquest of Darfur, and commented on the splendour of the royal palace and the efficiency of the Sultan’s clerical staff, concluding: The more I see and understand of the system on which this country was run do I pay grudging respect to Ali Dinar. It is no small thing to have kept it in entire subjugation, paying its taxes, never revolting (the Rezeigat were really outside the administrative scope all along), and obeying the ruler’s smallest behest, for all these years.102 Darfur’s history as an independent Islamic state had little bearing on decisions about its incorporation into the Sudan. The inclusion of Darfur into the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was never debated, because no other alternative suggested itself. Darfur’s history as a distinct and successful polity had no influence on the ‘manufacturers of states’ in London, whose concerns were with imperial rivalries and efficient administration. In attaching Darfur to the rest of the AngloEgyptian Condominium the colonial rulers laid the foundations for the creation of a state that comprised at least two pre-colonial political entities, which had been ‘. . . strongly independent and even hostile

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toward one another, as is witnessed by offensive military activities and attempts at invasion by one against the other.’103 There are important lessons which emerge from a survey of the Keira Sultanate’s history. First, race, at least as it is understood today, was absent in terms of defining identities prior to the colonial era. Second, ethnic differences were less important than may be assumed because of the way that the state was able to accommodate and incorporate different ethnic groups into the political, economic and cultural structure. Third, Islam was an important component for integrating diverse communities into the Sultanate, and in Darfur Islam became the principal identity on which state-building was based. Finally, and maybe most importantly for the argument to follow, an analysis of Darfur at the time of the Keira Sultanate illustrates that an effective state authority was a crucial component for maintaining order and ensuring livelihoods in the region. During the foreign occupation of Darfur (1874–98) war, banditry, and rebellion had culminated in severe famines that even today are remembered by the people of Darfur as the worst in history. The return of ‘Ali Dinar brought a large degree of stability to the region. The colonial conquest may have been irresistible in military terms, but for a decade the British faced the same problem that had plagued earlier foreign occupiers, and proved that ruling Darfur required more than just force of arms. The colonial era that followed ‘Ali Dinar would be largely defined by how the British solved this problem.

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CHAPTER 4 THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE COLONIAL STATE IN SUDAN: TR IBALISM, R EGIONALISM AND R ACE IN COLONIAL SUDAN

4.1

Introduction

The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was a condominium in name only. Any sense of a British-Egyptian partnership was as fictional as the premise put forward by the British government that the conquest of the Sudan was undertaken to reinstate Egyptian rule where it had been lost to the Mahdi in 1885. In practice, Sudan was administered as if was a British possession, with authority for Sudan’s affairs vested in a governor-general; every holder of that position, from 1898 until independence in 1956, was British. Even if, at the time that the British launched an invasion of the Sudan in 1896, they believed in the temporality of the colonial mission, colonialism’s own logic made a brief stay unlikely. In Sudan, that logic had developed from the wider colonial experience, especially the Indian1 and West African models.2 Evelyn Baring, the man who was to shape the policy of Egypt and Sudan for a quarter of a century, was called to Cairo from India,3 where he had been trained in colonial administration.4 But Africa was obviously not India, and African colonies came to represent something different for

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the British, even if the logic of colonialism remained similar in different parts of the Empire. The basic logic of British colonialism, can be said to have been based on three premises: first, colonial governments were concerned with the consolidation and maintenance of effective control over the indigenous inhabitants – the ‘natives’; second, London had made it clear that all colonies were required to be self-financing; and third, there was a broader imperative for creating colonial economies that served the interests of the Empire. In governing the Sudan according to these basic principles of colonialism, the administrators grappled with the contradictory effects of their policies, the peculiarities of a vast and diverse colony, and the problems of ruling over a foreign people in a foreign land. The state that developed did so as a consequence of the application of the colonial logic to the concrete realities of exercising power in Sudan. Colonialism in Sudan, as elsewhere, was above all made possible by faith in the ‘white man’s burden’, and by the certainty of Western Europeans’ power over the colonised, as Dirks remarks: Colonial conquest was not only the result of the power of superior arms and military organisation as important as these things were. Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened as much by the cultural technologies of rule as it was by more the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established control on foreign shores.5 The ‘cultural technologies’ rested first and foremost on the power to discover and then order the natural and human worlds inhabited by the colonised. In particular, power came from the capacity to decide on, and then to order, the identities of the ruled. African and Arab, northerner and southerner, semi-civilised and uncivilised, rural and urban, European and non-European were all classifications animated by the colonial government in Sudan, and each set of identities has left behind an indelible mark. Race, tribe and religion, in particular, were the most powerful means of control in the Sudanese context; identities in the colonial period were shaped by the exigencies of controlling and

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administering a huge territory, comprising diverse social and political communities, faced with serious economic limitations, and bedevilled by the byzantine politics of the Anglo-Egyptian relationship. In later chapters, it will be seen that these identities are part of the colonial legacy that the Sudanese would struggle to overcome.

4.2

The formation of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium

The British decision to invade and occupy the Sudan, Warburg argues, ‘was a logical outcome of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882’.6 By 1896, the year Kitchener set out to conquer the Sudan, controlling Egypt had become a cornerstone of British imperial policy, even if the original occupation of Cairo and the Suez had been conceived as a temporary measure by Gladstone’s Liberal government.7 Sudan’s geo-strategic importance to the British Empire was directly related to British control over Egypt, the Suez Canal and the sea-routes to British India.8 The importance of Suez for the British lasted until its loss in 1956. The crisis that followed emphatically signalled the decline of both the British and French Empires, as the US and the Soviet Union intervened to hand Nasser a major diplomatic victory, and the British and French a reminder that they were now subordinate states in the postSecond World War international system.9 In the same year, six decades of domination over Sudan also came to end, by which time Britain’s imperial reach had of course dramatically decreased. But in 1896, when the British government assigned Kitchener the task of conquering and occupying the Sudan, the Suez and Egypt were very much at the centre of British imperial considerations. Kitchener’s defeat of the Khalifat’s army in 1898, at the Battle of Omdurman, was decisive: in the aftermath Sudan effectively became part of Britain’s African empire. The estimated total of Sudanese casualties in the battle was 11,000 dead and 16,000 wounded;10 this devastation of the Khalifat’s forces was caused, first and foremost, by the vastly superior firepower of the Anglo-Egyptian army. Whilst the justification for the campaign was stated to be, on the one hand, the liberation of the Sudanese from the tyranny imposed by the Mahdist

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state, and on the other, revenge for the killing of Gordon, it was its geo-political importance that was conclusive in determining Britain’s involvement south of Egypt.11 The opening of the Suez Canal ensured a strong British commitment to matters involving Egypt. After this, control of the Nile through the Sudan was a vital factor in controlling Egypt, and doing so was a crucial element in Britain’s foreign policy.12 As noted in the previous chapter, Darfur was meanwhile of little interest to the British. Lord Cromer, the British Consul-General in Egypt, quite explicitly stated the British attitude to Darfur during this period, when he vetoed a plan put to him to conquer the region: To undertake the direct government and administration of the remote province of Darfur would be a useless and very expensive burden . . . while ‘Ali Dinar should be made to understand that Darfur is within the Anglo-Egyptian sphere of influence, he should be allowed wide latitude in dealing with local affairs.13 Conquest of the Sudan posed a number of diplomatic difficulties for the British. The public justification for the invasion was officially given in terms of retaking those areas over which the Egyptians had formerly ruled. This was a dramatic reversal of the British Prime Minister’s position in 1885, during the revolt that swept the TurkoEgyptian regime from the Sudan. At that time, Gladstone had spoken of the Sudan’s right to be free of Egyptian domination, and insisted the British military would not intervene to support Egypt’s foreign rule over the Sudanese. Gladstone remarked of the rebellion that it was ‘a people rightly struggling to be free’, and he further wrote: ‘[I] must say that it would be an iniquity to conquer these peoples and then hand them back to the Egyptians without guarantees of future good government.’14 Despite these sentiments, in 1892, as Prime Minister, Gladstone began preparations to help the Egyptians re-conquer the Sudan. The ‘scramble for Africa’ prompted British action to secure the lifeblood of Egypt from foreign control, and it was French ambitions for southern Sudan that seems to have compelled the British to act.15 The

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Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan brought Britain and France to the brink of war, but once this crisis was averted the task of deciding the status of this new acquisition had to be dealt with. The intricacies of the situation were clear, and to Cromer so was the answer. He invented the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium as a way of imposing Egyptian rights onto a region conquered by the British, in a manner that circumvented French and Ottoman designs on the newly acquired territories.16 Despite, the overwhelming victory at Omdurman, Kitchener was yet to take control of the entire Sudan. The southern Sudan remained outside the control of the new government, as did the country’s western reaches. The major problem facing Kitchener, even after Omdurman, was attack from the remaining Mahdist loyalists and the possibility of future Mahdist uprisings. The fear of a Mahdist resurgence coloured the politics of the early colonial period, and determined many of the policies enacted by the nascent colonial administration.17 Kitchener’s own disquiet regarding the Mahdi’s legacy led to the destruction of the Omdurman mosque which housed the Mahdi’s tomb, and to the desecration of his remains. Churchill at the time remarked that it was ‘. . . a gloomy augury for the Sudan that the first action of its civilized conquerors and present ruler [Kitchener] should have been to level the one pinnacle which rose above the mud houses.’18 Kitchener’s disrespect for the remains of the Mahdi was not incidental to colonialism but a metaphor for the way that the system attempted to erase the symbols of independence and of resistance to foreign control. Many of the decisions taken by the Condominium were to follow a similar pattern, even if they were less spectacular than Kitchener’s very public demonstration of the capacity of British authority in the Sudan.

4.3 Sudan: Anglo-Egyptian relations in action Throughout the six decades of British rule in Sudan, Egyptian politics prefigured in the decisions taken by the Condominium government, with Sudan’s fate often determined by British interest’s vis-à-vis Egypt. Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese relations were always extremely complex,

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and British rule in Egypt tenuous at best, especially after its annexation from the Ottoman Empire in 1914.19 Not only were the policies of the Condominium government often determined by the exigencies of British-Egyptian politics but also from the very moment that the decision to conquer Sudan was taken, British colonial policy was heavily contingent on its reliance on Egypt. Another of the defining factors determining British policy in the Sudan was that of financial self-sufficiency, which was again interrelated with the question of Egypt’s role there and was an axiom of British colonial policy everywhere, as Appiah points out: ‘But despite the variations in the political economy of empire, the colonial systems had shared a fundamental set of structuring assumptions . . . each colony was supposed to be economically self-financing until after the Second World War . . .’20 The situation in Sudan differed somewhat from this general pattern, at least for this first decade or so, because of the administration in Sudan being able to rely on Egyptian resources. The ethnic, religious and political diversity of the people forced to accept Condominium rule further complicated the task of pacifying, administering and exploiting a huge territorial acquisition such as the Sudan. The difficulty of this undertaking was apparent from the continued unrest that the British authorities were forced to deal with, on a continuous basis, for decades after Kitchener’s victory at Omdurman.21 In the Condominium’s first years the pacification of the country provided strong motivations for the construction of roads and railways to transport troops to quell the numerous uprisings that broke out regularly across the colony.22 The railway from Port Sudan to Khartoum, the expansion of Port Sudan and the linking to the sea of the central regions of Northern Sudan, in particular Khartoum, by rail were important factors in the eventual creation and consolidation of the country’s export economy, but must be viewed initially in the context of internal security.23 Most of this infrastructure was financed by Egyptian loans and grants to the Condominium government.24 Egypt’s financing of the initial invasion and the consistent drawing on the Egyptian treasury to pay for the consolidation of British control of Sudan came at a price, even if it offered some initial benefits for the

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colonial administration. The primary benefit came from the ability of the authorities to relax tax burdens on the Sudanese in the early years, which they hoped would reduce the potential resentment which foreign occupation, it was anticipated, would naturally create.25 The fear that anything more than the lightest taxation would result in a mass uprising on the scale of the Mahdist rebellion in 1882–85 was an important consideration in determining Condominium policy.26 The authorities also believed in the equally dangerous potential of Egyptian nationalism to spill-over in Sudan. One such moment when British authorities feared the Egyptian presence in the Sudan was when the Dinshawai incident sparked mass resentment amongst Egyptians against the British occupation.27 The British proclamation that Egypt had become a protectorate in the aftermath of the Ottoman declaration of war on Britain in 1914 was another such moment when British suspicions of Egyptian subversion were particularly acute. Even if less tense moments, the potential for Egyptian nationalism to infect Sudan was not lost on Wingate, or on future governors, who grappled with the formalities of the Condominium and the perceived danger to British interests of Egyptian nationalists operating in Sudan. British policy in Egypt was also affected by the Anglo-EgyptianSudanese relationship as it evolved in the first decades of the twentieth century. In Egypt, there was widespread resentment among increasingly vocal nationalists at the policy of diverting Egyptian funds to consolidate British rule in Sudan. While this was primarily an issue for the British-Egyptian relationship, it emphasised the continual balancing act that the British were forced to maintain with respect to the Egyptian role in Sudan. One other example of this was the policy of employing Egyptians as mid-level administrators in Sudan, which sought to give the illusion that the Condominium was more than merely a legal fiction. In 1909, Gorst wrote to Wingate that ‘. . . we must try and reconcile the Egyptians to spending some of their money on the Soudan, and the only way to do this is to make them feel that Soudan is part of Egypt . . .’28 Thus the British were forced to accommodate Egyptian nationalists, and to placate them with the impression that Sudan was a part of greater Egypt.

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One other primary concern resulting from the Condominium government’s reliance on Egyptian funds was the control that the British Consul-General in Egypt could exercise over Sudanese policy. Cromer certainly used this financial control as a lever to ensure his wishes were accommodated in Sudan.29 Sir Elton Gorst, Cromer’s successor, was more aware of the danger of continuing to finance the Sudanese administration from Egypt, especially as he was forced to deal with the nationalist upsurge in Egypt after 1906. Gorst’s preoccupation with Egyptian affairs freed Wingate to proceed with plans to convince British capital to invest in Sudanese agricultural and infrastructure projects; Gorst also supported such plans to help reduce Sudan’s reliance on Egypt. The financial independence of Sudan from Egypt became a key consideration of the Condominium Government and eventually led to the construction of the Gezira Scheme and to Sudan’s dependency on cotton exports. But what became just as important to the British as the question of financial independence was working out how to eliminate the Egyptian presence in the Sudan.

4.4 Indirect rule and the ‘thin white line’ of the British administration in Sudan Much as Britain may have wanted to bar Egypt from any involvement in Sudan, it was hampered by a lack of British personnel to fill the roles the Egyptians were playing in the administration.30 The outbreak of the Boer War and then the devastating human toll of the First World War placed severe restrictions on the availability of British personnel required to administer the Sudan effectively.31 Even with Egyptian support and increasing levels of indigenous acceptance and collaboration with the new regime, the title to the Sudan held by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium existed in most parts of the colony in form rather than substance. Controlling Sudan, as already noted, was complicated by the realities of distance, of ethnographic and political complexities and of continued agitation. Imposing colonial control over the entire country without the aid of Egyptian personnel was beyond the capacity of the limited British presence in Sudan, unless

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a more efficient means of administration could be found. Cromer’s solution consisted in ‘a number of young English civilians’, who would be trained to regard serving in Sudan as a vocation.32 In time, the Sudan Political Service would become ‘the most admired body of British administrators in Africa . . . second only to the Indian Civil Service world wide.’33 But before this alternative became available (or native administration, of which more will be said shortly) the British relied on Egyptian manpower as much as on Egyptian money to govern Sudan. However, events would overtake both Britain and Egypt after 1921. Nationalist agitation, beginning in the aftermath of the First World War, led to Egyptian independence and the end of the protectorate. British alarm rose, with Egyptians now seen to be less subservient to the British, and a possible fifth column inside the Condominium. The assassination of Sir Lee Stack on 19 November 1924 seemed to confirm these fears and provided the British with the opportunity to banish all Egyptians from the country.34 In Sudan, the news of the assassination and subsequent British ultimatum to the Egyptian government to recall all troops and other personnel from Sudan within 24 hours was the catalyst for a proto-nationalist uprising by the White Flag League, which had emerged in Sudan in June 1924 and was clearly sympathetic to the idea of unity with Egypt.35 The leader of the movement, Ali Abd al-Latif, had been incarcerated by the authorities and sentenced before the major uprising in November. As the Egyptian troops prepared to evacuate Sudan three platoons of Sudanese soldiers and four officers mutinied engaging British troops in a night-long battle.36 The Sudanese troops were defeated and the Egyptians left Sudan. British intelligence blamed Egypt for inciting the unrest and this only reinforced their decision to terminate Egyptian involvement in Sudan.37 The conundrum now facing the British was how to administer the vast territories under their control without Egyptian assistance, and with too few British administrators at their disposal. The problem of the weakness of the colonial façade in Sudan, or the ‘thin white line’, as Anthony Kirk-Greene38 describes the small numbers of British administrators who governed the heavily populated colonies, was acute and required a solution to save the

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colonial system. A policy known as ‘indirect rule’ in operation elsewhere in Africa was identified as that solution. Indirect rule had been framed by Frederick Lugard in The Dual Mandate in Tropical Africa (1922) as a means of protecting the integrity of indigenous cultures, and demonstrating sensitivity to the traditions of subject peoples, by allowing limited self-determination. The dual mandate, or ‘white man’s burden’, was based on the premise that European colonialism served the dual principles of gradually civilising the natives while also ensuring the efficient utilisation of the colonies’ natural resources for the benefit of all humanity. Or in the words of Peter Woodward, The Dual Mandate was British pragmatism ‘backed by a derived ideology . . . of serving both Africans and the world’.39 Essentially, it was a useful justification for colonialism and for the taking over of labour and production. While the implementation of the policy of indirect rule became urgent in the wake of the expulsion of the Egyptians in 1924 it was also believed that traditional authorities insulated the natives from the unsettling affects of social change and, importantly, ‘protected’ the Sudanese from the corrupting influence of Egyptian nationalism from north of the border.40 Additionally, the British in Sudan felt more comfortable with the ‘traditional leadership’, as C.P. Browne made clear when he advised that ‘magisterial powers’ should be entrusted to ‘the solid elements in the country, sheikhs, merchants . . .’ and not the urban elite, which he described as an ‘. . . irresponsible body of halfeducated officials, students, and town riff-raff . . .’ 41 The policy of indirect rule was implemented in the rural areas of Sudan, so that rather than colonial rule constituting dual-mandate colonialism came to represent a dual authority, in the sense that urban populations were governed differently from those that resided in rural Sudan. In particular, indirect rule was implemented in the western and southern Sudan, where geographical distance and the backwardness of the natives were perceived to create the most difficulties for effective administration. While the British considered the south the most backward area of the Sudan, it was actually in the west that indirect rule was first implemented, owing to the knowledge of Kordofan and Darfur gained earlier by the Civil Secretary, H.A. MacMichael, who was

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Sir John Maffey’s senior civil servant in the Sudan Political Service.42 MacMichael was also responsible for the publication of an extensive ethnographic work which classified the ‘tribes’ of western Sudan.43 Since it was he who was entrusted with putting indirect rule into operation, it is no surprise that he elected to start with Darfur, as the region of the country with which he believed he was most familiar. In the end, indirect rule replaced the limited efforts undertaken by the Condominium government to construct a civil authority for administering all of Sudan. The enacting of the Native Administration Ordinance (1927) extended to the southern Sudan, Kordofan, Kassala, Nuba and the province of Darfur. However, as de Waal points out, the recourse to traditional structures of rule in Darfur, except in Dar Maasalit, did not follow Lugard’s model of indirect rule exactly, but rather ‘the creation of a new hierarchy of tribal administrators’ aimed at regulating and regularising tribal identities and boundaries in Darfur.44 While there were some differences between this and indirect rule in Darfur, the policies were framed by the same exigencies of parsimony, social stability and prejudice as elsewhere in Africa, and the legacies of indirect rule/native administration that have been the focus of analysis in recent times also apply to the historical legacies as experienced in Darfur.

4.5 Native administration, tribalism and the construction of ethnic identity in Darfur Tribalism in the form evident in Darfur in most recent times did not exist in the same way during the reign of the Keira Sultanate. The devolvement of power to local political structures that occurred during the 40 years of colonial rule is an important element in understanding the solidification of the distinct tribal entities that seem to exist today. Native administration not only segmented and classified regions based on presumed tribal ethnicities but empowered traditional shaykhs, who were often elevated to the role of traditional rulers without evidence that this had actually existed in the past. As noted earlier, the colonial administration in Sudan was certainly a thin white line, but in Darfur the line was thinner than elsewhere in

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the country. The conquest of the Sultanate during the First World War occurred when the British were stretched by the commitment to war, and British personnel were at a premium. This shortage meant that there was, from the very beginning, a very limited colonial presence – or indeed interest – in the region. MacMichael’s method of addressing this problem was to recommend continuity right down to the mudir (governor), Colonel P.J.V. Kelly, locating his office in the former Sultan’s throne-room.45 MacMichael, with Wingate’s approval, retained as much of the Sultanate’s structure as possible which, according to M.W. Daly, accounted for the relatively peaceful transition that took place in 1916– 17. Daly’s conclusion from examining the records is that the conquest of Sudan and the incorporation of the Sultanate into the Condominium changed little in the region. He further argues that indirect rule promoted a form of benign neglect, and in the Darfur case it is difficult to disagree with this verdict.46 However, changes did occur as the old order was replaced with a colonial system whose imperatives differed from those of the Sultanate. In time, there was a major shift in the social relations in the region, as a process of ethnic identity formation resulted from the implementation of colonial policies. Ethnicisation occurred during the colonial period. It had not existed prior to this due to the Sultanate’s determined policies of assimilating the kingdom’s subjects into a culturally and politically homogenised kingdom. Indirect rule was legally instituted with the Powers of Nomad Sheikh Ordinance of l922, which was applied to approximately three hundred shaykhs across Sudan. By 1923 the policy had regularised and brought order to the traditional judicial functions of nomadic shaykhs. In l927 the Powers of Sheikhs Ordinance further extended the authority recognised and enjoyed by the shaykhs of nomadic groups to sedentary communities across Darfur, with powers over land and legal jurisdiction – including punishment and incarceration – and the issuing of fines.47 In 1928, the legislation was amended to extend the legal powers of shaykhs by authorising them to preside over legal matters pertaining to each particular tribe in separate tribally-specific native courts. Land allocation and the settling of disputes over land were also regarded as tribe-specific, which meant that tribal identities and boundaries became important features of the native administration

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policy, as Yousif Takana in his study of conflict in southern Darfur has commented with regard to the colonial policy of tribal delineation: The third device of the colonial administration was the demarcation of the tribal Dars. Looking at the colonial literature concerning Darfur since the inception of so-called native administration in the 1920s, when the whole of Darfur province was divided into five districts and one commissionerate, one is struck by the huge efforts that colonial officers put into the demarcation of tribal boundaries. The final outcome of this process of tribal lands demarcation in the late 1920s was a rigid tribal boundary with detailed maps fixing tribal identities in complete isolation from each other . . . 48 MacMichael’s own study of Sudan was premised on an underlying belief in the existence of self-contained and identifiable tribes. Even as MacMichael asserted the hybrid nature of the ‘tribes’ that he classified, he assigned ethnic and racial labels with a certainty few anthropologists would view as sufficiently nuanced today. But tribe and race were everything to the British in the colonial period, as they mapped the empire in terms of a human geography very much invented to meet the needs of administration and prejudice alike.49 Tribal differences were emphasised to justify the separation of one group from another, and for the authority of a shaykh to apply where another shaykh’s authority was inadmissible. Summarising O’Fahey’s seminal studies on the Keira Sultanate, it is clear that the colonial order differed in significant ways from past practice. In the pre-colonial period, the core of Darfuri society was held together by a common allegiance to the Sultan, who ruled with the authority of Islamic tradition and the legitimacy to which a descendant of the Prophet was entitled, combined with the customary symbolism and power of an African king. Furthermore, the Sultan retained the absolute ownership of land and absolute power to allocate it, or to deprive individuals or groups of it, as he saw fit. During the Sultanate the Sultan had allocated land based on loyalty and service to the kingdom, and expected his loyal retainers to accept the cultural and ethnic markers

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that characterised the Sultanate. De Waal has described the dominant identity of the Keira as ‘ethno-political’ which he describes as changing from ‘. . . a process tightly focused on the Fur identity (from about 1600 to the later 1700s), to a more secular process in which the state lost its ideologically ethnic character, and ruled through an administrative hierarchy (up to 1916).’50 Taking such a perspective does not preclude the existence of group differences – indeed, it relies on diverse identities. The key point is that during the period when Darfur was ruled by the Keira Sultanate ethnic identities co-existed within a political system which was comfortable with the assimilation and incorporation of heterogeneous ethnicities. In Darfur, a form of nation-building was taking place at the same time as this phenomenon was also transforming Europe. The British conquest of Darfur established an administration in the region that differed philosophically from that of the Keira Sultanate. Where the Sultanate emphasised unity and integration British administrators, in the words of Sir James Currie, searched enthusiastically for ‘lost tribes and vanished chiefs’.51 Indirect rule is described by Daly as ‘an anomalous attempt to “tribalize” people who had no memory of tribal authority or desire to recall it’.52 The tribalisation of the people of the Darfur region created a terrain where self-contained and distinctive group identities developed. The policy of indirect rule resulted in a decentralised power structure under the authority of shayks, nazirs, maqdums and omdas, where tribes became the primary unit of social organisation. The benefits bestowed on tribes, including recognition of semi-autonomy and an allocation of land, or a tribal dar, left outside the system those groups that failed to be recognised by the administrators as constituting a tribe, with ramifications that later become obvious. Despite the best efforts of the colonial authorities to impose order through the tribal structure, cooperation, interdependence and integration continued to complicate the ethnic map and relations within the region. Nevertheless, tribes had been invented, and tribal lands allocated, on the basis that certain areas of Darfur could be identified as the traditional lands of a particular ethnic groups. In doing so, the colonial logic of bringing order to the natives overturned an

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indigenous Darfuri logic which had evolved with the expansion of the Keira Sultanate. Native administration remained a cornerstone of British policy across Sudan until the very end. Even though the problems associated with it became apparent to British officials as colonialism entered its final stage after the Second World War, very little was changed.53 But changes were happening, despite British efforts to enforce inertia upon the Sudanese. In Khartoum in 1938, the Graduates’ Congress was organised by a group of northern intellectuals as a vehicle for Sudanese political expression. The Congress was established with the approval of the colonial authorities because it was perceived as a way of containing the increasingly vocal nationalist aspirations of the educated urban elite, by permitting the Congress to function as an advisory body to the government.54 The Congress served temporarily to defuse rising Sudanese nationalism, at least for a few years, until in 1942 it presented a memorandum listing its demands, which the government refused to entertain.55 In response to the clearly articulated nationalist outlook of the Congress, as shown by the demands contained in the memorandum, the colonial government created an Advisory Council comprised of tribal delegates perceived as likely allies against the nationalist elite.56 Unfortunately, for the British, the Council was unsuccessful, for two reasons. First, the tribal leaders had also been captured by the influence of the two main religious tariqas.57 Secondly, the attempted subversion of the Congress failed simply because nationalist aspirations in Sudan, as elsewhere in the world during this period, had developed beyond a point where they could be successfully suppressed. Thus the British failed to undermine the nationalist movement in Sudan, and their efforts to weaken nationalist sentiments served only further to empower the tribal leaders in Sudan’s rural areas and to prevent any erosion of native administration, even when it was widely accepted that the reform of regional political institutions was an important step towards modernising the country. Native administration was finally placed on the reform agenda in 1949.58 However, tribal leaders were still considered by the British authorities as an indispensable element in the government’s struggle

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to forestall independence, and to prevent a complete abrogation of the colonial system by the leaders of the nationalist movement. Throughout the 1940s, the goal of independence gained ground among the Sudanese. Events in Asia and elsewhere in Africa encouraged them to agitate for a complete transfer of colonial power into Sudanese hands. In 1952, amidst the turmoil created by the Free Officers’ coup, which had brought General Neguib to power in Egypt, a nervous colonial government announced Sudan’s first general election. The election, it was hoped would forestall any Sudanese moves towards unification with Egypt, which the British sought at all costs to prevent. In the lead-up to the elections the government-sponsored Socialist Republican Party was formed with the aim of restraining the urbanbased nationalist movements from dominating Sudanese pre-independence politics. Predominately a party of tribal leaders, the SRP was expected to outpoll the Umma Party and the National Unionist Party.59 The result once again disappointed the British, as the SRP failed to overcome the hold that the sectarian orders had on Sudanese politics, and thus polled poorly in the regions, winning only three seats in the General Assembly. The SRP was a belated and cynical attempt to undermine the nationalist parties; it failed not because of the weakness of the tribal leaders but because of the strength of the two sectarian parties, which together dominated Sudanese politics.60 Native administration remained largely intact and entrenched, and even if the tribal leaders were no longer allied to the British administration they remained important because the sectarian parties realised they could be counted on to act as key conduits for rallying political support in the underdeveloped regional areas. Native administration had served British colonial interests for years, and rather than unravel the system after independence, the first Sudanese government maintained it largely unchanged, until major reforms were undertaken in 1971.

4.6

The British policy of segregating Darfur

The Closed Ordinances Act of 1922, followed by the Permits to Trade Ordinance of 1925, were enacted by the Condominium government

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with the aim of preventing the jellaba from infiltrating rural Sudan and upsetting the tenuous stability that existed in the country’s periphery. In particular, it was intended to segregate southern Sudan from the north. The expanding cultural and economic influences of northern Sudanese were considered a danger to British security and the stability of southern Sudan. The colonial authorities’ fear of the spread of Arabism to the south is evident from a short communiqué issued by the District Commissioner of Raja in 1935: I notice that in spite of frequent requests to the contrary, large quantities of ‘Arab’ clothing are still being made and sold. Please note that, in future, it is FORBIDDEN to make or sell such clothes . . . No more Arab clothing is to be made from today: you are given till the end of February to dispose of your present stock.61 Trade and merchants had always acted as conduits for the expansion of Arabic language and culture, and of Islam. The expansion of Arabism through dress, language and the spread of the Islamic religion threatened to undermine British colonial dominance in the south, and the British had no intention of competing with the Sudanese elite for the loyalty of the southerners. The Closed Ordinances Act (and the Permits to Trade Ordinance) was aimed at reducing the interaction between the jellaba and Darfur’s ‘natives’.62 British economic imperatives were thinly veiled behind the politico-cultural project of entrenching traditional cultures in southern Sudan through indirect rule and segregation as means of control. In this way, the British were able to eradicate economic competition in southern Sudan while simultaneously preventing the expansion of Islam. Control of economic relations was a vital element of colonial power.63 Arabism and Islam were already well established in the western Sudan and the Closed Ordinances Act could not have had entirely the same intentions as for the southern Sudan. In particular, Darfur represented for the British the constant fear of resurgent Mahdism.64 The emergence of the Mahdi in 1882 from the western Sudan was a particularly influential motif in the narrative of the history of the

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Sudan, which was retold to members of the Sudan Political Service. Recurring religiously-inspired uprisings seemed to vindicate the colonial government’s fear that Darfur was being heavily influenced by Mahdism, and the danger of a resurgent Mahdism was apparent to the members of the Sudan Political Service in 1922 when a major revolt originated in the southern Darfur town of Nyala.65 The response from the authorities was to include Darfur in the provinces separated from central Sudan by the enactment of the Closed Ordinance Act. In particular, British officials had noticed the flow of people from Darfur to the Mahdist stronghold of Aba Island, and members of the Ansar preaching in Darfur.66 Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rahman, the posthumous son of the Mahdi, had survived the initial hostility of Sudan’s conqueror, General Kitchener, and by the outbreak of the First World War had been able to demonstrate his usefulness to the authorities. The British saw ‘Abd al-Rahman’s eagerness to profess loyalty to the government as a way of disarming Mahdism, but always with one eye open to the possibility that ‘Abd al-Rahman would betray the Condominium and declare himself King of the Sudan.67 With this in mind, the authorities used the Closed Ordinance Act from 1922 onwards to restrict ‘Abd al-Rahman and his agents from access to Darfur. While there is little doubt that the combination of Darfur’s long border and the meagre resources of the Condominium failed to seal Darfur off completely from external influences, including that of ‘Abd al-Rahman, the Closed Ordinances Act did have a negative impact on Darfur; it could not have achieved the government’s aim, as ‘Abd al-Rahim writes, of making each province as ‘self-contained and independent as possible’,68 but ultimately the result was segregation of the provinces, dividing Darfur from the wider dar al-Islam of which it had been a part since the 1700s. Trade was one way that the Keira Sultanate maintained relations with the states to the north and west. In particular, relations with Egypt and the Maghreb had continued throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ensuring that the Sultanate was integrated into the wider Islamic setting. Also, the Sultan sent representatives from Darfur to study at Al-Azhar University, Cairo’s prestigious Islamic university, ensuring the Darfuri royal family and elite were able to remain

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in touch with political events to the north.69 There is little doubt that throughout the history of the Sultanate Darfur had been connected with, and integrated within, the wider Islamic world. Colonial rule, while never being able completely to erase such a history or to seal Darfur off hermetically from the rest of the world, was responsible for diminishing Darfur’s traditional associations with North and West Africa. Institutionally, Darfur was unable to maintain the formal diplomatic contacts which had been established with the Muslim states of North Africa and which had allowed it to develop as a Muslim kingdom from the eighteenth century onwards. The segregation of Darfur had further negative implications. Education policy was one area where Darfuri suffered from the prejudices of the colonial government, which actively restricted education in Darfur. It was generally believed by colonial administrators in Africa that anything more than the most practical education ‘posed a greater threat to the country than no education at all.’70 The central policy behind native administration was based on creating an administrative model that promoted stability, and an education system designed to stimulate social mobility was not only deemed dangerous, but contradictory to the very philosophy of that overriding policy. It was clear from the establishment of the Condominium in Darfur that the authorities would not permit the ‘evil’ of modern ideas to infiltrate the region and to spoil those whom they ruled. Daly reports that ‘. . . as late as 1929, not a single student in the government secondary school was from Darfur, whereas there were 218 from Khartoum, 93 from the Blue Nile, 41 from Kordofan, and even some foreigners.’71 The number of Darfuri who attended Gordon College is well documented, with the first student from Darfur to enter the only institution of higher education in Sudan doing so only in 1934. As late as 1945, a policy of providing education above the level of elementary vernacular schools was considered by the central authorities to be excessive. All in all, Daly’s account of education policy in Darfur reveals the level of prejudice towards Africans inherent in the colonial project; so it should come as no surprise when it is recounted that in 1935 the annual funding allocation to Darfur for the educational needs of a province with

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a population of 750,000 people was 1200 Egyptian pounds, ‘less than the salary of one senior government official’.72 Heather Sharkey argues that the colonial education policy led to a situation where the British favoured a small group of, . . . self-defined Arabs at the expense of everyone else, including not only Arabic-speaking former slaves or their descendants, but also non-Arab Muslims and non-Muslims (such as the Dinka) . . . [in doing so] the British cultivated a group of men who had the literacy and the political know-how to develop and articulate nationalist ideologies. Not surprisingly, these men defined a nation in their own social image, as an Arab Muslim community.73 Native administration, in effect, imitated the practice of segregation imposed by the Closed Ordinances Act, but on a smaller scale. At the micro level, indirect rule was designed to seal off different tribal groups hermetically from each other, to facilitate greater control and to decrease the cost of administration, while at the provincial level the Closed Ordinance Act was designed to maintain the stability of Darfur by preventing influences from the rest of the world from reaching the province. The British were never able completely to achieve this but what they did create was a detached population who had been isolated from the formation of a national economic and political culture. The lack of a wider nationalist movement encompassing the western and southern periphery testified to the success of the colonial policies of segregation and tribalisation, which prevented the consolidation of trans-provincial alliances and blocked the development of a national identity. The absence of a Western-educated elite in Darfur marginalised the region as the country moved toward independence, and political and cultural segregation would remain one of the most decisive aspects of the colonial legacy for the people of Darfur. Darfur’s place in the British racial hierarchy was responsible for the discriminatory practices employed by the colonial government; also, the consequence of policies of segregation, tribalisation and social underdevelopment

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reinforced the racist stereotypes that have dominated successive Sudanese governments’ perceptions of Darfur.

4.7 Colonial racial ideology in Sudan Much has been written on the topic of race and racism as a feature of the modern era.74 This is not the place to rehearse the question of their causes, except to say that the concept of race as understood today was a feature of the European expansion of the world. It was in the nineteenth century that the British came to perceive that black Africans were significantly different to themselves. Nancy Stepan notes that there was . . . [a] change from an emphasis on the fundamental physical and moral homogeneity of man, despite superficial differences, to an emphasis on the essential heterogeneity of mankind, despite superficial similarities . . . [so that by] the middle of the nineteenth century, everyone [in Britain] was agreed, it seemed, that in essential ways the white race was superior to non-white races.75 Despite the best efforts of scholars like Bernard Lewis to export to the Arab world the European version of racism towards Africans, there is a clear distinction between the attitude Arab and Europeans held to skin colour. As John Hunwick has argued in this regard, ‘there is a lack of consistent literature that theorises the inferiority of black people. Islam did not have its Gobineau.’76 This different attitude is summed up neatly by Ali Mazrui, who states that ‘Arabs alerted the people of sub-Saharan Africa that they were black. Europe tried to convince Black people they were inferior.’77 British colonialism brought to Sudan a specific form of racism that introduced skin-colour as a marker of inherent racial qualities based on a Eurocentric typology, at times grounded in cultural superiority, at others racially determined. Arab-African relations in the pre-colonial period were not necessarily equal, and any suggestion that Arab slavery was benign is

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profoundly misconceived. But there was a difference. Slavery in the Arab and African sense was not racially determined, which is the major difference with the slave trade that dominated the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The gradual conversion of African societies to Islam over a thousand-year period is testament to the non-racialist foundations of Islam, and the potential for African societies to assimilate and adapt to cultural change.78 Sudan, according to Janice Boddy, was a special case in British colonial terms, because of the way it was ruled and the competition with the Egyptians, or other Arabs, over ‘civilising’ the regions considered the most primitive.79 Throughout Boddy’s analysis she explores the theme that the British administration encouraged ethnographic work which emphasised the cultural and genealogical differences in Sudan between north and south, Arab and non-Arab. In this way, the British were able to restrict the reach of both the Egyptian and riverain Arabs into the southern Sudan. H.A. MacMichael, himself the author of a major ethnographic work, describes the purpose of the ‘southern policy’ as providing an environment where: . . . a series of self-contained racial units will be developed with structure and organisation based on the solid rock of indigenous traditions and beliefs . . . and in the process a solid barrier will be created against the insidious political intrigue which must in the ordinary course of events increasingly beset our path in the North.80 Overall, one of the key themes that emerges from Boddy’s work is that race functioned as a corollary of colonial administration in much the same way as tribalism did, by systematically classifying and ordering the colonised. Heather Sharkey also examines the contribution of British colonial policies to the racialisation of Sudan, in her case by looking principally at education policy. Her starting point for Sudan shares certain key similarities with those taken by Mazrui and Hunwick, as noted earlier: that Arab-African relations were not determined by race in the same

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way as those that were formed by the colonisers with the colonised. Sharkey writes: When British and Egyptian forces overthrew the Mahdist state in 1898 and established the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, there was no such thing as self-identified ‘Sudanese Arab’ among the riverine region’s Muslim elites. At that time, to be Arab was to be Muslim, to be Arab was to be free, and ideally, it was to claim an Arab pedigree.81 Race played a large part in the British imaginary of the Sudanese Arabs and Africans, ‘African’ itself being an identity that came to exist only with European cartography, as racial profiles were introduced and extended to the Sudanese with the same level of eagerness that (as suggested earlier) marked the colonial administrators’ search for ‘lost tribes’. However, colonial officials had no need to invent the racial profiles they used: by the early twentieth century the invention of both ‘Arab’ and ‘African’ had solidified around a number of basic principles. Cromer’s declaration on ‘the Oriental mind’ parallels the British attitude to Arabs: The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description . . . [he is] often incapable of drawing the most obvious conclusions from any simple premises . . . 82 It might seem extraordinary, in the context of the orientalist attitudes of Cromer and other British colonial administrators, to read the views of L.F. Nalder, Governor of the Northern Province from 1930–36, when he describes Arab and British minds as inherently similar: . . . the culture of the north is one which is easily comprehensible to ourselves . . . Moreover the Arab mentality is not far removed from our own; we continually find things which surprise us, but seldom things which shock us. His ideas of right and wrong are broadly similar to our own.

