Sudan: the quest for the emancipatory subject

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By Magdi El Gizouli

April 3, 2013 -I would like to begin this talk with the narration of a
conversation I had back in 2010 with an old gentleman in El-Gineina,
capital of West Darfur state, close to the Sudanese-Chadian border. I
landed in the town seconded by Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman
on commission of the World Health Organization (WHO) to assess the
efficacy of a WHO-funded project to rehabilitate a string of hospitals
in the then three states of Darfur. Naturally, I was granted lodging
in the WHO Guest House wherever there was one. The guard of the guest
house in al-Jineina was a native Fur of my father’s age. He welcomed
me with the respect due to a dignitary, and then asked the evident
question of all encounters. Where do you come from? I said from
Omdurman, he replied, Omdurman, then you know how to speak, over here
we fight instead. We then drifted into a discussion about the war and
the impossibility of speech. From this gentleman I learned that the
war in Darfur was understood locally as a second Um Kwakiya, period of
mayhem, chaos, blood-letting and general deterioration of authority
(1). The first Um Kwakiya extended from 1874 to 1916, between the
collapse of the Fur state under the severe blows of al-Zubeir Pasha
Rahama and his army of slaves/mercenaries encroaching from Bahr
al-Ghazal and its tenuous inclusion into the Sudan under Ottoman rule
until the defeat of Darfur’s self-instated Sultan Ali Dinar and the
incorporation of the region into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. My
interlocutor and I shared Sudan as a geographical space but not as a
nation. We came from different worlds.

When indulging a foreigner in Sudan we say ‘welcome to your second
home’. The really existing New Sudan, which also doubles as Sudan, the
old Sudan, or North Sudan, is in a sense a second home for a large
number of its inhabitants, with the decisive difference that they do
not have a first one, unlike the audience here. The displaced
populations of Darfur, South Kordofan, the Blue Nile, as well as the
thousands straddling the elusive 1956 border experience Sudan, i.e.
the state apparatus and the armed actors who function in that name, as
a violent injunction into their life-world, a force that seeks to
civilize, modernize transform or liberate, whatever flavour you
prefer. It is as if becoming Sudanese was contingent on a baptising
passage though violence. Indeed, a Fur peasant forced to flee his
village to the doubtful sanctuary of the displacement camps around the
region’s urban centres attains his Sudaneseness as it were with this
coerced departure. Hurled into a new world governed by monetary
exchange and devoid of the cushion of communal access to land this
‘Sudanese to be’ is forced to probe the harsh domain of the lone
citizen as opposed to the subject dwelling in alleged Unmündigkeit.
Incidentally, the colloquial Arabic of the Sudanese cosmopolitans
provides an adequate translation of Kant’s enlightenment pejorative,
namely zol sakit, a worthless person, or a person incapable of proper
speech; the attribute is also used to dismiss unqualified or rather
powerless speech as kalam sakit, silent/worthless speech, or nonsense.

Is this violent emergence into Sudaneseness however not a permanent
theme of state-making in Sudan? Noteworthy in this regard is the
detail that the term Sudanese was initially used to refer to
emancipated slaves or slave descendants identified by the colonial
authorities as ‘detribalized’ negroes, in the rule individuals whose
families originated in one of the communities of southern Sudan or the
Nuba Mountains, and who had been absorbed into the Muslim
Arabic-speaking cultures of Sudan or Egypt through domestic slavery
and military service. These erz-Sudanese were continually policed and
probed for signs of subversion and corruption, particularly in light
of the dash 1924 insurgency, as opposed to the ‘Arabs’ of the
heartland, who once subdued by the ‘fire and sword’ of British
imperial power, were amenable to partition into tribal units under
admirably complacent but notoriously inefficient yet respectable
clients of the condominium government, the sheikhs, nazirs and omdas
of native administration. It was the effendis of the colonial state,
‘detribalized’ and taught to speak the language of the master in the
dormitories and corridors of Gordon College, who approbated the term
in the aftermath of the 1924 defeat and infused it with the strain of
nationalism that came to define post-colonial Sudan, first in literary
circles and later on in the Graduates’ Congress and the political
parties of the Sudanese establishment, the Umma Party and the Ashigga.
While the ‘detribalized’ negroes of 1924, Ali Abd al-Latif and Abd
al-Fadil al-Maz, had nothing but there Sudaneseness to fall back to
and therefore could do little to escape fidelity to the emancipatory
cause, their higher order effendi allies had their fathers, the
trusted sheikhs of the administration, to plead their excuse as
mischievous juveniles before the authorities. The discrepancy between
the fate of Ali Abd al-Latif, imprisoned and exiled until his death in
1948, and Ibrahim Bedri, the son of Sheikh Babiker Badri, who became a
Sub-Mamur i.e. junior administrator in southern Sudan and was
appointed in 1946 Assistant District Commissioner, could be regarded
as the formative sin of the effendi elite. What was initially a
betrayal became a political strategy as the effendiya short-cut
nationalist agitation to forge their alliance with the patrons of
Sudan’s major religious-business networks, the Ansar and the
Khatmiyya, thereby cementing what was initially a colonial project of
rule as a fixture of the post-colonial political landscape.

