The Southern Funj of the Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian Rule 1900–1933

Abstract

This paper reviews political and administrative developments in the southern Funj, a region on the Ethiopian borderlands of the Sudan, during the first thirty years of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. It arises out of historical and ethnographic research among the people of the Ingessana Hills, one of a diverse congeries of small ethnic groups in the region. Ingessana culture was not the outcome of a self-contained history detached and isolated from the wider region but, on the contrary, the consequence of a long and deep engagement of a particular kind. In the process of defending themselves from subordination, Ingessana culture and religious institutions came to reflect precisely those forces, which included invading imperial powers from the North such as the Funj Kingdom, followed by Turco-Egyptian rule, the Mahdist state, and then the Condominium. These circumstances, though often inchoate from the perspective of the people, should be identified as enduring and as having appropriately hostile and unpredictable characteristics. There is relatively little material in the public domain about the early decades of Anglo-Egyptian rule in the southern Funj. Yet this era is crucial toward understanding the historical formation of Ingessana society. This paper sets out to put on record some evidence for the later part of that history in order to assess the continuities and discontinuities of local government rule in the southern Funj. The evidence presented here suggests that for the first thirty years of the century there were considerable continuities from the nineteenth century in terms of the actualities of local government in the southern Funj. The question of continuities and discontinuities relates to the second purpose of the paper, which has to do with the history of British rule at the local level in Africa. The issue of ‘the colonial inheritance’ has a peculiarly ambiguous resonance here due to enduring aspects of the old Turco-Egyptian apparatus at the level of local government, which in some cases may have continued through Mahdist rule. The southern Funj presents a particularly complex ethnic, political, and administrative situation due to its location in the Ethiopian marshes and the fact that part of the administrative boundary of Southern Fung District has always also been an international frontier. On the Ethiopian side of the frontier Muslim rulers at various times enjoyed degrees of independence from, or acknowledged allegiance to, powers in the Sudan or in Ethiopia, according to political expediency. The international boundary was agreed by a treaty signed in Addis Ababa in 1902. Yet despite the hostilities arising out of, or amplified by, this international frontier, the boundary line itself has endured as one of the least disputed in Africa.