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The mentality of Africans, on the other hand, was incomprehensible to Nalder, and their way of life baffling: . . . for him our laws of cause and effect have little existence or meaning . . . [he] lives in a tiny portion of a dimly realized earth capriciously interfered with by a spirit world that can be partially controlled by magic. In anything abnormal, anything strange, he realises the working of that world.83 Nalder’s position can be best understood placed in the wider British world-view. In Sudan, the British rationalised colonialism as they did elsewhere, as a mission civilisatrice. In this world-view, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians and more recent Islamic empires had reached levels of civilisation that had been at one time the most advanced in the world. It was held by the British, at least publicly, that Sudanese Arabs could achieve a similar level of progress if provided with suitable opportunities, while their non-Arab fellow-countrymen inhabited another and quite different discourse, which can be traced back to the Atlantic slave trade where slavery was justified on the grounds that Africans were a primitive and savage “race” and were a people without their own history. In Francis Mading Deng’s view, the British historian A.J. Arkell most aptly articulated the British view of southern Sudan when he argued in 1955 that ‘. . . what is known as the southern Sudan today has no history before 1821’.84 Black Africans have suffered greater racialisation than Arabs on the part of Europeans, especially in the era where slavery dominated relations between Europe and Africa. The well accepted belief that Africans were a people without history has been repeated in both popular and intellectual circles from the time of Hegel in the early nineteenth century to Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University, in 1963. The Africans of Sudan were considered to be no different from the Blacks that inhabited the rest of the ‘Dark Continent’. They were seen as primitive, and it was believed that their own ‘traditional’ laws and customs would be more appropriate for them at the stage of development they had reached. Some minimal educational opportunities were provided for the chiefs and their sons, but otherwise it was felt

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education would ‘ruin’ the indigenous populace. The introduction of racial justification for the domination of one group over another has been profoundly debilitating for Sudan. Racialism has been one of the primary fields of political and economic struggle since independence. The north-south conflict and now events in Darfur have been infused with racial ideologies that can be traced back to the colonial perspective of races and racial hierarchies. The racial element in Sudan, as argued at the outset of this section, was a departure from the pre-colonial perceptions held in Darfur, which were shaped by Islam, Arabic and the power of the Keira Sultanate.

4.8

Colonial religious policy and the consolidation of Mahdism in western Sudan

Sudanese politics in the twentieth century has been heavily influenced by two neo-Sufi movements which pre-date British conquest. The older of the two, the Khatmiyya,85 arrived in Sudan in 1816 with the founder of the order, Sayyid Muhammad ‘Uthman al-Mirghani (1793–1853), a student (from Arabian origins) of the famous neoSufi reformer Ahmad ibn Idris (1760–1837),86 just before the great upheaval which accompanied the Turko-Egyptian military conquest of the region.87 Even though al-Mirghani was able to gain a foothold in Sudan at this time, it was not until the Turko-Egyptian regime entered into a mutual arrangement with the Khatmiyya that the order gained a strong Sudanese following.88 The strength of the order (as with other Sufist orders in Sudan, such as the Sammaniyya and the Tijaniyya), was found in the innovations they brought to the Sudan, for instance ‘. . . a new educational programme, an organisational structure and a sense of belonging to a wider Muslim world.’89 The favourable treatment the Khatmiyya received within TurkoEgyptian Sudan came to an end with the ascension of Mahdism. The Mahdiyya was an unfortunate interlude for the Khatmiyya, whose leaders were forced into exile in Egypt for the entire period from the fall of Khartoum to the victory of the Anglo-British forces at Omdurman over a decade later. With the return of the Egyptians, the Khatmiyya was reinstated in the Sudan, and supported as an

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acceptable religious alternative in the hope of preventing a muchfeared Mahdist revival. The other strategy adopted by the colonial government was to attempt the creation of a centralised Islamic system under government control. O’Fahey represents the British institutionalisation of Islam in Sudan as both a novelty and a failure,90 points echoed by Peter Woodward: The British attempt to promote orthodox Islam and create a controlling ‘Board of Ulema’ that would, it was hoped, limit the spread of the influence of the tariqas turned out to be a disappointment . . . This failure did, however, mean that unlike the situation in some other Muslim countries the qadis and other officials did not themselves emerge as a significant political force that might have been a basis for a concerted Islamic political stance.91 The initial failure of the Condominium to successfully institutionalise Islam within the confines of the state was soon overcome through the readiness of the two most prominent and powerful Islamic leaders in the Sudan to collaborate with the Condominium. In particular, the reversal of the British attitude towards Mahdism was startling, as was the rehabilitation of the leader of the order, Sayyid Rahman al-Mahdi, who became a key component in the effective pacification of Sudan by the government. The Mahdiyya, as already noted, was formed during the collapse of Turko-Egyptian rule in Sudan through the persona of the Mahdi and the mass movement he inspired to rise against foreign rule. Mahdism and the Khatmiyya arose in very different circumstances in the nineteenth century, and these contrasting origins are, in a number of ways, reflected in the political positions they occupied during the period of transition from colonialism to independence in Sudan. The AngloEgyptian Condominium oscillated between the Khatmiyya and Mahdism, and this vacillation was further complicated by the intricacies of the relations between the condominium ‘partners’, especially after the dramatic change that occurred after Britain lost control over

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Egyptian domestic politics in 1922. The British, at this time, overcame their last reservations towards ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi when they decided to place their trust in the Ansar because of the Mahdist aversion towards the Egyptians.92 The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty (1936) eased Anglo-Egyptian tensions and had a similar affect on the relations between the British and the Khatmiyya in Sudan. By this time, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and his movement had become extremely wealthy and a powerful influence in Sudanese politics. Woodward suggests the Mahdist order had become almost ‘a state within a state’ by the end of the 1930s.93 The influence of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, and of Mahdism, grew especially strong in western Sudan in the period between the two World Wars.94 Even though the original Mahdist revolt had sprung from western Sudan, to sweep the Turko-Egyptian regime from power with widespread popular support, the movement rapidly lost all its appeal, becoming known in Darfur as kubbū kullū, which translates as ‘pour out everything’.95 Mahdist influence in western Sudan was not a direct consequence of the mass movement of the nineteenth century, but resulted from a conscious government strategy of using the Mahdist movement to pacify the western periphery of the Sudan. Kaptijiens details a succession of rebellions against the Anglo-Egyptian presence in Darfur which threatened the tenuous government control over the peripheries of the colony.96 A major similarity of all these revolts was that they were led by faki claiming the title of either the ‘Mahdi’ or of the nabi ‘Isas. The revolt in Nyala led by one of the self-styled prophets, ‘Abd Allah Suhayni, was firmly contained by the colonial authorities, but the fear of neo-Mahdism in Darfur led to the decision to restrict ‘Abd al-Rahman’s contacts with the western Sudan.97 In 1927, a jihad by Faqih Muhajir and his supporters from south-western Darfur was the last to emerge. The reason for a cessation of rebelliousness in western Sudan, Kaptijiens argues, was due to the influence that ‘Abd al-Rahman, and the Ansar order, was able to exert over the region.98 Abd al-Rahman was a grandson of a Keira Sultan through his maternal line, and with that connection and the active recruitment of followers from Darfur the hostile posture of western Sudan to the

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Mahdist order was gradually changed. The effect on Darfur of the authority of ‘Abd al-Rahman was that ‘instead of generating prophetled revolts of their own, the common people of the western Sudan put their hopes in a “Prophet Jesus” in the Nile valley, namely Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi.’99 Increasingly, it became clear to the colonial government that the Ansar were proving adept in maintaining order and that ‘Abd al-Rahman was concerned with order in the rural areas. After the 1927 revolt, the colonial government reversed the earlier edict restricting Mahdist involvement in Darfur. In particular, the movement was from west to east as labourers from Darfur migrated to the Gezira Scheme to work for cash, and found themselves working on ‘Abd al-Rahman’s vast cotton holdings and reliant on the Mahdist order for spiritual and other basic needs.100 In doing so, many westerners were conscripted into the Mahdist order and over time this relationship between migrants from Darfur and ‘Abd Rahman made Darfur the political stronghold of the Ansar for years to come, as well as integrating Darfuri labour into the Sudanese economy.101

4.9 Economic policy during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium: Gezira and not much more in 60 years The one exception, in the Sudanese case, to the rule of colonial selfsufficiency can be applied to the British decision to fund the Gezira cotton scheme. O’Neill argues that international competition in the 1890s had pressed the Lancashire textile industry to specialise in the manufacture of fine cotton products.102 The finer, longer cotton required to furnish the industry was only grown in Egypt and the United States. Egyptian cotton supply was unpredictable and unreliable due to the continual rebelliousness of the fellahin. Because of the incapacity of the market to fulfil Lancashire’s growing demands, an alternative supply had to be generated in a region under the direct control of the British, and these economic imperatives were to have a profound effect on the economic and social organisation of the Sudan. The British government responded to the needs of the textile industry by providing the security for a £13 million loan which was used to build the infrastructure necessary to ensure the success of what was to

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become a ‘massive enterprise of primitive accumulation.’103 The Gezira Scheme was to become the largest gravity-irrigated cotton plantation in the world. With the construction of the Sennar Dam in 1926 the land under cultivation escalated from 240,000 feddans in 1925 to almost a million in 1956.104 The manner in which the Scheme was structured led to an immense drain of wealth from the Sudan, as millions of dollars were repatriated to British investors each year. As an example, Niblock calculates that over a third of the profit raised from the production of cotton in Sudan was returned to British investors, another million dollars was procured by the Condominium in taxes and other costs received from the tenants, leaving less than half the yield for the farmers.105 The expropriation of the surplus from the Sudanese peasantry prevented the accumulation of wealth by Sudanese cotton farmers, with the consequence that the petty indigenous agricultural bourgeoisie remained numerically and economically insignificant.106 In addition, the inequities of wealth and political power created by the unfair allocation of land have remained a considerable problem, which Sudan has yet to overcome. The economic and social development of Sudan was considered principally in terms of ensuring the financial maintenance of the colonial infrastructure and the system of rule, or as Fatima Babiker Mahmoud argues, because the Sudanese economy ‘during the colonial period was determined to a large extent by the colonial interests and the needs of external markets.’107 The Gezira Scheme was no exception, as it was designed to provide the materials required for the British textile industry and to preserve the authority of the colonial administration. So in addition to serving the interests of British financiers and industrialists the colonial government was strengthened by the Scheme in at least three ways. First, the allocation of large land grants to political elites, especially to ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, tied them even closer to the colonial government.108 Secondly, the regime’s control of water, property rights and export prices ensured that the Scheme strengthened the government’s control over the means of production even where land was privately held. Thirdly, the Scheme provided the colonial

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government with increased revenues for its further consolidation and expansion.109 Gezira aside, colonial policy continued to favour projects that facilitated the extraction of resources. Cotton production rapidly dominated the colonial economy of the Sudan resulting in the concentration of the investment in development projects in an arc in northern Sudan bounded by the Gezira Scheme, Khartoum and Port Sudan. The implication was an absence of investment for development projects in the peripheral areas of the Sudan. In the case of the most remote areas of Sudan, such as of Darfur, investment in economic projects or for social and political institutions were very insignificant and came extremely late, so that by the end of the colonial period, the development project was too little, and too late for the people of Darfur. Darfur was considered politically and economically backward. Without the raw materials, that British manufacturing desired there was no impetus for investment in the Darfur province from the colonial regime. In making a point about Darfur’s economic primitiveness, Robert O. Collins states, that, ‘[T]he British soon learned that Darfur had little to contribute to the rebuilding of the Sudan.’110 For Darfur, the consequence of being viewed from such a narrow perspective was that during the colonial period, economic planners and administrators largely ignored the entire region.111

4.10

Conclusion: the colonial legacy in Darfur and Sudan

Colonialism in Sudan followed a pattern of logic similar to that in other colonial locations, even if the practices and outcomes differed. In Sudan, British colonial governments operated to secure the interests of colonies and empire. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale’s eminent study of colonialism in Kenya demonstrates that colonial governments behaved in a similar way to other governments by prioritising the retention of political power over other interests.112 In the case of Kenya, Berman and Lonsdale describe the tensions that emerged between British settlers and the colonial government over native policy. While Sudan was not faced with the complication of dealing with a settler class, there was the problem of having to share government with the Egyptians.

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Egypt would remain a thorn in the Sudan Political Service’s side, but after 1924 only a minor one in most respects. The major problem for those Britons appointed to the Sudan Political Service was how to maintain control. The land was vast, the people were varied and the resources available to the state were meagre. In addressing these issues the colonisers introduced tribalism, segregation and racism into Sudan; they did more than introduce new forces, they invented, manipulated and deformed Sudanese identities to correlate with their prejudices and to overcome the shortage of manpower and money. The failure to develop an integrated economy was another impediment to national integration and, as Robert Tignor argues, would resonate beyond the end of the colonial period: ‘A country’s development is conditioned by its economic traditions and institutions. Although dramatic structural changes occur, they rest on prior foundations.’113 The foundations of the post-colonial state evolved in the colonial period. In particular, the sense of national disunity was the latter’s major legacy. British colonialism did nothing to foster a sense of a national Sudanese identity – in effect, the opposite occurred, principally as a consequence of the policies of indirect rule, the Closed District Ordinances and the introduction of racial discourses. The policies of the colonial government undermined any possibility of constructing Sudanese national unity after independence. The Sudan that emerged as an independent state in 1956 was a loose confederation of tribal, racial and regional identities. The further unravelling of national ties was most rapid between the north and south, but in the northern Sudan this process was more gradual. Independence brought great promise but also great responsibilities. The story to come revolves around the disappointment of the Sudanese state to meet the promise of independence, especially the twin disappointments of a state and nation in crisis.

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CHAPTER 5 THE FAILUR E OF SUDANESE POST-COLONIAL POLITICS, 1956–69: CHANGE IN DAR FUR AND THE STRUGGLE FOR INCLUSION

5.1

Introduction

The political institutions and economic structures bequeathed to the Sudan after almost six decades of British rule proved inadequate immediately the Sudan acquired independence. The transfer of power was, in the end, peaceful, though not without complicating factors, one of which was the importance of Sudan for the British policy of containing Egypt.1 British manipulation of the Sudanese nationalist movement in this period was nothing new, but part of a longer pattern of dealing with fears of neo-Mahdism, on the one hand, and of Egyptian-Sudanese unification on the other. In the end, the British were powerless to impede the coming of independence, but played a major part in preventing either pro-Egyptian or Mahdist forces taking over the country. Holt and Daly remark that the Sudanese greeted independence with some ambivalence, ‘[which] was a reflection of the continuity not only of the system of government, but also the tenor of politics’.2 At independence, Sudan suffered from a number of obvious problems

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including having no constitution. Also, the people of the southern Sudan had little guarantee of being treated fairly in a political system dominated by northern politicians. In addition, many of the structures of the colonial state such as native administration remained in place in the outlying regions of the country. The Sudan emerged from colonialism with a number of structural impediments to state- and nation-building. The size and diversity of the independent state cannot be overstated as a challenge facing the nationalist leaders who inherited power in 1956. As noted in the previous chapter, Sudan’s regions were historically diverse, and colonialism did very little to integrate the eastern, western and southern regions with the dominant centre.3 In fact, if the seriousness of this problem of integration was lost on anyone at that time, the mutiny of soldiers in the southern Sudan should have dispelled any doubts that may have been had that the north-south fracture was going to be a cause of instability. The legacies of colonial state-building in Sudan left its mark on Darfur, as did the failure of post-colonial politics to address these issues. Darfur was simultaneously both inside and outside the Sudanese political system, a feature of the relationship between centre and periphery which persisted right through the post-colonial period. The Sudanese elite adopted the perception of a homogeneous, Arab/ Islamic northern Sudan; but at the same time, the people of Darfur were westerners, and despite adopting Arab identity and being Muslim they were still subjected to notions of inferiority relative to Sudanese further to the east. While Darfur was an important component of the electorate in the contest for control of the national parliament, at the same time its politicians were on the whole excluded from the Sudanese government. Darfur was also a source of cheap migrant labour for the agricultural schemes in central Sudan, especially those owned and operated by the leaders of the Umma Party, but Darfur’s economic elites were excluded from ownership of the principal capital projects in the Sudan, and Darfur’s labour was by and large absent from the ranks of the growing labour aristocracy in the country. The result of these ambiguous relationships was a growing ambivalence in Darfur towards the parliamentary parties, and resentment at the marginalisation of the region. Such a sentiment was not confined simply

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to Darfur – other regions in northern Sudan, and in fact wider popular opinion in the country was infuriated with the politicians for the mismanagement of the state, which by 1969 had brought Sudan to the point of impeding collapse. Regional tensions within northern Sudan were a notable theme of the early independence period, especially with the emergence of regional movements and parties in the late 1950s and the 1960s. Regional tensions, combined with sectarian rivalries and internal party factionalism, rendered parliamentary democracy completely dysfunctional. The absence of political leadership ultimately proved to be the catalyst for the demise of democratic politics in Sudan, when a military coup brought the second period of parliamentary politics to an end in 1969.

5.2 The transition from colonial to post-colonial rule: Sudanese nationalism and Anglo-Egyptian influence The British behaved in the Sudan in much the same way as elsewhere in the Empire. In particular, the Condominium’s efforts at manipulating the diverse elements of the emergent nationalist movement, in a bid to forestall independence, were similar to its policies in numerous other colonies where nationalist movements were pressing for formal political separation from the Empire. In the Sudanese case, these policies concentrated on manipulating the rivalries of the two most important Sufist orders. R.S. O’Fahey has described the colonial politics in the Sudan as a ‘complex dance’, where the British constantly shifted support from one of the movements to the other.4 This process intensified as Sudan moved closer towards independence in the period following the Second World War. The religious movements were favoured by the British for a number of reasons, some noted in the last chapter, but most of all because of the ingrained cynicism and alarm that the British felt towards secular nationalist movements and communist parties. One scholar of Sudanese politics has described the British attitude towards the urban educated political forces in these terms: ‘The British saw secular nationalism in Sudan less as an ideological Achilles heel of the

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western education they themselves were importing into Sudan, and more as an infection caught from Egypt after 1918.’5 However, as the Second World War ended and Sudanese nationalism took inspiration from Arab, Asian and African anti-colonialism, the British were faced with an increasingly unfavourable set of actors with which to contend, as they moved to shape the likely structure of the post-colonial Sudanese state.6 With nationalist agitation everywhere in the background, the erstwhile allies of the colonial system, the two Sayyids, had lost the support of the colonial government. In the case of the Ansar leader, the growth in his power, popularity and wealth posed problems for the colonial authorities. In regards to the other Sayyid, the British remained fearful of him, for as long as the Khatmiyya continued to support the notion of Sudanese unification with Egypt. With the Sayyids on the outer, and the secular nationalist movement considered unreliable partners, British control of the nationalist process was faced with a number of perceived dangers. The first of these threats was that ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi might seize power over the Sudan. The second, even more alarming, was the possibility that the Sudanese leadership might choose unification with Egypt, where tumultuous events, beginning with the Egyptian abrogation of the Anglo-Egyptian agreement in 1951, and then the palace coup that toppled the monarchy a year later, escalated the British fears of the danger posed by Egyptian-Sudanese unification.7 Finally, the communist threat could not be completely overlooked, even in a country like Sudan, which seemed to be dominated by the traditional religious orders. The alliance of Sudan’s communists with the trade union movement and Gezira tenants had forced the colonial authorities to consider a possibility that there might exist, in the wings, a radical challenge to the existing system.8 Thus, colonial authorities were faced with a potential situation where Sudanese politics might take a more radical path if no declaration of support for immediate self-government was announced. Under these conditions, the British decided to take active steps towards transferring power to the Sudanese in a way that would, at the very least, prevent Egyptian expansion into the Sudan, and at the same time emasculate the radical forces.9 Thus, realising they had few alternatives, the British

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rehabilitated the two Sayyids, worked with the leader of the secular nationalists, Ismai’l al-Azhari, and promoted the rapid ‘Sudanisation’ of the Sudan Political Service. The British decision to integrate the Sudanese into the higher levels of the Political Service was far too late to ensure an effective transfer of power. Sudanisation of the Sudan Political Service had long been high on the agenda of demands on the part of the Sudanese educated elite. In 1943, the colonial government reacted to the demands of the Graduates’ Congress for independence and opened the possibility of Sudanese appointments to senior roles within the administration.10 This gesture was followed in 1946 with the establishment of a Sudanisation Committee, which reported back two years later with a plan to ‘Sudanize 62.2 per cent of the posts held by non-Sudanese over the next fourteen years.’11 However, little change occurred until 1953. In that year, 734 positions out of a total of 1219 jobs held by non-Sudanese were selected for immediate Sudanisation, and in the aftermath of that decision a further 200 British officials resigned voluntarily.12 Woodward describes the impact of the rapid transferral of authority as deleterious because: The loss of so many civil servants so quickly inevitably had an effect on the quality of the administration, which the new government accepted as a price to be paid for the reduction of British influence before the final decision to self-determination was taken. Some of the Sudanese replacements were inexperienced for the responsibilities thrust upon them, and charges of inefficiency were soon being made . . . .A further administrative problem was that of rapid decentralization. The British had maintained a significant degree of devolution to province governors, but the new masters were keen both to create new central ministries and to gather in developed powers to them.13 The Sudanisation of the civil service and the government in the years between 1953 and independence revealed the extent of the sectarianism that pervaded Sudanese politics.14 Though sectarian rivalries were momentarily transcended as the two Sayyids came together to

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‘side with Egypt against Britain and then to throw out the former’,15 Colonialism came to an end on 1 January 1956 and the outcome was a victory for the long-held Umma mantra of Sudan li’l Sudaniyyin (‘Sudan for the Sudanese’); but as time would clearly demonstrate, independent Sudan was not a country for all the Sudanese, or at least not on an equal basis. The end of the colonial period was intended to constitute a break with the past, but what was more evident was the lack of change. Native Administration remained almost completely unreformed, sectarian parties continued to dominate Sudanese politics, the economy was still confined to cotton production, and uncertainty over the relationship between central government and regional administrations, especially in the south, remained unresolved. The Condominium had lasted for 60 years, in which time the colonial government’s concern to maintain control over a vast region superseded efforts at state-building – a situation which only changed when the colonisers came to appreciate the implications of ignoring nationalism. Even then, their efforts were too late, and ultimately far too little. In the end, the structures and systems of colonial control in Sudan, namely Native Administration and sectarianism, survived longer than the colonial regime they were intended to protect.

5.3 Independent Sudan: towards political and economic crisis The first two years of independence revealed a number of issues that the Sudanese political system was unprepared or unable to address, but were at the very core of the problem with the new state, as Daly stresses: The rush to self-determination left many aspects of statehood incomplete. These included relations with the former codomini, ownership of their property, the rights of their and other foreign citizens, terms of service for remaining civil servants, currency, accession to treaties, the Nile waters, informal border arrangements, and much else. The country had no constitution:

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government carried on under authority of the old regime’s ordinances, as implicitly recognized on parliamentary elections; the head of state was a five-man committee.16 The Sudanese people’s aspiration for self-determination was based on the belief, widely held at that time, that as an independent country it could overcome most of these concerns and take its place as an equal member of the international system.17 The optimism of independence and self-government was short-lived as the challenges facing the new leadership were ignored, replaced by sectarian rivalries and intra-party wrangling. To add to the uncertainty of independence, new problems also surfaced. After independence, the al-Azhari government was faced with an economic challenge largely beyond its own control, and a rebellion in the southern Sudan, which was managed very poorly.18 The British had made no effort to integrate southerners into the northern Sudanese educational, political or economic structure until the Juba Conference in 1947. Northern Sudanese were also denied a role in the south until the Sudanisation policy was rapidly deployed in 1953. Almost immediately this policy caused resentment in the southern Sudan as northern Sudanese filled the vacated administrative and government positions in the southern Sudan.19 Events throughout 1955 demonstrated to the southern Sudanese that the northern attitude was as heavy-handed and despotic as their British predecessors. Very soon, the situation deteriorated, and the government was faced with rebellion in the southern provinces. The north-south conflict undermined the political and economic stability of Sudan for much of the country’s post-colonial experience. Not only did the conflict in the south illustrate the lack of Sudanese political unity, it also was illustrative of the centre-periphery relations that would dominate the entire political paradigm of post-colonial politics in Sudan.20 Economically, Sudan suffered from the dominance of the agricultural sector and from reliance on the international cotton price to maintain the revenues which were necessary to deliver on the material promises of independence. Despite a belated attempt to diversify the Sudanese economy in the period following the Second World War,

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the Sudanese economy remained dependent on cotton-production.21 In 1956, the country’s industrial sector consisted of a brewery, soap and match factories, and a textile mill, which in total accounted for only 2.5 per cent of GDP22 and employed only 9500 Sudanese workers.23 Overall the lack of economic development in Sudan is clear from an analysis of the composition of labour at the time of independence, which shows that the overwhelming proportion of the Sudanese labour-force was employed in the traditional agricultural sector. As Tim Niblock explains, taking the 1955–56 census figures as his guide, over 70 per cent of the workforce were farmers or nomads, and without a permanent role in the modern economy.24 The first independent Sudanese government, headed by Ismai’l al-Azhari, thus inherited an economy overly reliant on the production of cotton and exposed to the uncertainties of the international market; and it did not take long for it to be faced with economic difficulties it was quite unprepared to manage, with the collapse of cotton’s international value. The political paralysis of the first parliamentary period, combined with the negative impact of the rebellion in southern Sudan, quickly exacerbated the problem. Political machinations in Sudan after the dismantling of the AngloEgyptian colonial state were still heavily influenced by events in the wider international sphere. Even if domestic issues dominated the substance of the country’s politics, as Woodward argues, international factors contributed by superimposing another layer of tensions on an already problematic political environment: ‘It was the system of Sudanese politics that forced the politicians to concentrate on domestic survival, and it was the political and economic system that basically governed Sudan’s external relations or lack of them.’25 The most important international relationships for Sudan were with its immediate neighbours, but most particularly with Egypt.26 Relations with Egypt had shifted from a moment of unanimity in 1952 before sliding into a diplomatic crisis by the time of independence.27 This was triggered by an announcement from al-Azhari that Sudan had chosen independence over unity.28 The Egyptians, believing they had been betrayed, showed their indignation by openly criticising al-Azhari, and began publicly criticising his government in a campaign aimed

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at undermining the national leadership on the eve of independence. However, such enmity was short-lived. Sudan, as Tareq Ismael argues, was considered by the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Nasser, as the key to the success of his Africa policy.29 And, of course, there was always the Egyptians’ perennial concern over Sudanese control of the Nile water-flow to shape their policies towards Sudan. In this context, with Sudan high on Egypt’s list of external priorities, Nasser immediately set about repairing the fractured relationship between Cairo and Khartoum and demonstrating his commitment to it. Nasser changed the hostile Egyptian position toward Sudanese independence, and his country became the first to recognise it.30 Sudanese leaders reciprocated with similar gestures of goodwill, which they framed in terms of a historical closeness between the two nations. Following a similar gesture by al-Azhari in 1956, a year later, the new Sudanese Premier ‘Abdullah Khalil declared that Egypt was ‘. . . the closest state in the world to us . . .’ and further declared that he regarded Sudan and Egypt as ‘. . . two brotherly countries . . .’31 Despite these protestations of intimacy, relations soon soured as Sudan turned towards the US in 1957, amid a deteriorating domestic economic situation and increasing political instability. Egypt’s impact on Sudan would, along with the deteriorating economic situation, prove to be the main catalyst for the demise of the first democratic era. In particular, Nasser’s status as a Third World hero in the aftermath of the Suez crisis had a major impact on the precarious balance between the different parliamentary forces.32 Sudanese-Egyptian diplomatic relations for the rest of 1957 and into early 1958 remained stable, even if they were a little cool, with Nasser remaining a popular figure in northern Sudan. Sudan was no more or less immune to the rising tide of Nasser’s radical Arab and Third World nationalism than was any other of the neighbouring states.33 In this context of rising pro-Egyptian and especially anti-Western sentiment in Sudan, the decision by Khartoum to align Sudanese interests with the US in exchange for economic assistance provided the context for the first major post-independence political crisis. The influence of Nasser inspired radical nationalist and socialist movements to emerge in a number of Middle Eastern states, including

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Sudan, as there was ‘no doubt that the appeal of Nasser throughout the Middle East, even in Iran, was irresistible, especially after the Suez Crisis.’34 The US turned its attention to undermining Nasser and preventing the expansion of Soviet influence in the Middle East. Sudan was soon perceived by the US, as pointed out by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in August 1958,35 as a strategic asset in combating Nasser’s influence. Sudan was thrust into the international arena as an independent state at a moment when Egyptian fortunes were once again in the ascendant and radical nationalism was everywhere on the rise in the Middle East. Sudan was also influenced by the experiences of subSaharan Africa, where in the 1950s African independence movements were on the verge of dismantling the British, French and Belgian colonial empires. The year 1958 in many ways represents the high point of the revolutionary fervour inspired by Nasser, with the formation of the United Arab Republic between Egypt and Syria in February, the Iraqi military revolt on 14 July, the US Marine landing on Khalde beach in Lebanon three days later, followed by the siege of the Casbah which brought the bloody Battle of Algiers to an end in July 1958 (even if the Algerian war of independence continued for another four years). In this environment of heightened tensions between revolutionary movements and conservative forces across the entire region, Sudan held parliamentary elections in November 1958. Suddenly, as if greater powers were conspiring against the government of ‘Abdullah Khalil, cotton-prices on the international market collapsed due to a world-wide over-supply, 250,000 bales remaining unsold at the end of that year.36 The crash in cotton prices followed a bad cotton harvest in 1957, and only added to the economic slump the Sudanese government was forced to address. The military intervened, with the tacit consent of the Umma Party, and on 17 November 1958 took power from the civilian leaders. The fear of Egyptian interference was the catalyst that led to the coup but, as Woodward contends, the causes were much deeper: In one sense the whole episode was a replay of the Condominium, in that a reflex international orientation penetrated directly into Sudanese politics. And in 1958, as in the earlier era, it was ultimately the Sudanese alignments and institutions, in this case the

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conservatively orientated army (which had grown from a force set up to counter Egyptian influence), that resolved the matter.37 The first period of parliamentary government had been wracked by dissension, and the political parties were unable to provide the leadership necessary to unite the country or to instil a sense of confidence among the public. Mansour Khalid makes the point that the politicking of the major parties in the lead-up to independence and in the first parliamentary period was confined to inter- and intra-party rivalries, with no attempt or imperative to ‘articulate a national policy’, and it was this factor more than any other that led to the failure of the government and of parliamentary politics.38 Khalid is correct to identify, in this first parliamentary period, a distinct lack of any concrete progress in nation-building, or any sign of a project to expand the key state institutions that the Sudanese population expected from their government once independence had been won. It was this absence of an internal programme of reform more than external factors, according to Khalid, that wore out the popular support for the political parties and provided the context for the military take-over. Inter- and intra-party rivalries contributed to the instability of government, as did the Umma Party’s anxiety over possible political and economic changes resulting from a pan-Arab nationalist government, following the nationalisation policies which Nasser had enacted in Egypt. But there was also the complex mix of colonial legacies, which included problems with the cotton revenues that the Sudanese economy depended on so heavily, the intensification of the rivalries caused by Nasser’s policies and the southern question, which together left the politicians few options for effective nation-building. None of this obscures the fact, as Khalid is at pains to emphasise, that the Sudanese elite made many of the worst choices possible, especially in relation to the southern Sudan question.

5.4 Arab-African identities at independence The north-south dispute, not quite a conflict in this early period, has been regularly cast in terms of Arab-Islamic Sudan, on the one hand, and African and non-Muslim identities on the other. Even if numerous

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other factors play a part in the conflict, one apparent dimension is without doubt the northern Sudanese government’s efforts at subjecting southern Sudanese to ‘Arabisation’ and ‘Islamisation’, which commenced in the transition to independence and intensified under the Abboud regime.39 It is more common since the Darfur crisis escalated in 2003 for commentators on the northern Sudan to discern also an Arab/non-Arab demarcation in existence at independence as a reason for the instability of the new state. To prove this, it has become common for analysts to cite the census figures of 1955–56 as evidence of the racial/ethnic divisions that plagued the northern Sudan, with the statistics showing that more than 60 per cent of Sudanese were nonArab at the time of independence.40 However, it can be argued that these figures only reflected the British colonial perception of who was considered an Arab and who was not, rather than any actual Arab and non-Arab dichotomy in the Sudan. According to the survey information available, Sudanese were asked to indicate whether they were Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa or Beja, but which racial category each tribe fell within was a decision of the surveyors and not the surveyed. Racial differences were inscribed in the classifications adopted by the institutions but were largely overlooked by the Sudanese. The one-dimensional and unsophisticated understanding that dominated the British view of Sudanese identities failed to take account of the multiple-layered and shifting nature of identity in northern Sudan. It is quite apparent from reading the extensive literature analysing the racial identities of the Sudanese that the racial cartography of the colonial period introduced Arab, nonArab and African identities into the country in a way that obscured and denied the historical ambiguity and indifference towards race in this region of the world.41 Understanding ‘Arabism’ and ‘Africanism’ in Sudan since independence requires an analysis of the colonial and post-colonial political relations that have influenced identity formation, and have led to Arab and non-Arab markers as political instruments of state and non-state actors in the struggle for access to power and resources. Arab or non-Arab identities have little concrete meaning once abstracted from the shifting political and economic alliances shaping the post-colonial Sudanese condition.

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While the upsurge of pan-Arabism in the Middle East in the 1950s was one such influence, it did not necessarily exclude non-riverain Sudanese from participating as Arabs, because at this time Arabism projected itself as a politico-cultural movement.42 Nasser’s ideology extended to pan-Africanist and African nationalist movements, symbolised by the establishment of the Casablanca group in 1961.43 In establishing the group, Nasser was joined by Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Touré and the President of Mali, Modibo Keita Keita. The Sudanese president was noticeably absent from the conference as was the other significant Arab-African leader, the Libyan King Mohammad alSanousi. Not only did Nasser’s appeal go beyond a narrow appeal to pan-Arabism, it inspired radical nationalist and anti-colonial/antiWestern sentiments throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Arabism in Sudan has also been affected by domestic factors, such as the religious influence of the sectarian parties, relations between north and south, and the diversity of Arab identities across the northern Sudan. Notions of Arabism and Africanism in Sudan in this period were largely restricted to the perception of the north-south divide. Heather Sharkey makes just this point with respect to the projection of recent trends towards an Arab/African division in Darfur in the 1950s and 1960s, where in fact Sudanese intellectuals ‘stressed Sudan’s unique Afro-Arab hybridity, cultural tolerance, and capacity for internal coexistence’.44 Emphasis was placed on the representation of the people of northern Sudan as constituting a homogenous Afro-Arab Islamic cultural entity, with little recognition of any racial diversity.45 This widespread acceptance of the homogeneity of northern Sudan is evidenced by comments such as those made by Sudanese scholar Saad ed Din Fawzi in 1957: ‘Despite the persistence of old languages, dialects, and to a lesser extent customs, the North is, however, culturally homogeneous, thanks to Islam, for Islam is a culture as well as creed.’46 This view of a homogenous north comes with its problems but for the time illustrates the efforts that the leaders of the emergent state were undertaking to build a national identity based on a self-perception of what it was to be a Sudanese Arab. These efforts to consolidate Arab identity in northern Sudan and to unify the diverse social groupings across the country faced

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considerable resistance from the markers of identity formed during the colonial era. In particular, it was tribal identities, sectarian loyalties and regional differences, rather than racial distinctions that predicated politics in Darfur at the time of independence. However, as politics was reoriented in the 1960s to a parliamentary system dependent on the allocation of seats on the basis of regional voting patterns, regional identities came to play a far more important role. The increased relevance of regional identities should be understood not as ‘. . . the natural product of some self-evident regional-identity’ whose content exists a priori, but ‘as a social and political movement which emerges at a particular stage in the structuring and restructuring of the state.’47 Despite major changes to the political and economic (and hence cultural) relations in Sudan from the 1970s onwards, the distribution of the Black Book: Imbalances of Power and Wealth in the Sudan (al-kitab al-aswad) in 2000 highlighted the continuing relevance of regional identity.48 The detail of the Black Book is an important reminder that not only does discrimination and prejudice exist in northern Sudan, but also the basis on which inequalities were structured were principally along regional lines. The Black Book showed that the marginalisation and impoverishment of the so-called ‘Arabs’ of Darfur by successive Sudanese governments was equally as relevant as their disregard for the non-Arab population of Darfur. This is not to argue that in the context of recent events racial and tribal identities are irrelevant to the discussion of regionalism’s strength and resilience. Rather, highlighting the regional element serves to illustrate the complexities of issues related to identity, and provides a strong case for contextualising identity within both the local and also national political systems.