To these two modes of becoming Sudanese, violent extraction but not
necessarily inclusion, and disciplinary education, one should add a
third, the stream of rural to urban labour migration. The first
generations of these labour migrants, the Atbara railway workers,
experienced this transformation as an act of ‘shurad’ (escape) from
the village or ‘tashish’, losing one’s way or straying, a recognition
of the diabolic dimension of the city as compared to the perception of
the village as the ultimate anchor (2). These working Sudanese, in the
rule landless peasants from farming communities where land ownership
constituted the definition of employment and descendants of
emancipated slaves, broke the ranks of the supposedly self-contained
organic units of riverine Sudan to mould a modernity of their own, one
that led many of them straight into the ranks of the Communist Party
of Sudan.

These three modes of becoming Sudanese are not exclusive alternatives.
Rather they constitute channels that open into each other, and it is
through the lateral passages between them that Sudan’s political
dissidents have emerged to ‘speak’ against the political order
inherited from the colonial state, the alliance of convenience between
the effendi benefactors of Sudanization, the entrepreneur patron
families of the religious tariqas, and the notables of native
administration. The first to feature on the political scene was the
Anti-Imperialist Front, arguably the most successful political vehicle
ever devised by Sudan’s communists. In its heyday, the Front groomed a
cohort of counter-effendis, individuals who despite their education,
the rite of passage to state-delivered comfort, flouted government
employment and subservience to the establishment, to invest the trade
unionism of the Sudanese working class, the railway workers in
particular but also the tenants of the Gezira scheme and the Nuba
Mountains and the labour force of the Nzara scheme in Equatoria, with
a political dimension of emancipation. In retrospect, the efforts of
these pioneers could be read as an attempt to undo the shame of the
1924 betrayal. It is no coincidence that the first fully fledged
leader of the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation (SMNL), the
nucleus of the Anti-Imperialist Front, was the Egyptian trained
medical doctor Abd al-Wahhab Zain al-Abdin Abd al-Tam whose father was
a veteran of the White Flag League, a comrade in arms of Ali Abd
al-Latif and like other military officers of the League a
‘detribalized’ negro, i.e. of slave descent.

The Sudanese Um Kwakiyas are many though. Today, subsistence-geared
peasant communities in Darfur are being transformed into a reserve
army of cheap labour fit for the requirements of commercial
agriculture and extractive industry, gold mining for instance, in a
rather delayed fit of primitive accumulation. In the 1820 – 1880’s it
was the peasant communities of the Nile Valley who had to endure the
violent catapult into modernity as it were, i.e. integration into the
world system of resources extraction, production, and trade, better
known as capitalism. The forces of shock modernization came from the
north on horseback. In 1821 the army of Mohamed Ali Pasha, the Ottoman
Khedive of Egypt, invaded the lands up the Nile in an act of regional
imperialism that created the modern Sudans we know today. Mohamed Ali
Pasha took it upon himself to ‘modernize’ Egypt, an objective he
thought to achieve through the expropriation of Sudan’s perceived
wealth: gold for his treasury and slave soldiers for his army. The
Sudan did not meet expectations on both counts, it must be said. In
the process of maintaining a standing army and administration in the
country as well as the phantasy of an imperial Egypt that shares in
the burden of the white man the Turkiyya, as the period of Ottoman
colonial rule is known to the Sudanese, forced commercial cash-crop
agriculture on the peasant communities of the Nile Valley, the
riverine Sudanese identified in the political jargon of
centre-periphery as the ‘villains’ of contemporary Sudan, and
introduced canonical sharia as an ideology of the state. The links
between these two decisively modern innovations, commercial
agriculture with slave/forced labour as its engine and the
superstructure of canonical sharia constitute an enduring theme of
Sudanese history-making since.

