Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Research Articles

The League of Nations and the post-Ottoman recolonization of the Nile Valley: The imperial Matryoshka of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1922–1924

AbstractThis article addresses the Anglo-Egyptian dispute over Sudan following the Ottoman defeat in World War One and Cairo’s nominal independence in 1922. Drawing from Foreign Office documents, League of Nations archives, Egyptian parliamentary records and contemporary academic jurisprudence, it traces the failed Egyptian attempt to activate the settlement mechanisms of the Covenant after the assassination of the British governor of Sudan. In parallel, the article investigates the British preparations to face international arbitration, including the hypothetical request for a League mandate over Sudan. Through Cairo’s and London’s perceptions, we can grasp the global reach of the Geneva organization beyond its limited membership and agency. Although the League undertook no measures, the possibility of its intervention triggered competing legal arguments, as well as rival discourses of Egyptian and Sudanese self-determination. Thus, this essay sheds light on a recolonization process pre-dating World War Two. The clash of British and Egyptian imperial projects in the Nile Valley warns historians against forcing a teleology of the end of empire on the interwar roots of decolonization.

Culex/ mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) recorded along the Nile River in central and northern Sudan, with a key for the identification of all species of the genus known to occur in the country.

Despite the importance of Culex species as major vectors of Rift Valley fever virus, West Nile virus and the microfilariae that cause lymphatic filariasis, information on these mosquitoes in Sudan is limited to works published 65 years ago in the former Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where some species were only recorded from areas of the territory now known as South Sudan. In this paper, we provide updated information on Culex mosquitoes collected indoors during surveillance studies conducted along the Nile River in central and northern areas of Sudan between 2012 and 2019. Of 3,411 female mosquitoes collected in Khartoum and northern states along the river, 2,560 (75%) were specimens of Culex belonging to 12 species: Cx. (Culex) antennatus (Becker, 1903), Cx. (Cux.) laticinctus Edwards, 1913, Cx. (Cux.) neavei Theobald, 1906, Cx. (Cux.) pipiens Linnaeus, 1758, Cx. (Cux.) perexiguus Theobald, 1903, Cx. (Cux.) poicilipes (Theobald, 1903), Cx. (Cux.) quinquefasciatus Say, 1823, Cx. (Cux.) simpsoni Theobald, 1905, Cx. (Cux.) sinaiticus Kirkpatrick, 1925, Cx. (Cux.) theileri Theobald, 1903, Cx. (Cux.) tritaeniorhynchus Giles, 1901 and Cx. (Culiciomyia) macfiei Edwards, 1923. This is the first record for Cx. tritaeniorhynchus and Cx. macfiei in central Sudan. The relative abundance of each species varied in different areas and seasons, but Cx. antennatus and Cx. quinquefasciatus were the most abundant indoor resting species. We provide an updated dichotomous key for the identification of the adults of Culex mosquitoes known to occur in the Republic of the Sudan.

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: William (Bill) Kennedy, 9 September 1924-September 1934

William Kennedy was born in Scotland in 1884 and was elected a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (MRCVS) in 1908. Working in British East Africa (now largely Kenya) in the years before the First World War (!914-1918) as a Veterinary Officer he was in part responsible for ensuring the health of livestock moving from the northern Masai areas to a southern reserve and preventing disease being transmitted to the herds of white settlers. Kennedy served in the East African Veterinary Corps as a Major throughout the war, was on the Staff of the Commander in Chief when Britain was fighting the armed forces of German East Africa and where his main concern was to ensure the health of the large number of riding and transport animals. He was three times Mentioned in Despatches and awarded the Distinguished Service Order. After the war he was successively acting and then Chief Veterinary Officer of the Kenya Colony and Protectorate, issuing numerous proclamations designed to control rinderpest, contagious bovine pleuro-pneumonia and foot and mouth disease. Leaving Kenya in 1924 he was appointed Director of Veterinary Services in Sudan, the first civilian to occupy the position. He served in Sudan until 1934 during a period when disease identification, diagnosis and control made great progress. Honoured with the award of the Order of the Nile Third Class by the King of Egypt, he retired to England and died there aged 80 in 1965.

The curious case of Bakht er Ruda: liberal education, freedom and other technologies of colonial government

Drawing on the literature on governmentality, recent studies of colonial power emphasize the role of sovereign power and discipline as the means of creating obedient subjects in the exercise and maintenance of colonial rule. Through examining educational materials of the Bakht er Ruda educational institute of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and its work in liberalizing education, this essay argues for the significance of liberal technologies of rule as modes of exercising power and securing colonial rule over the natives. Specifically, we will look at two aspects of Bakht er Ruda’s programme. Through a close reading of colonial era documents, we will first examine the use of school societies as a means of training the Sudanese into a harmonious and orderly social whole through the interiorization of a set of norms, bringing together ideas and practices relating to freedom and responsibility. Secondly, we look at the introduction of psychology as a language and set of techniques utilized by the institute in the construction of political subjects skilled in the self-regulation of desires and actions necessary for the free and responsible subject, upon which liberalism as a strategy of power depends.