5.5 The post-colonial politics of centre vs periphery One of the first indications that regional politics would develop into an important dimension of power relations in northern Sudan was when the Beja Congress formed into a regional interest group in 1957. The Congress was an expression of the regional solidarity

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of the loosely-related Beja tribes in their relationship with the Sudanese state, and its purpose was to ‘work with the major parties [to develop] policies favouring the region.’49 In 1958, the Congress supported the southern politicians when the latter proposed that the political structure of the Sudan be altered to a federal system, composed of regions whose governance would be independent of Khartoum.50 Parliamentarians representing Darfur, the Nuba and the Nubians also supported the proposal, but the decision by southern politicians to boycott parliament prevented the proposal from going any further. Before the issue could be raised again, the military junta of General Abboud dissolved parliament. This act ended the emerging shift towards the regional elites that had begun with the end of the colonial period. This tension between centre and periphery would be a recurrent theme in Sudanese politics from this time on, and not only in terms of Khartoum and the south, but also Khartoum and the east and most importantly for this study, Khartoum and the west. The first parliamentary period did nothing to alter the bias towards the centre and the neglect of the needs of the regional areas that had been key characteristics of the colonial era. Bad cotton harvests and a drop in the price of cotton may have been the reason why the parliamentary government did nothing to address chronic underdevelopment but in the early 1960s, when both harvests and cotton-prices rebounded, nothing changed. Under the Abboud regime, there was a further concentration of economic and infrastructural projects in and around Khartoum and in the Gezira Scheme only serving to widen the disparities of wealth and opportunity between central Sudan and the rest of the country. The extension of the Gezira Scheme, as well as modest investments in education, transport and state institutions, were certainly part of the positive legacy of the Abboud period. However, whatever benefits arose from these initiatives only added to the sense of marginalisation felt in Sudan’s outer regions. The failure to resolve issues associated with southern Sudan and with the increasing financial and human cost of pursuing a military solution was a major cause of post-independence disillusionment.51

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Furthermore, by the early 1960s a deeper feeling had surfaced of a political failure in a more abstract sense, as Robert Crawford explains: General Abboud’s bloodless revolution of November 17, 1958 was accepted by most Sudanese as a necessary step in their struggle for an independent political maturity. Its acceptance was a result of their increasing disenchantment with civil political rule, due to the inability of the political parties to work together constructively. It was the hope of most that the new military government would be able to make the necessary decisions, and take the necessary steps, to ensure the country’s progress without seriously curtailing the inherent determination to maintain liberty and integrity demanded by the people. But as the military regime more and more consolidated its position of authority, an increasing number of individuals became more disenchanted with what was, as well as what was not, happening.52 By 1964, there were ambivalent attitudes to the Abboud government, but amongst some groups a strong ideological hostility had developed. The trade unions, communists and students formed the core of the October Revolution, as the movement that forced the resignation of the Abboud government has become known; by 1964 they had become very dissatisfied with the direction that the regime was taking.53 In particular, the regime had maintained close links with the West and continued to protect the interests of the nascent indigenous bourgeoisie and the assets of foreign capital, ignoring calls for a socialisation of the economy. But also, the poor handling of the situation in the southern Sudan was fuelling further resentment towards the government. With popular resentment high, the shooting of a student by the military on 21 October brought matters to a head. Anti-government protests erupted a day later and Khartoum was brought to a standstill when a general strike was called. When the regime’s leaders realised that middle-ranking officers were aligned with the opposition and that the people would not stand aside they came to the conclusion that they had no option but to dissolve government and appoint an interim administration.54

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After six years of military rule there were no notable structural changes to the shape or content of Sudanese politics. But the transitional government, which came to power, under Prime Minister Sirr al-Khatim al-Khalifah, shared a similar ideological position to that of the radical forces at the forefront of the October Revolution.55 The transitional government enacted a number of policies that challenged the dominance of the traditional elite; these included legalising the Sudanese Communist Party, extending the vote to women and repealing the restrictions against trade unions which Abboud had imposed in 1958.56 Against this, the sectarian parties formed a broad alliance, which included the Islamic Charter Front, led by a young and dynamic Islamic ideologue, Hasan alTurabi, to face the challenge al-Khalifah’s government posed to their interests. In February 1965, bowing to the pressure from the sectarian parties, al-Khalifah dissolved the government and appointed ministers from the traditional parties signalling that the short-lived ‘radical experiment was over’.57 The elections that followed returned the Umma Party to power, and the next three years were characterised by a set of themes similar to those of the earlier parliamentary period: sectarian rivalry, government instability, corruption, economic decline and popular disillusionment with parliamentary politics. One of the other apparent themes of the second parliamentary period was the re-emergence of the regional parties as actors in national politics. In 1964, groups from Darfur and the Nuba Mountains formed their own regional organisations, and together they joined the Beja in lobbying the government to provide the regions with greater access to resources and development allocations. The periphery’s resentment of the centre increasingly shaped the post-colonial politics of Sudan, as Mohammad Salih explains: A common complaint which the regional movements levied against the largest sectarian political parties (Umma Party and Democratic Unionist Party) was that they cared less about the people of the marginalized of provinces such as Darfur and more about their votes.58

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What had been largely unorganised and spontaneous regional politics in the first parliamentary period had grown by 1964 into a significant political cleavage in Sudan. Regional politics was now playing a part in undermining the fragile stability of parliamentary politics in the second half of the 1960s, and Darfur was at the forefront of that dynamic.

5.6

Regional disparities in Sudan: Darfur’s marginalisation

Despite the seeming importance of the issue of regionalism, there is only a small (though still important) body of literature which examines the question of the regional divisions in Sudan as a cause of political instability. The Black Book was mentioned earlier as one of the more recent efforts to highlight the regional inequalities existing in Sudan, but it was not the first. In an earlier study from the 1970s, David Roden argued that the stark inequalities in economic development between the well-developed central Sudan and the western, eastern and southern provinces were largely responsible for Sudanese political instability.59 He identified the origins of this phenomenon in the colonial practice of concentrating economic activities on an arc surrounding Khartoum, and which laid the framework for a pattern of economic imbalance between the northern riverain regions and the rest of the country.60 According to Roden, the first Ten Year Plan of Economic and Social Development, launched in 1961, allocated the vast majority of funding, with only a few minor exceptions, to the geographical zone around the capital. In the period covered by the Plan, ‘[R]ailway links to Nyala and Wau were the only major governmentfinanced projects undertaken in the west and the South since independence.’61 The outcome, Roden argues, was to encourage further regional imbalances between the developed central Sudan and the outlying areas, in a number of important ways. One area of uneven development that Roden identified as contributing to further imbalances between central Sudan and the regional areas of the country was in the area of education: there were no funding allocations in the 1960s for new universities or higher-education

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facilities in any of the regional capitals. Second, the concentration of nearly all investment in extending existing agricultural and industrial projects or the initiation of new projects in central Sudan, while neglecting economic opportunities elsewhere, led to an increase in disparities of wealth between a central Sudanese elite that was growing richer and outer regions, which latter remained throughout the 1960s overwhelmingly engaged in the traditional sector. As a result, it was becoming more and more apparent over time that the central Sudanese were benefiting from independence, while the needs of the regional populace were continually overlooked. Roden concluded that disparities between the centre and the periphery were on the increase, and if such policies continued regional discontent was bound to spiral.62 In a study some 20 years later, Yoshiko Kurita came to similar conclusions: that the cause of the rise of regional movements in Sudan was located in the nature of uneven capitalist development, resulting from the government spending that privileged the centre over the periphery.63 Kurita discusses the way that regional underdevelopment provided a cheap and flexible labour force for the labour-intensive cultivation centred on and around the Gezira Scheme. Kurita describes how in the early 1960s the Sudanese government established labour recruitmentcentres in Darfur, among other areas, to ensure a constant source of seasonal labour for the picking of the cotton crop. While there is no evidence to suggest that this is in anyway incorrect, it fails to note that this seasonal labour-force was a pattern of employment established during the colonial period. Nevertheless, post-independence governments implemented policies, which guaranteed its continuance. Whether maintaining the underdevelopment of Darfur was a way of guaranteeing the continual availability of cheap labour, as Kurita argues, or a result of the structural legacies of colonialism and the short-sightedness of Sudan’s political elites, labour from Darfur migrated to the central Sudan in large numbers.64 The evidence that Darfur was largely unaffected by development investment in the period from 1956–69 is overwhelming;65 the exceptions, other than the Nyala railway, were the Jebel Marra and the South Darfur Savannah Rural Development Projects. The latter were undertaken by HTSPE (formerly known as Hunting

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Technical Services), which undertook major surveys of Darfur’s agriculture and livestock activities and prepared reports for the UNDP on land-use technologies.66 The surveys themselves had little impact on Darfur until the 1970s, when UN-led development projects were implemented in southern Darfur and in the 1980s in the Jebel Marra region. Nevertheless, the survey produced a body of technical information, which can be drawn from to help develop a better understanding of the socio-economic and environmental conditions in Darfur at that time, and as a basis from which to question the dominant perceptions of the region as resource-poor and economically stagnant.67 While it is clear that colonial and post-colonial governments had neglected Darfur in terms of investment in economic development, health-care facilities, education or the modernisation of communications and transport, the poverty of the region is a different matter. Darfur has been cast not only as poor, but also an economically stagnant region and a part of the world where natural resources are particularly scarce; but this representation seems to be contradicted by the evidence of the 1960s surveys. If Darfur’s poverty is not a matter of history, then other factors must be responsible for the impoverishment apparent to observers visiting the region in the 1980s and 1990s. Also, a number of long-time scholars of Darfur, such as Fouad Ibrahim, refute the notion that the region suffers from resource scarcity: It is often said that the cause of the war in Darfur is the conflict between pastoralists and farmers over limited natural resources: water, agricultural land and pasture. No doubt, conflicts have always existed over these resources. But they are not the true cause of the current brutal war. In fact, the natural resources of Darfur are not meagre at all.68 The surveys thus provide a basis to reassess the economic and environmental conditions of Darfur. James Morton argues that there needs to be a reassessment of the common assumptions that the entire region, while undoubtedly

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marginalised, was stagnant and poor.69 He does not contend with claims that Darfur’s economy in the 1960s was overwhelmingly dominated by traditional agricultural production; nor does he disagree that there was an absence of industrial or, in fact, any value-adding economic activities across the province, except for a small services sector located in the main urban centres of El Fasher, Nyala and El Geneina. However, he argues that this alone is not evidence of Darfur’s poverty. The absence of industry is not surprising in the context of the wider Sudanese economy, which was also dominated by the agricultural sector.70 As mentioned, the only factories and industrial activities in Sudan were located in Khartoum and the central Sudan. Darfur and the other regions were neglected by the Sudanese government and marginalised in terms of spending on education, healthcare and the modernisation project, from which all Sudanese believed they had an equal right to benefit, but this does not mean Darfur was impoverished. Darfur was, in fact, the most important livestock region in Sudan, as Morton explains: The Darfur cattle herd was nearly twice the size of any other province and only Kordofan had anything approaching the same number of goats. Kordofan was also more important for camels, and both Kordofan and White Nile for sheep, but Darfur was still an important producer of both of these classes.71 This increase occurred despite a strong bias against the pastoralist economy in the colonial period, when policies favoured sedentary farmers. In particular, in cases where pastoralists and farmers were in dispute over access to land or water, the 1944 Soil Conservation Committee recommended that ‘the rights of the cultivator be considered as paramount, because his crops yield a bigger return per unit area.’72 But, despite this bias against nomads, the cattle population in Darfur trebled between 1953 and 1976.73 Farm holdings in Darfur also reflected the general abundance of land – the Census of Agriculture, held in 1964–65, recorded only 0.15 per cent of Darfur’s population as landless.74 The majority of land holdings in Darfur, almost 60 per

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cent of them, were recorded as being between 2.50 and 9.99 feddans, with an average holding in Darfur of 7.06 feddans, according to the Census figures. Further, the Census confirmed that the vast bulk of the land was still owned under tribal tenure arrangements, with only 13 per cent classified as privately owned. The problems of land scarcity and competition, which became defining issues from the 1980s onwards, were not yet present in the studies conducted during this time, whether the HTSPE surveys or the Census. Poverty and dislocation in Darfur, in this period at least, are not apparent from the available evidence, and this is why Morton argues that there has been a major misrepresentation of the region’s economy.75 So, Darfur, was not the impoverished, desolate and isolated region so often represented; on the contrary: The evidence of the three major export goods, gum arabic, cattle and groundnuts, is that Darfur has been through a number of cycles of boom and bust, but that there has been strong underlying growth through the first 75 years of this century. The strongest and most prolonged boom came after the Second World War, when exports of gum arabic entered their period of most rapid growth up to 1965, the wartime cattle boom lasted through to 1960 and the early phase of expansion in groundnut exports lasted to 1965 as well.76 Despite this picture of a gradual expansion of economic production, and further evidence of the gradual infiltration of a cash economy,77 Darfur remained a backwater in terms of investment in social welfare, education and the other essential building blocks of a modern state. The level of health services available to the population, even in El Fasher, was minimal, and the education system in Darfur received no serious upgrades during the first period of independence, which can be said to have lasted until 1969. Education levels remained lower than in any northern province, and even if the figures for Darfur were only marginally lower than those for Kordofan, both western provinces lagged far behind central Sudan in terms of the availability of schoollevel education.

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Table 6.1: Percentages of enrolment with respect to total population in the groups by provinces-1970–1971

Province Khartoum Northern

Primary level (Age 7–12) %

Junior second level Higher second level (age 13–15) % (age 16–18) %

62.8 53.7

28.3 18.3

Blue Nile

39.4

11.4

4.0

Kassala and Red Sea Kordofan Darfur Equatoria

28.6

6.0

2.3

16.6 16.5 6.8

3.5 3.5 0.8

1.2 1.0 0.2

Upper Nile

5.7

0.3

0.2

Bahr al-Ghazal

4.5

1.0

0.7

30.5

6.6

2.4

Whole Sudan

20.9 6.5

Table 6.1, from Bikas C. Sanyal and Sammani A. Yacoub, Higher Education and Employment in the Sudan, Report for the International Institute for Educational Planning, Paris, 1975, p. 65.

With respect to higher education, in Darfur there were still no facilities, and only 4.89 per cent of higher-education students in Sudan were from Darfur.78 If education, in particular, is symbolic of the project of nation-building, then Darfur was excluded from the benefits that independence had promised to deliver. In the literature on Sudan since independence, the grievances of the southern Sudanese have attracted most of the commentary, while the struggle for recognition by the people of the marginalised northern provinces has received only cursory attention. This is understandable in the context of the appalling violence that has been visited on the south by the Sudanese military and northern Sudanese tribal militias since 1955. But with the outbreak of a major civil conflict in Darfur, a significant scholarly effort has been undertaken to retrace the region’s history within Sudan. However, knowledge of the southern Sudan still overwhelmingly exceeds what is available on Darfur.

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One period, in particular, stands out for the lack of available information. Independence, as noted earlier, was accompanied by government efforts to centralise power and control Sudanese affairs from the ministries located in Khartoum. Along with this came a very strong Khartoum-centred, or Nilo-centric, viewpoint from which Sudanese affairs have been portrayed.79 The one exception to this was the recognition of the differing nature of southern Sudan, and the grievances that existed in the south; but in the northern Sudan a belief in the homogeneity of the people remained the dominant motif. The divisions between the northern Sudan, led by the riverain elite, and the southern Sudanese reflected the colonial division of the ‘Two Sudans’80 and the Arabo-Islamic bias of the northern politicians. The north-south cleavage escalated into a civil conflict in 1958, when the southern politicians left parliament in protest over the decision by their northern colleagues to adopt a national constitution defining Sudan as exclusively Arab and Islamic in character.81 The north-south division had solidified into a clear demarcation of regional and racialcultural differences by 1958. Abboud’s takeover of the state did nothing to alter the northern Sudanese attachment to the Arab-Islamic character of Sudan, but only promoted further division with the south, which resulted in the situation rapidly deteriorating between 1958 and 1964.82 And, while the cleavage between north and south deepened, and the Arab-Islamic character of the northern Sudan was largely unquestioned by the northern Sudanese, there were growing regional divisions opening up between central Sudan and the other northern provinces.

5.7

Khartoum-Darfur dynamics, 1956–69

The first indication that there was a level of regional dissatisfaction in Darfur became apparent with the formation of the Red Flame movement (al-laheeb al-ahmar), established in 1957.83 The movement was small, with concerns that seem to have been limited to protesting against the appointment of the riverain elite to those administrative positions in Darfur vacated by the British during the Sudanisation programme prior to independence.84

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Abboud’s ascension proved the catalyst for the emergence of a more substantive regional movement in Darfur. The end of parliamentary politics isolated the province of Darfur even more from the national landscape, and resulted in a move by disgruntled soldiers to challenge the dominance held bythe riverain elite. In 1963, they formed a movement known as ‘Sooney’, named after the historic heartland of the Keira Sultanate, the very place from which the ‘shadow sultans’ had launched their insurgencies against the Turko-Egyptian and Mahdiyya in the late nineteenth century. Soldiers returning from the war in the south were ‘. . . convinced that the civil war in this part of the country is illegal and immoral, and they established their own movement in Darfur to address the issue of marginalization.’85 The reaction of the regime was swift, with those suspected of involvement purged from the military. However, this reaction was short-lived, as the military regime fell in October 1964, paving the way for a return to party politics and the re-entry of Darfur into the political system. And to make the most of this opportunity, a number of Darfur’s educated and tribal elite formed a new regional movement that would have far more influence on national politics than either the Red Flame or Sooney. The Darfur Development Front (DDF) was formed in 1965 by the respected Fur shartay Ahmad Ibrahim Diraige, and mainly comprised members of Darfur’s educated elite. The membership of the DDF was restricted to native Darfuri and excluded non-indigenous inhabitants of the region. The issue of regional marginalisation was for the DDF a very clear and consistent agenda. But in more specific terms, the purpose of the Front was to deal with two significant grievances of Darfur’s political class. The first was the appointment of non-natives to bureaucratic and other government positions which, the DDF argued, should be filled by natives before being offered to riverain Sudanese, or indeed Sudanese from any other region. Second, there was the more important issue of the exclusion of Darfur’s political representatives from participating in the Sudanese government, as Ahmad Diraige explained in 1989: Then, after that, in 1956, the independence, there was a government till this government was overthrown by Abboud in 1958.

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In all this period there was not a single minister from the whole west, which is one-third of Sudan. There was not a single cabinet minister from Kordofan or from Darfur. It may never have been deliberate, but again this is a part of Sudan which is very significant, one third of the country. By historical accident there was nobody to represent it in Parliament as a minister. It was the first time in the history of the western Sudan when in 1965–66 I became a minister from the west, and with me Dr. Buhari.86 The DDF’s concerns, then, were similar to those of its forerunners, but the Front proved far more effective than earlier movements, for a number of reasons. First, the return to democracy in Sudan, with elections held in 1965 and then again in 1968, offered Darfur’s politicians a legitimate institutional mechanism to argue for the rights of the region. Second, the DDF was able to organise a united front, transcending tribal or racial identities in Darfur: Unlike the other regional organizations that were launched around the same time, the Beja Congress (BC) and the General Union of the Nuba Mountains (GUNM), and which were characterized by a distinctly narrow ethnic base, the Darfur Development Front was founded on a wider ethnic base which made the whole region its base of recruitment.87 Diraige also explains that the shared interests held by the diverse groups across Darfur in the 1950s prepared the ground for the emergence of a genuinely regional view of the problems they faced.88 Third, the DDF had greater success because it was ‘part of a broader trend: elsewhere in Sudan, the Beja Congress in the East and the General Union of the Nuba in the Nuba Mountains were speaking out on behalf of Sudan’s marginalized peoples’89 in the various regional and rural areas of the country. In the 1965 elections the Beja Congress achieved a remarkable success in capturing the vote in the Eastern Sudan from the PDP. In doing so, the Congress had ten members elected to parliament, which in the absence of the southern bloc of politicians made it the largest

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regional bloc in parliament.90 The DDF also did very well in the elections, but had already forfeited its regional status when Diraige and the other DDF candidates accepted an offer to join the Umma Party in the lead-up to the poll, thus contributing to the Umma’s success in the elections. Diriage, reflecting on this time, has argued that the rationale for joining the Umma Party was that he believed the DDF would be far more effective as part of a ruling party. He contends that being involved in government provided access to power that would have been unavailable to a small regional party.91 While in Sharif Harir’s view this move compromised Diraige,92 it also catapulted him to one of the senior positions in the Umma Party, and a ministerial post in the government. Despite the likely dilution of the DDFs influence, the issues of importance to the regional parties found their way onto the political agenda as a result of the influence that Diriage came to hold. As Minister of Labour and Cooperatives (1966–68) and then as the parliamentary leader of the Umma Party (1968–69) he was able to ensure Darfur’s grievances were raised. However, with the genuine disarray of the Sudanese government, and the mounting cost of the civil war in the southern part of the country, there was little in the way of capacity or resources to address any of the major problems facing the Sudan, let alone the issues high on the DDF’s agenda. Even though the 1968 elections ended in a clear victory for the Democratic Unionist Party, which had been formed by the amalgamation of the NUP and the People’s Democratic Party in 1967, factionalism quickly erupted, proving a major distraction from the important issues that required government attention. The Umma Party was itself in disarray, and unable to act as a united parliamentary opposition, after a split between Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rahman’s brother, Sayyid al-Hadi al-Mahdi, and ‘Abd al-Rahman’s son Sadiq al-Mahdi over the leadership of the party.93 The factionalism which tore the party apart filtered through to Darfur, where the vote was split between Sayyid al-Hadi’s Umma-Imam Party and Sadiq’s Umma-Sadiq Party. However, the division was short-lived, as the party agreed in 1969 to unite behind the leadership of the Imam al-Hadi until he was killed by the military in an attack on the Mahdist stronghold of Aba Island in 1971.

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Gerard Prunier has placed greater significance on the split in the Umma Party than is warranted. In his view, the division between its factions was responsible for the creation of rivalry in Darfur between the Fur supporters of Sadiq al-Mahdi and the Arab supporters of the Imam, which outlived the elections and the eventual reunification of the party.94 While political rivalries were evident in the lead-up to the election, and politicians exploited the tensions between the supporters of different factions of the Umma Party, the evidence that this created an Arab vs non-Arab political division in Darfur in this period is just not there.95 Sharif Harir’s list of tribal conflicts indicates no apparent upsurge of inter-tribal violence between Prunier’s Umma-Arabs and the non-Arab supporters of Sadiq al-Mahdi in the years following the split.96 Even if the political tensions led to some racially inclined conflict then Prunier’s account should have also explored the question of the effect on Arab and non-Arab identities after re-unification of the party in 1969. If, as Prunier argues, racial identities were rapidly altered by the political competition between rival factions in the lead-up to the 1968 elections, then it would be just as possible that the unity which followed the elections could have healed the split in much the same time as it was formed in the first place. To assume that ethnic and racial identities in Darfur are as pliable as Prunier describes is to neglect the historical, geographical, economic and cultural traditions on which identities are always based. Certainly identities are shaped by socio-political and economic factors but not in the one-dimensional manner of Prunier’s account. Prunier’s effort to shift what became the dominant perception of the nature of the Darfur conflict to a more nuanced and historically-grounded constructivist narrative should not be discounted. Yet, his own analysis fell into the trap of instrumentalism which he could have prevented if had shown more awareness of the longer process of identity formulation engendered by the collapse of Sudanese state- and nation-building in the Darfur region. The end of the second parliamentary period followed soon after the elections of 1968. In May 1969, a group of mid-level officers seized power, and for many Sudanese the change could not have come soon

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enough,97 since the parliamentarians and political parties had failed to resolve Sudan’s mounting problems. Above all, the increasing fiasco in the southern Sudan had reached a critical point, with the Anyanya forces in a stronger position than ever before, and the military suffering very high casualties. The cost of the war was becoming prohibitive, especially at a time when the Sudan was experiencing another economic downturn from a fall in international cotton prices.98 The country’s situation was critical, and the crisis was deepening for as long as the government remained internally divided and without the experience to deal adequately with the pressing issues. As one scholar has commented on Sudan: The parliamentary regimes of 1965 to 1969 were thus characterized by chaos, intrigue and lack of purpose. The successive governments representing the traditional parties and groups failed to carry out what they set out to do. Crisis followed crisis and their impotence became obvious.99 The demise of the second parliamentary period brought to power a group of military officers committed to radical change. Inspired by the legacy of Nasserism, which was still evident in the Arab world despite the disaster of 1967,100 the Sudanese Free Officers came to power with a clear purpose: to erase the legacies of the colonial era and to reconstitute the state by applying socialist principles such as the nationalisation of the economy and the reorganisation of the state’s political structures. After 13 years of independence the Sudan had experienced two military take-overs and two periods of parliamentary rule and despite that period and its multiple governments there was little evidence of progress in terms of building the institutions of state or constructing a shared sense of nationhood. Throughout this entire time, the weaknesses of the state that the colonial period had bequeathed proved a challenge beyond the capacity of the nationalist leaders to overcome. In 1969, it was obvious to everyone involved with Sudan that not only had its leaders failed to meet the challenge, they had in fact compounded the problems and brought the country to the brink of collapse.

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Conclusion

The independence period promised much but delivered very little for the majority of Sudanese. The provinces received far less than the central regions of the northern Sudan, where development efforts were concentrated. Such development commitments mirrored the colonial tendency to neglect the periphery. For the region of Darfur, the first decade of independence offered very little in the way of economic or social development, nor political representation. The traditional sectarian-based political groups, especially the Umma Party, relied on Darfuri voters for electoral success, but without reciprocating until the Darfur Development Front under the leadership of Ahmad Diraige placed Darfur’s grievances on the political agenda. But still nothing much came from the region’s push into national politics. However, government neglect of Darfur was reflective of a wider problem in Sudanese politics in this period. From the time of independence to the May Revolution in 1969, Sudan suffered from the machinations of the elite, whose members were unable to provide clear leadership on the key issues that plagued the country. The rudderless nature of Sudanese politics was as much due to ineptitude as to any other factor. The Sudanese political elite produced no programme for state-building except to reproduce the blueprint of the colonial period. And the results were the same: concentration of wealth and political power in the central Sudan, marginalised regions, over-reliance on agricultural production and foreign capital, and the emasculation of progressive forces by the traditional sectarian parties, whose rivalries only resulted in political inertia. The regions may have successfully forced the issues of regional underdevelopment and neglect into Sudanese politics in the 1960s, but the failure of the political system and the weakness of the state ensured that these issues remained unresolved. The Nimeiri-led coup by the Free Officers installed the first government in Sudan since independence intent on overturning the colonial legacy, by reconstructing the state and society; but the impact on the country and on Darfur would, in time, prove disastrous.

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CHAPTER 6 THE COLL APSE OF THE SUDANESE STATE IN DAR FUR: A PR ELUDE TO WAR?

6.1 Introduction The 16 years during which Ja’afar Nimeiri ruled Sudan have been covered in some detail by other scholars focusing on different elements of contemporary and recent Sudanese history and politics. Studies on the north-south conflict, for example, have examined the Nimeiri legacy in some length because he was, at one time, the bringer of peace, and later also the harbinger of war. Political scientists concerned with the Sudanese state have also contributed much to our understanding of the Nimeiri period, as it was under him that state-building reached its apogee, before eventually leading to the effective ruin of the political system that had been assembled.1 Economists and political economists also find the Nimeiri years an exceptionally rich period for exploring the development-policy failures which sent Sudan into an economic tailspin, so that by the early 1980s the country had its debt payments rescheduled by the IMF a record eight times.2 Regional and international studies can find much material for analysis of Nimeiri’s intervention in conflicts in neighbouring states.3 Moreover, for analysis of the conflict in Darfur, the Nimeiri period is central in a number of important ways.4

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The Nimeiri period, covering the years 1969–85, should have been a watershed in modern Sudanese history. The Free Officers who took power in a bloodless coup in May 1969 were inspired by a radical ideology that revolutionary structural changes were necessary to save the country from potential collapse. The basis of this ideology was that Sudan remained weak and backward due to the pervasiveness of the colonial legacies, especially underdevelopment and national disunity. Both these factors were confronted in turn by the new regime. To do so, the regime attempted to dismantle key structures of the colonial state such as Native Administration and customary title, and to dissolve the traditional parties, in doing so endeavoured to end the sectarianism that had dominated Sudanese politics. Yet, despite the reformism of the Nimeiri era, these forces continued to pervade Sudanese society and remained influential determinants of statesociety relations. Over time, Nimeiri’s style of government became increasingly authoritarian as he struggled to counter the forces of tradition. In addition, he countered political challenges by continually manoeuvring between different sectarian and ideological allies, leaving one analyst of Sudanese politics to write that: Numeiri’s coup of 1969 had turned Sudan inside out and upside down in the sixteen years that he had remained in power, sometimes by the skin of his teeth. Ideologically the regime had moved from left to right across the political spectrum.5 Nimeiri and the May regime were never successful in eliminating the vestiges of the colonial state, and after the al-Mussallaha al-Wataniya (‘national reconciliation’) between Nimeiri and his political rivals the tide turned against change. By the late 1970s Sudan’s agricultural and industrial development schemes were in crisis, and the state was running a huge deficit, with debts it could not meet. Things started to crumble when, in 1980, Nimeiri announced a restructuring of the political system as part of a programme to decentralise power. Regional governments were re-established as a means of devolving power and shifting the responsibility for regional management from central to

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regional government. The strategy may have prolonged Nimeiri’s time in power and obscured, at least for a short time, the extent of the Sudanese state’s economic and political crisis but in the end it was too acute to be concealed by political manoeuvring or the manipulation of populist sentiments. The major ramification of the policies, however, was that by 1980 the state had all but returned power to the traditional leaders and sectarian parties in the country’s periphery while it maintained a firm hold over Khartoum and the most important economic assets. Nimeiri turned to the so-called traditional system for much the same reason that the colonial regime had relied on it: to maintain a cheap and efficient method of control. However, in doing so the state placed the responsibilities for resolving the contradictions and tensions of a political and economic system on the verge of collapse to local and regional bodies ill-equipped to deal with them. When drought, famine and the war in Chad destabilised the Darfur region, it was left to the regional government to find solutions, with devastating results. This chapter tells the story of the rise and fall of the Sudanese state, and how the structures of the colonial system re-emerged when the state-building development project of the Nimeiri government failed. By the time Nimeiri was deposed as president in 1985, the state in Darfur had become little more than skeletal.

6.2 Dismantling the colonial state? Native Administration and land tenure reform Other than the reliance on cotton-production and on a sectarian-dominated political system, the most pervasive legacy of the colonial period was arguably Native Administration. The decision to dismantle this system was an initiative which the intelligentsia had long held out as a key element in the modernisation of Sudan’s ‘backward’ regions.6 In 1971 the Local Government Act overturned both the logic and architecture of a Native Administration policy which had survived for 50 years. For the modern Sudanese, it was a residue of colonialism that the Sudan could well do without, and removing this anachronistic political system was an important step in emancipating Sudan

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from the remaining legacies of the past. More cynical commentators tended to focus their attention on the political benefits which accrued to the regime from abolishing Native Administration. Especially, they argued, the abolition of the system would undermine the power base of the sectarian parties in regional Sudan, which at the time was concentrated in the traditional tribal elites.7 Ideological motivations certainly lay behind the Revolutionary Command Council’s determination to dismantle the colonially derived local administrative system, as Sudanese scholar Mahmoud El Zain explains.8 Modernisation and economic development were the dominant ambitions of the RCC, and of the Third World more broadly, as post-colonial societies struggled to emulate the advanced countries of the First World. The RCC believed, in a similar vein to most governments at that time, Marxist and non-Marxist alike, that primordial identities, whether tribal or ethnic, stood in the way of building a modern society. Dismantling the tribal system was therefore seen by the RCC as a crucial reform. The chief architect of the local government reforms was Ga’afar Bakheit, who oversaw both the dismantling of Native Administration and the modernisation of the local-government system. He aimed, as M.W. Norris explains below, not only to eradicate the tribal organisation of rural Sudanese society but also to initiate a programme of citizenship and participation which would was in essence contrary to the purpose of Native Administration.9 It is likely that Bakheit, along with key members of the RCC, held a dual commitment both to the economic goals of modernisation and to destroying the power of the sectarian parties. Gaafar’s primary objectives were to reverse the process of centralization to the capital, to eliminate the conception of local as distinct from central government that Marshall had assumed, and likewise to blur the distinction between political leadership and the public service, emphasized by the alleged ‘neutrality’ of the latter. Above all he had the aim of encouraging the widest public participation in government, bringing government activity to the most accessible levels, multiplying opportunities for

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council membership, and at the same time changing the balance of involvement.10 The impact of these reforms, however, proved less transformative in the long term than Bakheit, and the framers of the revolution, had anticipated. Abolishing Native Administration withdrew government support, including financial contributions, from tribal leaders, but failed in most cases to undermine their authority or influence over local affairs; so even if the government was able to enact legislation to undermine the authority of the traditional elite, the latter remained influential actors in regional politics. Ahmad al-Shahi agues that the resilience of the native administrative system was due to tribal leaders ‘. . . [seeing] themselves, not only as government representatives but also guardians of the tribal codes and ethnics . . . They were feared, respected and their decisions were accepted both because they had legal sanctions and because they were tribal representatives.’11 While the influence of tribal elites may have been resilient to change, the reasons they held onto some power are more complex than just tradition. Sources from the time of the implementation suggest that the tribal elites were able to integrate into the new system. In a sense what occurred seems to have been more realistically the creation of two parallel administrative systems with the tribal elite able to maintain their relevance because they were able to straddle both. Decentralisation has neither completely broken the hold of traditional elites nor promoted decision-making that will achieve the kind of development desired by the Government. In many Sudanese villages, for example, traditional leaders have emerged as local councillors, and their demands are for social rather than productive investments.12 Either way, despite government efforts to raze the edifice of Native Administration on which the traditional parties had been able to almost monopolise support in regional areas of the northern Sudan, by the late 1970s the traditional elite had largely returned to their prior positions of local authority.

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Nevertheless, the decision to abolish Native Administration did have an impact. One change apparent in Darfur in the 1970s was the emergence of alternative local elites, who used their positions of authority in the newly formed local-government councils to construct a rival patrimonial system to that already in existence in the form of traditional leaders and their clients.13 These new elites could distribute land and jobs, and dispense justice, in the way the tribal leaders were formerly able to do. However, just as they were emerging as serious rivals to the tribal rulers, funds ran low and in many localities across the Sudan local councils were unable to raise adequate finances, either through local funding or from central government sources, to continue to fund clients or to finance normal governmental activities.14 Tim Niblock’s observations of local government in Sudan in the 1980s led him to doubt ‘whether many of the councils enjoy more than a paper existence’,15 which is illustrative of the local-government system’s decay. Ironically the only reason that local administration eluded total collapse, was because the void was filled by the very social structure that it was anticipated would be eliminated by the reforms. It was not that the tribal elites returned – they had never really left – but rather that they were able to restore the tribal systems on which their authority and power were based. The other pillar of the traditional system identified by the designers of the revolution as a structural barrier to development was the customary land-tenure arrangements. Land tenure constitutes a major issue in Darfur and for many analysts lies at the very heart of the current conflict. There is little doubt that access to land and water have figured prominently as major grievances, and disputes between parties over land and water have been responsible for a breakdown of law and order and for increasing levels of mistrust between social groupings. However, as the discussion in the last chapter began to illustrate and this chapter will continue to show, the causes of conflict over resources in Darfur reside in complex changes that began to transform agricultural production and land ownership at a time when traditional politics was undergoing a major realignment and when regional/international issues were increasingly influencing national affairs. As the central argument of this book has maintained, local issues alone, especially when abstracted from the context of national and international

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politics, can only provide a very partial account of the origins of the civil war in Darfur. It was the contradictions inherent in the formation of the Sudanese state, and the subsequent political manoeuvres of different and competing social groups to maintain or capture power, in which a more thorough explanation of Darfur’s tragedy can be found. Land functions as a major resource in Sudan, and it is issues associated with land that exposes many of the aspirations of competing social groups. It was in the 1970s, with the changes to land tenure, that a new chapter in the struggle for control of the national economy began, and while Darfur was relatively peripheral to this struggle at that time, the impact at the local level was nonetheless significant. The origins of the changes to land tenure can be traced back to the enactment of the Unregistered Land Act in 1970. The Act stipulated that: . . . all land of any kind whatsoever, whether waste, forest, occupied or unoccupied, which is not registered before the commencement of this Act, shall on such commencement, be the property of the Government and shall be deemed to have been registered as such.16 This act brought about a major reform of land tenure in Sudan, overturning the colonial system in which control of land, according to Mohammed Hashim Awad, was placed in the hands of native administrators. The enactment of the legislation ‘. . . made the Government the biggest landlord in the Sudan. It is in full ownership of all unregistered land and can control the property market.’17 As with the institutional transformation to Native Administration, land reform served the dual purpose of undermining the power of the traditional leaders and of meeting the ideological assumptions held by members of the RCC.18 In acquiring untitled land the Sudanese government was concerned with much more than just the status of the traditional elites: it had designs for modernising the agricultural and industrial sectors of the economy. Liberating rural societies from ‘traditional’ forms of land ownership and labour practices was understood, as part of the common wisdom of the period, as a necessary step in the modernisation process.