Sharia as a canon of law was not foreign to pre-colonial Sudan of
course, but co-existed and competed with more popular ‘nativised’
readings of Islam in tune with customary practices and local habit:
the soft sharia of the Sufi brotherhoods and sheikhs. In the courts of
the Sennar Sultanate (ca 1505 – 1821) canonical sharia, as can be
derived from the rare books of Islamic jurisprudence available, was an
exhibit if you like to demonstrate ‘civilisation’, ‘progress’ and
attachment to the greater Arab peninsula just like Arab genealogies
were adopted by various Sudanese communities, the Arabized Nubian
peasants of the Nile Valley and the nomads of the Kordofan and Darfur,
to prove the worth of these mulatto communities on the margins of the
Moslem world.

The tension between these two variants of sharia, an orthodox textual
sharia and the popular-moulded sharia of inspiration and admittedly
convenience, is best demonstrated in a magical realist encounter
between a Sufi Sheikh and a sharia judge that took place sometime
during the reign of the Sennar sultans, before the assault of Mohamed
Ali Pasha’s armies on Sudan, a narrative immortalized in the
bewildering chronicle of Sufi sheikhs and saints preserved in writing
by the oldest known Sudanese historian Mohamed al-Nour wad Daifalla
wad Mohamed wad Daifalla al-Jaali al-Fadli (1727 – 1810), a man about
whom very little is known but who provides us today with a rare
primary source of the history of the era.

Kitab al-Tabagat fi khusous al-Awlia wa al-Saliheen wa al-Ulmaa wa
al-Shuraa fi al-Sudan – A genealogy of saints, holymen, scholars and
poets in the Sudan – or shortly the Tabagat (the genealogy) –
incidentally, tabaga, plural tabagat is also the word for class in
modern Arabic - tells the story of the confrontation between Sheikh
Mohamed al-Hamim and the sharia judge Dashein in Arabaji, once a large
trade centre in Gezira and today a minor town. Wad al-Hamim was known
as a malamati, i.e. a Sufi who appeals to God’s benevolence through
indulgence of sin. Under the spell of holy inspiration Wad al-Hamim
exceeded four in marriage, orthodox sharia allows for four wives
simultaneously with no limits on successive marriages, and went beyond
that in marrying two sisters, a sharia prohibition. He married the two
beautiful daughters of Abu Nadoda in Rufaa, and the two daughters of
the revered Sheikh Banaga al-Dareer, Kalthoum and Khadmalla. Enraged
by this flagrant disregard of sharia marital discipline the judge
Dashein annulled Mohamed al-Hamim’s marriages. Dashein intercepted Wad
al-Hamim as he left the mosque in Arbaji after the Friday prayers.
“You married five and six and seven… and over and above you combined
between two sisters in wedlock”. Mohamed al-Hamim responded, and what
is that to you? The judge replied: “I hereby annul your marriages
since they contravene the Holy Book of Allah and the traditions of his
prophet.” To this argument Wad al-Hamim reacted with the invocation of
holy sanction. The prophet permitted me to do so, he said, and Sheikh
Idris, standing by, knows that. Idris from his side told the judge:
“leave him to his own affairs and his Lord’s judgement.” Dashein fired
back with the standard self-empowerment of the modern day Salafi: “I
won’t ignore his case, and I announce his marriages revoked”. To this
uninvited intervention Mohamed al-Hamim replied sure of his cosmic
power: “May Allah tear apart your skin”, the word in Arabic, faskh, is
identical for both the break-up of a contract and the tearing apart of
skin. Dashein is said to have fallen with severe illness, his skin
flaked apart like the dry soil of the Gezira until he died. Dashein
never repealed his judgement against Mohamed al-Hamim the malamati and
for that he is known as the Judge of Justice, tells us Wad Daifalla
(3).

Another famed poet of the Turkiyya provides us with further insight
into the increasing influence of canonical sharia on the daily life of
the nas, the common Sudanese. Haj al-Mahi (1789 – 1871) implores the
holy saints of the Nile valley and their superiors in the centres of
Moslem scholarship to race to the aid of his people in hunting down a
crocodile that plagued the villages around Kassinger, his hometown.
Haj al-Mahi’s crocodile could also be interpreted as a stand in for
the reviled Turkiyya administrator which would make the poet an early
agent of anti-colonial agitation particularly that he explicitly
chides the consortium of sheikhs for failing to counter the menace of
the crocodile in a timely fashion, telling them that their reputation
was at stake. Towards the end of the popular poem Wad al-Mahi asks the
sheikhs to do something about the roaming Wahhabis, followers of the
19th century reformer of the Hijaz, who tell people that praising the
prophet in verse and song, his vocation, was a religious violation. By
the way, Haj al-Mahi’s tunes, mild and passionate swings, sustain
contemporary Sudanese music to this day, and are the original resource
of the Hagiba, the explosion of semi-repetitive musical patterns in
Omdurman of the 1920-1950s.