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Claude Percy Fisher (Director 1940-1944), 1918-1944

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Claude Percy Fisher (Director 1940-1944), 1918-1944

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Leonard Danels (Director, 16 December 1922-19 June 1924), 1913-1924

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Leonard Danels (Director, 16 December 1922-19 June 1924), 1913-1924

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Sampson Charles Jenkin Bennett (Assistant Director and Senior Research Officer 1936-1944), 1925-1944

Directors of veterinary services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Sampson Charles Jenkin Bennett (Assistant Director and Senior Research Officer 1936-1944), 1925-1944

Before the Bright Star: football in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

ABSTRACTSouth Sudan’s independence was accompanied by the creation of a new national football team and its entry into the Federation of International Football Association (FIFA). Despite Sudan’s football history, there has not been much inquiry into the game’s growth and importance in Southern Sudan. This article analyzes football’s development in Southern Sudan during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium era (1899–1956). In Northern Sudan it was featured in Khartoum’s Gordon College and the Sudan Football Association. In the South, football was played at Christian mission sites; locations that aimed to challenge the spread of Islam. As the British sought to separate the North from the South, the encouragement of football in each region was a point of unity in a divisive colonial agenda; one that planted seeds of conflict for the postcolonial state.

A Surrealist Writer’s Diary of a Twenty-One-Month Anthropological Expedition

A Surrealist Writer’s Diary of a Twenty-One-Month Anthropological Expedition

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Frederick Ulysses Carr, 1908-1917 (Principal Veterinary Officer to 1910)

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Frederick Ulysses Carr, 1908-1917 (Principal Veterinary Officer to 1910)

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Frederick Ulysses Carr, 1908-1917 (Principal Veterinary Officer to 1910)

Directors of Veterinary Services in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: Frederick Ulysses Carr, 1908-1917 (Principal Veterinary Officer to 1910)

The Purposes of Land Settlement in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1914: Drawing Paths through the Weeds

ABSTRACTThis article examines the programme of land surveying and registration that was undertaken by the British-led administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the period 1898–1914. The Legal Secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, stated that programme was the most important project of his division in this period. Scholars have shown that the programme, known as land ‘settlement’, was used to build alliances with elites and to clarify title for European investors in the new irrigation scheme at Gezira. This article argues that, as such, the ambitions of land settlement were relatively limited. In many other colonies, and in Britain itself, politicians and administrators across the political spectrum saw the reform of private property in land as the key for addressing structural problems in agricultural labour. One might have thought that, the Sudan, land settlement might have provided a means of addressing the dependence on slave labour in agriculture. The article demonstrates that, except for a small number of administrators (including Bonham Carter), this was not the case. The general indifference to slavery itself carried through to an indifference to the transformative potential of land law. The article examines the proposals of this minority of administrators, and contrasts their views with the majority’s focus on land settlement as demonstration and opportunity to enhance state power.

The colonial linguistics of governance in Sudan: the Rejaf Language Conference, 1928

This paper explores the discursive history of ‘language-making’ in the context of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, focusing on a significant colonial moment of standardisation: The Rejaf Language Conference (RLC) of 1928. Through inspecting the report of the proceedings of the RLC, the paper contends that this institutional event contributed to the construction of racial and regional differences by, then: (1) being informed by scientific theories of racial categorisation as an epistemological basis for creating a stratified local sociolinguistic system; (2) with a Eurocentric audience design, inventing ‘technical versions’ of ‘local vernaculars’ and ‘language groups’ imbued with specific indexical values, anchored to specific localities and social identities; (3) relationally, vernacularising Arabic by reworking its ideological load and orthographic order determined by a colonial economy of education; (4) artefactualising a pluralistic image of the society as an effect and function of institutional linguistic classification of forms tied to specific localities and people; and (5) resulting in the planned absence of a perceived ‘indigenous’ lingua franca in the Southern Sudan. The RLC as a relatively regimented format, characterised by a rationalised absence of the ‘local voice’, was one of the significant contexts in which the very disciplinary identity of linguistics was rationalised, resisted, and maintained.

Setting the scene of the crime: the colonial archive, history, and racialisation of the 1924 revolution in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillot's “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.

Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome and Dr Andrew Balfour: an enterprise on the Nile and the early foundation of public health and medical research in the Sudan (1899-1935).