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As with the case of abolishing Native Administration, the conflicting political interests of the regime distracted the reformist agenda. This was truest in the case of land distribution where, as Leif Manger argues, land became another state resource with which the regime rewarded its supporters.19 The new system altered the rules that had existed under customary title, where ownership of all land, even unoccupied, which fell within the boundaries of a dar came under the sole authority of tribal leaders.20 When colonialism overturned the system of land charters granted by the Keira Sultans, it distorted the value of land and hindered the introduction of modern agricultural techniques.21 Some growth had occurred in the 1960s due to the shift to export-driven agricultural production, as Darfuri producers took advantage of increasing market opportunities caused by the expansion of the national market and by the increasing integration of Sudan into the international economy. The Unregistered Land Act provided the impetus for the growth in private ownership of land in Darfur, which de Waal explains was a ‘return to an older tradition of land tenure.’22 Despite the importance of overturning the colonial system and removing the regressive power of the latifundia elite, the new laws were responsible for creating some serious problems. Arising from the changes was the problem associated with the undermining of the well-established grazing and migration agreements. Disputes ensued, but more often than not, the records show that the state and local leaders were able to intervene through mediation and bring the parties to agreement. A second more serious problem seemed to arise as a consequence of the new policy. The law provided the state with the power to reallocate whole areas to whomever they chose. Under the law, tribal groups could claim lands even when the land fell under the jurisdiction of another group’s tribal dar.23 With the state responsible for handling these claims it was vital that the state had the capacity to remain an effective and independent arbiter. When the functions of the state in Darfur practically ceased, local leaders inherited the problem of adjudicating land claims. Local leaders were tied to social groups and brought these interests and identities into the adjudication on land claims whether they intended to or not. The ethnic dilemma in Darfur may not have been created by the claims over land but there is little

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doubt that each decision by local leaders to award or not award land claims to individual groups did nothing to ease the tensions. As already mentioned, there was a dynamic current in Darfur in the 1960s centred on economic growth. Merchants, mainly jellaba from central Sudan, were increasingly influencing agricultural production by opening new markets for cash crops grown in central Darfur.24 Commercialisation was stimulating other changes, including the development of a service industry and of markets for consumer goods, and higher levels of urbanisation in the wealthier parts of the region. As Abdul-Jalil writing in the early 1980s, explains of the rural and semi-rural population of Darfur: As their need for cash increased, their strategies in agriculture gradually became market-oriented. Oil-seed production, (groundnuts, sesame and watermelon seeds) on the eastern goz has been greatly expanded to meet a growing export market. Vegetable and fruit cultivation is increasingly practised where conditions permit.25 By the early 1970s, merchants were also offering lines of credit for the expansion of agricultural production to meet the growing demand. Pastoralists participated in the market economy by supplying livestock to agents located in Nyala and El Obeid, who exported it to Omdurman.26 As a result, Nyala grew to be the largest city in Darfur and a major market town, which according to James Morton, was as vibrant as any in Sudan.27 As the old land-tenure system was eroded, land sales and leasing became more common, creating a number of co-existing forms of land tenure; by the later 1970s, Abdul-Jalil contends, there was no longer a single land-tenure system in Darfur, but many.28 The Unregistered Land Act disrupted the old land system but the evidence tends to suggest that this only gave further impetus to the transformation of land ownership and of agricultural production that was already under way, and further influenced by external development funding. The establishment of the donor-funded Western Savannah Development Scheme in southern Darfur in 1978 and of the Jebel

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Marra Development Scheme in 1980 expanded commercialised production over larger areas of southern Darfur and the Jebel Marra hinterland. The latter initiative was the larger of the two, comprising a total area of 1.5 million feddans.29 The transformation of land tenure and the partial mechanisation and commercialisation of the traditional agricultural sector in central Sudan had a threefold impact on the region. First, it led to a stratification of farming communities, with more successful farmers increasing their holdings at the expense of the less successful. As land holdings grew, a class of rural proletariat emerged whose livelihoods relied on a mix of farming less arable goz land and of seasonal wage labour. The extension of farming activities into new areas was a persistent trend following population growth, but the speed and intensity of the expansion accelerated as a consequence of the changes to the ownership and usage of land in the Jebel Marra region. Those areas that increasingly came under the cultivation of displaced farmers were typically important routes for pastoralists travelling from the dry-arid north to seek lush grass and water for their precious herds. The settling of these lands generated competition for finite resources, and with this competition conflicts began to intensify as pastoralists found their traditional routes interrupted and their traditional pasture-lands occupied by farmers.30 Two options faced these pastoral groups: some decided to move from their traditional routes to others where passage had not been blocked by the expansion of permanent agriculture; however, in most cases this meant moving through semi-arid regions used by other pastoralists. Some groups, on the other hand, were determined to follow their traditional routes. The decision to alter routes generated competition between pastoralists, while in other cases the competition was between farmers and pastoralists. Either way, as Sharif Harir has documented, conflicts over land escalated in the late 1970s and 1980s. The second issue that arose from the changes occurring in the Darfur agricultural sector revolved around food supply. Whereas the customary system produced food for local consumption, commercial and semimechanised farms tended to produce goods for external markets. This shift led to a reduction in the local supply of food, and thus to price increases in the market-place. Reports pre-dating the Sahelian drought

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of 1984–85 indicate rising food insecurity in Darfur, suggesting that even under normal conditions changes in agriculture production had an impact on living conditions.31 Third, as customary ownership and usufruct land tenure were replaced by private-property rights, farms were increasingly divided into individual holdings separated by fences (zaraib) which, even if possibly at first had not intended to do so, still had the effect of preventing the movement of herds along the established migratory routes through the Jebel Marra.32 Consequently, even these regions, with long-established habits of co-existence between farming communities and pastoralists, saw tensions escalate. In contrast to the Jebel Marra Scheme, which concentrated on agricultural production, the Western Savannah Development Project aimed at developing ranches in southern Darfur. The Western Savannah Development Project initiated a programme which settled the cattle-herding Baggara on communally operated ranches. The communities were collectively responsible for protecting the herds, fencing and reseeding. A local act was issued to regulate and control the use of these ranches, which included the payment of nominal fees to the Western Savannah Development Corporation for maintenance and other services.33 In common with the Jebel Marra Scheme, the Western Savannah Scheme led to the commercialisation of livestock production. The communal element of the scheme protected livelihoods in way that the Jebel Marra Scheme did not, and in recent the southern parts of the Darfur region have experienced less instability and violence than the central and northern regions.34 The disputes and the violence engendered by the competition over resources, as we will see later, resulted in serious security problems for the region. Some commentators prefer to see these events as the natural outgrowth of tribal societies or as the continuation of traditional tribal violence. Since such views are easily countered, and our analysis of Sudan’s transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, and of the process of change that occurred in Darfur, illustrate their lack of any explanatory value, no space will be found here to discuss them. An alternative perspective has been put forward: that the severity of the violence that overtook Darfur in the 1980s (and then again after 2003) resulted from the coincidence of reforms that dismantled the system of Native Administration at a

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moment when tensions over dwindling natural resources were on the rise. Thus, without the traditional system of tribal-mediation, disputes formerly settled through tribal mediation became violent and deadly clashes, as Adam Azzain Mohamed explains, when he argues that: ‘To a large extent the proliferation of tribal and/or ethnic violent conflicts in the Darfur region may well be attributed to the weakening and untimely dissolution of the system of native administration.’35 There are a number of problems with taking this line. As explained above, efforts by Nimeiri to dismantle Native Administration were at best only partially successful, and by the late 1970s the traditional elite had returned to sustain a system that was in serious decline. The continuing relevance of the local elite was apparent from results in the first post-Nimeiri multi-party elections, which favoured the Umma Party mainly because the traditional party machinery was largely intact, even after 17 years of central authoritarianism.36 In fact, despite the reformist agenda implemented in the initial radical phase of government from 1969–72, Nimieri was responsible for few lasting changes to regional institutions.37 Also, reducing the cause of the conflicts that have erupted in Darfur to the problem of the erosion of Native Administration fails to take into account the other significant changes that occurred in the region. Even when these views do address issues of the transformation of the local economy and land tenure, or desertification and pressures on the environment, or the problems associated with the spill-over effects of the war in Sudan’s western neighbour, Chad, there is an implicit assumption that all those problems would have been resolved if the government had left Native Administration intact. The political reforms ultimately failed to reconfigure the loyalties of the traditional elite, whose affiliations remained tied to the sectarian parties rather than the state. The Sudanese Socialist Union, as a political movement, was unable to sustain the long-term mobilisation of the traditional elite, or to inspire the masses, and as history has shown either one of these is necessary to propel the project of nation-building.38 Whatever nation-building was possible in Darfur seemed rapidly to dissipate, in parallel with the reduction in the state’s resources for funding education, infrastructure and economic development. When the state

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retreated in the late 1970s and 1980s the ‘Sudanisation’ of rural society slowed, and local affiliations and alliances turned once again to those that existed prior to the reforms undertaken by the Nimeiri regime.39 And this occurred, because, for all the efforts of the 1970s, the outlines of the colonial state, especially traditional leaders, sectarianism and the centre-periphery relationship, remained in place. Rather than see the problems of Darfur as caused by the erosion of Native Administration, there is a stronger case for arguing that it was the institutional weakness of the state in Darfur which allowed disputes over natural resources to remain unresolved. Whether or not the Native Administration system proved incapable of addressing the causes of conflict in Darfur, then becomes somewhat irrelevant. Instead, a focus on the institutional weakness of the state may provide a better understanding of the environment where the crisis emerged. At issue is not whether a local-council system or Native Administration was the better structure for dealing with local issues, including inter-tribal conflicts, but rather that Native Administration was far more effective than a system, which had effectively ceased to exist. In reforming Native Administration and land tenure, the Nimeiri regime was showing its determination to ‘remove the power once and for all from the sheikhs’, as the first essential step in the transformation of Sudanese society.40 Nimeiri’s failure to achieve this was emblematic of the larger failures of the May Regime and in the collapse of Nimeiri’s development state, due to economic crisis, is where the story of Darfur’s own crisis must be understood.

6.3 Nimeiri’s state-building programme: breadbasket to basket-case Initially, the Nimeiri-led government declared openly that it was committed to breaking the bourgeoisie’s hold on the political and economic control of Sudan. Close connections between the pan-Arabist military regime and the Sudanese Communist Party provided a clear ideological perspective for the new government. Just as important for the regime was the notion that to fix Sudan’s numerous problems it was necessary to resolve the underlying causes: a lack of national unity

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and of economic development.41 The nation- and state-building platforms were central themes of the early Nimeiri period that is until more cynical approaches to staying in power were employed. In his first address to the nation after the coup, Major-General Nimeiri explained to the people that the May revolution was dedicated to ‘. . . [the] benefit of the our people, thereby leading our country into a new era, building its unity, augmenting its economic resources, formulating its social life along the road of socialist development.’42 After securing victory over the Ansar in pitched battle in March 1970 Nimeiri set about nationalising banking and trading companies under foreign control. The communist programme of transforming Sudan into a socialist state seemed well under way. In 1970, the Sudanese government embarked on a five-year development programme outlined in the Five Year Development Plan (1970/71–1974/75). The initial programme included wholesale nationalisation of foreign assets,43 the completion of which in 1970 marked the end of Nimeiri’s socialist project. His alliance with the Sudanese Communist Party was swiftly repudiated after a coup attempt by the SCP was crushed, with the aid of Libya’s Gaddafi and the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, in June 1971. Gaddafi’s support for a fellow pan-Arab leader was crucial in the defeat of the Communist plot, and heralded the emergence of a new player in regional politics.44 The regime in Libya would become a major influence on regional politics, and on the fate of Darfur, in the decades to come. The purge of SCP members from the regime and the subsequent suppression of the communists marked Nimeiri’s turning away from the Eastern Bloc.45 While his imperative in doing so was mainly political, there was also a clear economic dimension to his decision. The new government was faced with enduring economic problems, especially poor economic growth, increasing foreign debt and growing trade deficits. With communists arrested, in hiding or in exile, Nimeiri was now free to seek financial assistance from private capital, and especially from the US, as well as from the supposedly independent multinational lending institutions.46 The turn away from the communist bloc improved Sudan’s foreign relations with the US, Britain and the Gulf States, leading to the opening of new lines of credit that

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had previously been closed.47 Almost immediately, the US granted $18 million-worth of credit and the IMF $40 million in loans.48 The World Bank also assisted, with loans for ‘priority and infrastructural and agribusiness projects’.49 Sudan, under the now Western-oriented Nimeiri, was ready to embark on a state-building development drive, but without quite knowing just how momentous the programme would become in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The oil embargo and the subsequent decision by OPEC to quadruple oil prices produced a bonanza for the oil-rich Gulf States. With the new-found oil wealth at their disposal Saudi Arabia and Kuwait sought regional investments in agricultural projects, principally aimed at reducing the Gulf States’ dependence on food imports from European and North American sources.50 By 1975, Sudan had become the focus of a systemic development programme aimed at transforming its agricultural sector into the ‘breadbasket of the world’.51 The strategy is outlined in a Sudanese Government report from 1976 which states: . . . the neighboring Arab world looks to the Sudan as a focal point in the Arab economic integration plans, where the combination of financial resources of the Arab community, Western technology, and the agricultural resources of the Sudan could produce the food requirements of the community and agricultural raw materials for part of their industrialisation plan.52 A basic planning assumption was that only 20 million feddans, of what was believed to be the 200 million that were available, were actually under cultivation, which meant that the capacity for expanding the food production of the Sudan was immense.53 Jay O’Brien disputes the figures cited in 1970s reports. His first contention is that much of the land in northern Sudan was crucial for the survival of the pastoralists and for their annual drive from north to south, and as such was far from unoccupied.54 O’Brien follows this argument with evidence that questions the so-called quality of the land, which is why it was most suited to pastoral use and not high-intensity cultivation. Such concerns however, had little impact on the Sudanese government or on the

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experts promoting the ‘breadbasket strategy’, and by the mid-1970s the programme was well under way. During the Nimeiri years the Gulf States played an increasingly important role in the Sudanese economy. Khartoum became the centre of these states’ economic drive into Africa. Not only were huge funds poured into developing Sudan – over £S1000 million in 1976–77 alone55 – but also Khartoum was chosen to host the headquarters of the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa.56 The movement was not uni-directional: Sudanese were moving to the Gulf in huge numbers. By 1979 there were approximately 300,000 workers from Sudan, including many of its most skilled, located in the Gulf States.57 Despite the huge investment in agricultural and industrial development in Sudan, the economy slid into crisis before the decade came to an end. A number of explanations have been put forward for the failure of the breadbasket strategy. Peter Woodward, whose excellent study of Sudan focuses principally on exposing the patron-client relations at the very core of the Sudanese political system, argues that it was political machinations that overtook, and distorted, the entire development programme, resulting in widespread corruption. For Woodward, ‘The importance of Gulf Arab states’ money in the end lay less in its contribution to Sudan’s economic development than in the resources it provided for the exercise of clientalistic politics.’58 In addition to clientalism, centre-periphery disparities continued to shape the Sudanese experience of Nimeiri’s state- and nation-building programme, which for the majority of the outlying regions of the country seemed to differ very little from previous periods. While there was definite growth in the industrial sector, in 1980 some 20 per cent of GDP was derived from industry, the latter was disproportionately located in Khartoum.59 The capital grew dramatically as the population almost doubled between 1973 and 1982, according to the 1983 census reaching 1,343,000 inhabitants.60 Khartoum also grew as a centre of industry and finance, with 70 per cent of industrial and service jobs, 85 per cent of commercial companies and 80 per cent of banks located in the capital.61 As with the earlier history of colonial and post-colonial Sudan, the peripheries continued to be marginalised during Nimeiri’s time in power. But as Niblock proposes, the

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problems this time went further, because as the economy deteriorated the regions suffered doubly: Effectively, the outlying parts of the country were starved not only of development funding but even of funds for recurrent expenditure. They (the outlying regions) experienced, therefore, all of the negative effects of Sudan’s economic position (high inflation, shortages of essential products, etc.) and none of the positive aspects (the influx of funds for selected development projects).62 There was one notable success from the expansion and mechanisation of agricultural production in Sudan: food productivity grew in the 1970s, which was a rare development for the time. In a study conducted by J. Hinderink and J.J. Sterkenburg, only two countries in Africa showed a substantial increase in food production per capita between 1961–65 and 1976–80.63 In fact, Sudanese food production outpaced population growth, which was unusual for underdeveloped economies in this period, and unique in Africa; across the continent in West Africa, for example, food production fell by 25 per cent in the decade from 1975 to 1985, at the same time as this increase in Sudanese agricultural production.64 However, the latter failed to translate into greater food security for the Sudanese themselves, who paradoxically faced increasing levels of hunger and malnutrition, despite higher yields. By 1990, almost half of the Sudanese population, according to a World Bank study, suffered from chronic or transitory food insecurity.65 The major cause of this decline in food availability was that more and more of the country’s agricultural produce was redirected to foreign markets to repay the mounting debt. Despite this increase in agricultural exports, Sudan plunged into a major economic crisis in the 1980s. Even with generous foreign assistance, and the exceptional patience of the US and other international creditors, Sudanese debt continued to escalate. The breadbasket strategy not only failed to reverse the precarious economic situation it also created further economic and political problems. Debt, inflation, rising poverty levels and corruption irrevocably

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undermined Nimeiri’s political legitimacy. Unlike the leaders of the traditional parties, Nimeiri was unable to call on tradition or on sectarian or tribal affiliations to buttress his falling popularity when the economic strategy faltered. In a bid to save his leadership from the combination of economic crisis and a deteriorating situation in the south Nimeiri embarked on a regionalisation policy that would have serious repercussions for government in Darfur.

6.4

The demise of national unity: regionalisation and re-ethnicisation in Darfur

Ja’afar Nimeiri, always the pragmatist, at least during the initial years of his time in power, was responsible for concluding a peace deal with the south, which lasted for 11 years, providing the stability the Sudanese, had longed for since independence. When Nimeiri came to power there was few initial signs that he would alter the modus operandi employed by previous Sudanese governments in dealing with the southern rebels, but a number of factors conspired to make a settlement propitious. The government’s new tone played some part, and the appointment of a number of highly educated and secular technocrats brought people into government who supported the idea of peace with the south as a means of promoting national unity.66 Despite the philosophical change, the military solution seems to have been favoured by Nimeiri until the changing fortunes of war made peace an imperative. The consolidation of the rebel forces in the south in 1970–71, under the leadership of Joseph Lagu’s Southern Sudanese Liberation Movement (SSLM) was a decisive moment in the history of the north-south conflict.67 The combined forces of the rebels rapidly proved superior to the Sudanese army in guerrilla warfare, and in July 1971 Nimeiri commenced secret peace talks with the SSLM. On 27 February 1972, the two parties signed the Addis Ababa Agreement. This peace deal brought to an end 17 years of fighting, and was a historic moment for Sudan. Nimeiri basked in the limelight that followed, both in international and domestic circles. Internationally, Nimeiri was heralded as a peace-maker and the man who brought an end to a 17-year conflict.

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At home, Nimeiri received accolades from many of his compatriots, for whom the peace deal was seen as a major victory for the very idea of the Sudanese state and nation, as exemplified by the words of one Sudanese writer in 1972: ‘With the restoration of peace and stability as their primary concern, both parties have attained a political, legal and administrative framework within which the national interests can be fulfilled and sovereignty best preserved.’68 Peace was widely seen as an opportunity, the first since independence, for Sudan genuinely to take up the issue of constructing a sense of inclusive nationalism. Nimeiri’s achievement, as Salah al-Zein puts it, ‘. . . [was] the first time, in the political history of the country, that Sudan’s cultural diversity was publicly and politically recognized.’69 While the deal brought peace, and within government there was clearly a shift in relations with the south, there is less evidence that the northern Sudanese had departed from ambitions of constructing a national identity that was firmly rooted in Arab culture and in Islam. It can be discerned, from multiple sources from the time, that there remained a strong attachment within the northern Sudan to a Sudanese nation that was inherently Arab and Islamic in character.70 Important voices argued that without stronger government recognition of the south’s equality – not only legally, but also culturally – the peace was always tenuous at best. One serious barrier to modifying the cultural chauvinism prevalent in the north was the Islamic character of the major political movements in Sudan, especially the Umma and Khatmiyya, whose influence on Sudan needs no further explanation. Despite, the 1970 law prohibiting all political parties in Sudan, the traditional party groupings remained, even in absentia, an authentic threat to the regime. The potency of that threat became apparent in 1976, when Nimeiri was almost toppled by a second coup in two years. Launched from Libya, the coup was a combined assault on the capital by members of the Ansar and the Muslim Brotherhood, and it was only thwarted when the Egyptian military intervened on Nimieri’s side.71 Nimeiri was shaken by these events and decided on reconciliation with the principal architects of the coup, Sadiq al-Mahdi and Hasan al-Turabi. However, Ahmed al-Mirghani, the head of the Khatmiyya, was unmoved by this dramatic change in Nimieri’s stance

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towards his northern opponents, and maintained his distance, and that of the Unionist Party, from the regime.72 In 1977, a year after the attempted coup, Nimeiri repatriated the exiled sectarian leaders and rehabilitated the traditional parties in what became famously known in Sudan as ‘National Reconciliation’. The coup of 1976 had shown the precariousness of Nimeiri’s hold on power, and that his political opponents were powerful enough to overthrow him. The breadbasket strategy had not overcome Sudan’s economic woes, and the government’s mounting debt started to restrict its options. Nimeiri’s decision to support Sadat’s peace with Israel brought Sudan into dispute with the other Arab states, including the powerful monarchies of the oil-rich Gulf which were responsible for providing the bulk of Sudan’s development aid in the 1970s. With little income accruing from the huge investments in agriculture and industry, a debt that was increasingly beyond servicing, and the loss of access to Gulf funds, the regime was starved of the financial resources it needed to maintain the bureaucracy and the huge number of government retainers around the country.73 In this context of impending economic collapse and rising political opposition, Nimeiri announced a major restructuring of government, to be based on devolving power to the regions. In an article published in 1983, Mukhtar Alassam explained the regionalisation policy as a brainchild of the First People’s Local Government Conference, held in 1978.74 Alassam defended the policy of regional devolution as a commitment on the part of the President to decentralise power so that ‘. . . the creation of these governments is designed to curtail centripetal forces by encouraging rural development and by building up services to the benefit of the regions.’75 Whether this was Nimeiri’s rationale or not – and there hangs a question over the economic and political benefits for Nimeiri in devolving power,76 – the policy transferred responsibilities for governance to regional authorities handpicked by Nimeiri. As one commentator on the Sudanese economic situation in the 1980s remarked, regionalisation policies proved counter-productive because ‘. . . the government simply did not possess the resources to implement them.’77 The motive for regionalisation was to shift the burden and the cost of government

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to the regions, but the latter had far less resources and expertise and the result in may parts of the country was a collapse of government. In Darfur, the timing of this reform was particularly unfortunate. The first major problem that the regionalisation policy encountered in Darfur was due more to a miscalculation than to any hostility towards the notion of devolving power. Nimeiri erred when he appointed Al-Tayeb al-Mardi, a native of Kordofan, to the position of governor, instead of a native of the region. The announcement of Al-Mardi’s appointment sparked off numerous demonstrations in El Fasher, Nyala, El Genenia and elsewhere across Darfur. The demonstrations became more serious when the police and military were called in, leading to the death, according to local reports, of up to 20 people. On 19 January, Nimeiri revoked Al-Mardi’s appointment – though not before the incident became known as Darfur’s intifada – and bowed to popular agitation by appointing Ahmad Diraige as governor.78 Despite what seemed to be a major victory for the people of Darfur, it was clear at an early stage that regionalisation amounted to far less than the government had made out, as M.W. Daly argues: When all was said and done, the new Regional Government of Darfur was a gussied up version of the Anglo-Egyptian provincial system of 1944, replete with a governor and advisory council. Thus ‘regionalization’ was recentralization, with, as always, a proliferation of offices and explosion of expense.79 Diraige faced a huge challenge when he came to power. Regional tensions were on the rise, and within two years of taking office he had to confront a major environmental catastrophe, and a human tragedy in the making, when the Sahelian drought ravaged the region. In addition, the Sudanese economy was in meltdown, and with the state rapidly buckling under budgetary pressures Diraige’s task of dealing with the multiple issues he faced became impossible without adequate resources or funding.80 Sharif Harir describes the transfer of power and the tensions that resulted from the appointment of regional government in Darfur in an important article detailing the causes of the violence that erupted

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in the region in the 1980s.81 Overall, it is clearly his view that the policy was a disaster for Darfur, in that the politicians increasingly fell into the ‘ethnic trap’ of mollifying ‘. . . the ethnic group to which one belonged at the expense of others or indulge in wholesale nepotism.’82 Peter Woodward argues that regional governments contributed to the ‘politicization of ethnic identity’,83 a perspective shared by Martin Daly.84 While these eminent scholars are correct to point out that regionalisation created intra-regional problems that might have developed differently if Khartoum had retained control over the region, they may be overstating the tribal/ethnic dimension. Another viewpoint might offer a slightly different picture, where tribal/ethnic identities are viewed as masking more serious emergent socio-economic cleavages. One scholar whose work offers an interesting insight into the intersection of ethnic and socio-economic identities is Paul Doornbos, whose study of Darfur in the 1970s and 1980s presents interesting evidence that while nation-building had captured some segments of the urban and educated Darfuri population, it had alienated others. In Darfur, he argues, the relevant division that appeared was not along ethnic lines but between a ‘Sudanised’ segment of the population and the proprietors of indigenous cultures.85 Doorbos defines Sudanisation as ‘. . . the process of conversion of ethnically diverse population groups living in the Sudanese periphery to the dominant and prestigious lifestyle of the central Nile valley region.’86 He further argues that a discernible trend of Sudanisation was evident in Darfur, especially in the urban areas, to the extent that the ‘. . . Sudanised increase numerically at the expense of other cultural identifications.’87 Conversely, it was apparent to Doornbos that those groups marginalised economically by the transformation of the local economy tended to react by strengthening their attachment to their ‘traditional’ indigenous cultures. Doornbos, Harir, Woodward and Daly are describing the same phenomena: re-ethnicisation. The subtle difference is in the theorising. Doornbos presents a view of ethnicity that is more complex than either Harir or Daly. In this perspective, the rise and fall of the Sudanese state’s relevance in Darfur is an important component in understanding

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the region’s shifting ethnic markers. Understanding ethnic identities in Darfur must then take into account rising tensions between the urban and rural populace, the rich and the poor, pro-government and antigovernment factions, rich farmers and poor herders, to name only the most apparent of the social groups existing in 1980s Darfur. While ethnicity plays a part, the complex reasons for the reformulation of ethnic identities are as important as those for ethnic mobilisation, and while sometimes the two sets of reasons converge, sometimes they do not. In the case of Darfur in the 1980s, the considerable changes to political and economic relations within the region were responsible for provoking a new set of actors and for creating new or aggravating existing grievances. Ethnic identities were also responsive to the major crisis that the Sudan was facing at the time that the regionalisation policy was being implemented. Regional governments, like that in Darfur, were created at a time when the state was collapsing under the pressures of a failing economy and a regime which had exhausted its mandate to govern. In effect, the dissatisfaction and anger of Darfur people at multiple failings of government should have been directed at the central government, but as a result of regionalisation were instead aimed at the newly formed regional authority, which had neither the expertise or the resources to deal with issues that were increasingly national and international in scale. Despite the serious problems faced by the regional government, events would only overtake Diraige in 1983, as famine gripped the region. While, as argued, the impact of the regionalisation policy was undoubtedly felt in Darfur, it was in the south that the first signs of an impending disaster became evident. The south had provided crucial political support for Nimeiri, so much so that Norman O’Neill considered that: Numeiri’s ability to hold onto power came to depend upon this Southern base of support as he had permanently alienated the Umma-led faction of the right through the Aba Island massacre and the left through the crackdown on the SCP and attendant rightward shift.88

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Southern resentment remained a problem even after peace had been concluded. Southerners expected the gap between north (the north here being the region of the privileged riverain elite) and south to be reduced, in terms of social welfare, education and employment opportunities. Writing in 1973, only a year after the Addis Ababa agreement, Oluwadre Aguda evocatively set out the poverty and marginalisation of Sudan’s south when he stated: For it would be difficult to find elsewhere in black Africa a population of about five million, occupying over a quarter of a million square miles, who 15 years after independence could boast of only two secondary schools, and neither a permanent secretary nor a director of a department in the public service.89 The neglect of the south continued, and by the time that Nimeiri had reached reconciliation with the northern elite in 1977, the north-south agreement was barely worth the paper it had been written on as the government’s ambivalence for the terms of the agreement intensified the distrust of southerners.90 The announcement in 1983 of the introduction of Shari’a law as the legal system for the entire Sudan finally repudiated the north-south agreement. But, as most commentators have recounted, the promise of national unity outlined by the agreement of 1972 had ended much earlier, and by 1983 was already buried in the ruins of the Sudanese economy. The reasons for Nimieri’s decision to abandon the terms of the peace deal with the south are complex. His immediate concerns about holding on to power in the south seem to have been raised when he was forced to cut short a tour of the southern regions in December 1982, after violent protests broke out in Rumbek. He reacted by announcing a division of southern Sudan into three separate regions, which aimed to weaken the unity of the south and place allies in key positions there. Later that month, soldiers stationed at Bor mutinied against a proposed move to the north and quickly headed to the bush, from where they launched an insurgency. At this moment, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLM/A), under the leadership of Colonel John Garang de Mabior, was born.91 The civil war

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had resumed and did so with a ferocity and brutality that exceeded the previous conflict. Nimeiri’s only achievement was now nullified, and his years in power were no longer to be remembered for his bold determination to bring about peace, but for being the person responsible for war.

6.5 The disintegration of the Sudanese economy Nimeiri’s legitimacy was based on one key pillar: the promise to raise living standards through economic development. As suggested, the early reforms undertaken by the May Regime were largely designed to remove barriers to development. Yet, despite these foundations and almost a decade of Gulf financial funding and foreign ‘expert’ development assistance, the dreams of a Sudanese development miracle had become an economic crisis by the end of the 1970s. The major catalyst for the slump in the Sudanese economy’s performance originated with the changes to funding and subsidies from the Gulf. When Gulf oil concessions came to an end the Sudanese economy simply could not afford to purchase unsubsidised oil, and the country’s fuel bill rose from £S 550 million in 1978 to a staggering £S 5170 million in 1980.92 Gulf investments also fell dramatically, partly due to the tensions over the Camp David Accords and partly due to the 1980s fall in oil prices. With investment and aid from the Gulf States at a complete standstill, in 1981–82 total Arab aid to Sudan was $26 million, and development funding only $15 million;93 Sudan’s economy entered a period of significant decline. However, the signs that the Sudanese development project was struggling were evident even before the end of Gulf oil concessions. In 1978, the IMF was called in as Sudan’s debt and deficit mounted. The IMF advised a devaluation of the Sudanese currency as the key to reining in expenditure on imports; as conventional IMF wisdom saw it, a cheaper currency made exports more attractive to overseas buyers. The advice was not well received by some Sudanese economists and government officials who understood, far better than the IMF at the time that devaluating the currency was a certain recipe for economic chaos. Despite this well-informed opposition to the IMF plan,

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on 15 February 1978 the Minister of Finance announced a 25 per cent devaluation of the Sudanese pound.94 In return, the IMF offered a stand-by arrangement, and other donors, including Saudi Arabia, offered Sudan generous loans and write-offs of Sudan’s spiralling loan repayments. The result of the currency devaluation was a dramatic increase in the trade deficit, from £S 23.7 million in 1978 to £S 83.7 million in 1979, a result which had been predicted by Sudanese economists.95 At the same time, export revenues suffered from the one-quarter fall in the value of the currency. In effect, following the IMF advice only served to increase the terms of trade imbalance, to a point where the Sudanese government was only able to service the 1979 debt through additional borrowing. With the situation deteriorating rather than improving, in 1980 the IMF was called in again. This time the reforms were more comprehensive, and foreshadowed the Structural Adjustment Policies so widely employed by the Fund in the 1980s to restructure the economies of indebted countries all across the global south. Sudan was advised to adopt a number of key policy recommendations, including trade liberalisation, the privatisation of national industries and corporations, austerity measures and the removal of all restrictions on profit repatriation for foreign businesses.96 With the situation reaching a crisis for which there seemed no resolution in sight, the IMF plan was, as Tim Niblock has described, ‘. . . a framework from which there was no escape, short of Sudan’s reneging on its international debts.’97 The impact of the IMF programme was to exacerbate the economic crisis and to shift even harsher economic burdens onto the Sudanese people.98 By 1986, the real value of the minimum wage in Sudan had fallen to only 16 per cent of 1970 levels, inflation was running at 20 per cent a year, and the emigration of Sudan’s professional and skilled workforce had risen from 45,000 in 1979 to an estimated 250,000 by 1983.99 As economic conditions deteriorated, the political reverberations began to be felt. The first sign that the IMF-imposed policies were generating a political backlash was when government subsidies on wheat, sugar and petrol were removed, and the tax on tobacco was increased. Protests and strikes broke out across Khartoum, Omdurman and Gezira.

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Nimeiri called in the army, and clashes with protesters led to several deaths.100 Ultimately, it was another round of IMF austerity in 1985 that led to the mass demonstrations and protests that toppled Nimeiri while he was on one of his regular trips to the USA. Even his status as one of the US government’s most valuable friends did not protect him from the wrath of the Sudanese people.101 The collapse of the Sudanese economy in the 1980s left its mark on urban and rural Sudan alike. International factors also played their part in the depredations felt across the country, as declining prices and international demand for agricultural goods undercut the expansion of cash-crop production that had occurred in the 1970s. Figures given by Morton of decreasing sales of sugar, tea and other consumer goods in Darfur is illustrative of the decline in living standards, as the economic bubble of the 1970s burst.102 As the Sudanese economy contracted and the breadbasket strategy failed, exports of agriculture products and livestock assumed a new significance in the struggle to service foreign debt. Food exports became the staple of Sudan’s trade revenues, driving up the cost of food and restricting its availability. Even in normal times, this would have made food a top-order issue for the people of Sudan; in the 1980s, as a major drought and famine engulfed the entire Sahel, it became incendiary. The Sahelian drought that hit Sudan in the 1980s was not the first such experience in Darfur, but Alex de Waal’s important study of drought and famine in the region concluded that the 1980s drought created greater devastation and suffering than any other in living memory. However, while the drought was severe, de Waal identifies political indifference and the shift from subsistence to market-oriented agriculture as primarily responsible for the scale of the disaster.103 Following de Waal and others who have surveyed this period, it can be argued that the government mishandling of the famine was illustrative of everything that was wrong with the politics of the Sudan. The government ignored the famine even after domestic and international pleas for it to intervene. The moment of truth for Darfur arrived when Ahmad Diraige flew to Khartoum to plead the case personally for government assistance in helping to relieve the humanitarian crisis that had developed. Rather than promising assistance, as had been

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anticipated, Nimeiri reacted angrily to the request and Diraige fled Sudan. Not only was aid denied, but the government continued to export food as tens of thousands of Sudanese died from starvation. In fact, food exports in 1985 contributed 42.9 per cent of GDP – an increase over the 1984 figure.104 But as the people of the western Sudan faced starvation, Nimeiri was more concerned with preserving his rule from urban opposition and southern rebels than with organising a relief effort to save his people’s lives.105 However, the most insensate move of all was Nimeiri’s order to remove western Sudanese refugees from Khartoum and return them to the famine-ravaged regions whence they had fled. The Sudanese, in spite of everything they had endured during Nimeiri’s 16 years in power, found the removal of the refugees a shocking incident which further highlighted just how bankrupt the regime had become. However, to lay the entire blame for the catastrophe on Nimeiri misses one crucial point: the regional government’s powerlessness to intervene to alleviate the hunger.106 Nimeiri’s 1980 decentralisation policy should have allowed the regional government to act in defence of the population, but without funds or the necessary resources Diraige was reduced to seeking assistance from the central government – whose focus remained on the war in the south and increasing urban unrest in Khartoum. The drought ended in 1985, with 1986 crop-yields returning to pre-drought levels, but the impact of the drought had been felt in some way by every community in Darfur, and the legacy of the time was that food insecurity became a constant spectre in many parts of the region.107 In addition, the northern pastoralists had lost the majority of their herds, and thus faced an uncertain future. Just as importantly, for the people of Darfur events had revealed that the state apparatus in Darfur was unable to effectively intercede when needed. If the government was powerless at crucial times of distress, then other forms of collective organisation were clearly needed to fill the void. The rise in ethnic and tribal identities in the 1980s must also be seen in the context of government failure at this crucial moment of need. The coup that ended Nimeiri’s 16-year reign was a relief for many Sudanese. That the collapse of the regime should have occurred in the context of the perilous nature of the economic and political problems

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facing the country is hardly surprising. Drought had ravaged the western Sudan, the war in the south was intensifying, and the collapse of social services and governance in the regions were matched by high inflation, food shortages and rising unemployment in the urban centres. The task facing the new government was to say the least unenviable. But the new leaders were members of the same regime that had overseen the collapse of both the economy and the north-south peace arrangement. The leader of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, John Garang, exasperated with the duplicity of the new government, aptly labelled them ‘Nimeirism without Nimeiri’, and Jay O’Brien describes the transitional government of Commander-inChief General Siwar el-Dahab, who replaced Nimeiri, as ‘. . . a proWestern coup, with Egyptian support, led by top army officers who seek to re-establish the status quo as soon as possible.’108 Sudan had survived the Nimeiri years, but was entering the post-Nimeiri era with the same twin legacies that had plagued the Sudan 16 years earlier: national disunity and a severe economic crisis.

6.6 Sudan and the war with Chad Leaving aside the famine that had caused great suffering in Darfur, the events surrounding the impact on Darfur of the war with Chad best illustrate the extent to which the Sudanese state had become emasculated by the 1980s. That Darfur was drawn into the civil war in Chad is not surprising, but that it became a major military theatre is more so. Darfur and Chad share a boundary approximately 1300 kilometres in length. Historically, the two regions have been closely intertwined, and in addition a number of large ethno-cultural groups straddle the Sudan/Chad border, including the important constituency of the Zaghawa. Economic and cultural ties bind people in Darfur and Chad together, as Millard Burr and Robert Collins describe: Sudanese from Darfur, both cultivators and pastoralists, had settled there [Abeche], and during the French administration, town planning included quarters for new emigrant ethnic groups . . . Not surprisingly most of the residents of Abeche

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continued their close ties to Darfur in the Sudan while the pastoral Baggara in Chad continued to drive their cattle to the Sudan railhead at El Obeid in Kordofan.109 On a more formal level, the contacts between the Khartoum government and disaffected groups from northern Chad can be traced back to the 1960s. The ‘Arabs’ of northern Chad looked eastwards to Sudan and Cairo, or to the Gulf States, for education and employment opportunities unavailable to Arabic speakers in Chad.110 In this way the integral links between the ‘Arabs’ from Chad and the riverain Sudanese became more than merely symbolic. Additionally, the Cold War and Libyan intervention in Chad played a crucial part in internationalising the conflict. In August 1981, Libya, with Soviet approval, signed a tripartite agreement with Yemen and with another of Sudan’s hostile neighbours, the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia.111 This treaty, in the opinion of William Brewer, gave Libya’s intervention in Chad ‘importance in the wider global context’, especially as far as the USA was concerned.112 As the war in Chad began to intensify in late 1981, Nimeiri was able to utilise US concerns over Libya’s relationship with the Soviets to ‘impress on Secretary [of State] Haig . . . the immediacy of the Libyan threat and the consequent need for more, and faster, US support.’113 The aid was forthcoming because the Sudan sat astride two Soviet allies, and was seen to be an important ally in the struggle against communist expansion in Africa. These new funds from the US and the IMF saved Sudan from certain economic collapse. An increase in oil revenues after the oil crisis in 1973 allowed Gaddafi to pursue his ambition to extend his influence into Africa, though he suffered a setback in the late 1970s when his proxy, Goukouni Oueddei, was ousted. Libya responded by intensifying military involvement in Chad, which often led to cross-border raids into Sudanese territory; this in turn led to Sudanese casualties and the destruction of property. Nimeiri reacted during September 1981, Brewer argues, by moving Sudanese troops into Darfur to prevent further Libyan attacks on Sudan, specifically advances into Darfur.114 While this action protected the region, the motivation behind Nimeiri’s

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decision was more likely to have been strategic: to earn further credit with the USA.115 With Nimeiri demonstrating his determination to thwart Libyan expansionism, Sudan became a major recipient of US military aid and financial assistance.116 The year 1983 was a turning point for Darfur: the Sahelian drought intensified, leaving communities across the region fighting for survival, and just when the Sudanese military presence was most needed to stop the further encroachment of Chadian rebels and Libyans into Darfur, the war in the southern Sudan re-erupted. Nimeiri transferred all available military, including the forces in Darfur, to the south to combat the SPLM insurgency. This move left Darfur largely unprotected, and the spill-over from the war in Chad intensified as a result. Things only got worse in the wake of the overthrow of Nimeiri. The Transitional Military Council (TMC) that succeeded to power failed to gain the acceptance of international donors, including the USA. The search for aid to continue the war in the southern Sudan proved futile as Western donors, for one reason or another, rejected Sudanese requests.117 The US offered food aid, including further loan write-offs, but no military assistance, the latter being what the Sudan’s leaders desired in their struggle with the rebels in the south. In desperation, the TMC sent Saddiq al-Mahdi on a mission to seek assistance from his friend and former ally, the Libyan President Gaddafi. Gaddafi was very ready to assist his former guest, and the provision of Libyan weapons and financial assistance was hastily organised and dispatched to Sudan. In addition, Libya ended assistance to the SPLM, and Gaddafi welcomed Sudanese guest workers by according them ‘special status’ in Libya. The Sudanese matched Gaddafi’s generosity, as the TMC ‘terminated the flow of arms to Hissen Habre, closed the frontier, and opened another chapter in the strange relations between Khartoum and Tripoli.’118

6.7 Libya in Darfur: the abrogation of responsibility by the Sudanese state The Libyan-Sudanese alliance swung events against the people of Darfur. Under the TMC, and then following elections in 1986 under

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the Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, Gaddafi was allowed to wage his war against the pro-Western government of Chad by being given a free hand in Darfur. The Sudanese government’s action in allowing the Gaddafi government to arm and train militias for the fight against Chad’s military prefigured its own strategy of the wider militarisation of society. In effect, the limited Sudanese sovereignty in western Darfur was completely sacrificed, at one time or another, to either Libyan or pro-Libyan forces. Under pressure from the USA and NATO, Gaddafi had become aware of the range of forces allied against him in Chad, and feared the possible international and regional ramifications of continuing to intervene directly in Chad. With this potential threat in mind, Gaddafi turned to tribal militias, which effectively meant arming and mobilising the disaffected and desperate nomads of the Sahara. This became the cornerstone of Gaddafi’s strategy for fighting the war in Chad, but was only one of a range of tactics centred on Darfur. He utilised the da’wa islamiya, which had since 1973 been heavily active in Sudan in promoting the concept of an Islamic and Arab renewal, as part of a historic mission to extend Islam and Arab culture throughout Africa.119 This was the first of a series of efforts by Gaddafi to extend his influence further south through the da’wa, and Darfur was a region where the latter was very active.120 The creation of the Islamic Legion to fight the war in Chad was Gaddafi’s next move. The Islamic Legions were, as Roland Marchal describes them, ‘crude African mercenaries’,121 drawn from northern Chad, Darfur, Libya and other parts of the Sahel.122 In 1980, a force of the Islamic Legions, some 5000 in number, crossed into Chad and occupied the capital N’djamena, before being forced to evacuate the city in January 1981 and relocating in north-eastern Darfur.123 But given the military and political will, Nimeiri was able to remove the Islamic Legions in 1981 and to prevent the Libyans from securing permanent bases in Darfur. However, within a few years (from 1985 onwards) the Islamic Legions were permanently stationed in Darfur, with the consent of the Sudanese Government. Gaddafi’s economic and military assistance came at a price. General Osman Abdullah, the Sudanese Minister of Defence, signed a military protocol with Libya that ensured Libyan aid for Khartoum in its war

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against the SPLM in southern Sudan.124 In return, Gaddafi was able to count on Sudanese support in the war with Chad, and Libyan forces pushed further into Darfur. With the Sudanese government turning a blind eye, the Libyan presence in Darfur became more open as Libyan soldiers and intelligence officers moved freely in El Fasher, Kutum, Nyala and all the other principal towns of Darfur. The Libyan military, according to Burr and Collins, were able to use the drought and famine in Darfur as cover for ‘. . . “humanitarian missions” to roam freely throughout the vast expanse of northern Darfur beyond Kutum where Islamic Legion units were being prepared to reinforce Acheikh’s contingent at Fada.’125 In 1986, for example, reports were filed of a 350-truck convoy moving food aid from the Libyan province of alKufra to the Darfuri capital El Fasher. This shipment was just one of many regular convoys of food aid said to have arrived in El Fasher during this period.126 Considering the Sudanese government had, by and large, ignored the plight of the people of Darfur, it is little wonder that many answered the Libyan call to arms. In 1986, Sadiq al-Mahdi became prime minister for a second time, and Gaddafi made immediate overtures to him for the integration of western Sudan and Libya. The Sudanese government’s need for Libyan financial and military assistance prevented al-Mahdi from openly defying his erstwhile ally, and in 1988 he eventually agreed to an integration pact.127 From that moment, Gaddafi now saw Darfur as part of Libya. Then, in 1990, Sudan’s newly installed military government signed a formal charter of integration with Libya. Once the charter had come into effect Sudanese officials including the governor of Darfur, Major General Abu al-Qasim Ibrahim, formally and publicly supported the Libyan military effort, offering assistance to the pro-Libyan forces of Idris Deby despite evidence that the war was causing death and destruction across the Darfur region.128 Not only had the government allowed the Libyans to operate with impunity in Darfur, but successive Sudanese governments traded the ‘sovereignty’ of Darfur, at one time or another, for military and economic aid from the Libyans. The economic problems faced by Khartoum and the urgency of the war effort in the south made the trade-off with Libya convenient for those purposes. But there was a very high cost

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paid by the people of Darfur for Libyan assistance. While Saddiq alMahdi publicly presented his concerns that the security situation in Darfur was in crisis, his government was tied to an alliance with Libya that prohibited any Sudanese government interference. Al-Mahdi attempted to circumvent this problem by creating tribal militias in Darfur, but this strategy soon backfired. These militias when confronted by the superior might of the SPLM, turned to easier targets, namely the sedentary farming villages in the region, with devastating results.129 By the late 1980s, Darfur was faced with foreign forces fighting a war for control of another country across their territory, tribal militias armed by the Sudanese government using Darfur as a base for attacks into the south, and random violence and looting from groups of impoverished pastoralists and farmers turned bandits and roaming the countryside. At this point, it should have been clear that only robust government intervention could curb the violence. However, the government remained aloof from events in Darfur, leading to the situation deteriorating badly. By 1990, the situation there was so bad that the region had become known in Sudanese circles as the ‘wild west’. In 1988, in response to the chaos unfolding in Darfur, a group of Khartoum-based Darfuri formed the National Council for the Salvation of Darfur (NCSD). The NCSD convened a meeting at the University of Khartoum in February 1988 in an attempt to place the Darfur crisis on the national agenda. The meeting was followed on March 12 by a mass protest in the streets of the capital, which made its way to the Council of Ministers, where a petition was presented demanding the restoration of civil order in the province and the expulsion of all foreign elements. The NCSD protest was successful in raising public awareness of the disastrous situation in Darfur and simultaneously the campaign illustrated the extent to which the Sudanese government was largely responsible for the crisis.130 The problems in Darfur symbolised the immensity of the al-Mahdi government’s inadequacies. Economic problems were rife; the civil war in the south had resulted in huge casualties, and despite this there was no evidence of any progress in defeating the insurgency. In addition, the Sudan’s international reputation was under serious scrutiny by the

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USA, Europe and the United Nations, as numerous reports of humanrights abuses surfaced. As these became too great for international actors to ignore, aid and foreign investment dried up, which only added to the perilous economic situation in Sudan.131 By 1989, the country had been abandoned by the majority of the world’s nations, with the exception of Libya. With Sudan now internationally isolated, and facing what seemed like an unwinnable war in the south, public awareness of the problems overtaking Darfur only served to magnify the feelings of despair and anger against the al-Mahdi government. Al-Mahdi reacted to the widespread criticism and promised to re-impose order in Darfur. However, before he could act, another successful military coup, the third in 30 years of independence, brought down the government and ushered in what is now generally regarded as the darkest period in modern Sudan’s short history.