Canonical sharia might have been resisted by the likes of Wad al-Hamim
and Haj al-Mahi, organic intellectuals intent on preserving a communal
way of life and belief system under threat by greater powers with a
global traction but it constituted the ‘ideology’ of the emergent
mercantile class, first as a common grammar of trade with the markets
of the Orient during the Sennar era, and under the Turkiyya as a tool
of primitive accumulation. Sharia’s rules of inheritance are strongly
biased towards milk ‘freehold’, i.e. individual land ownership, and
generally toward private property, and tend to fragment land over
generations as opposed to the ‘common use’ principle of customary law
that provided the basis of the complex system of land tenure in
riverine Sudan before the advent of the Turkiyya. According to
customary practice, only shares in the produce of the land were
inherited but not the land itself. Sharia served the interests of
capital in bestowing the fragmentation of land between heirs and its
subsequent entry into the market sphere with a legal framework. Under
pressure communities in the Nile Valley reverted to roka (communal)
cultivation as individual plots became successively too small for
rational individual utilization, and ultimately voted with their feet,
fleeing the Nile in mass to the diaspora of the hinterlands, a process
that created the ‘itinerate traders’ of the Sudan and beyond, the
jellaba. Today the word has become almost an insult as it entered the
discourse of racial dichotomy pitting the ‘Arab’ communities of the
Nile valley, the Jaaliyeen, Shaygiyya and Danagla from which the
jellaba were mostly drawn, against the ‘African’ populations of the
hinterlands.

The colonial authorities of the Turkiyya started producing documents
of individual land ownership, freehold certificates, some of which
survive in the preserve of landowning families along the Nile today
and are still in use to argue rights against the state. The Turkiyya
state was determinately autocratic and overtly ambitious, but
chronically weak, and, it follows, notoriously aggressive,
characteristics that define the Sudanese state until today, only with
the benefit of experience (4). A Sudanese saying from the era,
probably originating from the Jaaliyeen peasants of the Nile Valley
captures most succinctly the relationship between the Turkiyya state
in Sudan and its subjects. ‘Ashara rus fi turba wala riyal fi tulba’ –
better ten heads in the grave than a dollar in tax, goes the saying, a
testimony to the well documented extractive taxation policy of the
Turkiyya. Taxation constituted a heavy burden on the capacity of the
riverine subsistence economy, the sagiya (waterwheel) system of
agricultural production along the Nile. Eventually, the colonial
hunger not only undermined the peasant livelihoods of the Nile valley,
providing the major push factor for the widespread expansion of the
riverine peasants through contemporary Sudan as itinerant traders,
adventurers, slave traders, and preachers, but ultimately sounded the
death knell of the Turkiyya state, which literally dug its own grave.

The reign of the Turkiyya came to a bloody end on 26 January 1885 with
the death of Charles Gordon on the stairs of the Governor General’s
Palace in Khartoum, the victorious peak of the Mahdist revolution in
Sudan. Mohamed Ahmed (the Mahdi) was a man of modest origins. His
father was a boat builder in Labab Island close to Dongola, which
places the family on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, superior
only to slaves. He accompanied his brothers to Karari close to
Omdurman and then to al-Jazeera Abba in the White Nile but did not
pick up the trade. Instead, he went sheikh-seeking to become an
itinerant scholar of religious disciplines, a Taliban of his time and
age as it were, travels that exposed him to the full treacheries of
Turkiyya rule.

The Mahdi harnessed the liberatory edge of sharia, its promise of
freedom, equality and fraternity between believers, to raise an army
of the dispossessed. His call for struggle against the Turkiyya
resonated across the Sudanese heartland and beyond; the ranks of the
Ansar swelled with the landless peasants of the Nile, the nomads of
Kordofan and Darfur, and the slave-soldiers of the Turkiyya. The
Mahdi’s religious innovations and military tactics have received
considerable attention in Sudanese scholarship but little has his
political acumen been discussed. The stability of the Turkiyya relied
on an alliance between the implanted state machinery, the emergent
Sudanese merchant class and sharia scholars like Dashein. The Mahdi
raised an army against the coercive powers of the first, negotiated
with the second and attacked the third with venom.