In Sudan, modern medical practice and medical research began soon after the creation of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan at the turn of the 20th century. The benevolent involvement of Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome, and the ingenious feat of his protégé Sir Andrew Balfour, was crucial to the strong foundation of that establishment. Sir Henry Wellcome provided the financial sponsorship plus influential, logistical and moral support. Dr Balfour put great energy into making the enterprise one of the most amazing medical achievements in colonial medicine. Improvement in the public health of the capital Khartoum was emulated by other doctors working in this vast country. Research was not restricted to tropical medicine; it also encompassed agricultural and chemical research. This helped with the establishment of the first modern medical school in the country in 1924 and resulted in the medical service in Sudan being described as one of the best in the world. Many British doctors flocked to Sudan to make a fortune and to set a path for their career back in Britain.

The biological exploration of Darfur, 1799–1998

Darfur covers an area in excess of 400,000 square kilometres in the west of the Republic of Sudan. The Sultanate of Darfur was an independent entity for eight centuries. Three “outsiders” in the sultanate commented on its biology before its annexation by Egypt in the 1870s. A naturalist accompanied the Egyptian invasion but the area was overrun by Mahdist forces in 1883, then reverted to independence in 1898 before incorporation into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1916. No outsiders entered Darfur in the period 1883–1916 but information from spies and informers on wildlife and trade in products appeared in Sudan government reports. The period 1916–1955 produced considerable information from officers in the Sudan Political Service (SPS) and from travellers as a by-product of voyages of geographical discovery. After independence in 1956 biological discovery continued with data gathered, especially on the vegetation and its ecology, through rural development projects by their staff as part of their duties and for animal life through the personal interests of some staff: there were also field trips by Sudanese and foreign universities. There has been little new information since the 1980s and it seems there will be restricted future new knowledge. Darfur's biological importance derives from its range of ecosystems, from northern deserts to southern deciduous woodland, because it forms a bridge between west and east and because of the isolated massif of Jebel Marra. Biologically it has been, and is being, affected by human population expansion, spread of cultivation, civil strife and climatic vagary. The combined effects of these factors have had a mainly negative effect on larger mammals, birds and the composition and productivity of the vegetation.

The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan

The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan

The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: From Collaboration Mechanism to Party Politics, 1898–1956

This article examines the features of the collaboration mechanism that permitted a handful of Anglo-Egyptian colonial officers to incorporate tribal shaykhs and educated Sudanese into the structure of the colonial regime (1898–1956) and manipulate religious leaders and merchants to function in harmony with the government's objectives. It discusses how the Khartoum policy-makers maintained a wide scope of choices in shifting their support from one client to another along the lines of their political agendas. It investigates the gradual shift from collaboration mechanism to party politics, highlighting the response of the Khartoum policy-makers and the Sudanese nationalists who were largely influenced by the divergent attitudes of London and Cairo towards the future of the Sudan, and that of Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani and Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi who had a widespread influence on Sudanese society. The distinctive features of the pre-independence political discourse are examined in terms of the support that the colonised (i.e. the Umma and the National Unionist parties) received from the colonisers (Britain and Egypt) in order to run their election campaigns in 1953 and pave the way for post-independence political roles. Thus, the collaborative relationship between the colonisers and colonised reflects the uniqueness of the case of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the history of British colonialism in Africa and the drive of African nationalists towards decolonisation.

Crossing the line: 100 years of the North-West Uganda/South Sudan border

This article looks at the complex history of the border area between what is now North-West Uganda, the Equatoria region of South Sudan, and the North-East Democratic Republic of Congo, over pre-colonial, colonial and post colonial periods. In the early colonial period, international borders changed several times, and local people found themselves successively part of King Leopold's Belgian Congo, Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Sudan, and the Uganda Protectorate. Cross-border movements included European adventurers, slave armies and ivory poachers, who periodically terrorised local populations. As “West Nile” district, colonial North-West Uganda was systematically underdeveloped, and became a labour reserve and a major source of army recruitment (epitomised by the characteristic local figure of Idi Amin). In the post-colonial era, movement over the borders has been characterised by large-scale cross-border informal trade, refugee movements, armed rebel groups, and the region's continued marginalisation from more economically developed and politically powerful parts of the three countries. The article explores changes and continuities in the salience of these borders over the past century and a half.

Business Failure, Capital Investment and Information: Mining Companies in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1900–13

Investment in mining enterprises in the British Empire was popular in the period 1880–1914 despite the high-risk nature of the business and the presence of unscrupulous company promoters who sought only pecuniary gain; most mining companies failed. This article examines the reasons for the failure of mining companies in Sudan to 1913, using this analysis to explore the importance of information for mining investment, the role of business and social networks in the formation of mining companies, the relationship between business and colonial government, and the ‘gentlemanly’ nature of the City of London as a financial centre with reference to the provision of capital and related specialist mining services. The main reason for the failure of mining in Sudan was deficient information on which investment decisions were based, related to inaccurate notions of mineral wealth located in the colony. Nevertheless, the dynamism of the City at this time can partly be explained by the ability to tease out commercial opportunity in the most marginal of locations with the minimum of capital outlay.