6.8

The legacy of the Libyan presence in Darfur

The government-sanctioned penetration of Darfur by Libya in the period between 1985 and 1990 had serious implications, which have only become apparent to most analysts since 2003. However, a decade before the conflict in Darfur erupted, Mohammed Salih and Sharif Harir had warned of the danger from the militarisation of its society, from the combined effects of a flood of arms into the region, the government’s strategy of arming tribal militias, and the remnants of Libya’s Islamic Legions, who remained armed and roamed Darfur without a war to fight.132 The Libyan presence in Darfur was not only a tragedy in terms of human security it is thought to have been responsible for the introduction or intensification of a virulent form of Arab racism. Julie Flint and Alex de Waal describe the emergence of a small, violent group of racially motivated Arab supremacists in Darfur in 1983, known as the tajamu al arabi (‘Arab gathering’).133 The expansion of this group, according to Abdullah El-Tom, occurred when the Islamic Legions and other Gaddafi-inspired Arab supremacists were permitted to operate from Darfur.134 With a strong foothold there, Gaddafi was able to infuse his Legions and militias with a racist ideology. His

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Arabism was based on the belief in this historic right and duty of the Arab nation to extend the message of civilisation to the world that had been formulated as the ‘Third Universal Theory’.135 An intrinsic element of Gaddafi’s pan-Arab ideology was the concept of Arab supremacy, which he used to inspire the enlistment of disaffected Arab nomads in Chad and Darfur in the Libyan campaign to extend Arab dominion into sub-Saharan Africa.136 The Arab supremacist racism of the statements of the tajamu al arabi, as reported by El Tom and also by Flint and de Waal, are at odds with the Arabism of the riverain Sudanese elite, even if El Tom perceives them as identical. The racism apparent in the documents purportedly written by the Arab Gathering, and referred to by El Tom and Flint and de Waal in their respective studies of Darfur, differs from the racial discourse that was conveyed by Khartoum in the 1980s. That there was an unambiguous racist element to Khartoum’s war against the southern Sudanese is clearly articulated in studies of the north-south civil war by Francis Deng, Ann Lesch, J.M. Jok and a number of others.137 However, the riverain Sudanese racial discourse differed from that espoused by the Arab Gathering in at least one important way. That difference can be found in the way that riverain Sudanese Arabism had always been a cultural identity; the war in the southern Sudan had always been intended as a way of converting the inhabitants to Arabism and Islam.138 The Arabism of the Arab Gathering, as espoused by Gaddafi, was absolutist, however, and based on inflexible racial distinctions. The aim of the Gathering was not to assimilate non-Arabs to Arabism but to remove them from Darfur. Race emerged as a factor in the conflicts in Darfur, as Harir illustrates in his presentation of the statements of those party to the 1989 reconciliation conference in Darfur.139 Yet only one of these bodies, the Arab coalition, referred to racial differences, the Fur delegation calling on the Arabs to desist from ‘dividing people of Dar Fur region into “Arabs” against “Blacks” [Arabic Zurga] with superiority attributed to the former.’140 That the government of Sudan was unwilling at this stage to buy into this form of racist discourse against the Fur should not be ignored. The Fur were an important constituency of the Umma Party, providing large numbers of recruits for the military

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campaign in the southern Sudan, and contributing important revenues to a war-ravaged and seriously depressed economy. The 1989 change of government that brought Islamists to power was not, at least in the initial years, detrimental to the Fur, who were considered an important constituency in the NIF project to Islamise the state.141 This is a topic taken up in the next chapter.

6.9

Conclusion

If race was introduced to Darfur, what can be said about ethnicity? Ethnic or tribal identities remained an active component throughout this period. The regional identities that shaped political discourse in Darfur, in the first post-independence period and in the first ten years of the Nimeiri era, did not see an expunging of ethnicity but only its censorship, and the public denial of its existence. Ethnicity in Africa has proven to be, in Timothy Shaw’s phrase, a ‘resilient paradigm’.142 The colonial invention of tribes and ethnic groups continued to shape identities in the post-colonial era, as long as native administration and tribal dars structured social and economic life in regional Sudan. The abolition of Native Administration led to an increase in tribal disputes, but the evidence from the 1970s is that there was a level of acculturation, on the part of regional Sudanese, to the dominant riverain identity. As the state was forced to contract, and eventually retreated from Darfur in the face of economic decay, the so-called ‘traditional’ tribal structures and relations re-emerged to take its place. The problem was not with the reforms to Native Administration, but that the local government system created to replace tribalism was under-resourced, and in the end isolated government appointments were unable to compete with the tribal system. As one system unravelled, another returned to fill the void. However, the challenges that the region faced were beyond the capabilities of tribal elites to resolve. What had been weak state infrastructure in the first decades of independence practically ceased to exist as the state itself collapsed under the combined pressures of economic crisis and civil war. And when the government turned to tribal militias as a new front in the war in the south, it unleashed a force

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beyond its direct control. There is no doubt that the decision to arm tribal militias was a direct result of the dire situation the Sudanese government faced, as Salih and Harir explain: ‘A weak state striving to survive underdevelopment and unprecedented economic crises, has misconceived tribal militias as an inexpensive defence force.’143 The aim here is not to dismiss race as a factor in conflict in Darfur, but to place the local factors within a national framework, and to argue that the violence and chaos that Darfur experienced in the 1980s was avoidable, and that it was the descent into lawlessness and foreign occupation that provided the environment in which race surfaced. As the Sudanese state retreated from responsibilities to protect Darfur and lost the monopoly of violence in the region, the region became ungovernable. Most problematic of all, was the decision taken by successive Sudanese governments to cede Darfur to the Libyans, to be used as a staging point for armed forces launching operations into Chad. While violence was unchecked, and in the case of the tribal militias officially sanctioned even more routine matters were beyond the capacity of the state to deal with. Key concerns for the people of Darfur, such as banditry and the increasing disputes between communities over a range of issues such as migration, access to land and to water, and the distribution of food all remained unsettled. It was this incapacity of the state to resolve basic issues of security that proved so disastrous in the 1980s, and it would be legacies of this period that would reverberate and lay the foundations for the more troubling events to come.

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CHAPTER 7 THE NIF AND DAR FUR: THE ISL A MIST STATE PROJECT AND THE R EVOLT OF DAR FUR

7.1

Introduction

Finally, a further warning that the current conflict in Darfur is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from the ethnic and tribal clashes that occurred in the 1980s. The violent ethnic-cumracial strife that gripped Darfur in the late 1980s resulted from state neglect and from mounting inter-ethnic tensions over natural resources. The violence that has gripped Darfur since 2003 has the state at the very centre of the conflict, which ultimately is a struggle for control over western Sudan. The SLA and JEM have taken their cue from the SPLA/M, whose great victory was to escape the predatory state. The centre-periphery dimension of Sudanese politics has altered dramatically since 1989, when the grievances of the people of Darfur revolved mainly around government neglect and underdevelopment on the part of the state. Since 1989, in one way or another, the people of Darfur have been subjected to the predatory behaviour of a state intent on plundering Darfur’s resources and subjugating its people.

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The first issue requiring clarification is that of the role of the janjawiid, and the racism and religious intolerance that has been at the forefront of many representations of the Darfur conflict. Only one statement needs to be made in relation to this: the janjawiid and the racist and religious intolerance of the conflict are means in this struggle, and not explanations. An equally important, but more ambiguous component is the role that Hasan al-Turabi, the one-time leader of the NIF and architect of the Islamic republic, has played in the intensification of conflict. In 1999, a split in the ruling party resulted in an internal-party coup that ousted al-Turabi. His power base was in the western Sudan and since the end of 1999 he has been involved in manipulating Islamist sentiment in Darfur to support an overthrow of the government. The forceful nature of the response to the Darfur insurgency was partially out of fear that al-Turabi was behind the anti-government uprising, but more so, the brutality of the response was a result, as Alex de Waal has written, of ‘the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power . . .’1

7.2 War by proxy in Sudan: the militarisation of Sudanese society The militarisation of Sudanese civil society remains the most potent symbol of the weakness of the Sudanese state and as de Waal argues, militias in Sudan ‘. . . have in places become even more powerful than the armed forces with the result that the power of the central government can no longer extend to these areas.’2 It was also in the weakness of the state that the conditions arose that led to the formation of the militia strategy. The Sudanese tribal militias grew out of the north-south conflict, when a unit of the SPLA attacked the village of Gardud in south Kordofan populated by the Misseriya semi-nomads of the Baggara tribe.3 In the aftermath of the attack, as Jago Salmon explains, . . . a government delegation to the area led by Minister of Defence Major General Burma Fadlallah Nasir was presented

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with a choice by native administration leaders: either provide security for the Arab Baggara communities of South Darfur and South Kordofan, or these communities would request such guarantees from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and de facto join the rebellion. Unable to redeploy the demoralized and overstretched military from the South, the delegation made a decision – without the authorization of the national Constituent Assembly – to arm the Baggara.4 Often, especially since the crisis in Darfur became international news, there has been a tendency to view the government and militias as sole aggressors. Without seeking to absolve either the Sudanese government or the muraheleen (Sudanese Arabic, ‘tribal militias’) of atrocities, the background conditions in which the latter group developed was a chaotic and violent state of war. Salih and Harir describe the insecurity felt by the population of southern Kordofan and southern Darfur, especially by the Baggara, in the mid 1980s.5 The inability of the state to protect its allies provided the context for the expansion of the militia strategy by the al-Mahdi government. The SPLM responded by arming villages in the border regions. With both sides arming villagers and supporting tribal militias there was an institutionalised militarisation of civil society in this region of Sudan. In terms of the militia strategy, working in the government’s favour was the destitution and desperation of a number of the semi-nomadic pastoralists in Darfur and Kordofan. While in the southern parts of these provinces the land was arable enough to settle and farm, in the north this was not an option. When the severe drought and famine of the 1980s had destroyed the herds of many western Sudanese pastoral groups, leaving them impoverished and without animals or the money to restock their herds, many groups turned to the government for assistance in rebuilding their pastoral lifestyles. The government offered them an opportunity, not through financial aid or welfare assistance, but by providing them with arms and sending them to join other tribal militias from further south in the war against the SPLA. The tribal militias were an inexpensive way to fight the war. They

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drew no salaries from the state and other than arms they asked for no provisions. There were no casualty statistics compiled or compensation paid. As de Waal said of the janjawiid militias over a decade later, the government use of tribal militias in the 1980s was indeed ‘counterinsurgency on the cheap’.6 So reliant was the government on the tribal militias that Sadiq alMahdi sponsored a parliamentary motion, called the Popular Defence Forces Bill, to formalise militias as an official arm of the military. This measure was resoundingly defeated in a parliamentary vote, but the government continued to implement the strategy.7 It is likely that al-Mahdi also had other motives for expanding the use of tribal militias such as acting as protection against a military coup as Mansour Khalid explained to members of the military in 1989.8 But the alMahdi government’s hold on power was always too tenuous to be saved by tribal militias, and when on 30 June 1989 Omar al-Bashir led an Islamist core within the army in a coup, al-Mahdi’s tribal militias were powerless to intervene to save him. Once in power, al-Bashir, now head of the Revolutionary Command Council of National Salvation, legalised tribal militias by passing the Popular Defence Act. The Act stipulated that the purpose of the Popular Defence Forces (PDF) was to . . . train citizens in military and civil capabilities, to raise security awareness and military discipline among them, in order to act as a support force to the other regular ones on request.9 Cadres of the National Islamic Front (NIF) also joined the PDF. Once the thin veneer obscuring the true character of the new government was removed, the PDF became a major instrument in the regime’s effort to Islamise society.10 And, according to Mahmud El Zain, it was through the tribal unit that the NIF pursued its domination of society.11 El Zain’s study of Sudan in the 1990s makes an important contribution to our understanding of the role that tribes play in contemporary Sudanese politics. In an approach not that dissimilar to that taken in this book, he explains how the colonial regime invested tribes with

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‘traditional’ legitimacy and elevated them as political units, as part of its strategy of countering any modernising or nationalist forces in Sudanese society. And then, after independence, tribal elites mounted stubborn resistance against the efforts of successive post-colonial governments, notably the May regime, to overturn the tribal logic and displace the tribal system.12 El Zain departs from most of the analyses of tribal violence in Sudan by extending this approach to show how ‘tribal violence’ resulted from government policy. The major significance of his study is that in the Sudanese case, the tribes have not been static entities, but shaped and structured by their relationship with state power. The NIF’s endorsement and support of tribal militias, El Zain argues, altered the tribe by re-investing it with the formal authority it had lost as a result of the reforms in the 1970s. Under the NIF, the tribe was officially sanctified as an important political organisation and effectively an extension of the state. Tribes became institutions of the state and tribal militias were formally recognised and placed under the command, however loosely, of the military.13 With tribal militias under state control it was a natural extension of this policy to bring tribes under the direct control of the government: In giving special consideration to tribal structures, the state was obliged to intervene in the selection of tribal leaders in order to secure collaboration. As in the colonial past, leaders who are not cooperative are dismissed.14 Once institutionalised, ‘tribes’ were lionized by the new regime, with the state shifting its focus ‘. . . from its former role of providing services and benefits, to re-ordering and embellishing the “tribal” as a representation of the glorious past. In this it is assisted by tribal elites anxious to retrieve power and prestige . . . .’15 However, the traditional elites had survived previous efforts to marginalise them, and the Islamists were soon forced into a confrontation in a bid to enforce their tribal policy on Darfur. The violence that broke out in Dar Masalit in 1996 was the first instance of this confrontation, and in a number of ways foreshadows the events of 2003.

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7.3 The rise of “radical” political Islam in Sudan: the NIF in power The coup that brought the NIF to power in 1989 had been 20 years in the making. The architect of events was undoubtedly Hasan alTurabi, whom de Waal and Abdel Salam refer to as the ‘Islamist Lenin’, 16 ands whose efforts to bring about a thorough Islamisation of the Sudanese state commenced in 1964 when he returned from the Sorbonne with a doctorate in constitutional law. al-Turabi’s erudition or his skill as a politician have never been in question, with a number of scholars crediting him with the success of the Islamic movement in Sudan. He is also recognised as one of the most prominent Islamic intellectuals anywhere in the world. His reputation, political acumen and power made him a dangerous adversary for Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi, when the latter endorsed a peace agreement between the SPLM and the Khatmiyya, and announced that he would repeal the September Laws on 1 July.17 It was as a result of the timing of the coup that there was much scepticism amongst the Sudanese when Hasan al-Turabi and his lieutenant ‘Ali ‘Uthman Muhammad Taha were imprisoned by the military leaders. It was widely accepted, even with al-Turabi in prison, that he was the mastermind of the coup that brought down the government of his brother-in-law Sadiq al-Mahdi. The NIF was an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan) and was formed in 1985 to broaden the political appeal of Islamism in Sudan. Despite, the change of name the NIF has remained inextricably tied to the Brotherhood, whose long preparation for capturing power in Sudan entailed the design of a military strategy well before the events of 1989.18 Gabriel Warburg describes the formation of a secret organisation (al-nizam al-sirra) in 1972 to train them for the eventual seizure of the state.19 Accordingly, he explains: . . . members of the secret organization received military security, propaganda, intelligence and other training within these camps, led by expert mujahidin, who had participated in the Iranian, Lebanese, Libyan, or Afghani jihad.20

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But until the moment for military action arrived, al-Turabi was content to exploit the prevailing political conditions, even if it meant allying himself with the authoritarian Nimeiri in 1978, when he was first appointed as Secretary of Information and Foreign Relations before accepting the post of Attorney-General. In 1978, when the Muslim Brotherhood endorsed Nimeiri’s offer of National Reconciliation, the movement was in disarray. Nimeiri’s repression of the Brotherhood was harsh, and the majority of the prominent Muslim Brothers in Sudan, El-Affendi explains, ‘who had escaped death or imprisonment were either in hiding or exile’.21 The movement’s financial situation was equally weak, and only the continued support of members who had fled to the oil-rich Gulf States furnished the clandestine movement with the funds it needed to survive. 22 The decision to accept Nimeiri’s offer of National Reconciliation not only saved the movement but provided the political support the Brotherhood needed to develop into a powerful force in Sudanese politics. Mohammed Zahid and Michael Medley contend that on the face of it the alliance between Nimeiri’s secular Socialist Party and al-Turabi’s Muslim Brotherhood was bizarre. On closer inspection, however, the partnership was strategically important for both the parties. In Nimeiri’s case, his rapidly weakening political position and unpopularity were becoming dangerous, while for the Brotherhood political repression had almost destroyed their capacity to act as a political force.23 International factors assisted al-Turabi in making the alliance a success as the oil boom led to a spread of ‘Islamic controlled banks, companies, newspapers and voluntary organizations’ establishing branches in Sudan.24 It was the simultaneous access to political positions within the ruling party, and the ability to utilise the influence of the Islamic economic institutions, El-Affendi remarks, which transformed the Muslim Brotherhood into a major political force in Sudan.25 In this period, there also was an expansion of the Brotherhood into western Sudan. The movement had established a foothold in Darfur in the 1960s,26 and in the 1970s there had been a growth in the number of Muslim Brothers in Darfur as more students migrated to the national capital to enrol in tertiary education where, Mohamed Salih asserts the ‘. . . NIF cells in Khartoum University were dominated by students from Darfur . . .’27 According to Salih, after graduating many of them went on

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to hold prominent positions in regional government.28 The success of the Muslim Brothers in recruiting support from Darfur is partially explained by millenarian beliefs they shared with Mahdism. According to Warburg, in the case of the Mahdists, they held as one of their core beliefs that the establishment of an Islamic state would hasten the arrival of the future Mahdi.29 For the Muslim Brothers, the creation of an Islamic state was also a core belief they held. In both cases, an Islamic state was necessary to fulfil greater goals. While this sharing of dogma may have been true, there is still a need to explain the shift that occurred in Darfur in the 1986 election with the NIF winning all four graduates’ seats in Darfur despite the Umma fielding candidates.30 Electoral success of this kind, suggests that something more politically profound than doctrinal convergence had taken place amongst the educated elite of Darfur in the years between the election of 1968 and the one held in 1986. A possible explanation is that the educated strata of Darfuri society had turned away from the Umma Party and had chosen an alternative political programme based on the Islamism espoused by Hasan al-Turabi. In effect, al-Turabi offered the people of Darfur an acceptable alternative to Mahdism. Kamal el-Din, for example, explains that the success of the NIF in Darfur can be understood as a repudiation of the Umma’s failure to address the widespread sentiment of government neglect. It was in this context, that the Muslim Brothers came and offered the people of Darfur a departure from the elitism and centricism that had characterised Sudan since formation. As El-Din explains, Hassan al Turabi and his deputy, Ali al Haj Mohamed, had appealed to Darfurians’ historic piety and their discontent with the established parties, and promised that all Muslims, regardless of their color, could achieve emancipation through an Islamic revolution.31 The people of Darfur were being offered the promise which Islamists offered Muslims in many other parts of the world: that an Islamic state would transcend the poverty, corruption, political instability and discrimination that afflicted the post-colonial state.32 And, for many in Darfur, after decades of disappointment in government, the opportunity on offer to participate in the Islamic revolution was their only

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hope of remedying the marginalisation, poverty and injustice they perceived all around them. For the first time since the fall of the Keira Sultanate, the people of Darfur were being offered a political project that seemed genuinely inclusive. The tragedy of Islamism for Darfur was that this inclusion was as illusory as the regeneration of the state that the Islamist movement had promised. In 1983, as Darfur was being influenced by increased Muslim Brotherhood activity, President Nimeiri made an unexpected decision to enforce Shari’a law. For the Muslim Brothers this was a watershed moment in their struggle to Islamise the state and even though they were not consulted on the move they still saw it as a victory. Most commentators agree that Nimeiri’s move was not designed to fulfil the Islamists mission but that it was planned to strengthen his own Islamic credentials at a time when he was increasingly vulnerable to internal challenge. Nimeiri’s loyalty to the Muslim Brothers was as strategic as theirs was to him, and when Nimeiri’s house of cards started to crash down in March 1985, it was the Brotherhood on which he turned. The latter survived the political manoeuvring; it goes without saying that Nimeiri did not. In the same month that Nimeiri fell from power, the National Islamic Front was formed and the final metamorphosis of the movement had taken place. During the lead-up to the third parliamentary period, it was al-Turabi’s adept political leadership which is credited by many for the strong vote that the NIF received in the 1986 elections. James Chiriyankandath’s examination of the 1986 election results concluded that: The fact that most of the constituencies it won were clustered – in Khartoum, the Gezira and along the Nile in the Northern region – also indicates an effective deployment of resources. Another factor that helped the Front was its popularity among sections of the armed forces, gained during the Numeiri years and through having championed the military in the war against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement.33 The Muslim Brothers had worked diligently to infiltrate the armed forces and, in terms of the success of that infiltration as, Warburg

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explains, four of the five members of the military council that came to rule Sudan after 1989 had attended courses on Islamic ideology during the Nimeiri years.34 This support for the NIF among the military was the most important factor in the Front’s eventual securing of power when the time was propitious. And that moment came in 1989, when amid political turmoil caused by urban dissatisfaction with the deteriorating economic situation and military anger mounting with what was deemed to be the mismanagement of the war in the southern Sudan, Sadiq al-Mahdi’s civilian government was toppled by a coup led by Brigadier Omar al-Bashir. The success of the NIF-backed generals was not only a sign of the strength of the Islamic movement in Sudan, but also was symbolic of the weakness of Sudanese politics. Examples from other countries in North Africa, in particular from Algeria and Egypt where strong Islamic movements have been defeated, and in the case of latter successfully incorporated into the political system, illustrate the success of the coup was a result as much of the Sudanese state’s weakness as it was of the Islamists’ strength. In the days that followed the coup, members of the military junta gave three reasons to justify their actions.35 The first was that the continued sectarian rivalry of the two major parties was responsible for sabotaging all political efforts to address the worsening economic situation. Secondly, they argued that the intensification of the violence in southern Sudan and southern Kordofan, as well as the turmoil in Darfur, showed the extent that the government had lost control of the country. Thirdly, they claimed that the public had lost all confidence in the political parties. Political instability, the weakness of the state, and economic turmoil were as responsible, on balance, for the success of the coup as any other factor, including the strength of the National Islamic Front. Due to the failure of the sectarian parties and the absence of any strong and coherent secular elite in Sudan, the Islamists had few opponents within civil society to resist them.

7.4 Continuing economic crisis in Sudan: international political economy of a pariah state In 1989, the new government faced a situation where economic conditions had deteriorated to the point where the Sudanese war effort and

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the economy relied, almost totally, on foreign aid. In the context of this perilous situation, the new leadership recognised the danger of alienating donors, and presented itself to other Arab states as another in the long-line of ‘moderate’ Arab nationalist military dictatorships. With the perception of other Arab states in mind, Omar al-Bashir announced the formation of the Revolutionary Command Council without mention of either the NIF or any Islamist orientation on his own or his government’s part. These early attempts to reassure neighbouring states seemed to have initially calmed nerves, even if the coup did little to improve the reputation of Sudan. However, whatever calm prevailed at the time of the coup rapidly dissipated as the regime exposed its underlying ideology and fears mounted as it started to become obvious that they may be more to the regime than first observed. A profound change that was taking place in the international system also had an impact on the leverage Sudan could muster as an important geo-strategic player. The military focus that had dominated international politics for much of the second half of the 20th Century came to an end and with it the patronage system that had allowed states to profit from Cold War rivalries also concluded. The US, as the sole remaining superpower now dictated international politics and one of the key prescriptions in this ‘new world order’ was the replacement of authoritarian regimes with democratic ones. In this context, there was little sympathy in the US for a military dictatorship at the very moment that the forces of democracy were sweeping across Eastern Europe and Latin America.36 Additionally, the many accusations of human rights abuses being made against the Sudanese military resulted in Congress suspending American assistance programmes to the Sudan in 1989. The US continued to deliver humanitarian assistance to the southern Sudan through Operation Lifeline Sudan which was the largest humanitarian operation in the world at the time.37 US decisions of this kind seemed to matter little to al-Bashir (or al-Turabi) as they consistently reinforced the idea that they had no interest in maintaining relations of any kind with nonMuslims. Thus the only aid requests from the Sudanese Government were made to Arab states, with little regard for whether they were radical or conservative in their outlook. Most Arab states refused Sudan’s

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requests for arms, but some offered some aid to assist the regime meet urgent needs.38 The exceptions were Libya and Iraq. Libya maintained its close relationship with Sudan, even though Gaddafi’s long-time but estranged friend, Sadiq al-Mahdi, had been the victim of the coup that brought the new government to power. A significant amount of Libyan oil arrived in Khartoum in August 1989 and the Sudanese regime made no effort to frustrate Gaddafi’s ambitions in Chad by mentioning Libyan depredations in Darfur. In fact, the deal between al-Mahdi and Gaddafi continued with the new government; Sudan would receive Libyan arms and oil, and Gaddafi would have, . . . a free hand in Sudan’s western frontier where his Islamic Legion and Libyan troops were supporting Idris Deby’s activities in Darfur and his efforts to overthrow the government of President Hissene Habre in Chad.39 With Deby’s victory over Habre in December 1990, whatever little interest Gaddafi had for Darfur evaporated and from reports it seemed he had even less interest in continuing his friendly relationship with the Sudanese regime. In November 1991 all Libyan oil shipments to Sudan were terminated, and Gaddafi then annulled the Libya-Sudan integration pact signed a year earlier.40 The relationship soured further when Gaddafi demanded that Khartoum repay loans that had been made to Sudan. Sudan was in no position to do so, and even if they were, the Islamists who were now openly in power showed no inclination to deal with Gaddafi unless it was on terms that they found favourable. Khartoum’s refusal to repay these “loans” was only one problem Gaddafi was having with the Sudanese. He soon learnt that the NIF was providing sanctuary for Libyan Islamists known for their anti-government activities. With this news, Gaddafi reacted by breaking his relationship with Khartoum and soon after he broke all diplomatic ties with Sudan. So by 1994, the Sudanese government had managed to alienate even Libya, itself one of the most isolated states in international politics. Unlike the longer standing Libyan relationship, Sudan’s alliance

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with Iraq was short-lived. Iraq offered both arms and oil to Sudan until Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait, at which time Iraq’s own dire situation prevented them from sending further assistance to Sudan. As it turned out, Sudan received very little material assistance from Iraq and what support it did receive came at a high price as once the US unleashed Operation Desert Storm, as Ann Mosely Lesch argues: ‘[T]he tie with Iraq proved a liability rather than an asset.’41 Hasan al-Turabi’s decision to offer public support for the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a defining moment in determining the direction the regime was to take. The first casualty of its sponsorship of Iraq was the US-Sudan relationship, which in any event was by 1990 of little benefit to either party. Importantly, the US shift away from the regime was most likely a key factor in the IMF decision, in December 1990, to issue a Declaration of Non-Cooperation against Sudan, which acted as a warning of possible expulsion if appropriate steps were not taken to repay arrears or consent to further economic restructuring.42 Two years later, Khartoum had become the largest debtor to the World Bank, with $21 billion outstanding, and this huge debt burden led the World Bank and the IMF to take further drastic action against Sudan. In 1993, the IMF suspended Sudan’s voting rights, and this was followed by a World Bank decision to suspend Sudan’s right to make withdrawals.43 Under the NIF the Sudanese economy had reached a nadir, even by its poor record. While the NIF inherited an economy already in crisis, it made a number of decisions which led to catastrophe. The support for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait was just one of those ill-fated decisions which resulted in further economic turmoil. The Sudanese backing for Iraq angered Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with both countries immediately turning off the oil pipelines to Sudan, cancelling the concessions that the regime had been receiving and to make matters worse expelling Sudan workers en masse in reprisal. It was this latter action, as much as any other in this period, that inflicted the coup de grâce on the Sudanese economy. Upwards of 200,000 Sudanese workers were expelled from the Gulf States, which had the effect, according to a World Bank study, of denying the Sudanese economy of approximately

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$400 million per annum.44 This event was then followed in 1995 by the expulsion of tens of thousands of Sudanese workers from Libya after Libyan Islamists linked to Khartoum launched an attack on Gaddafi.45 Sudan’s support for Islamic extremists and international jihadists such as Osama bin Laden had left Sudan regionally and internationally isolated, and more importantly, denied Sudanese workers access to the foreign work that sustained them and many thousands of their family members back home. The cost of the ongoing civil war in the southern Sudan added another layer of desolation to Sudan’s economic and political situation in the 1990s. The war was costing $3 million a day by 1993, not to mention the huge human and environmental cost of the conflict.46 The famine in Sudan in 1990–91 was considered by numerous international agencies as a major humanitarian crisis.47 The government response was to deny the existence of any famine, while continuing to export food. In 1991, for example, almost 500,000 tonnes of Sudanese grain was sold to the European Community and Saudi Arabia.48 It was this policy of exporting large amounts of food at a time of food insecurity that created the conditions for a famine.49 The lack of any government reaction to regional requests for food aid was similar to Nimeiri denials of a food crisis almost a decade earlier. However, there was at least one major difference between the two crises: the famine of the 1990s effected the urban population to a far greater extent than earlier famines with food shortages and severe malnutrition reported in Khartoum. According to Karl Wolmuth, in 1990-91, 9 million people in the northern Sudan, which amounted to a third of the population, were suffering from chronic hunger and either transitory or severe food insecurity.50 The shortages of food only compounded the severity of the situation in the capital. Inflation had reached 300 per cent by 1991, and wages had fallen below the sustenance level, as the cost of food rose and real wages fell. In Sudan, there were somewhere between four to six million refugees, of which a million had migrated to Khartoum’s sprawling shanty-towns. Spending on social welfare had crashed from the heyday of the Nimeiri period. For example, health spending had fallen by 60 per cent from 1985 levels.51 With the state in complete retreat

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from the provision of almost social goods, the Muslim Brotherhood filled the void, with what amounted to a strong social welfare presence across the northern Sudan, including in key areas of Darfur.52 In 1998, the country’s debt reached $23billion, without any significant increase in revenues. International investors were no longer interested in placing their capital in Sudan and unemployment continued to rise making government even more challenging. In this context of international isolation and economic crisis, the Islamist project faced a massive hurdle if it was to live up to its promise of transforming Sudan into a peaceful and prosperous country. It was not the NIF’s fault that the economic situation was dire; after all they had inherited an economy already under immense strain from the combination of reliance on agricultural exports, debt incurred by previous governments and reforms undertaken under the advice of the World Bank and the IMF that proved as counter-productive to stimulating growth in Sudan as they have shown to be almost everywhere they were implemented. However, the NIF contributed to what was nearly the complete collapse of the Sudanese economy as they mismanaged both foreign relations and domestic issues. There is little doubt, that international factors played a significant part in the collapse of the Sudanese economy, which Michael Kevane and Leslie Grey argue can be said to represent, ‘. . . the inevitable outcome of processes of disarticulation and dependence of peripheral incorporation into the global market economy.’53 With this dire economic situation, a war in the south, which again was proving beyond the state’s capacity to win, social conditions in decay and with security and public order also deteriorating rapidly the Sudan was rapidly becoming a ‘failed state’.