The ideological premise of a puritan Islam accessible to all believers
and free of the mediation of Sufi authorities was a threat to
established social hierarchy as it was a challenge to dominant
religious doctrines. In that sense, the Mahdi earned the enmity of
both the Dasheins and the Hamims, the proponents of the hard sharia of
the canon and the soft sharia of inspiration. Employing what in
contemporary terms is the standard fundamentalist twist the Mahdi
efficiently tapped the resources of popular sharia as he laid claim to
the authority of its canon. He ridiculed the Dasheins as puppets of
the colonial regime and the Hamims as agents of degeneration. In that
light, the millenarian message of the Mahdi could be read as a
synthesis of the two, the local appeal of the Hamims and the
pan-Islamic/universal legitimacy of the Dasheins. This productive
contradiction at the heart of Mahdism proved to be the Achilles heel
of the movement once it transformed into a state. As an ideology of
protest however the formula was a resounding success.

Considering Sudan’s wealth of agricultural land beyond the Nile it was
the availability of labour rather than the resistance of tenure
systems that constituted the primary limiting factor to commercial
agriculture under the Turkiyya. Slave labour was the economic answer
to this dilemma, and it was through the sanction, support and
organisation of slavery that the Turkiyya state drew into its alliance
the most successful among the itinerant traders of the Nile, the
jellaba, who served it well in that regard. The career of al-Zubeir
Pasha Rahama provides ample illustration of the rise and fall of a
crown-jellabi in Ottoman duty. The New York Times had this to say when
he died in January 1913: “One of the most picturesque characters in
Africa is dead. He was Zubeir Pasha, at one time an immensely wealthy
slave trader, and virtually a King in the Sudan. Gen. Gordon selected
him as the only man capable of holding the territory, and there is
little doubt that had Gordon’s advice been followed the tragedy of
Khartoum would not have occurred.” Zubeir delivered Darfur to the
authority of the Turkiyya in 1874 with a mighty slave army. Three
years later, the Khedive Ismail appointed General Gordon governor
general of the Sudan with the mandate to suppress the slave trade.
Zubeir travelled to Cairo in 1878 in an attempt to negotiate his
commercial and political survival. He was detained by the Egyptian
government and eventually banished to Gibraltar in 1885 as a prisoner
of the British government.

Other less ambitious crown-jellaba drew the right conclusion from the
calamities that befell Zubeir and after him his son Suleiman, executed
on Gordon’s orders in 1879, and opted for alliance with the Mahdi.
This shift in the balance of power granted the Mahdi the decisive edge
he needed over the ailing Turkiyya state. The jellaba networks
provided the Mahdi with the political infrastructure for revolution.
Elias Pasha Um Bareir’s ‘insider’ assistance was instrumental in the
Mahdi’s takeover of al-Obeid and Mohamed Khaled Zuqal’s role was
pivotal in delivering at least Darfur’s administrative centres to the
Mahdi’s authority, to name only two key examples. Both men had
achieved visibility in the Turkiyya hierarchy. Elias was the senior
merchant in al-Obeid, an importer, slave trader and landowner who
served for a brief spell as governor of Kordofan under Gordon. Zuqal,
a cousin of the Mahdi and a wealthy merchant, administered Dara in
Darfur under the governorship of Rudolph Slatin. He was dispatched by
Slatin to the Mahdi in Kordofan to negotiate a peaceful transfer of
power but returned to capture Dara and al-Fasher at the head of an
army of Ansar as the first Mahdist governor of the region.

