‘The best laid out town on the Red Sea’: the creation of Port Sudan, 1904–09

Abstract

By the outset of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over Sudan in 1899, the status of Suakin as one of the two most important ports on the western shores of the Red Sea was already of several centuries standing. Its sister entrep6t, Massawa, situated further to the south, lay outside the sphere of British or Egyptian influence. It had not always been so, however. During the reign of Sultan Sulaiman (1520-66), Ottoman soldiers from Egypt had captured both Suakin and Massawa with the intention of using them as bases to fend off Portuguese thrusts into the Red Sea. The two ports remained in Ottoman hands for the next three hundred years. Their function as not only commercial centers, but also as major embarcation points for African pilgrims travelling to Mecca, helps explain the otherwise peculiar Ottoman practice of administering the cities as exclaves of the Ottoman province of the Hijaz. Muhammad Ali's bid to bring the Sudan under Egyptian control in the 1820s posed the first real challenge to Ottoman authority in the ports. Between 1846 and 1849 Egypt leased Suakin and Massawa from the sultan, but it was not until 1865, in the reign of Ismail, that the Ottomans ceded the ports to Egypt. Throughout the Mahdist era, Egyptian forces, eventually augmented by British troops, successfully held Suakin. In 1885, however, Italy occupied Massawa, subsequently turning the city into a base for the conquest of its Eritrean hinterland. Thus at the turn of the century, Italy and Great Britain, clearly the two foremost European powers in the Red Sea, each controlled a traditionally important west coast port. The city of Suakin occupied a small island just off the mainland, to which it was connected by a short, narrow causeway. As might be expected of a vibrant commercial center, its population in the late 19th century was cosmopolitan. Over the years, generations of immigrants from the Arabian Peninsula had mingled with the descendants of both the original Sudanese settlers and the Turks. A sizeable contingent of merchants with origins in Yemen, Hadramawt, the Hijaz, India, Syria, and Greece maintained businesses in Suakin, exporting gum, ivory, and ostrich feathers in return for cloth, tea, coffee, tobacco, and foodstuffs. A floating population of Egyptian soldiers and bureaucrats also resided at Suakin, and at the pilgrimage season the population of the island and the adjacent mainland community swelled to far more than its usual 8,000 persons.1 The Condominium government's decision to build a railway from the Nile Valley to the Red Sea at Suakin seemed to cement the city's position as the most important urban center in eastern Sudan. Surveys for the new line began in 1901. Over the next two years Suakin took on the appearance of a boom town as the Sudan Government Railways (SGR) imported