7.5

Almashrou Alhadari Al-Islami (the Islamic Project for Renewal): power and repression in Sudan

The Revolutionary Command Council faced a disunited and weak opposition on taking power. Despite this, within weeks of the coup, the regime commenced a programme of purging the state of any unsympathetic elements. At a time of impending economic and military crisis the decision to clear the bureaucracy, government and army

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of known secularists created further turmoil in the economy and undermined the war effort in the south. The extensive purge of the army resulted in the arrest or dismissal of 40 per cent of the officer corps.54 With the army in disarray a series of catastrophic military defeats at the hands of the SPLA ensued.55 Within months of coming to power, the extreme economic situation and the military setbacks fostered growing public opposition to the regime in the capital. This only heightened repression and led to further purges of the civil service. Hundreds of police were dismissed, and when the NIF revealed itself to be the true power behind the coup, a new internal security service consisting of the Revolutionary Security Guards, Guardians of Morality and Advocates of Good, and the People’s Police were established.56 An incendiary speech made to NIF supporters by al-Bashir at a rally held on 3 December 1989 set the tone for the years to come: I vow here before you to purge from our ranks the renegades, the hirelings, enemies of the people and the armed forces . . . Anyone who betrays this nation does not deserve the honor of living . . . The responsibility is really a collective one. You have authority, and are its enforcers.57 Al-Bashir had prepared the ground for purging any suspected opponents when he introduced a decree giving him powers to terminate the employment of any government employee.58 The repression of suspected opponents continued as NIF cadres occupied all the positions that became vacant in the wake of the mass purges that took place. The purges according to one long-time observer of Sudanese politics, were extreme even in a country that had experienced as much violence and repression as Sudan. 59 In a prescient statement made in 1990, on what was to come, he added: ‘The previous tradition of reluctant acceptance of those with different beliefs, ethnic background, and lifestyles has been replaced by intolerance for all dissenters.’60 Not only did the NIF come to occupy all government positions but they had also seized the commanding heights of the economy. The ground for this capture of economic power in Sudan had been sown by the privileges Nimeiri has awarded Islamic banking in the late

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1970s.61 The Faisal Islamic Bank, in particular, worked closely with the Muslim Brotherhood to expand the financial and business capabilities of like-minded Islamists, with much of their original wealth coming from remittances from the hundreds of thousands of Sudanese working abroad in the Gulf, and particularly, in the largest, wealthiest and most Islamic of the Gulf States in Saudi Arabia. According to Gabriel Warburg, by 1989 the NIF had amassed a huge economic machine, with $800 million of financial and corporate assets under their control.62 Abdullahi Gallab’s study of the NIF illustrates the extent to which the economic imperatives of the party’s elite, a group that another Sudanese scholar of the NIF has described as the “superparty”, determined the character of the movement and the regime that eventually came to power.63 Once in power the NIF set about extending control over the economy. In 1990, the Civil Transactions Act was amended and all customary title was finally abolished, allowing the regime to expropriate land.64 The privatisation of state resources, ostensibly to propel the economy, in reality, became a way for NIF leaders to plunder the assets of the state.65 The architect of the scheme, ‘Abd al-Rahim Hamid, who was appointed Minister of Finance and Economy in 1990, signified to many in Sudan that, as Abbashar Jamal suggests, ‘. . . the authority of the state in economic matters has become subservient to the interests of the Muslim Brethren.’66 This is a point supported by Abdel Gadir who argues that ‘[T]he Salvation revolution was the era that witnessed the complete fusion between the Islamist empowered businessmen and the State.’67 The Islamist promise of change had indeed transformed the state, not into the egalitarian and just society the Islamist leadership had promised the rank and file, but into a project which enriched a small group of Islamist and military leaders. Gallab’s analysis of the NIF in power is a powerful illustration of the extent to which the Islamist project had become deformed through its access to power, into a system designed to plunder Sudanese state and society.68 Another area of the state and civil society that the NIF was intent on dominating was the education sector. The Islamists had strong foundations for taking over control of Sudan’s universities, with a loyal

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following amongst both the faculty and the student bodies, which had been built up since the days of Turabi’s attendance at Khartoum University in the 1950s.69 The pluralism of university life, however, had survived the Nimeiri dictatorship, and flourished again during the brief democratic interlude during the late 1980s. This all changed as the NIF intervened at every opportunity to ensure its supporters remained in complete control of faculty and student organisations. The control of student politics remained a central element of government policy, and when an institution demonstrated, or students attempted to challenge the domination of the NIF, the government acted swiftly, as in the case of the Ahilya University in Omdurman in 1996 where, as Human Rights Watch reported: . . . [T]he triumph of antigovernment students in student elections in mid-1996 led to more violent clashes between student groups. Although pro-NIF student supporters and NIF militias attacked and destroyed university buildings during these clashes, none were detained and instead the government used this as a pretext to close Ahliya University permanently.70 Al-Turabi viewed the transformation of education as one of the areas most critical for building an authentic Islamic state, and this is why it remained so central to the NIF strategy of control. In effect, universities and schools became tools of the NIF party. Bashir appointed himself chancellor of every university in Sudan and then summarily dismissed ten vice-chancellors replacing them with NIF apparatchiks.71 University curricula were amended, or replaced altogether, to adhere to the NIF demands that the tertiary education sector reproduced the dogma of the ruling party. In schools, a similar process occurred. For a country such as the Sudan, which had enjoyed a relatively liberal and dynamic intellectual heritage, the tyranny imposed by the NIF on the education system showed that the new regime’s outlook was more sinister than any of the previous governments that had ruled over Sudan since independence. The NIF’s interference in public life also affected the independence of the press. On the first day after the 1989 coup, an outright ban

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on all non-governmental publications was insituted. Constitutional Decree No. 2 stated that: All licences and permits issued to nongovernmental journalistic establishments and publications are cancelled until a new licence is issued by an authoritative organisation.72 Independent newspapers were closed, printing presses confiscated or destroyed and journalists who refused to accept the rules of the new regime were arrested or forced into exile. Torture and re-education were regular punishments faced by members of the press as the NIF dictatorship went about destroying the fourth estate.73 The attempt by the NIF to control information flows extended beyond the press and media, as Sudan’s mosques and religious leaders also became targets of government censorship. In particular, the NIF went about systematically closing and taking over mosques known to have loyalties to the Umma Party. Religious functionaries opposed to the orthodox Islam imposed by the NIF were detained or killed, and replaced by NIF loyalists. Constitutional Decree No. 2 also banned free association: ‘[A]ll political parties and groups are to be disbanded, and it is illegal for them to be established or to remain active.’74 The same decree also banned all trade unions and federations, confiscated their funds and properties, and cancelled all licences issued to non-religious institutions and societies. Civil society also came under sustained attack from the NIF. Any form of dissent was treated with maximum severity, and the government of Sudan was widely regarded by human-rights advocates as one of the most abusive regimes in the world. The Sudanese Lawyers Committee in December 1996 described the NIF government in these disturbing terms: The first years of the regime were characterized by gross human rights violations . . . such as extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, torture, unfair trial procedures and repressive security measures. The situation has not remained static, however, and these brutal governmental tactics have largely given way to

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more subtle methods of social control such as restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, opinion, religion, association and movement. The Sudanese government has criminalized political and ideological dissent, engages a multi-faceted security apparatus, and has installed a system of rewards and punishments based on adherence to governmental policies and observance of government-approved Islamic practices. Though less conspicuous than mass arrests and summary executions, these control mechanisms are equally debilitating to the fundamental freedoms of Sudanese citizens.75 The actions of the NIF in silencing dissent and destroying opposition in Khartoum was both uncompromising and brutal, and it needed to be, because the NIF had after all come to power with a clear and inflexible strategy: to take control of Sudanese state and society by imposing Islamic law. R.S. O’Fahey explains that the NIF employed a range of tactics to achieve its goal including: . . . the establishment of armed militias both in the cities and countryside, purges of academics, lawyers and journalists, and most importantly, the creation of financial institutions and trading monopolies that are increasingly independent of outside funding.76 The level of repression and domination in the capital was unprecedented. H.A. Abdel Salam and Alex de Waal argue that by the end of the 1990s the NIF had largely imposed its domination on the central organs of the state and on the urban populace of central Sudan.77 However, the situation in Sudan’s peripheries remained more complex.

7.6 NIF repression in the peripheries: sowing the seeds of war in Darfur In a number of ways, the events surrounding the government’s two counter-insurgency campaigns in western Sudan in the 1990s are more

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relevant for gaining an understanding of the conflict in Darfur than the ethnic-tribal clashes that occurred between the Fur and nomadic Arabs in the late 1980s. The latter conflicts can be explained as the consequence of the state’s collapse in Darfur, through marginalisation and ethnic-tribal conflict, and tensions over land and water. The rise of the NIF created somewhat of a disjuncture for Darfur in terms of the relations between the centre and periphery. The inside-outside metaphor employed earlier no longer suffices to explain Darfur because the Islamist state, unlike predecessors, was intent not only on controlling the centre, but on subjugating and dominating all parts of the country. It was in the Nuba Mountains where the evidence of this is first detected. In 1992, the Nuba Mountains became Sudan’s newest killing fields, as government troops alongside units of the PDF and tribal militias attacked the SPLA/SPLM affiliated Nuba of Kordofan. The events that followed have received far too little international attention given the amount of suffering that the Nuba people endured. Violence in the Nuba Mountains escalated in the 1980s with the creation of the murahaleen militias. These militias regularly attacked Nuba villages with impunity and military assistance from the outset. In 1992, the NIF added a religious justification to the brutal attacks by issuing a fatwa against the Nuba. The fatwa was clear in its intent and unambiguously stated that: An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate; and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.78 With religious law now on their side, the Nuba were massacred, raped and imprisoned, or forcibly deported and dispossessed of their lands, in a campaign aimed not only at punishing or and subjugating them but at destroying their identity altogether.79 The testimony given to Sudan Human Rights Voice by a former member of the Sudanese Armed Forces portrayed the grim reality with evidence of the horrific crimes committed by government forces.80 This witness estimated that in a

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period from May 1992 to February 1993 60–70, 000 Nuba had been killed.81 There also seems that events in Nuba had an important economic dimension and a large element of what de Waal describes as ‘greed’. Ann Lesch concludes that government strategy in the areas inhabited by the Nuba had a dual purpose of dealing with the SPLA and also ‘an important economic component to the government actions, since the government facilitated the creation of large-scale mechanized farms by Nile Valley Arab entrepreneurs and retired military officers on land from which the indigenous peoples had been displaced.’82 Mass killings and the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of people and the expropriation of their land is the preferred approach taken by the NIF government to impose itself onto Sudan’s peripheral regions. But by no means has it been the only method. The NIF used other techniques to ensure its dominance over Darfur which involved less overt violence, even if over time it would prove equally confrontational and predatory. Gallab’s study of the NIF, as noted earlier, is precise in its criticism of the abuses that the regime has perpetrated since coming to power and of the means by which that power has been consolidated, which, he argues are: . . . to be found in the strategy employed by the Islamist regime within the first and second republics to appoint governors, senior employees, and even tribal leaders as a way of expanding the state machinery in the center and the regions and empowering a class of the Islamist elite through whom the regime could control all aspects of life.83 The conflict that erupted in Dar Masalit in the 1990s was a response to exactly this strategy of expanding the state machinery against the wishes of the wider population. This area was one of the last outposts of unreformed native administration, and a bastion of the Umma Party.84 In the 1980s, Chadian Arab nomads had settled there to escape war and drought in their own country, and by the end of the decade they had come to constitute a significant minority of the population, possibly as much as one-third. 85 This influx of immigrants, according to

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Flint and de Waal, into the region led to tensions over land and created questions relating to political representation.86 These tensions were sometimes played out violently, and at other times through political machinations, but things swung heavily in favour of the immigrants when they were seen as key allies in the government’s drive to control Dar Masalit. As part of a larger reorganisation of Darfur’s political structure by the Minister of Federal Affairs ‘Ali al-Hajj in 1994, Dar Masalit was divided into 13 emirates87, each presided over by an ‘amir appointed by the provincial governor. The decision that followed to award eight of the emirates to either riverain Arabs or to recent Arab arrivals from Chad worried the Masalit. For the Masalit, there was every possibility that the position of Sultan, long held by one of their own, could be in jeopardy since the Sultan was elected by the ‘amirs. Most worrying for the Masalit, was a fear that the changes were designed to deprive them of their land and award Dar Masalit to the newcomers. Mahgoub El-Tigani Mahmoud describes the resentment that swelled in Dar Masalit as being driven by exactly these fears: The Massalit exemplify the resentment among Darfurian Africans toward the Muslim Brotherhood and the emirate system . . . .The Massalit feel that they are the ones targeted by this policy, which aims at Balkanizing their territory and giving away large portions of land to migrant Arab tribes. This is the real cause of the violent conflict, which recently erupted between the Massalit and the Arab tribes in their area . . . 88 With tensions running high, the government attempted to restore some level of calm by appointing a local Ibrahim Yahya to the position of governor. His task was made more difficult by the opposition he faced from the superior provincial governor and the heads of the security organs of state, including the President himself.89 Flint and de Waal explain that in 1999, when violence erupted for second time, al-Bashir intervened personally, dispatching his Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, retired general Mohamed Ahmad al-Din.90 al-Din oversaw the destruction of Masalit villages carried out jointly by the

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military with the assistance of militias comprised of the Arabs from Chad who had settled in Dar Masalit only a few years earlier. As already described, this strategy was not new, it had been employed in the south against the SPLM and against the Nuba in the early 1990s. A Human Rights Watch report on the events in Dar Masalit explains: The Sudanese government claimed that the Masalit were fifth column of the Sudan’s People Liberation Army . . . and sealed off Dar Masalit. Reportedly the Arab militias then killed more than 1,000 Masalit. The government set up special courts to try leaders of the clashes, sentencing fourteen people to death, and sponsored a tribal reconciliation conference [which] concluded that 292 Masalit and seven Arabs were dead; 2,673 houses burned down; and large numbers of livestock looted, with Masalit suffering most. The Arabs refused to pay compensation. About 29,500 fearful Masalit refugees remained in Chad, where the Arab militia reportedly came to kill eighty Masalit refugees in mid-1999.91 The policy of altering the sub-provincial boundaries in 1994 also affected the position held by the Fur in local and regional politics. Darfur was partitioned into three separate states, so by design dividing the Fur population in three. The result was that they became minorities in each of the three sub-regional states. In 1996 the government added to this earlier provocation by overlooking NIF loyalists from Darfur for key local and regional government positions. As in Dar Masalit, the Darfuri elite, whether NIF loyalists or not, had inexplicably lost their government positions. While these events suggest a push from the NIF to solidify their hold on the western peripheries of the country, the reshuffling that occurred was a result of something quite significant occurring at the very top of the party. The reshuffle was reflective of the emerging struggle between al-Bashir and al-Turabi for control of the NIF. The political emasculation of the leaders of the Fur, Zaghawa and other urban and sedentary communities of Darfur, including those affiliated with the NIF was symbolic of

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a power struggle within the NIF leadership but the repercussions were far reaching, possibly much more so than anyone in the party could have envisaged. Events such as those that occurred in Dar Masalit in 1999, and the eruption of the civil war across Darfur since 2003 have been perceived as occurring along an Arab/African fault line. Race and ethnicity, or tribe, have been present in Sudan since independence, but as this book has tried to show these forces have been shaped by the political and economic power structures that emerged in Darfur’s relationship with the Sudanese state. In Sudan, there has always been an element of racial, religious and ethnic prejudice on the part of the riverain Arabs towards the south, who they perceived as being inferior for not being Arab or Muslim. Even in the northern Sudan, there has been elements of this prejudice towards those who were perceived as unsophisticated in their Arabicity and knowledge of Islam. In the post-colonial Sudan, the institutionalisation of Arab racism towards the south was a reflection of northern Sudanese efforts to impose control over southerners. The extension of this form of racism to the northern Sudan can be said to be a response to the way that the NIF state tried to impose its power over Darfur. The racism in Darfur is real, but tells us very little about why an Islamist state turned on Muslims from Darfur, whether black or Arab, when that same state was playing host to Islamists from Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia, and other so-called Black Africans.92 Rather, a closer look at the political dynamics within the NIF during this period provides instruction into why this happened.

7.7 The fracturing of the NIF- Is Darfur a front in the inter-party conflict? In 1999, the NIF split after a short and bloodless internal struggle between Omar al-Bashir and Hasan al-Turabi. Al-Turabi had survived the political cut and thrust of Sudanese politics for over 30 but in December 1999 he was overtaken by events. His fall from power ended the Islamists’ aspirations, and many in the country saw al-Bashir’s victory as the old guard re-affirming dominance. Al-Turabi’s fall also

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destroyed the aspirations held by many from Darfur that the years of marginalisation were about to end. The people of Darfur had been told by the NIF that in Islam racial and ethnic differences did not exist and ‘. . . Islamists . . . do not recognize any plurality in Islam or Islamism, instead insisting that in any disagreement, one party must be deviating from Islam.’ 93 This promise of egalitarianism, as represented by the belief in the undifferentiated umma, is one reason that has been put forward to explain the attraction of the Islamist message for the people of Darfur. The other main hope the NIF held out to the people of Darfur was that the resources of the state would be shared equally and that decades of being marginalised and overlooked by successive governments in Khartoum would be over. However, the NIF promised much when it came to power and after a decade, it was clear to almost everyone that the situation for the peripheral regions of the Sudan, such as Darfur, had not only not improved, they had in fact, deteriorated badly. Unfortunately, for the people of Sudan, as Ahmed Kamal El-Din argues, ‘. . . the promise of a color-blind Islamism turned out to be sham.’94 One NIF member from Darfur realised much earlier that the Islamist leaders in Khartoum were equally inclined to monopolise power and exclude to non-riverain Arabs from power. Daud Bolad’s story of defection from the Islamists after facing years of discrimination within the NIF has become mythologised by the coalition of activists, academics, politicians and the media which have coalesced as the Save the Darfur campaign. Bolad’s tragic death fits neatly into the framework of Sudan as an Arab racist state.95 However, a closer look at the story of Daud Bolad tells us something very different from what has become the accepted account. What is an equally important and often overlooked element of the Daad Bolad story is that despite repeated efforts by the SPLM leadership to seek an alliance with the Fur and Masalit, including the backing of the tragic incursion of Bolad and his team into Darfur in 1992, there is no evidence of any serious cooperation in the campaign by the Fur or Masalit leadership. This fact, completely overlooked by observers trying to make Bolad a pioneer of what was to come a decade after his ill-fated expedition, should point to the conclusion

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that at the time of Bolad’s ill-fated foray into Darfur, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa had not yet rejected the Islamist project, or the hope that the NIF might deliver on promises where previous governments had not. One reason for popular support for the NIF in Darfur was that, at least in one area, some progress seemed to have been made. Security and order seemed to have markedly improved from what was experienced when al-Mahdi was in power. The inter-communal violence of the 1990s was no-where near the scale of the preceding decade’s clashes, though the causes for the tensions that led to the strife had not been resolved by the NIF government. The peace agreement signed between the Fur and the Arab tribes in June 1989 brought an end to the intensive warfare that had devastated Darfur for two years. Even with the drought of 1990–1 (which was considered to be as severe as that experienced in 1983–5) afflicted the region there was no repeat of the upsurge of conflict that was responsible for thousands of deaths, and for the pillaging and the theft of animals, associated with the earlier period. For one thing, the war in Chad had concluded and Libyan adventurism no longer impacted on Darfur as it had in the 1980s. Some of the calm Darfur experienced in this period resulted from events outside the control of the NIF, but for the people of Darfur this respite from the violence that had occurred during the tenure of Sadiq al-Mahdi was welcome and whether real or imaginary, the NIF presided over a period of relative peace within Darfur. Also, the Islamists came to Darfur with a religious message that was well received. There is little evidence, despite concerns among NIF ideologues over some interpretations of Islam held by the people of Darfur, that there was any heightened tensions between the NIF and the people of Darfur over religious issues throughout the 1990s. Willemse’s fieldwork, which has been referred to before in this book, describes instances of minor disagreements over interpretations of Islamic practices between NIF officials and some segments of Kabkibiya’s diverse population. What is most illuminating in Willemse’s study is that there are very few signs of ethnic, racial or major religious divisions from her extensive reports of her stay in Darfur.

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The religious problems seemed to arise in conjunction with the political struggle between al-Bashir and al-Turabi and it is at this point that Darfur becomes a stage on which the national power struggle takes place. It is in this struggle that Abdullahi A. Gallab suggests that the lead-up to the civil war in Darfur can be located.96 The questions over race, ethnicity and tribe may also be a result of this same struggle as it unfolded which is an argument put forward byAbdel Salam and de Waal, who argue that: When Sudan’s Islamist movement split in 1999/2000 it did so along ethnic lines, with many of the ‘westerners’ staying with Turabi and the riverain Arab elite aligning with Bashir.97 With al-Turabi’s demise, the failure of the Islamist project to remake Sudan became increasingly obvious across the country, including in Darfur even if it had been for some decades the heartland of the Islamist movement in Sudan. There was a sense amongst many Sudanese that the military cabal that had overthrown al-Turabi had never been committed Islamists at all but opportunists, as one Sudanese intellectual in the US has written.98 Abdelwahab El-Affendi, the author of a sympathetic work on the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote in the days after the al-Turabi was toppled that the Islamic experiment was over and had ultimately ended in failure. For El-Affendi, al-Turabi’s demise was the sign that the military had assumed power over civilians and the tenuous alliance between the barracks and the mosque had ended99 The split had immediate ramifications in terms of the structure and personnel of the Islamist state. Al-Turabi had supporters, and some of them were in influential positions in regional government and in the PDF. The PDF had evolved since the heady days of the coup, when the notion of a spontaneous Islamist army or mujahidin would sweep away the enemies of Islam. The Afghan experience of the 1980s did not repeat in Sudan, regardless of how hard the Islamists tried to replicate the anti-Soviet jihad in the way they conducted the war in the southern Sudan.100 The PDF was a huge failure. Casualty

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rates were much higher than in the regular army, with thousands of poorly trained and badly armed youths sent to their death in senseless attacks on SPLA strongholds, reminiscent of the slaughter on the Western Front during the First World War.101 Burr and Collins refer to the PDF as little more than ‘. . . a rabble in arms, volunteers, used by the Sudan army in its southern civil war as cannon fodder . . .’102 By 1997, the PDF was in decline, with too few recruits and a long list of past military failures. With little faith in the capability of the PDF to exert any influence on the war in the south the government shifted its focus back to the regular army.103 The latter was then authorised from 1997 onwards, to supervise the PDF by bringing the civil militias under the direct control of the President.104 This transition from the PDF towards the military symbolised the shifting power relations within the ruling party. The President was positioning himself to move against al-Turabi when the power-struggle developed. The PDF may have re-emerged after al-Turabi’s fall, but without the jihadist ideology or the legitimacy it formerly carried. In fact, by the time of al-Turabi’s demise, it seems that the religious orientation of the PDF had been shed as: [M]ost Sudanese today perceive the PDF as a political rather than religious project and, moreover, as a project that contradicts the tolerant and diverse Islamic currents that constitute Sudanese religious life.105 The shift in the Sudanese attitude towards the PDF was also symbolic of a more fundamental shift in people’s perceptions of the state. The Islamist project was an illusion, but one many Sudanese tolerated while al-Turabi was a part of it. When al-Turabi fell from power the façade of what was claimed to be the project for Islamic renewal was evident to all. Soon after al-Turabi’s removal, the publication of the Black Book (kitab al-aswad) openly revealed the hypocrisy of the Islamics state’s professed egalitarianism. The Black Book laid out in detail what was already well known to many Sudanese: that the country’s politics and

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government were dominated by the riverain Arabs. What the Black Book said differently though was that: . . . the domination of government institutions by riverain Arabs was not the result simply of their higher education but of their nepotism and indeed organization of the government to serve their own interests. In other words, the Black Book, made a coherent case for the conscious underdevelopment of Darfur . . . 106 With the publication of the Black Book agitation against al-Bashir and the National Congress intensified, especially in Darfur, with riots in El Fasher in June 2000. A government statement on the cause of the riot read: ‘Leadership in the North Darfur State legislative council, known for their loyalty to the People’s Congress, have instigated the riots.’107 Al-Bashir acted immediately to purge the party even further, and it was in this act of the Islamist state turning on itself that proved the catalyst for the formation of the Darfur Liberation Front, which in 2003 would become the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A). The other anti-government group to emerge from Darfur at this time was the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), with deeper roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, and despite repeated denials, with what most believed were close links to al-Turabi. While the battlelines had yet to be drawn, there was a disquieting sense that al-Bashir and his regime were preparing to face an al-Turabi led putsch from Darfur. Al-Bashir had taken further precautions against a possible alTurabi seizure of power by closing the regional offices of the NIF, and dismissing all senior regional government officials and personally appointing their replacements. The National Executive was purged of al-Turabi loyalists, and the Islamist state’s internal conflict intensified. The power struggle between the military and the civilian Islamists pervaded the entire northern reaches of the state, as a realignment of state power proceeded to displace al-Turabists and to dislocate existing relationships. The description that Flint and de Waal provide of the formation of the janjawiid and the militarisation of Darfur by the government in the post-2000 period reads very

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much like a state preparing for war.108 In the background to their portrayal of events, there is a very strong sense that the Sudanese state was disintegrating, and that the power structure was in a state of flux. In this sense, the war in Darfur begins much earlier than the rebel attacks in 2003. While in the 1980s the Sudanese state’s coercive power had been used to attempt the subjugation of the south, in 1992 the same coercive power of the state was turned on the Nuba, and in 1999 on the Masalit. When the realignment of political forces in Darfur, after al-Turabi’s fall, failed to deliver control of the region to al-Bashir’s National Congress Party, the state’s coercive power turned against Darfur, and at this moment the crisis of the Sudanese post-colonial state in Darfur reached a nadir.

7.8

Conclusion

The postcolonial state had always been weak in Darfur, and had only functioned with the acquiescence of the traditional tribal elite. After a decade of state-building in which the Islamists had imposed their will on the centre and tried to achieve a similar level of dominance in Sudan’s periphery, the task of subjugating the northern Sudan seemed complete. However, the ruling party was wrought by internal tensions, and in 1999 the alliance between the civilians and the military splintered. At this moment, the NIF state fragmented and this brought the military into a direct confrontation with their former Islamist allies. The fall of the once all-powerful al-Turabi from power symbolised the failure of the Islamist project of renewal. Without the façade of the Islamist project al-Bashir was just another Sudanese dictator. For the marginalised groups of Darfur who had found hope in the Islamist political programme, al-Bashir was not only another Sudanese dictator but also another riverain Arab military dictator. What the western Sudanese now saw was the brutal, exclusionary, predatory nature of the state. In the publication of the Black Book, Darfur’s Islamists articulated what they perceived to be the racist and nepotistic character of Sudanese politics. Racial, ethnic, religious differences resurfaced as the perceived egalitarian umma splintered along centre-periphery lines.

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Anger against the reformulated regime surfaced across the northern Sudan, but it was in Darfur where the failure of the Islamist state was most palpable. Unlike the events of the 1980s, where the state failed to protect its citizens, the war in Darfur that broke out in 2003 has been a war for control of the state, and wars of this type have always proved the most intractable and brutal of all especially when they result from the crisis of the post-colonial state.

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CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION: THE CR ISIS OF THE POST-COLONIAL STATE

8.1

Does Darfur have a future in Sudan?

In 2006, the most eminent scholar of the history of pre-colonial Darfur wrote an article asking whether Darfur had a future in Sudan.1 It was a timely question, in the wake of the brutal counter-insurgency and humanitarian crisis that had occurred since the outbreak of the war in Darfur three years earlier. In his examination of Darfur’s future, O’Fahey begins by interrogating the past, as a good historian could be expected to do. He explains that Darfur has had a shorter relationship with riverain Sudan than the south; in other words, using the passage of time as a measure, Darfur is less Sudanese than even southern Sudan. Using time as a measure may lead one to assume that the future for Darfur points to a path similar to that taken by the south. However, putting the time factor aside, and looking more closely at the relations between Darfur and Khartoum, a very different dynamic can be discerned than that which characterised the north-south relationship. Darfur has been intrinsically intertwined with the Sudan in a way the south is not – the latter has fought for, and now won, autonomy from Khartoum. The same cannot be said for Darfur, which, since it was forced into becoming a part of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, has struggled for inclusion and a

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share of power. Darfur has been Sudanese in a way that the south has not. British reasons for the conquest of Darfur amounted to no more than ensuring it did not fall into the hands of others who might use it as a launching-pad to threaten British control of the Nile. In the 40 years of British rule in Darfur, the region was treated as if it had no intrinsic value and no qualities of its own. Margery Perham visited Darfur in 1938, and her views on the area express something about the British colonial attitude. Perham taught and wrote extensively on Africa, as Reader in Colonial Administration at Nuffield College, Oxford University, in the first half of the twentieth century. She was a widely cited authority on Africa, and her teaching shaped the views of thousands of Britons who might or might not have been involved in the colonial service. As a consequence of her reputation in the academy, and her influence over the production of knowledge relating to the colonies, her views are reflective of the wider colonial attitude toward Darfur. Following Perham’s visit to Darfur in 1938, she wrote the following: We are in a great wide basin, ringed by the peaks of pointed or domed rock. It all seems so un-African that I seemed so surprised, and perhaps, also disgusted, to meet negroes in this Paradise. For whatever I might feel about negroes, they are not romantic. Their appearance and their general servile character must always from this point of view, put them in a category apart from Red Indians, Polynesians, or Arabs.2 In many ways, Perham’s comments here are reflective of the British colonial attitude to Africa, and to Africans in Sudan. That the Sudanese attitude has been marked by a similar dismissal of any African achievements is not a result of British racism in the country; but certainly the British attitude shaped a belief that the Arabs of the Nile were superior to all other non-Arab Sudanese. British prejudice against Darfur went deep, and well beyond simply neglect. The colonisers erased from the history books any knowledge that a powerful kingdom had existed prior to the formation of modern

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Sudan. The erasure of the Keira Sultanate was entirely in keeping with the British attitude of the time as O’Fahey remarks: Nowhere to the best of my knowledge, did McMichael or others of the Sudan Political Service, the British administrative cadre that ran the Sudan, ever face up to the reality that state-formation was the work of non-Arabs.3 Despite their racial confidence, the British also demonstrated how difficult the task of identifying Darfur’s people along racial lines was to be when they drew the line dividing northern Arab Sudan from southern African Sudan. Darfur was included in the former because as Muslims its people were more Arab than African. In making this distinction the British were acknowledging that the Arab and non-Arab distinction in the northern Sudan was not based on racial difference but on the degree of Arabisation that had occurred over the preceding centuries. They were only able to perceive these differences in racial terms, once again proving how dominant the racial element was in the British construction of empire. The colonial state erected an internal barrier that prevented Darfur from being Sudanese from the very beginning. Institutional segregation followed, as the colonial government’s policy was to hold Darfur’s natives in the embrace of traditionalism to prevent the spread of riverain Arab influence, in case they were infected by the malignancy of nationalism. This not only prevented Darfur from participating in the expansion of Sudan’s modern political movements, it also created a dichotomy of modern and traditional in the Sudan which is still evident in the prejudices the riverain Arabs hold towards (what they perceive to be) the less sophisticated western Sudanese. The third consequence of the policy of segregation was that the assimilation and penetration necessary for nationbuilding was hindered, and the Sudan emerged from colonialism as a number of separate regions held together by a brief history of Anglo-Egyptian control and a flimsy state infrastructure that consisted of an overdeveloped central Sudan and very underdeveloped periphery. This relationship between a homogenous and developed

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centre and a heterogeneous and underdeveloped periphery would be a continual barrier to nation-building in the northern Sudan during the post-colonial era. If upon entering independence the Sudanese nation was weak, the state was, arguably, even weaker. Administration in Darfur consisted of a scattering of British colonial officials, and a tribal hierarchy which was utilised when available or imposed when it was not. In either case, it was cloaked in the legitimacy of tradition and publicly referred to as respecting indigenous culture, but privately as the most effective and least expensive system for controlling the natives. But in doing so, it created tribes where there were none. The Fur were not a tribe but the dominant identity of the people who had assimilated, or been forced to assimilate, into the Keira domain. The same was true of the Masalit and of the smaller sultanates along the SudanChad border (a border which was also a colonial invention). As part of the colonial dispossession of African history, nations and ethnic groups in Darfur were demoted to tribal units, so as to satisfy the colonial desire for a sense of mission, and as a way of controlling the colonial landscape. When scholars use the phrase ‘deep tribal division’ they are referring to a process that occurred less than a century ago, under the aegis of the civilising mission. Pre-colonial Darfur had been involved in a process of state-building, over centuries of detribalising its subjects; Native Administration reversed this process. Even with this knowledge of the colonial intervention in Sudan, it is astonishing how many people search for pre-colonial clues to the conflict in Darfur, rather than in the colonial and post-colonial dynamics of the Sudanese state. The state that emerged from colonialism was weak, and beset by rivalries between the major political parties, between the centre and the northern periphery, and between the north and south. Economic underdevelopment, political instability and the ongoing north-south conflict prevented the normal pattern of state-building followed elsewhere during the first generation of independence. The Sudanese had to wait until the 1970s before they had a government dedicated to the development process. Ja’afar Nimeiri oversaw the implementation of a number of initiatives during the first half of his 16 years in power.

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But since his regime, as Tim Niblock has argued, lacked ideological purpose the results were more superficial than structural. Rather than enact genuine reform, the Sudanese developmental state adapted to the structural modalities of the Sudanese state – clientalism, centralisation, and authoritarianism. As the development state withered so did the legitimacy of the Nimeiri regime. Nimeiri’s other reforms also failed. Native Administration and customary land laws were relics of the colonial system, and at least in terms of land practices were being broken down anyway by the forces of modernisation, as James Morton has argued. His analysis of the changes to Darfur’s economy provides a foundation for understanding both the local conflicts that undermined the interdependence of the different communities in Darfur and the tensions that emerged between the state and Darfur in this period. The conflict between Darfur and the state, in particular, was a conflict between riverain Arab conservatism and the reformism of Darfur’s elite. Understanding the Darfur conflict from this perspective opens a number of possibilities for resolution that are not available if events are viewed through the prism of static identities. Arab and African identities in Darfur, as they exist today, have been shaped by the struggle between Darfur and a Sudanese state that still declares those who support the state to be Arabs and those who do not to be Africans. The question, then, is not whether Darfur has a future in the Sudan, but whether the Sudan itself, as it is today, has a future.

8.2

What can be learnt from the conflict for Darfur?

The question of whether Sudan has a future is a question that analysts of many ‘failed’ states are forced to address. Darfur’s conflict is an example of the wider and equally complex issue of the crisis of the post-colonial state. The Sudan, as many, many observers have understood, is a state continually lurching from crisis to crisis, brought back from the brink of collapse on a number of occasions and only barely surviving. The secession of the three southern provinces has resolved one Sudanese crisis only to create others. For now, north and south are no longer engaged in full-scale war even if tensions continue to

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threaten regional stability.4 That both the North and the South continue to face serious internal crises suggests that viewing the problems through the prism of racial and religious problems was insufficient for understanding the Sudanese crisis. As this book has maintained throughout, the conflict in Darfur has its roots in the crisis of the post-colonial state and from this perspective there is a possibility that there are wider lessons to be learnt here. Perceiving conflicts as the result of contemporary problems is a useful place to start. Some astonishment at the tendency to search for causes of the conflict in pre-colonial history was expressed above. Equally astonishing is the search by analysts for answers that recycle colonial policies. Propositions such as reinstating tribal leaders, utilising tribal reconciliation and reallocating lands to tribal units have been put forward as potential ways of resolving the conflict. Land is a major issue, but the people of Darfur do not want to be dragged backwards; the rebellion in Darfur was in fact all about access to the modern state and thus to a place in the global economy. Pastoralists ceased being camel-nomads in the 1980s, and today rear sheep for export markets. Farmers are no longer subsistence producers: they grow cashcrops and food that they export. The conflict between nomadic groups and farmers in the 1980s over access to land and water was the result of the commodification of production and the competition for profit. Depictions of Darfur caught in some timeless traditional past, whether intentional or not, are not so dissimilar from earlier colonial prejudices. Resolving the conflict in Darfur can only be made possible by dealing with the underlying problems of the Sudanese state and addressing the instability of its politics. The causes of contemporary wars are located in contemporary problems. As this book has tried to suggest, history is crucial for understanding the present, but not for explaining it. The war in Darfur has its roots in the creation of the colonial state, and its causes are in the immediate problems of state collapse and regime preservation. The war for Darfur is a new war, the result of the splintering of the NIF and the collapse of the Islamist state, which left Darfur’s place in the Sudan uncertain. With all due respect to the eminent scholars who have published important studies of Darfur

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over the last five years, there is neither a history of destruction and genocide in Darfur nor a history of a long war. But unless the crisis of the Sudanese state can be resolved, then the gloomy reality is that Darfur’s struggle may indeed become a longer and deeper tragedy than has already been the case.

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GLOSSARY OF AR ABIC TERMS

abbala abd (pl. abid) amir ansar

awlad al-Bilad Baggara Bazinger bilad al-Sudan dar darb al-arba’in da’wa islamiyya

dura faki, fashir fatwa feddans fellahin

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camel herders Slave Prince: also used to refer to tribal leaders helpers of the Prophet, used in Sudan to describe the loyal followers of the Mahdi, and more recently the followers of the Mahdi’s descendants children of the country cattle herders located in Darfur and Kordofan, comprising numerous sub-groups including the Rezeigat and Ereigat an army of well-trained slave soldiers armed with firearms the land of the blacks homeland, territory of, such as dar al-Islam (land or kingdom of Islam), Darfur (land or kingdom of the Fur) literally the ‘forty days road’ which caravans traversed from Darfur to Egypt commonly understood amongst Muslims as charitable missionary organisations, in Darfur an organisation established by Gaddafi to spread Libyan influence in Africa a variety of sorghum which is a staple crop of the Sahel pl. faqura’Religious or Holy man of Islam Fur for ‘Sultan’s camp’ or ‘capital’ such as El Fasher the capital of Darfur legal ruling by an Islamic scholar measure of land equivalent to 1.038 acres peasant or agricultural worker in Arab countries, esp. in Egypt

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GLOSSARY ferman fursan goz hakura jamal or jammal janjawiid

jellaba khalifa khedive Mahdi

maqdum murahaleen

mufti mudir nazir omda qadi qoreish qoz or goz shari’a shartay shaykh sirdar

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a command issued by the Ottoman Sultan in his capacity as Caliph horseman, in the context used refers to armed and mounted raiders or soldiers see qoz a system of usufruct land title in Darfur originating in the period of the Sultanate camel herders located in northern Darfur ghost riders or demon riders, from jinn (ghost, demon) and jawad (horse), has become the common name for pro-government tribal militias in Darfur term used in Sudan to describe traders/merchants from the riverain region the successor of the Mahdi, originally used to describe successors of the Prophet from Persian for lord, was one of a line of governors and monarchs who ruled Egypt and Sudan from 1805 to 1914 inspired or anointed one: Islamic holy man who paves the way for the return of Christ and the end of time, believed will appear to defeat the anti-Christ and restore Islamic justice to the world. In the Sudanese context, has become a reference to Mohammed Ahmed al-Mahdi. Administrator or arbitrator of disputes, minor aristocrat during the period of the Keira Sultanate a generic term for tribal militias in Darfur, but more recently a term for the government-sponsored militias engaged in the war in the south in the 1980s and responsible for exacerbating tensions in Darfur Islamic scholar and interpreter of religious laws Egyptian Provincial Governor Rulers of nomadic tribes middle-ranking tribal leader judge of Islamic law Tribe of the Prophet Mohamed sandy area Islamic law in Darfur equivalent of an aristocrat or member of the landed gentry, under the Condominium tribal chief Arabic for chief commander in the Egyptian army

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zurqa

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The French name given to the Sudan, which stretched from Mali to present day Sudan Muslim sage or shaman marketplace Sufi order learned men of Islam community of believers in Islam, Umma: also the name of political party affiliated with the Mahdist movement seasonal river, important area of water supply during the wet season an enclosed area, commonly used to refer to fenced farms in Darfur that prevented pastoralists from watering and feeding their livestock western Sudanese term for blacks

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NOTES

Chapter 1 The National Islamic Front and the Immediate Causes of Conflict in Darfur 1. The same contradictions can be said to have led to the separation of the South in 2011. 2. Lesch, 2001, pp. 153–91. 3. Scarcely any media attention, and very little international outcry, was directed at the sufferings of the Nuba people at the hands of the Sudanese military and militias, whose extensive atrocities committed in the Nuba Mountains have been detailed by Africa Watch and Human Rights Watch. See also Omaar, and de Waal, London, 1995. 4. Sidahmed, 1995, pp. 110–80. 5. Burr, and Collins, 2006, p. 284. 6. Of course this is a huge generalisation. The ideas around Arab and African identities, Arabised and indigenous cultures, and Islamic and ‘traditional’ African religions are contested, and using such terminology obscures the infinite gradations, complexities and interconnections between the realities of identities and culture/religion in Africa. 7. While the North remains member of both the Arab league and the African Union, the newly formed Republic of the South Sudan has joined only the African Union. 8. A recent publication covering the ‘entire’ Middle East and North Africa, but excluding Sudan, is Long, et al., 2007; this is just one example of the general tendency for Sudan to be neglected by scholars of the Middle East. Examples of the country’s ambiguity with respect to its place in the field of Middle

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9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

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East and North African studies can be found by searching through journals and monographs, some of which dedicate space to Sudan while others ignore it altogether (except with reference to Egypt). Fleur-Lobban and Lobban, 2001, p. 1, make a similar point, and adds that Sudan’s ‘important role in Islamic Africa is often ignored’. The body of literature dedicated to explaining the colonial and post-colonial ‘construction’ of knowledge has multiplied dramatically in the period since erstwhile colonies received their independence. While a dramatic and profound intellectual movement – known as ‘postcolonial studies’ – arose after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, the idea that it was the powerful who shaped dominant ideas about the world has a longer heritage, going back to Marx and later refined by Antonio Gramsci, Max Horkheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School. For a comprehensive review of postcolonial theory predating Said, see Young, 2001; Jessop, 2005, pp. 421–37, refers to Antonio Gramsci’s spatialisation of history and politics. For Gramsci, location was an important factor in understanding political interests and in coming to terms with historical power-relations; Italy’s ‘southern question’ in particular represented for him an example of the deep connection between politics, history, culture and geography. The historical ethnic and tribal fluidity and symbiosis evident in Darfur will be dealt with later in this book. Huntington, 1996 is not understood here as an accurate description of the shifts in the world system since 1990, but as a way in which conflicts in the world have come to be described; see Halliday, 2002, pp. 3, 6–52, for a critique of this ‘clash of civilisations’. The issue of race and ethnicity in Darfur is much disputed in the studies that have emerged since the outbreak of hostilities there. Prunier, 2005 and Flint, de Waal, 2005 present two differing positions relating to heightened racismin Darfur. Prunier argues that Arab racism was largely a result of external manipulation of localised tensions. Flint and de Waal offer an explanation firmly rooted in the internal dynamics of the region. They agree on the importance of the racial dimension of the conflict. Michael Kevane, on the other hand, disputes the significance given to Arab racism as a factor in Darfur. In his review of Prunier’s The Ambiguous Genocide he argues that, ‘ethnicity remains the organizing structure, rather than a new or stronger racial identity; see ‘Book review’ at , accessed 15 October 2009; Mamdani, 2009 makes a similar argument, namely that ethnic are more important than racial identities. Doornbos, 1991, p. 53.