The internal dynamics of the Mahdist state made a clash between these
cross-over representatives of the ancien régime and the emergent elite
of battle-hardened Ansar warriors around the Mahdi’s successor, the
Khalifa Abdullahi, inevitable. The revolution was ready to devour its
sons. The Mahdiyya’s show trials as it were began with accusations of
embezzlement against Ahmed Suleiman, the Mahdi’s treasurer. He was
thrown into prison and his property confiscated. The Khalifa summoned
Zuqal and his army from al-Fasher to Omdurman, but dispatched his
trusted captain Hamdan Abu Anja, mocked by the riverine jellaba for
his slave origins, at the lead of a mightier force to intercept Zuqal
in Kordofan. Zuqal’s army was annihilated close to Bara and the
Mahdi’s cousin sent in shackles to al-Obeid and eventually to
imprisonment in Omdurman and then exile in the Rajaf garrison in
Equatoria. In al-Obeid, Abu Anja found opportunity to settle old
scores with the Rizeigat chief Madibu Ali, a veteran of the revolution
who swore allegiance to the Mahdi in Gadeer as early as 1882 and the
man credited for the Mahdist breakthrough in Darfur. Abu Anja executed
the Rizeigat chief and sent his head to the Khalifa in Omdurman. Elias
Um Barier was lured to Omdurman, imprisoned and his property
confiscated. Whatever wealth remained in the possession of his son,
Omer, was also seized. Similar fate awaited the top brass of the
Mahdiyya. In the morning of 23 November 1891 the Khalifa’s gendarmerie
rounded up the Mahdi’s designated third successor and cousin the
Khalifa Mohamed Sharif Hamid, the Danagla notables Salih wad Siwar
al-Dahab, Saeed Mohamed Farah, Ahmed Mohamed Khair and Ahmed al-Nour
among others to face executive justice. All but Sharif who was
imprisoned in Omdurman were eventually exiled to the garrison in
Fashoda under al-Zaki Tamal and then clubbed to death on the Khalifa’s
orders. The Mahdi’s sons, al-Fadil, Mohamed and Bushra were placed
under house arrest, and his physician Abd al-Gadir Satti arrested and
then exiled to Fashoda. A secondary purge caught up with Tamal himself
despite his loyalty to the Khalifa. He was brought in chains to
Omdurman, incarcerated and starved to death.

What does all the above tell us about contemporary struggles in Sudan?
The Mahdist revolution constituted the single instance in Sudan’s
modern history when a mass revolt from the hinterlands beyond the Nile
managed to subdue the centre of power in Khartoum. The temporary union
of the dervishes as the British preferred to call the Mahdi’s Ansar
was the product of a political economy of state-driven expropriation.
To translate barren grievance into mass political action the
revolution offered its supporters the vision of a Mahdist new man, an
ascetic warrior ready to trade this life for heavenly immortality, and
more importantly the opportunity to strike at the existing social
hierarchy and reshape relations of power. The Mahdi’s insight into the
ideology and functioning of the Turkiyya state and the alliance that
sustained it guided his almost surgical sabotage of its operative and
coercive capacity. With that in mind, it is probably worthwhile to
think the envisaged ‘revolution’ in Sudan as multiple and conflicting
agents rush to execute it. Ultimately, it is the nas who revolt, the
self-declared revolutionaries negotiate.

The author is a fellow of the Rift Valley Institute. He publishes
regular opinion articles and analyses at his blog Still Sudan. He can
be reached at [email protected] This paper was delivered to the
Otto Suhr Institute (OSI) Club at the Free University Berlin, 29
January 2013

Notes and sources

(1) Professor Adam El Zein of Khartoum University introduced the term
into discussions of what he identified as “Sudan’s crisis in Darfur”;
‘From the current Um Kwakiya to good governance in Darfur: a future
perspective’ in Arabic, paper presented to forum organised by the
Communist Party of Sudan in Khartoum in October 2008 ahead of its
fifth general conference held in January 2009.

(2) Ibrahim, A.A. (1996). Trojan Duck: Migration and Modernity in
Sudan. The Journal of the International Institute. Available online:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jii/4750978.0003.208?rgn=main;view=fulltext

(3) I am indebted to Edward Thomas for drawing attention to Wad
al-Hamim’s story in his lectures at the Sudan Course of the Rift
Valley Institute (RVI).

(4) I borrow this depiction from Justin Willis’ lectures at the RVI
Sudan Course.

Bjørkelo, A. (2003). Prelude to the Mahdiyya: Peasants and Traders in
the Shendi Region, 1821-1885. Cambridge University Press.

Holt, P.M. (1970). The Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1881-1898. Oxford
University Press.

Henri Riad Sikla’s Arabic translation from Russian of chapters two,
three and five of S.R. Smirnov’s ‘History of the Sudan, 1821 – 1956’
(1968), published in 1994 as ‘The Mahdist state from the perspective
of a Soviet historian’.

Daly, M.W. (2007). Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and
Genocide. Cambridge University Press.

Shuqayr, N. (1967). ‘Geography and History of the Sudan’. Beirut. (Arabic).

Bedri, B. (1961). ‘My Life Story’. 3 volumes. Khartoum. (Arabic).

Qaddal, M.S. (2002). ‘The History of Modern Sudan, 1820 – 1955’.
Omdurman. (Arabic).

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