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15. Ibid, p. 56. 16. One notable exception is the valuable study by Prunier (2005), which makes some effort to explain the outbreak of violence in the context of the shifting fortunes of Sudan at the regional and international levels. However, despite placing the conflict in a national and wider regional framework, Prunier returns to the local level to explain the immediate causes of the conflict. In some ways, Prunier’s account is most insightful, but due to brevity and some lapses in application of the conceptual framework there are major weaknesses apparent, especially with his perspective on the forces that shaped Darfur’s Arab and African identities, which was in a number of ways was contradictory and undermined the value of his study. 17. Kevane, ‘Book review’. 18. The words ‘post-colonial states’ of course embodies a generalisation, and

the huge differences in the size, composition, history and capacity of such states are not overlooked. However, they can be said to share a number of similarities, which makes it possible to claim a model to help in their understanding. In the African context, see Doornbos, 1990, pp. 179–98. 19. While Sudan was never formally a colony of Britain, officially being administered jointly by Britain and Egypt, the country was effectively under British rule from 1898 onwards. The institutions, ideology and practices of the British in Sudan were intrinsically colonial, even if the Foreign rather than the Colonial Office made appointments to the British service there. Egyptian joint administration of the Sudan was a façade in which neither the Egyptians nor the Sudanese ever believed. This is why Sudan is taken to have been under colonial rule. (The role of the British and the Egyptians in the Sudan is discussed at some length in Chapter 5.) 20. Clapham, 1994, p. 433. 21. In the African context, Egypt, Ethiopia and Liberia joined the United Nations on different dates during the second half of 1945 – as did South Africa, which remained under minority white rule until 1994. Other African states were granted membership after they achieved independence from colonial rule, the vast majority doing so in the 1950s and 1960s, 13 in 1960 alone. The process of decolonisation was considered incomplete even after the break-up of the last of the European empires, when the Portuguese empire fell apart in 1975. Over the 30 years from 1945 until Portugal’s exit from the continent, almost 50 African states emerged from colonialism, to be joined by latecomers Zimbabwe (1980), Namibia (1990) and Eritrea (1993). But it was the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, which is considered to have finally brought to an end the colonial era in Africa. Despite the different end dates for colonialism in individual cases, the post-colonial period

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22. 23. 24. 25.

can be said to refer to the period following the Suez crisis of 1956 which for many signalled a shift to new era of international politics. Gallab, 2001, p. 87. Gill, 2003, p. 1. Englebert, 1997, pp. 767. Makinda, 1982, pp. 94–5 explains that the motive behind this move was the realisation that the states emerging from colonialism retained as a result a degree of fragility.

26. 27. 28. 29.

Rotberg, 2002, pp. 127–40. Anderson, 1987 pp. 1–18.

Jackson, 1990, p. 21.

Due to the absence of the rule of law in Darfur, which permitted a state of anarchy to emerge in some of the western and northern reaches of the region, it was compared to the American Wild West; see ‘Sudan: the Wild West’, Africa Confidential, 1988, pp. 6.

30. Abubakar, 2001, p. 72. 31. Here the hyphenated concept of the nation-state is used to illustrate the notion that the crisis facing postcolonial states such as Sudan is one associated with the lack of a coterminous nation and state, which for a number of scholars is a leading explanation for the crisis of political legitimacy in the postcolonial state. The issue of terminology and the implications for the study of nations and states is discussed in Connor, 1994; see especially Chapter 4, ‘Terminological Chaos (“A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a . . .”)’. For the relationship between the failure of nationbuilding and contemporary crises, see Tambiah, 1996. 32. Woodward contends that Sudan ‘. . . has survived with increasing uncertainty . . . and by the late 1980s it was becoming an open question whether Sudan as legally constituted could continue’; see Woodward, 1990, p. 1. 33. Ibid. 34. A few examples drawn from the academic literature on Sudan will demonstrate how relatively marginal the treatment of Darfur was, until the outbreak of conflict in 2003–04. Peter Woodward’s study on the Sudanese state mentioned above has only four references to Darfur in the index (pp. 23, 29, 31, 34); Voll, 1991 mentions Darfur (pp. 65–6), but only in the context of the conflict in Chad!

Chapter 2 Beyond Mainstream Representations of the Conflict in Darfur: Bringing the State Back In 1. The debate on ‘cultural turn’ is beyond the scope of this study. For more on the problems associated with this see Eagleton, 1998/9, p. 26. Also, Said (2001) provides a salient reminder of the context in which culture and identity

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2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

203

should be placed when analysing politics; he argues that: ‘These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis.’ I recognise that the scholarly (or the wider media views) are by no means uniform and that a body of literature exists which is based on a nuanced understanding of identities in the region and of the complex causes that lie behind the conflict. But as will be shown, there is also a largely uncritical view amongst some scholars, public commentators and officials who adhere to the view that conflict in Darfur is largely primordial and the result of irrational hatreds. While some scholars and commentators appreciate the complexities of the conflict, few if any relate the events as a result of the precipitous decline of state capacity and the recent transformation of the Sudanese state. The failure of the Islamist state is also rarely recounted as a factor in the analyses of Darfur. Mukesh Kapila, interviewed by the BBC, 19 March 2004. Kristof, 2004a, 2004b, were followed by a third article, 2004c, framed around the broader question of crisis in Africa, which also mentioned the crisis in Darfur. Kristof, 2004a. Kristof’s inaccuracy over the identities of the groups involved was matched by an equal error regarding the death toll. Initial figures of 200,000 violent deaths were highly inflated, but in 2005, despite this, he raised the figure to 400,000. In 2008, when the UN estimated the excess death toll at less than 200 people a month, Kristof was still writing that genocide was being perpetrated in Darfur. The notion of ‘tribe’, and the occurrence of that term in both administrative and anthropological usage in Sudan, has been largely political rather than cultural. The concept of tribe used throughout the present study refers to the administrative division of Sudan’s population established originally by the Anglo–Egyptian Condominium and retained by successive governments after independence. The non-use of the term ‘tribe’ in the 1960 was then reversed, with the term back in vogue from the 1990s on. In referring to the identity of different groups in Sudan the term ‘ethnic group’ is preferred, but the reality is that tribes were formed during the colonial era, and as a result many groups in Africa now see themselves as tribes, and for this reason the term has gained both relevance and popularity. Numerous websites and publications continue to subscribe to this one-dimensional view of the racial identities of the actors involved in the conflict

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10.

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in Darfur. The following quotation, from The New York Times On-Line, 6 March 2009, is representative of much of the coverage of the conflict, in the on-line press and in other media. In the paragraph preceding the short passage quoted below, the article defines the government as ‘Arab’ and then goes on to characterise the victims as ‘Black Africans’. Also, it then fails to disclose the religious identities of the latter, which is likely to lead the uninformed reader to believe that the conflict in Darfur is also along MuslimChristian lines. The article then goes on to say: ‘Darfur has been the focus of international attention since 2004, when government troops and militia groups known as janjawiid moved to crush rebels who complained that the region’s black African ethnic groups had been neglected by the Muslim central government.’ Aidi, 2005, presents a strong case for viewing the representations surrounding the Darfur conflict in the US as being heavily influenced by the ‘War on Terror’ discourse and by post-9/11 Islamophobia and anti-Arabism. Aidi also traces the relationship between representations of Darfur and US based Darfur activism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In summary, Aidi’s analysis demonstrates the degree to which the issue of Darfur has been politicised in the US. A large body of literature exists which can be seen as framed by an interest in the study of how representations of Africa are related to colonial and international institutions, and in what ways they persist in shaping contemporary ideas about Africa. Said, 1993, p. 52, describes the approach to studying African identities taken by post-colonial critics as ‘. . . analysed not as god-given essences, but as results of collaboration between African history and the study of Africa in England, for instance, or between the study of French history and the reorganization of knowledge during the First Empire’. While Hegel’s and Trevor-Roper’s attitude towards the absence of historical change in Africa are well known there are also more recent examples of the resilience of this view, including the declaration in Huntington, 1996, that Africa is best understood as either a) part of an undifferentiated Islamic civilisation, or b) European, because ‘European imperialism and settlements brought elements of Western civilization . . . [and] Christianity . . .’ to Africa, or c) Ethiopia, which has its own distinctive (Christian) civilisation. In each case, Huntington’s view of Africa resides in the power of external agents to determine the identity of African cultures and for this reason can be said to follow in a tradition that has denied Africa its own integral history. CBS, 2004; American Jewish World Service, 2007; Kristof, 2006; Lake and Prendergast, 2006.

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13. Ryle, 2004. Ryle’s argument that the counter-insurgency policies used by the Sudanese government in Darfur were similar in style and brutality to those used by the same military cabal in the southern Sudan is a pertinent one. 14. Power, 2004. 15. Aidi is joined by Mamdani (cited above) and Herman in criticising Power and others for using the unfolding tragedy in Darfur for personal, nationalist or other reasons; see Herman’s comments at accessed 15 July 2007. De Waal, 2006, gives a particularly robust commentary on the selective use of the genocide cause by campaigners for intervention in Darfur. 16. Tar, 2006, p. 423, provides an interesting example of the tendency of some scholars to understand the conflict from this perspective, but also to offer insightful commentary on the situation in the Sudan and the multiple issues that plague the region. Tar clearly understands many of the intricacies of Sudanese politics but generally speaking fails to grasp the complexities of the identity politics behind the conflict. 17. Mazrui, 2005b, p. 70. 18. A similar duality in perceptions of Arab identity is evident in the Al Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldoun and in Wynn, 2007, which gives a more recent anthropological account of the multiple menaings of the term ‘Arab’ in the context of Arab Gulf tourism to Egypt. 19. Harir, 1994. 20. In particular, Daly, 2007, and Prunier, 2005. 21. Willemse, 2007. 22. De Waal and Abdel Salam, 2004. 23. For example, Prunier, 2005, argues that the Arab and African divide resulted from political manoeuvring in Darfur between factions of the Umma Party in the lead-up to the 1968 elections, and then from the introduction of a racialist doctrine by Gaddafi in the 1980s. While racial politics are evident in both of these studies, the assumption common to both is that identities in Darfur ceased to be further influenced by factors such as the coming to power of the Islamist government, which I believe offers an analysis that is unfinished. 24. Haaland, 2005, p. 105. 25. Makinda, 1982; Clapham, 2002, pp. 161–3. 26. van der Graaf, 1997, p. 2. 27. Schraeder, 1994, p. 51, sums up the relationship between Mobuto and the US very well by quoting George Bush, Snr, in a speech given on 29 June 1989: ‘Zaire is among America’s oldest friends and its President – President

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Mobutu – one of our most valued friends [on the] entire continent of Africa . . .’. 28. Arrighi, 2002, p. 7. 29. Rodney, 1974, p. 20. 30. Comaroff, 1996, p. 174.

Chapter 3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

The Rise and Demise of the Keira Sultanate and the Formation of Sudan

For an earlier version of this chapter, see Bassil, 2006. Insoll, 2003, pp. 127–8. Ibid; see also Mohammed, I.M., 1986. O’Fahey, 1980, p. 8. Ibid, p. 114; further to this point, O’Fahey states that: ‘The theme of the “Wise Stranger” is widespread in the Sudanic belt; he comes to a remote and barbarous land, introduces new customs, often associated with eating, and marries the chief’s daughter and their descendants rule but in a different style and under another dynastic name.’ Ekeh, 1975, p. 93. As a result of economic opportunities there has been a gradual change to sheep herding by jamal communities in Darfur. Harir, 1994, p. 152. O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, p. 6. Haaland, 1972; Haaland’s research into the fluidity of ethnic identities amongst the Fur and Baggara presents a perfect example of the shift in perceptions of ethnicity in Darfur since the end of the colonial period. Holy, 1974, on the Berti, and Asad, 1970, on the Kababish of Kordofan (also Darfur), are other examples of anthropological work emphasising the historicity of identities. Manger, 2006 is another scholar whose work on Darfur and Sudan emphasises the complexity of ethnic identities. Willemse, 2007, whose study is more recent again, also represents identities in Darfur as very complex and historically contingent. O’Fahey, 2008, p. 163. O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, p. 115. Theobald, 1965, p. 1. O’Fahey, 1971, p. 92. Morton, 1996, p. 6. Birks, 1977, p. 47; in this article Birks traces the historical and modern passage of West Africans into Sudan, estimating that as many as 15,000 would pass through the central Sahel on their way to Mecca each year.

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NOTES 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

207

Ibid. O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, pp. 164–7. Ibid, pp. 136, 167. Cunnison, 1966, p. 67. Ibid. Warburg, 1978, p. ix; in his preface, Warburg contends that ‘an overwhelming impact of Islam on Sudanese culture and politics’ is evident. He sums up the centrality of the Islamic and Islamising forces in shaping Sudanese politics and society. O’Fahey, 2008, p. 126. Ali Mazrui, 1975, 1985, has written extensively on the issue of Islam in Africa; for an empirically comprehensive study of how Islam spread into Africa and how it has lent itself to adaptation in the African context, see Lapidus, 2002. O’Fahey, 2008 pp. 212–25, for an explanation of the adoption and adaptation of Islam by the Keira Sultanate. Lapidus, 2002, p. 400. O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, p. 125; O’Fahey, 2008, p. 231. Robinson, 1928, pp. 55–67 Mazrui, ‘Religion and Political Culture in Africa,’ p. 822 O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, p. 108. O’Fahey, 1971, pp. 55–62. Ibid, p. 122. O’Fahey, 1971, pp. 91–2. ‘Abd al-Rahim, 1973, p. 34. Ibid. Holt, 1975, p. 22. Cooper, 1981, p. 24. O’Fahey, 2008, pp. 37, 79, are two occasions when O’Fahey stresses the development of the multi-ethnic nature of the Keira Sultanate. O’Fahey, 1997, p. 1, stresses that multi-ethnicity was a feature of all three Sudanic Sultanates of the pre-colonial era, in Darfur, Wadai and Funj. O’Fahey, 1971, p. 92. Harir, 1994, p. 152, comments on the way that the Fur cemented relationships with neighbours by marrying off Fur princesses to rulers from other groups, both those they had conquered and those, such as the Baggara, whom they had been unable to subjugate. Ibid. Ibid; Jay, 1972, explores the history of the Musabba’at Sultanate that ruled Kordofan in the period prior to the Keira conquest. O’Fahey, 2008, p. 55,

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43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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argues that Sultan Muhammad Tayrab viewed the invasion as a way of securing succession to the throne for his son. Ibid, pp. 55–62, where he describes the role-played by the powerful royal slave Kurra in the ascension of ‘Abd al-Rahman as Sultan, after the death of Muhammad Tayrab, in which the intrigues of the succession are explained. Browne, 2005, pp. 180–293, covers the time that the author was in Darfur. O’Fahey and Tubiana, 2009, p. 9. Vertray, 1883, in Herold, 1962, p. 212. Collins and Tignor, 1967, pp. 53–9. Johnston, 1884, p. 191, refers to Nachtigal’s earlier travels through Darfur, stating: ‘For many centuries an annual caravan used to come hence to Egypt, bringing ivory and gimis, ostrich feathers and slaves, which were disposed of there to advantage; and the merchants returned with manufactured goods, powder and shot, and weapons, to their native country. The chief export of Darfur, however, was slaves, the most of them the property of the Emir, who was the greatest tradesman of his dominions.’ O’Fahey, 2008, p. 69. Holt, 1976, p. 15. O’Fahey, 1980, p. 95. La Rue, 1988, presents a comprehensive review of the hakura system (drawing on a PhD dealing with the same topic). O’Fahey, 2009. It was a mandatory aspect of the hakura system that land would not be left fallow for more than three years, if it was then occupancy would be reclaimed by the sheikh for redistribution. de Waal, 2005b, p. 49. Halaand,1972. Barth, 1969, p. 23. Cunnison, 1966; see also Holy, 1974; 1991, p. 20. O’Fahey and Salim, 1983. Ibrahim, H.A., 1997, pp. 204–5; Warburg, 1992, is an excellent survey of the historical debates with regard to perceptions of Egypt’s involvement in and impact on the Sudan; pp. 37–42 deal with the Turko-Egyptian period from the three main contending perspectives, Sudanese, Egyptian and British. Holt and Daly, 1988, provides a detailed account of the Egyptian expansion into the Sudan in the first half of the nineteenth century. O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, pp. 172–3, for a brief description of the TurkoEgyptian invasion of Kordofan and the implications for Darfur. This event occurred in 1841, according to Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 63.

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NOTES 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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O’Fahey and Spaulding, 1974, p. 180. O’Fahey, 2008, p. 79. Ibid, p. 78. Dunn, 2005, pp. 91–2. O’Fahey, 1995, p. 139. Theobald, 1965, p. 21. O’Fahey, 1980, p. 12. There is a comprehensive literature on the cause and effect of the Egyptian government’s indebtedness to British and French creditors, which led to the financial take-over of the country and then to the British conquest in 1882. The concern here is that as the government reached a situation of economic and financial crisis, the administration of Sudan also suffered. For a study of the debt and the take-over of Egypt by the ‘dual controllers’ and the continuing debate over the reasons for the Gladstone government’s decision to order the British invasion and occupation of Egypt, see Mowat, 1973; Scholch, 1976. Warburg, 1992, pp. 11–29. Warburg, 1991, presents recent Egyptian scholarship on the Turko-Egyptian period that challenges the British and Sudanese accounts of Egyptian mistreatment, incompetence and exploitation of the Sudan. Daly, 2004, p. 193. Ibid. Ibrahim, 1997, provides a succinct account of Turko-Egyptian rule in Sudan. Daly, 2007, p. 54. Warburg, 1992; Holt, 1970. Gordon, C., 1884, p. 531. Amin, 1972. Issawi, 1982, pp. 36–43. Galbraith and al-Sayyid-Marsot, 1978. Toledano, 1997, p. 272. Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 92. As mentioned, the death of Gordon has inspired many accounts of his heroism and portrayals of the dervishes as Muslim fanatics who followed the Mahdi. Voll, 1979; see also Dekmejian and Wyszomirski, 1972; Holt, 1970. Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 97. Ibid, p. 113. O’Neill, 1988, p. 31. Kaptejins, quoted in de Waal, 1989, p. 63.

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97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

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de Waal, 1989, p. 63. Kapteijns, 1983, p. 604. Theobald, 1965, pp. 20–2. Warburg, 1970, p. 51. Theobald, 1965, p. 225. Ibid, p. 103, states that the minor kingdoms were clients of the Keira and that historically they perceived themselves as protectorates of their larger eastern neighbour. The French had no interest in such arguments on the part of ‘Ali Dinar, because they claimed that the people in the disputed region were also bound to Wadai and therefore came under French power. Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 128. Ibid, p, 138. Woodward, 1985, p. 43. Asad, 1970, p. 163. Theobald, 1965, p. 177. MacMichael, quoted in Theobald, 1965, p. 219. Harir, 1994, p. 151.

Chapter 4 The Construction of the Colonial State in Sudan: Tribalism, Regionalism and Race in Colonial Sudan 1. Metcalf, 2007, argues that India was the central pivot of the British Empire; more than just a model it was here that the Empire was forged. This argument is beyond the scope of this book, but we can take Metcalf’s point: ‘The practice of Empire was, as well, shaped by structures of governance devised in British India’ (p. 2). 2. Lugard, 1965, provided the blueprint for the administration and civilising mission of African colonies, with Margery Perham transferring his ideas into the academic institutions that were training the next generation of colonial administrators. Additionally, when Lugard retired from Africa he joined the higher echelons of the colonial administration, his eminence adding weight to his views. 3. Ibid, p. 183. However, not all the significant British players in Africa were equally shaped by India, as explained in Daly, 1997, p. 8. Wingate, Sudan’s own ‘pro-consul’ for the first decade of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, also served in India, but in Daly’s view ‘India left no noticeable impression on Wingate’. 4. See Owen, 2005, pp. 61–88, for an excellent biographical analysis of India’s influence on Baring.

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NOTES 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

211

Dirks, 1996, p. ix, also quoted in Sharkey, 2003, p. 42. Warburg, 1985, p. 48. Daly, 1998, p. 240. On 23 December 1929, in the House of Commons, Anthony Eden described the Suez Canal as ‘the swing-door’ of the British Empire, emphasising the centrality of Suez for the preservation of the Empire; quoted in Kyle, 2003, p. 7. Louis, 2006, pp. 3–5. Daly, 1986 pp. 1–11, provides an account of the campaign, which ended with the bombardment of Khartoum and the destruction of the Mahdi’s tomb. Holt and Daly, 1988, pp. 110–11, suggest that the catalyst that prompted the British to invade in 1896 was neither geo-strategic nor financial but rather related to Great Power politics in Europe. Pakenham, 1991, pp. 524–9, considers the threat of French conquest, combined with the protection of the Nile, as the key reasons for the British invasion. In either case, the popular motive was driven by a desire to revenge the death of Gordon. Lord Cromer, as Vice-Consul of Egypt, argued that: ‘Whatever power holds the Upper Nile Valley must by the mere force of its geographical situation, dominate Egypt.’ Quoted in MacMichael, 1967, p. 55. Theobald, 1965, p. 38. Quoted in Churchill, 2004. Bates, 1984, provides a comprehensive account of the Fashoda incident and of British and French interests in securing a bridgehead on the Upper Nile; Pakenham, 1991, gives a complete and always interesting account of the British, French, Belgian and Italian ‘race to nowhere’, of which Fashoda was just one example. Pakenham, 1991, pp. 539–541; Rahim, 1969; see also Daly, 1986, pp. 11–18. Ibid, pp. 104–5. Churchill, quoted in ibid, p. 5. Daly, 1998, pp. 243–50, assesses the period in which Egyptian nationalism drove towards the partial independence achieved in 1922. The defining moment for galvanising Egyptians against the British occupation was its heavy-handed response to the Dinwashai incident in 1906. Amongst other things, the Egyptian reaction was a major factor in Cromer’s decision to retire as Consul-General and in the implementation of political reforms; see also Hourani, 1991. Appiah, 1992, p. 164. Burton, 1981 p. 126; see also Lesch, 1998, p. 31. For example, Ibrahim, H.A., 1979, p. 440, says: ‘With the exception of the war years, hardly a year passed during the first generation of Condominium rule without a Mahdist uprising.’

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23. Tignor, 1987, p. 182, states that the railways were almost exclusively used by the military after the conquest of the Sudan in 1889. 24. Ibid, p. 185. 25. Ibrahim, H.A., 1979. 26. Woodward, 1985, pp. 40–2. 27. Daly, 1998, p. 243. 28. Gorst, quoted in Warburg, 1971, p. 36. 29. Ibid, p. 13; Wingate was well aware that Cromer used his financial power to ensure the subservience of the Sudanese governor to the interests of his own rule in Egypt. 30. Ibid, p. 92; Slatin illustrates the reality that the Condominium faced in its reliance on Egyptians when he argued: ‘I am the last to trust a Gyppy, but we have to back them up as long as there is nothing against them and support them against the natives, if they are honest.’ 31. Daly, 1986, p. 82, makes the point with respect to the diversion of military personnel from Sudan to South Africa in 1900, and the impact of this on the administration of the British Empire’s newest territory. 32. Ibid, p. 83, 33. Woodward, 1985, p. 40. 34. Idem, 1990, p. 18. 35. Abdin, 1985, p. 65. 36. Ibid, pp. 92–3. 37. El-Amin, M.N., 1992, describes what was effectively a conspiracy by the British to place the onus for events in Sudan on the Egyptians as way to justify a monopoly of rule. Abdin shares El-Amin’s scepticism regarding the Egyptian role in the uprising, but suggests that British prejudices and paranoia are more likely explanations for the alacrity with which the British blamed Egypt, rather than a conspiracy. The British certainly took advantage of events when they happened, by expelling Egyptians, but this had already been decided upon as a course of action after the assassination of Wingate. 38. Kirk-Greene, 1980. 39. Woodward, 1990, p. 4; later (p. 7), Woodward speaks of the cooperation and mutual benefits implied in the notion of the ‘dual mandate’. 40. Ibid, p. 45. 41. Stiansen and Kevane, 1998, p. 125. 42. Ibid. 43. MacMichael, 1922. 44. de Waal, 2005a. 45. Daly, 2007, p. 118. 46. Ibid, p. 125.

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47. Asad, 1970, pp. 168–76, explores the impact of Native Title on the authority of the nazir and the sheikhs of the Kababish, concluding that native title was responsible for the centralisation of power in the hands of the nazir and for the solidification of the identity of different nomadic groups which had been loosely tied by tradition into the Kababish tribe. 48. Takana, 2008. 49. Apter, 1999, presents an excellent summary of the role anthropologists played in the classifying and ordering of the colonies for administrators; see also Said, 1994; Mudimbe, 1988, also discusses the role of anthropology, but analyses the place of missionaries and traders in inventing a popular European perception of Africa that conditioned the colonial attitude to it; Curtin, 1973. 50. de Waal, 2005a, pp. 1–2. 51. Quoted in Holt and Daly, 1998, p. 137. 52. Daly, 1986, p. 367. 53. Woodward, 1990, p. 77; Al-Rahim, 1969, p. 209. 54. The discussions on the Graduates’ Congress are well-rehearsed in the literature on Sudan; see Woodward, 1999; Daly, 2004, pp. 76–83. 55. The memorandum included a guarantee of self-government at the conclusion of the Second World War, an end to the Southern Policy and the abolishment of Native Administration. 56. Woodward, 1990, p. 73. 57. Ibid, p. 74. 58. The Marshall Report (1949) criticised the system of local government in Sudan and was followed by the Local Government Act (1951), but as Elhussein, 1989, p. 438, argues: ‘[T]he newly established local governments councils, under the 1951 act, housed the old native administration under the umbrella of a warrant . . . in rural areas, native chiefs continued to hold the upper hand. This entrenched position of native chiefs continued even after independence in 1956.’ 59. Daly, 2007, p. 174, adds that the failure of the SRP in Darfur was due to the ambivalence of the tribal leaders compared to the well-organised campaigns of both the Umma and NUP delegates. 60. Elhussein, 1989, p. 438; Woodward, 1990, p. 87. 61. DC Raja, 21 January 1935, quoted in Rahmin, 1969, p.78. 62. MacMichael conveys this point when he instructs that in the southern Sudan ‘The limitation of Gallaba trade in towns or established routes is essential’, quoted in Rahim, 1969, pp. 75–6. 63. Amin, 1972. 64. Woodward, 1985, p. 43.

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65. Warburg, 1997, provides a broad overview of British attitudes and policy towards Mahdism in Sudan. A deeper analysis of Mahdist uprisings in Sudan, including Darfur, is given by Ibrahim, H.A., 1979, pp. 44–6, 50. 66. Woodward, 1985, p. 42. 67. Kapteijns, 1985, p. 396. 68. Rahim, 1969, p. 73. 69. Reichmuth, 2004, pp. 142–3; O’Fahey, 1997a, also describes the Keira Sultanates’ commitment to sending students to Al-Azhar in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 70. Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 124. 71. Daly, 2007, pp. 134–5. 72. Ibid, p. 136. 73. Sharkey, 2008, p. 30. 74. Adas, 1989; Austin and Woodruff, 1969; Frederickson, 1999; Snowden, 1970; West, 2002; Wallerstein and Balibar, 1991. 75. Nancy Stepan, quoted in Wheeler, 2001, p. 33, my addition in parentheses. 76. Hunwick and Powell, 2002, p. xx. 77. Mazrui, 2005, p. 70. 78. Ibid; see also Lapidus, 2002; Laremont and Seghatolisami, 2002, pp. 87–97, 99–146; in the specifically Sudanese context, Muddathir, 1969, pp. 6–7. 79. Boddy, 2008. 80. Ibid. 81. Sharkey, 2008, p. 29. 82. Cromer, quoted in Lockman, 2004, p. 93. 83. Quoted in Lienhardt, 1982, p. 25. 84. Arkell, quoted in Deng, 1995, p. 185. 85. The Order is more formally known as khatim al-turuq (‘seal of all paths/ orders’) and its leader as sirr al-khatim (‘secret of the seal’); see Al-Shahi, 1981, p. 15. 86. On the tradition in Sudan in particular, see O’Fahey, 1990, pp. 173–9. 87. Warburg, 2003, pp. 4–5. 88. Al-Shahi, 1981, p. 16, states that the Khatimiyya under Muhammad al-Hasan al-Mirghani, son of the order’s founder, Muhammad ‘Uthman al-Mirghani, arrived in Sudan and immediately ‘. . . supported the regime, and in return the authorities did not interfere with the activities of the Order to which people gave their personal loyalty and with which they identified themselves’. 89. O’Fahey, 1993, p. 25. 90. Ibid, p. 30. 91. Woodward, 1983, p. 98. 92. Warburg, 2003, p. 87.

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NOTES 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113.

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Woodward, 1983, p. 101. Kapteijns, 1985, pp. 390–9. Ibid, p. 392. Ibid, pp. 393–4. Warburg, 2003, p. 88. Kapteijns, 1985, p. 395. Ibid. Barnett and Abdelkarim, 1991, pp. 29, 65. Abdelkarim, 1986. O’Neill, 1988, pp. 32–3. Ibid, p. 32. Niblock, 1987, p. 14. Ibid, pp. 350–5. Kursany, 1982. Mahmoud, 1984, p. 149. Niblock, 1987, p. 51. Barnett and Abdelkarim, 1991, is an excellent survey of the history and practice of the Gezira Scheme. In particular, it shows that the Scheme has yet to offer the transition to capitalist agricultural production that it has promised. Much of the reason for the failure of the capitalist mode of production to expand into the practices of the Scheme can be attributed to the manner in which it was formed, as a state-controlled enterprise, and to the division of labour which dominated Sudan during the colonial period and which discriminated so heavily against the landless peasantry. Collins, R.O., 2006, p. 4. Daly, 2007, pp. 137–9; Daly labels the colonial underdevelopment of Darfur ‘institutionalized neglect’. Berman and Lonsdale, 1992. Tignor, 1987, p. 179.

Chapter 5 The Failure of Sudanese Post-Colonial Politics, 1956–69: Change in Darfur and the Struggle for Inclusion 1. Louis, 2006, pp. 529–52, presents an interesting chapter on the change in British attitudes to the Sudan and Egypt through the eyes of Margery Perham, the influential British scholar/administrative advisor on British colonialism in Africa. The shifting attitudes of the British, in particular Perham’s, are set against the decline of the British Empire, nationalist upsurges in Egypt and Sudan, and British anxiety over the control of Suez. 2. Holt and Daly, 1988, p. 167.

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3. Often referred to as the ‘three towns’, Khartoum, North Khartoum and Omdurman together form a larger conurbation. 4. O’Fahey, 1993, p. 131. 5. Woodward, 1983, p. 103. 6. Warburg, 1985, p. 43, presents a perspective similar to that of Ronald Robinson: that Britain’s decision to abandon Sudan was premised on the realisation that it had finally run out of Sudanese collaborators. 7. Warburg, 1985, p. 43. 8. Beshir, 1974, pp. 191–9. 9. Warburg, 2003, p. 132, reports that Selwyn Lloyd, Minister of State in the Churchill government, visited ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and offered him the crown of Sudan ‘to help Britain keep the Egyptians out of Sudan’. 10. Woodward, 1990, p. 79. 11. Niblock, 1987, p. 59. 12. Ibid; the numbers provided by Niblock are actually ‘647 of the 1111 posts held by British personnel . . . and 87 of the 108 posts held by Egyptians’. 13. Woodward, 1990, p. 89. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Daly, 2007, p. 178. 17. Sudan became a member of the UN on 12 November 1956. 18. Rahim, 1966, pp. 227–49, highlights the British attitude to the South and the dramatic change in the policy on southern Sudan in the lead-up to the 1947 Juba Conference. 19. Wai, 1980, pp. 391–2. 20. Lesch, 1998, pp. 36–7. 21. O’Neill, 1988, p. 34, claims that exports of raw cotton accounted for over 70 per cent of Sudan’s total export earnings in the 30 years from 1926 to 1956. 22. O’Brien and O’Neill, 1988, p. 18. 23. Niblock, 1987, p. 43. 24. Ibid, pp. 81–3, states that 59.4 per cent of the workforce were farmers and 13.2 per cent classified as nomads. 25. Woodward, 1990, pp. 130–1. 26. Sudan’s other neighbours would each in turn provide further challenges and opportunities in time. Ethiopia, Libya, Chad and Uganda all had an impact on Sudan, just as the latter would itself be responsible for destabilising the neighbourhood. 27. When General Neguib assumed power in 1952 the relationship improved dramatically. Neguib was born in Sudan, was half Sudanese by birth and very popular amongst the country’s unionists. His presidency marked the

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NOTES

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50.

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high point in the Egyptian-Sudanese relationship, which ended in 1954 when he was deposed by Nasser. Ronen, 2003, p. 81, states that the swing in relations between the two countries in the 1950s was not an unusual feature: ‘Since Sudan gained independence in 1956 and even before, relations with its powerful neighbour Egypt oscillated between the extremes of enmity and affinity.’ Ismael, 1968. Idem, 1969, p. 19. Ibid, p. 21. Lefebvre, 1993. Ibid, pp. 152–3; see also Ismael, 1969, p. 20, where he argues that the Suez Crisis, ‘intensified the bonds between the Sudanese and Egyptians . . .’. Sluggett, 2002, pp. 213–4. John Foster Dulles, in a memorandum of a telephone conversation, 23 August 1958, quoted in Kunz, 2002, p. 94. Collins and Tignor, 1967, p. 158. Woodward, 1990, p. 132. Khalid, 1990, p. 128. Poggo, 2002, pp. 67–101 Abbas,1973, pp. 29–43, including statistical information from the census in the appendix. The literature is extensive and includes an number of authors already cited here, such as Doornbos, 1988, Aguda, 1973, de Waal, 2005a, and other valuable works, such as Manger, 2004a, 2004b. See also Lesch, 1998; alRahim, 1970. . Hourani, 1991, pp. 401–10. Ismael, 1968, pp. 182–3. Sharkey, 2009, p. 28. Trimingham, 1949, p. 4, as an example of the preponderance of this view, states that in the Muslim Northern Sudan ‘. . . the adoption of Islam has fused the peoples so that they are culturally homogeneous, for Islam is not so much a creed as a unified social system’. Fawzi, 1957, p. 395. Kurita, 1994, p. 202. El-Tom, 2003, details the primary arguments put forward in the Black Book. The book itself caused a huge controversy in Sudan when it was covertly distributed by members of the Darfuri-based Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) in 2000. It has since become available on the JEM website. Morton, 1989, p. 63. Lesch, 1998, p. 37.

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51. Deng, 1995, pp. 138–40, explores the impact of the Abboud government’s drive for Arabisation and Islamisation in the South. 52. Robert Crawford, quoted in Wai, 1973, p. 149. 53. Ibid. 54. The importance of this event has been entirely forgotten as the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ developed throughout 2011. Commentators from all over the world described the overthrow of the Tunisian leader in January 2011 as the first instance whereby the Arab people had forced a dictator from power. Yet, as just shown the Sudanese people had achieved this forty-seven years before the Tunisian leader was ousted. And if there were any doubts about the strength of the Sudanese people, they would repeat this again in 1985. 55. Niblock, 1987, pp. 227–8. 56. Ibid, p. 228. 57. Ibid. 58. Salih, M.A.M., 2005, p. 7. 59. Roden, 1974. 60. Ibid, pp. 503–8. 61. Ibid, p. 511. 62. Ibid, p. 516. 63. Kurita, 1994, pp. 202–16. 64. de Waal, 2005b, p. 151, states that 76,000 Darfuri were believed to be working in Khartoum or on agricultural estates in the central Sudan in 1984–85. It is widely recognised, though without certainty regarding exact numbers, that from the 1920s onwards labour from Darfur regularly travelled to the central Sudan to undertake seasonal labour. 65. The literature on Darfur concedes that the development of the region was not undertaken by any of the post-colonial administrations until Nimeri’s government moved to devolve power, as a mechanism for state-building – but this did not occur until the 1970s. Long-time scholars of Darfur, including O’Fahey, have made this point in commenting on the causes of the conflict; see O’Fahey and Tubiana, 2009, p. 13. 66. The HTSPE archives hold numerous reports and maps on Darfur dating from the 1960s on. There are too many to list here but the archive is easily accessed and well worth consulting. 67. This notion has become popular in the mainstream media and has become an assumption in scholarly work, which portrays the conflict in Darfur as a struggle for resources in a resource-poor and hostile environment. 68. Ibrahim, quoted in Salih, M.A.M., p. 22. 69. Morton, 1985/2005.

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70. Sanyal and Yacoub, 1975, p. 21, Table 11, gives the percentage of Sudanese employed in the agricultural sector as 67.45 per cent, plus another 3.96 per cent of Sudanese in animal husbandry. 71. Morton, 1985/2005, p. 96. 72. Quoted in Shazali and Ahmed, 1999, p. 9. 73. Adams, quoted in Morton, 1994, p. 170. 74. Republic of Sudan Department of Statistics, 1965, p. 5. 75. Ibid, p. 13; see also de Waal, 2005b, p. 87–89, where he describes the upward trend in cash-crop production in Darfur in the 1960s and 1970s. 76. Morton, 1994, pp. 66–7. 77. Numerous studies refer to the existence of the cash economy in Darfur in the 1960s, such as Holy, 1980, who suggests that while gum arabic was the only source of cash, by the 1970s the predominant system across Darfur was a mixture of subsistence and cash economies. Se also El Tom, 1987, p. 149 and passim, who presents a very similar depiction of the co-existence of cash and subsistence economies in Darfur. 78. Sanyal and Yacoub, 1975, p. 74, point out that Red Sea province had the lowest percentage in the Northern Sudan with less than 1 per cent of the student intake, but only 2.41 per cent of the population compared with 13 per cent in Darfur. 79. de Waal, 2005a, p. 181, makes exactly this point ‘. . . accusing much Sudanese historiography of “Nilocentrism” . . .’. Sharkey, 2008, views the tendency of the Khartoum elite to portray Northern Sudan through a Khartoum-oriented lens that masks the inequalities and dissatisfaction in the Northern Sudan. 80. Nalder, 1935 (a title also used by Deng and Ruay, 1994). 81. Beshir, 1975, pp. 47–9, gives a detailed account of the machinations in parliament at this time. 82. Abboud made a number of statements regarding the inviolability of the Arab-Islamic nature of the Sudan. 83. Abuelbashar, 2006. 84. Daly, 2007, p. 194, makes a somewhat different point: that the Red Flame directed its protests against the control of the local economy by the jellaba. It is more likely that the primary grievance was the lack of local appointments to government positions, produced strong resentment. 85. Abuelbashar, 2006. 86. Diraige, 1989. 87. Harir, 1994, p. 156. 88. Diraige, 1989, emphasises the multi-ethnic character of the regional movement: ‘In Darfur, the Fur, the Masalit, Zaghawa who are originally indigenous, and other tribes, and the real Arab tribes, who are real Arabs, we all

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89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

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rallied behind this Darfur Development Front irrespective of our origin, because we felt that this is a common forum that identified our problems, and that we have to stick together to fight together for our problems.’ Tanner and Tubiana, 2007. Morton, 1989, pp. 63–76, explores the machinations which led to the election victory, and the repercussions for the Beja. Diraige, 1989. Harir, 1994, p. 157. The Umma Party suffered from a split in its ranks over the rightful successor to the leadership of the Party, and the position as Imam of the Ansar. In 1961, on the death of Sayyid ‘abd Rahman al-Mahdi, he was succeeded by his brother as the Imam, or leader of the Ansar movement, while his son Sadiq al-Mahdi became leader of the Umma Party. In 1966, Sadiq expected to be invested with the title of the Imam in his uncle’s place. However, his uncle declined to step aside for his young nephew, leading to a split in the party. Prunier, 2005, pp. 41–2. Ibid; Prunier speaks of a discourse on Arabism which differentiated the Arab tribes from the Africans in the region. This fails to take into account the much more common contention of the hybridity of Arabs in the north, including the central Sudanese, during this period. Without any evidence that such a mantra was used and accepted during the campaign, it is difficult to accept that there was a successful introduction of a racist doctrine in Darfur, considering the evidence of Alex de Waal, for example, which places the introduction of racist Arabism some time in the 1980s. Harir, 1994, p. 149. Daly, 2007, p. 202, neatly describes the Sudanese reaction to the coup as ‘between apathy and resignation’. Collard, 1969, p. 303. Khalid, 1985, p. 226. Another pro-Nasserist coup brought Colonel Gaddafi to power in Libya in 1969, when pan-Arab nationalism had yet to completely run its course; Nasser’s death in 1970 was the cause of mass scenes of grief in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world.

Chapter 6

The Collapse of the Sudanese State in Darfur: A Prelude to War?

1. Woodward, 1990, pp. 137–200; see also Khalid, 1985. 2. Niblock, 1987, pp. 233–87. 3. Wai, 1979.

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4. The Nimeiri years have not received adequate treatment in the studies of Darfur to date. There has been a recognition, in Daly, 2007, Prunier, 2005, Flint and de Waal, 2005, and Burr and Collins, 2006, among a plethora of shorter studies, that Nimeiri oversaw a period of increasing traumatisation of Darfur through banditry, drought and famine, and some studies have also remarked on the impact of the political reforms and changes to land tenure that occurred as a part of Nimeri’s transformation of the state in the early 1970s, but few studies have acknowledged the part played in Sudan by the demise of Nimeiri’s project for state-building, as it collapsed under the dual pressures of war and economic crisis in the 1980s. The ensuing chaos was a central feature of the Darfur conflict. 5. Woodward, 1990, p. 165. 6. In 1964, the transitional government planned to abolish Native Administration, but before it could make the changes the ministry was reshuffled to include a majority of Umma and PDP party members, whose interests were very much aligned with maintaining native administration and tribal rule. 7. Elhuseein, 1989, p. 438. 8. El Zain, 2005. 9. Woodward, 1990, p. 146. 10. Norris, 1983, p. 212. 11. al-Shafi, 1991, p.148. 12. Rodinelli, 1981 p. 614. 13. Manger, 2006 p. 7. 14. The collapse of local administration is not to be confused with the abolition of Native Administration which is not seen as the core problem here. The collapse of local administration due to underfunding and political manipulation during the second half of Nimeiri’s time in power is referred to in El Zain, 1996 p. 528: ‘It should be noted that the state plays no role at the local level . . . In contrast to the developmentalist state of the past, the state is shifting from its former role of providing services and benefits, to re-ordering and embellishing the ‘tribal’ as a representation of a glorious past.’ 15. Niblock, 1974 p. 409. 16. The Unregistered Land Act (1970) s.4 quoted in Gordon, 1986 p.148. 17. Awad quoted in ibid. 18. Manger, 2006,p. 9. 19. Ibid, p.10. 20. de Waal, 1989, pp. 47–48. 21. Ibid, p. 49, this is based on the work of O’Fahey and Abu Salim, 1983. 22. De Waal, 2005b, pp.49.

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222 THE POST-COLONIAL STATE 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Abdul-Jalil, 1984. Manger, 2006 p. 7. Abdul-Jalil, 2006 p. 19. Manger, 2006, p. 7 Morton, 1994, p. 80. Abdul-Jalil, 2006, p. 21. Abdalla, 2004, pp. 98–9. Takana, 2008, p. 5. Duffield, 1990, pp. 187–203; also a point made by Woodward, 1990, p. 199. Harir, 1994, p. 179. Zaroug, 2000. The exception, as with much of what is being addressed here, is the period covering the drought and famine of 1983–5. Also, on the whole, the southern Rezeigat have remained neutral in the current clashes between the various competing forces. Mohamed, 2004, p.73. Chiriyankandath, 1987 pp. 99. Woodward, 1990, makes this point in relation to institutional change but it is just as relevant to say Nimeiri’s 16 years in power failed to transform local political relations. Changes did occur, but at a later date, when the NIF government initiated far more profound changes- see chapter 8 below. Amin, Samir, 1978, provides an excellent analysis of the question of Arab nationalism, including the weakness of nationalism in the region. His prognosis for the future of Arab states, including Sudan, was pessimistic, but has proven accurate with the passage of time. Doornbos, 1988, explores the transformation of identities in Darfur during the 1970s and argues that due to the expansion of state-sponsored education, and the expansion of the state more broadly, increasing numbers of urban and semi-urban people identified as Sudanese. This was not an Arabisation, as such, but rather a Sudanisation, meaning that people identified with the dominant Sudanese identity. Holt and Daly, 1988, p.205. Niblock, 1987, p. 266. Major President Nimeiri, Sudan Government Preamble, 1969, quoted in al Assam, 1989 p. 38. Aguda, 1973, pp. 431–448 provides a useful analysis of the economic policies undertaken by the Nimeiri regime in those first three years in power. St John, 1987, p. 53 on Gaddafi’s intervention to save Nimeiri; the book also provides a wider study of the oscillating relationship between Gaddafi and Nimeiri, Libya and Sudan.

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45. In many ways Nimeiri’s move from the Soviet sphere to the US mirrored the shift Sadat made in the 1970s. 46. O’Neill, 1988, p. 45 47. Karim, 1988 p. 43. 48. O’Neill, 1988, p. 45. 49. Kaikati, 1980, p. 103. 50. Ibid, p. 100. 51. In the mid-seventies Sudan was often referred to as the ‘breadbasket of the Middle East’. 52. Karim, 1988, p. 45. 53. Niblock, 1985, p. 16; also see O’Brien and O’Neill (eds.), 1988,p. 16. 54. O’Brien, 1981, p. 26. 55. Niblock, 1985, p. 16; Woodward, 1990, p. 169, gives a figure of $US2 billion of Gulf money invested in the Sudan in the 1970s. 56. The Bank’s Establishment Agreement and amendments is located at http:// www.badea.org/Portal/Document_Repository/18/1_badea%20eng.pdf accessed 19 July 2011. 57. Woodward, 1990, p. 168. 58. Ibid, p. 170. 59. Kaikati, 1980, p. 110. 60. Woodward, 1990, p. 189. However, according to the census of 1983, the population of Sudan was 21.6 million meaning that the vast majority of Sudan, notwithstanding the exceptional growth of Khartoum, remained rural and regional inhabitants. 61. Ibid, p. 190. 62. Niblock, 1987, p. 287. 63. Hinderink and Sterkenburg. 1983, pp. 1–23. 64. Olsson, 1993, p. 395. 65. Quoted in Wolmuth, 1994, p. 228. 66. Niblock, 1987, p. 275; Woodward, 1990, pp. 141–2. 67. Ibid. 68. El-Ayouty, 1972, p. 10. 69. el-Zein, 2008, p. 3. 70. Wai (ed.), (1973), p. 107, argues that, as far as the southern Sudanese were concerned, the northern Sudanese were racially homogenous, even if there was cultural and ethnic diversity, and that the northern and southern population were different. Other studies from this period, and later, share a similar position. 71. Lesch,1991, p. 48. 72. al-Shahi, 1991, p. 208.

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73. Al Assam, 1989, p. 32, states that the Sudanese bureaucracy had grown from 23,000 employees in 1956 to 123,000 by 1975 and then to 300,000 employees by 1983. This does not account for the huge government infrastructure of the Sudanese Socialist Union with thousands of branches and state employees around the country. 74. Al Assam, 1983, p. 111. 75. Ibid, p. 120. 76. Woodward, 1990, pp. 154–155; Niblock, 1987, p. 287; al-Teraifi, 1991, pp. 92–118. 77. Niblock, 1985. 78. Harir et al, 1994, p. 264 also a similar description of events appears in Daly, 2007, p. 225. 79. Daly, 2007, p. 224. 80. de Waal, 2005b, p.206 makes the point that as the drought hit in 1983 the regional government was powerless to intervene, because ‘the Darfur regional government had practically no revenue.’ The regional government was dependent on Khartoum for 90 per cent of its funding which remained unpaid in 1982–83. 81. Harir, 1994, pp. 159–160. 82. Ibid, p. 160. 83. Woodward, 1990, p. 196. 84. Daly, 2007, p. 226. 85. Doornbos, 1988, pp. 100–1. 86. Ibid, p. 100. 87. Ibid, p. 101. 88. O’Neill, 1988, p. 48. 89. Aguda, 1973, p. 196. 90. The Jonglei Dam development, Kosti oil refinery, the aborted attempt to redraw the boundary between the north and the south, national reconciliation with the Umma and Muslim Brothers, and a number of signs that Shar’ia law was being considered by Nimeiri were just some of the most well known incidents. 91. Scott, 1985, pp. 69–82 provides an excellent introduction to the SPLM/A. 92. Gurdon, 1991, p. 23. 93. Ibid. 94. Hussein, 1988 pp. 64–5. 95. Ibid, p.65. 96. Prendergast, 1989, p. 43. 97. Niblock, 1985, p. 18. 98. The impact of structural adjustment programmes on developing economies is now well recognised, with even the World Bank and IMF acknowledging

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99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110.

111.

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119.

225

that the programmes were not as effective as they had anticipated. Joseph Stiglitz gives an economist’s account of the negative impact of SAPs in Stiglitz, Joseph, Globalization and its Discontents, (London, 2002). Morton, 1994, p. 217. O’Neill 1988, p. 50. Sudan under Nimeiri had become the second highest recipient of US military assistance in the Middle East and Africa after Egypt. Morton, 1994, p. 88. de Waal, 2005b. Williams, 1990. Unlike the southern Sudan, where Keen, 1994, for example, found that the regime manufactured famine as a weapon of war, the famine in Darfur was not intentional but occurred simply because of government neglect. While this might be a fine line it is still an important distinction. de Waal, 1989, pp. 205–206. Duffield, 1990a, p.4. O’Neill 1988, p. 53. Burr, and Collins, 1999, p. 27. Ibid, p. 62, describe the accommodation of the rebels from Chad in Khartoum in terms usually limited for honoured guests: ‘. . . In Spring 1967 El Hajj Isaaka led a more formal FROLINAT delegation, which was greeted with all the ceremony usually reserved for a diplomatic mission from a sovereign state.’ Patman, 1990 p. 269, also states that it was reported in Pravda an important alliance of anti-imperialist forces. Ogunbadejo, 1983, pp.166–7, presents a different view arguing that the Soviet response was lukewarm and the US, caught in the Cold War paradigm, envisaged a Libyan-Soviet alliance where it did not exist. Brewer, 1983, p. 206. Ibid, p. 211. Ibid, p. 212. The Council of Foreign Affairs reported that from 1980 Sudan became the sixth largest recipient of US military aid, over $100 million in 1982, according to Ogunbadejo, 1983, p. 165. Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 231–2. Burr and Collins, 1999, p. 197. Ibid. Idem, 2006b, p. 111. Further, the authors state that in 1980 the organisation mysteriously moved its headquarters to Khartoum, in what seemed to have been a severing of tis ties with Gaddafi.

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120. According to idem, p. 113, within a decade the da’wa had as many as 132 offices in sub-Saharan Africa. 121. Marchal, 2007, p. 179. 122. Pollack, 2002, p. 369, briefly outlines Gaddafi’s use of the Islamic Legions in Uganda in 1978 to forestall the Tanzanian invasion aimed at toppling Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. 123. Brewer, 1982, p. 211. 124. Lesch, 1991, pp. 55–6. 125. Burr and Collins, 1999, p. 215. 126. Prendergast, 1995, p. 32. 127. Simons, 1993, pp. 296–7. 128. Burr, and Collins, 2003, p. 35. 129. Salih, M.A.M. and Harir, 1994, p. 196 130. Salih, K.O., 1990. 131. Duffield, and Prendergast, 1994, pp. 9–15. 132. These issues are discussed in Salih, M.A. M., 1989, pp. 168 – 174; idem and Harir, 1994, pp. 186–203; Harir, 1992, pp. 14–26. 133. Flint and de Waal, 2008, pp. 45–6. 134. El Tom, 2009. 135. St John, 1987, p. 29. 136. Tubiana, 2006, p. 20. 137. Deng, 1995; Lesch, 2001; Jok, 2001. 138. This element of the Arabism of the riverain Sudanese is well-rehearsed and needs no going over here. 139. Harir, 1994, pp.145–7. 140. Ibid, p147. 141. O’Fahey, 1996, pp. 258–267 142. Shaw, 1986. 143. Salih M.A.M. and Harir, 1994, p.188.

Chapter 7 The NIF and Darfur: The Islamist State Project and the Revolt of Darfur 1. de Waal, 2004. 2. de Waal, 1993, p. 142. 3. Salih and Harir, ‘1994, p. 185, suggest that several versions of events have been reported. Whether the SPLA was involved or not is the major controversy, whereas the government and the residents of Gardud blame the SPLA there is evidence that the perpetrators were Dinka renegades retaliating to an earlier cattle raid by Baggara thieves. Importantly, the

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

227

government believed it to be the SPLA and this prompted the initiation of the militia strategy. Salmon, 2007, p. 12. Salih and Harir, 1994, p. 196. de Waal, 2004, pp. 716–25. Salmon, 2007, p. 13. Khalid, 1990, p. 357, also quoted in Salih and Harir, 1994, p. 186. Government of Sudan, 1989, Article 5, quoted in Salmon, 2007, p. 14. Warburg, 2003, p. 210. El Zain, 2005, pp. 523–9. Ibid, pp. 525–6. Ibid, p. 528. Ibid. Ibid. de Waal and Salam, 2001, p. 83. Warburg, 2003, pp. 205–6 explains the motives of the NIF leader in organising a coup to sabotage the impending peace agreement between the GoS and the SPLM in 1988/1989. In 1959, under the leadership of al-Rashid al-Tahir, the Muslim Brothers were involved in an unsuccessful coup against the regime headed by President Abboud. Ibid, p. 207. Ibid. El-Affendi, 1991, p. 114. Ibid. Zahid, and Medley, 2006, p. 697. Ibid. El-Affendi, 1991, pp.116–7. el-Din, 2007, p. 100, explains how in the 1960s early electoral success translated into a belief that ‘. . . deep-rooted Islamic orientation, Darfur could shift its political allegiances in their favour . . .’ Salih, 2005, p. 7. Ibid. Warburg, 2003, p. 196. Chiriyankandath, 1987, p. 99. el-Din, 2007, p. 105. There is a growing literature on this topic with some excellent sources. An earlier study was conducted by Mitchell, 1969, more recently Kepel, 2003, Mandaville, 2007 and Hroub, 2010. Chiriyankandath, 1987, p. 100.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Warburg, 2003, p. 189. Bechtold, 1991, p.16. Woodward, 2006, p. 43 Ibid, p. 43. Burr and Collins, 2005, pp. 25–36. Ibid, p. 35. Burr and Collins, 1999, p. 271. Lesch, 1991, p. 63. Fadlalla, 2004, p. 126. ‘IMF Lifts Suspension of Sudan’s Voting and Related Rights,’ IMF Press Release No. 00/46, (2000) 44. ‘Migrant Labor Remittances in Africa: Reducing Obstacles to Developmental Contribution,’ 2003. While this is a total of all remittances the study also reveal a huge drop in remittances from 1990 to 1991 from approximately $US 400 million to a figure below $US20 million. 45. Europa Publications Staff, 2002, p. 769. 46. Holt and Daly, 1988, p193, also see Lesch, 2001, pp. 93–4. 47. Patel, 1994, pp.313–31. 48 Justice Africa, 1997. 49. Burr and Collins, 1995, p. 274. 50. Wolmuth, 1994, p. 228. 51. Ibid. 52. Zahid and Medley, 2006, p. 700. 53. Kevane and Grey, 1995, p. 274. 54. Woodward, 2006, p. 39. Salmon, 2007, p. 16 states that the number of officers dismissed had reached 1,500 by 1993, leaving the military utterly demoralised. 55. Burr and Collins, 2005, p. 29, The overrunning of the garrison town of Kurmuk in Blue Nile Province in October 1989 was a disaster for the military and led to a call from the regime for a jihad to save the north from the SPLA. 56. Lesch, 2001, p. 136–7. 57. Mohammad, 199, p. 48. 58. Lesch, 1998, p. 170. 59. Bechtold, 1991, p. 54. 60. Ibid. 61. Burr and Collins, 2006, p. 108, Nimeiri allowed the Faisal Islamic Bank to operate with an exemption from taxes on assets, profits, wages and pensions. 62. Warburg, 2003, p. 212. 63. Gallab, 2009, p. 80.

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NOTES 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

229

Saavedra, 1998, p. 251. de Waal and Salam, 2007, p. 85. Jamal, 1991, p.17. Abdel Gadir, 2006, quoted in Elnur, 2009, p. 76. Gallab, 2009, p. 80, he further states that the logic of accumulation which had brought the NIF leaders to power was a significant factor in shaping the party as the people responsible for the ‘wild accumulation of wealth’ became the invisible power behind the throne. El-Affendi, 1990, p. 89. Human Rights Watch, 1997a. Lesch, 2001, pp. 143–5. Human Rights Watch, 1996, p. 142. Salam, and de Waal, 2001, p. 34. Human Rights Watch, 1997b. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1996. O’Fahey, 1996, p. 264. Salam and de Waal, 2001, p. 34. Dean, 2000, pp. 71–91, provides a full quotation of the fatwa: ‘The rebels in the south Kordofan and southern Sudan started their rebellion against the State and declared war against the Muslims. Their main aims are: killing the Muslims, desecrating mosques, burning and defiling the Koran, and raping Muslim women. In so doing, they are encouraged by the enemies of Islam and Muslims: these foes are the Zionists, the Christians and the arrogant people who provide them with provisions and arms. Therefore, ‘An insurgent who was previously a Muslim is now an apostate; and a non-Muslim is a non-believer standing as a bulwark against the spread of Islam, and Islam has granted the freedom of killing both of them.’ The fatwa was signed by six sheikhs Musa Abdel Majid, Mushava Juma, Muhammad Saleh Abdel Bagi, Qurashi Muhammad al-Nur, Nayer Ahmed al-Habib, and Ishmael al-Said Abdallah. de Waal, 2001, pp. 117–32. Testimony of 1st Lt. Khalid Abd al-Karim Salih,. Flint quoted in Salmon, 2007, p. 19. Lesch, 2001, p. 162. Gallab, 2009, p. 151. Flint and de Waal, 2009, pp. 57–8 describe Dar Masalit more in terms of Native Administration in India than Sudan, with a Sultan acting as a ruler with all the trappings of an independent and absolute ruler who is subservient to the state. In Dar Masalit, Mahmood Mamdani’s notion of settler and native may have stronger resonance than in other parts of Darfur where the distinction

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86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

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was less apparent, see Mamdani, 2009, also see the response to Mamdani’s work by R.S. O’Fahey titled, ‘O’Fahey Responds to Mamdani,’ retrieved from http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2009/05/18/ofahey-responds-tomamdani/ Ibid, pp. 56–8. There is contradictory information given in the literature over whether the number is eight, Flint and de Waal, 2009, p. 58, or 13 as recorded by Mahmoud, 2004, p. 6. Thirteen seems more likely since Daly, 2007, p. 262 and a private Sudanese source have presented thirteen as the figure. Mahmoud, 2004, p.6. Flint and de Waal, 2008, p. 63. Ibid, p. 62. Human Rights Watch, 2004. NIF intelligence and cadres were involved with the Somalia Islamist movement at the time the NIF was targeting the Masalit in western Sudan. Inter-Arab violence and repression of riverain Arab dissidents has been ongoing since the NIF came to power. Race is as tactical a reason for state-directed violence as geography, religion, ethnicity, and ideology. Whilst most analysts question the Arab and African dichotomy they still tend to be led into viewing the problems through the Arab and non-Arab/African lens. Salam and de Waal, 2001, p. 78. el-Din, 2007, p. 105. Mamdani, 2009. Gallab, 2009, p. 151. Salam and Waal, 2007, p. 99. Hassan, 2004. El-Affendi, 1999. Burr and Collins, 2005, During the 1990s when the Arab mujahidin who had joined Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Sudan many of them were billeted out to the PDF training camps to instruct the new recruits in fighting jihad. Salmon, 2007, p. 19. Burr and Collins, 2005, p. 18. Salmon, 2007, p.19. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, p. 23. Daly, 2007, p. 276. ‘One Killed in Riots,’ Panafrican News Agency, 15 September 2000. Flint and Waal, 2008, pp. 16–70.

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Chapter 8 1. 2. 3. 4.

231

Conclusion: The Crisis of the Post-colonial State

O’Fahey, 2006. Perham, 1938, quoted in Louis, 2006, p. 529. O’Fahey, 2006, pp. 32–3. The oil-rich border region around the area of Abyei is a scene of continued conflict between forces allied to the GoS and the new government of South Sudan. The United Nations peacekeepers maintain a fragile peace but until the ownership of the border area is resolved this issue will remain a flashpoint between the two Sudans.

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Young, R. (2001), Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Zahid, M. and Medley, M. (2006), ‘Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Sudan’. Review of African Political Economy, No. 110, pp. 693–708. El Zain, M. (1996), ‘Tribe and religion in the Sudan’. Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 23, No. 70, pp.523–29 . —— (2005), ‘The passing of development discourse and its successors: is the condition ripe for putting forward alternative development packages? (A case from the Sudan.)’. Maputo: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa. —— (2008), ‘Articulation of cultural discourses and political dominance in Sudan’. Sudanese Alternative Discourses, Vol. 2, http://www.africa. upenn.edu/Newsletters/sad2.html#Articulation%20of%20Cultural%20 Discourses%20and%20Political%20Dominance%20in%20Sudan, accessed 16 August 2009. Zaroug, M.G. (2000), Country Pasture Profile: Sudan. Report for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. http://www.fao.org/ag/ AGP/AGPC/doc/counprof/sudan/sudan.htm accessed 2 July 2007.

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INDEX

Aba Island, 75, 115, 141 Abboud, Ibrahim, 100, 103–5, 113 ‘Abdallahi ibn Muhammad, (Khalifa), 50–1, 60 Abd al-Latif, Ali, 66 see also White Flag League ‘Abd al-Rahman (Keira Sultan), 40 ‘Abd ar-Rahman, Khalil, 55 Abdullah, Osman, 150 Abu Jammayza, 51 Addis Ababa Agreement, 136, 142 Agriculture, 109, 128–9 ‘Ali, Muhammad, (Egyptian Khedive), 40, 43, 45, 46, 49 Alassam, Mukhtar, 138 Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, and conquest of Darfur, 54–5 and conquest of Sudan, 52, 60 as fiction, 64 formation of, 60 and reliance on Egyptian funds, 65 and tensions between Britain and Egypt, 64, 66 Ansar, crushed by Nimeiri, 132 in Darfur, 75, 84–5 as followers of the Mahdi, 49 and rebellion against Nimeiri, 137

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Anyanya, 117 Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, 134 Arab Gathering (al-tajamu al-arabi), 153, 154 Arab League, 4, 10, Arab nomads, 43, 150, 154 from Chad, 178 Arabic language, spread into Darfur, 35–6 and southern Sudan, 74 Arabism, 100 pan-, 101 Arabisation, in Darfur, 27, 36 in southern Sudan, 100 Al-Azhar, 36, 75 Al-Azhari, Ismai’l, 93, 95–7 Baggara Arabs, geographic location of, 29 and integration of outsiders, 32–3, and involvement in Western Savannah Development Project,189 miltiarisation of, 158–9 and relations with Keira Sultanate, 37–8, 45, 52, 55

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258 THE POST-COLONIAL STATE

AND

Bakheit, Ga’afar, 122–3 Baring, Evelyn, see Cromer, Lord, invention of Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Al-Bashir, Omar, and end of war with the south, 2 intervention in Dar Masalit of, 179 as leader of coup, 166 and purging of the NIF, 186 and repression of opposition, 172 and struggle with al-Turabi, 180, 184 Battle of Bara, 44 Battle of Omdurman, 60, 62, 63 Beja, 2, 100 Beja Congress, 102, 103, 114 Bilad al-Sudan, 27, 44 Bin Laden, Osama, 170 Black Book, (al-kitab al-aswad), 102, 106, 185–6, 187 Bolad, Duad, 182–3 Boer War, 65 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 40 Bor Mutiny, 90 Breadbasket strategy failure of, 134–5, 145 rationale for, 131, 133

Cold War, 23, 148, 167 Colonialism, 7, anti-, 72, 92, 97, 101 and dual mandate, 67–8 and education policies, 76–7, 79, 81–2 logic of, 58–9, 62 and policy of self-financing, 59, 63 and policies towards Sufi sects, 83–4 and racialist policies, 78, 80–1 and ‘Scramble for Africa’, 53, 56 Communist Movement, 91–2, 94; also see Sudanese Communist Party Cromer, Lord (British Consul-General in Egypt), 58 disinterest in Darfur of, 52, 61 influence over Sudan of, 65, 66 and invention of Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 62 Orientalism of, 80 Cultural reductionism, 11, 14–15

Camp David Accords, 143 Census, 96, 100, 110, 134 Central African Republic, 28, 45 Centre and periphery, 90, 95, 103–7, 131, 134, 157, 177 Chad, borders with Sudan, 27, 130 civil war, 121 French conquest of, 53 impact on Darfur, 130, 149, 150, 154 victory of Idris Deby in, 168 US interest in, 23, 148 Churchill, Winston, 62 Civil society, 158, 159, 166, 173, 175 Civil Transactions Act (1991), 173 Civilising mission, 67, 79, 81 Closed Ordinances Act (1922), 73–5, 77

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El-Dahab, Siwar, 147–8 Dar al-Islam, 6, 28, 36, 45, 75 Dar Masalit, outbreak of violence in, 161, 178 reorganisation by NIF in, 179 uprising in, 3 Darb al-arba’in, 37, 40 Darfur Development Front, 113, 114, 118 Deby, Idris, 151, 168 Democratic Unionist Party, 105, 115 Al-Din, Mohamed Ahmad, 179 Dinar, ‘Ali, becoming Sultan of, 52 death of, 54 Macmillan’s view of, 56 and relations with Baggara, 52 and relations with Wingate, 54–5 Dinka, 32, 52, 77 Dinshawai incident, 64

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INDEX Diraige, Ahmad Ibrahim, as governor of Darfur, 139, 141 meeting with Nimeiri, 145–6 role in the Darfur Development Front of, 113 as speaker of the parliament 115 Dual Mandate, 67, see also Colonialism Economic crisis, 12, 23–4, 94, 121, 131, 135, 143–5, 166, 169–71 Education, 106, 110–1, 142, 173, 186, see also colonialism, education policies Egypt, see also Turko-Egyptian Regime British occupation of, 60, 63, 84 and declaration of support for Sudanese independence, 97 and fall of Mubarak, 11 intervention to save Nimeiri of, 137 as leader of pan-Arabism, 98 strategic importance for Britain of, 60 and Suez Crisis, 98 and trade with Keira, 37, 39, 40 Elections, 73, 98, 105, 114–5, 116, 130, 149, 165 Environmental degradation, 12, 108, 139 Ethiopia, 23, 148, 181 Ethnic cleansing, 16, 177, 180 Ethnicity, 5, 6, 19, 30, 42, 140–1, 155, 181 Al-Fadl, Muhammad (Keira Sultan), 44 Failed states, 10–1, 171 El Fasher, 3, 39, 51, 52, 55, 56, 110, 139, 151, 186 First People’s Local Government Conference, 138 France, 46, 62 expansion into southern Sudan of, 52 intervention in Egypt of, 46, 49 involvement in Suez Crisis of, 60 Food insecurity, 129, 146, 170 Fur, 3, 27, 192 and conflict with Baggara, 177 Darfur as homeland of, 30 as ethnic identity, 71, 100 and the NIF, 180, 183

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259

Gaddafi, Muammar, see also Libya, and Arabism, 154, and da’wa islamiya, 150 designs for Darfur of, 151, 168 fall of, 11 imperial ambitions in Africa of, 148 and racial policies’ impact in Darfur, 153 and relations with Sadiq al-Mahdi, 149, 168 and severing of ties to Sudan, 170 and support of coup against Nimeiri, 132 and Third Universal Theory, 154 and war in Chad, 148, 149–50, 168 Garang de Mabior, John, 142, 147 General Union of the Nuba, 114 Genocide, 15–6, 18 Gezira Scheme, 45, 85–7, 103, 107 Gladstone, W.E., 60, 61 Gordon, Charles (General), 48, 49, 61 Gordon College, 76 Gorst, Sir Eldon, 64, 65 Graduates Congress, 72, 93, 164 Great Depression, 9 Al-Hadi al-Mahdi, Sayyid, 115 Hakura, 41–2 see also land, tenure Hamid, ‘Abd al-Rahim, 173 Human rights abuses, 153, 167, 175 Humanitarian crisis/disaster, 3, 15, 16, 145, 170 Ibn Idris, Ahmad, 82 Ibrahim, Abu al-Qasim, 151 Ibrahim, Yusuf, 51 Identity, in Darfur, 19, 140, 177 national, 90, 100, 101–2, 137 politics, 19–23 pre-colonial, 38; re-formulation under colonialism, 68–71

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260 THE POST-COLONIAL STATE

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IMF, austerity programs, 143–4, 145, 171 rescheduling of debt, 120 support for US allies during Cold War, 23, 133, 148 suspension of Sudan from, 169 Indirect Rule, see Native Administration Iraq, 10, 98, 168, 169 Islam, see also Islamism, Islamisation adoption by Keira of, 35–36 colonial use of, 83 expansion into Africa of, 33–4, 74, 79 introduction to Darfur of, 26, 28 unifying effect of, 48 and view of blackness, 20, 78–9 Islamic Charter Front, 105 Islamic Legions, 150, 151, 153, 168 Islamisation, 2, 21, 28, 100, 162 Islamism, 7, 162, 164, 165, 182 Islamists, colour-blindness of, 22, 164, 181–2 dogmatism of, 1 failure of, 171, 185 importance of Fur to, 155 reason for strength in Sudan of, 165–6, 183–4 and al-Turabi, 158, 162 wealth of, 173 Isma’il Ayyub Pasha, 44, 45

and Battle of Manawashi, 45 and conquest of Kordofan, 39 conquest by Turko-Egyptians of, 46 and control of slave –trade, 40–1 and dispute with Muhammad ‘Ali, 39 expansion into Darfur of, 38 and General Gordon’s intervention into Darfur, 48 integration of non-Fur into, 43 introduction of Islam into, 34–5 land policy of, 41–2, also see Hakura links to Egypt of, 37, 44–5 origins of, 27 and shadow Sultans, 51 and slave trading, 31, 37–8, 40 and support for Mahdi in Darfur, 48–50 Kelly, V.P. (Lieutenant-Colonel), 56 Khalifa, the see ‘Abdallahi ibn Muhammad Al-Khalifah, Sirr al-Khatim, 105 Khalil, Abdullah, 97, 98 Khartoum, anti-government opposition in, 104, 144, 146, 152, 170 death of Gordon at, 48, 49 economic development of, 87, 106, 109, 134 election results from, 165 NIF repression of, 176 student enrolments from, 76, 111 transport links to/from, 63 Khartoum University, 152, 163, 174 Khatmiyya, see also al-Mirghani, Muhammad ‘Uthman founding of, 83–4 opposition to September Laws of, 162 and relations with British colonial administration, 84, 92 strength of, 82 support for unification with Egypt of, 92

Janjawiid, 22, 158, 160, 186 Jebel Marra, 26, 38, 107, 108, 128–9 Development Scheme, 127–8 Jellaba , 74 Jihad, 2, 54, 84, 162, 170, 184, 185 Justice and Equality Movement, 3, 186 Kabbabish, 54–5 Kapila, Mukesh, 16 Keira Sultanate see also Dinar arabisation of 35–6

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INDEX Kitchener, Herbert (General), 52, 60, 62–3, 75 Kordofan, 27, 30, 32, cattle wealth of, 109 conflict in, 158–9, 166, 177 conquest by Keira Sultanate of, 39–40 conquest by Turko-Egyptians of, 44 marginalisation of, 114 Native Administration, in 67–8 student enrolment from, 76, 110–1 Kristof, Nicholas, 16 Lagu, Joseph, 136 Land, commercialisation of, 127–8, 134 disputes over, 42, 43, 69, 124, 126, 129–31, 156 mechanisation of, 128, 135, 178 tenure, 110, 21, 124–31 see also Hakura Libya, 27, 101, 137, 168, 170, 183 see also Gaddafi Local council, 123–4, 131 Local Government Act (1971), 121 Lugard, Frederick, 67–8 MacMichael, HA, 56, 67–70, 79 Maffey, John (Governor General of Sudan), 68 Mahdi, the, 48–52, 60, 62, 64, 74 Al-Mahdi, Sadiq, and coup against Nimeiri, 137 and deals with Gaddafi of, 150–1 and endorsement of peace with SPLM, 162 militia strategy of, 160, 162 overthrow by al-Bashir of, 166 and split with al-Hadi, 115–6 al-Mahdi, Sayyid ‘Abd Al-Rahman, and Gezira Scheme, 85–6 influence in Darfur of, 85 and rehabilitation with colonial government, 75, 83–4 as a threat to the British, 92

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261

Mahdism, 48, 74–5, 82–84, 164 Al-Mardi, Al-Tayeb, 139 Masalit, 3, 100, 179, 180, 182–3, 187 sultanate of, 53, 192 May Revolution, 120, 132, see also Nimeiri Al-Mirghani, Ahmed, 137 Al-Mirghani, Sayyid Muhammad ‘Uthman, 82 Militias, see janjawiid, Popular Defence Forces Misseriya, 158 Musabba’at, 39 Muslim Brotherhood, 3, 137, 162–3, 165, 171, 173, 179, 184, 186 Nabi ‘Isas, 84 Nalder, L. F., 80–1 Nasir Fadlallah, Burma (Major General), 158 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 60, 97–9, 101, 117 National Islamic Front (NIF), academic neglect of, 21 coming to power of, 1, 166–7 and division of Dar Masalit, 179 ethnic cleansing of Nuba Mountains by, 177–178 origins of, 162–5 plundering of state assets by, 173–4 repression by, 171–176 rule over Darfur of, 3, 180–7 ruthlessness of, 2 struggle within, 22, 181–187 and support for global jihad, 168 tribal policy of, 160–1 and use of militias, 161, 184–6 National Reconciliation, 138, 142, 163 National Salvation Government, see National Islamic Front Nationalism, 72, 91, 94, 137; Egyptian in Sudan, 72

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262 THE POST-COLONIAL STATE

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Native Administration, dismantling of, 120–6, 129–30 impact of, 70, 76, 77 implementation of, 69–73 philosophy of, 67, 76 tribalisation as a result of, 71, 77 Native Administration Ordinance (1927), 68 Neguib, Mohammad (General), 73 Nimeiri, Ja’afar, and Addis Ababa Agreement, 132, 145 and breadbasket strategy, 131–5 and devolution of power, 138 during early radical period, 132 importance of, 119–20 and meeting with Diraige, 141, 145 overthrow of, 146 relations with US, 132, 149 and resumption of north-south conflict, 142 and shari’a law, 142, 165 Nimieirism without Nimeiri, 147 Nuba, 2 extension of Native Administration to, 68 fatwa against, 177 government violence against, 178 subjugation of, 177 Nyala, 75, 84, 106, 109, 127, 139, 151

Power, Samantha, 18 Powers of Nomad Sheikh Ordinance (1922), 69 Powers of Sheikh Ordinance (1927), 69

October Revolution, 104–5 Operation Lifeline Sudan, 167 Organization of African Unity, 10 Perham, Margery, 190 Permits to Trade Ordinance (1925), 73, 74 Popular Defence Forces (PDF), 160, 177, 184–5 Popular uprisings, 11, 104–5, 145 in Darfur, 139, 186 Post-colonial state, 7–12, 23–4, 193–4

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Race, difference between European and Islamic notions of, 78–9 Racism, Arab, 5, 153–4, 158, 181 colonial British forms of, 78–9, 190 Red Flame Movement, 112–3 Regional devolution, 93, 138 Regionalism, 102, 106 Revolutionary Command Council of National Salvation, see National Islamic Front (NIF) Rwanda, 15–6, 18 Sadat, Anwar, 132, 138 Sahel, drought in, 128, 139, 145, 149 mercenaries from, 150 pilgrimage across, 5, 31–2 Saudi Arabia, 133, 144, 169–70, 173 Sectarianism, 94, 120, 131 Shari’a Law , 142, 165 Slavery, 5, 31, 37–40, 48, 78–9, 81, see also Keira Sultanate Socialist Republican Party, 73 Solungdungo, Sulayman, 27 Sooney, 113 Southern policy, 79 Southern Sudan, and abrogation of Addis Ababa Agreement, 142–144 British attitude towards, 74–5, 81 British conquest of, 52 and causes of antagonism towards north, 90, 94–5, 100 and conflict with north, 8, 17 French ambitions for, 61 implementation of indirect rule in, 67, 79

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INDEX independence of, 2, 11 marginalization of, 110–1, 115 peace agreement with Nimeiri, 136–7 and support for Nimeiri, 141 and war with north, 150–4 Stack, Lee, 66 State, definition of, 9 Sudan Political Service, 66, 68, 75, 93–4 Sudan li’l Sudaniyyin, 94 Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement, 3, 186 Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement, 2, 23, 142, 147, 159, 186 Sudanese workers, 134, 149, 169–70 Suez Canal, 60–1 Suez Crisis, 97–8, see also Nasser Sufist Orders (tariqas), 82, 91, see also Khatmiyya, Mahdiyya Taha, ‘Ali ‘Uthman Muhammad, 162 Tayrab, Muhammad (Sultan), 39 Thin White line, 65–6, 68, see also Native Administration Trade, see slavery, Keira Sultanate, Egypt Transitional Military Council, 147, 149 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 81 Al-Turabi, Hasan, see also al-Bashir, Islamists as architect of Islamist takeover, 162 as attorney-general, 163 and coup against Nimeiri, 137 fall of, 184–5 and links with Justice and Equality Movement, 186 popularity in Darfur of, 164

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263

return from France of, 162 and struggle with al-Bashir, 3, 22, 158, 180–1, 186 Turko-Egyptian Regime, administration of Sudan by, 44–7 and defeat by Mahdists, 48–9 expansion into Sudan of, 43 legacies in Sudan of, 51 Umma Party, 73, electoral fortunes in Darfur of, 164 intra-party rivalries in, 99, 115–116, and involvement in 1958 coup, 98–9, NIF attacks against, 174–5, 178 and reliance on Darfur, 90, 105, 118, 154 United Nations, 153 United States, 15, 16, 23, 98, 145, 148–9, 150, 167 Congress, 167 Unification, 73, 89, 92 Unregistered Land Act, (1970), 125–7 Wadai, 30, 39, 53 Western Savannah Development Scheme, 127, 129 White Flag league, 66 ‘Wild West’, 152 Wingate, Reginald (Governor of AngloEgyptian Sudan), 54–6, 64–5, 69 World Bank, 23, 133, 135, 169, 171 Zaghawa, 2, 38, 100, 147, 180, 183 Al-Zubayr Rahman, 45

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