A review of Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy
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Historical background
To understand fully today’s popular protests, we need to look all the way back to the Sudan’s colonial past. Post-independence conflicts in Sudan were largely caused by ethnic divisions created by the British colonial administration between 1899 and 1956. “Divide and rule” policies pursued by the British continue to haunt contemporary Sudan, both north and south.
During most of the colonial period (1899-1956), Sudan was ruled as two Sudans. The British separated the predominantly Muslim and Arabic-speaking north from the multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multilingual south.
Britian’s “divide-and-rule” policy separated southern Sudanese provinces from the rest of the country and slowed down their economic and social development. The British authorities claimed that the south was not ready to open up to the modern world. At the same time, the British heavily invested in the Arab north, modernizing and liberalizing political and economic institutions and improving social, educational, and health services. Western regions of Sudan, such as Darfur, were also neglected during this time.
The condominium’s educational policies reflected the separation of north from south. The British, until 1947, developed a government school system in the north, while Christian missionaries undertook educational matters in the south.
The British placed northern riverine peoples in positions of power and authority, specifically the Shaigiyya, Jailiyyin, and Dongola groups. These groups continue to wield power and influence today. Al-Bashir is from the Jailiyyin group. Consequently, the British created a social hierarchy in Sudan that resulted in distrust, fear, and conflict between the various Sudanese peoples.
The British encouraged Islamization and Arabization of the north through financial help for building mosques and pilgrimage travel for Muslims. In southern Sudan, however, Christian missionaries attempted to prevent the spread of Islam and to preserve a way of life they considered more authentic. Some scholars maintain that the British planned to attach southern Sudan to British East Africa, a British protectorate that became Kenya.
Another colonial experiment that slowed down development of southern Sudan was the “indirect rule” policy. In order to prevent an educated urban class and religious leaders from influencing social and political life in southern Sudan, the British authorities gave “power” to the tribal leaders and ruled through them. While the divide-and-rule policy separated the north and south, indirect rule divided the south into hundreds of informal chiefdoms.
The period of British rule in the south proved to be the longest the nation experienced without invasion or the large-scale use of force. However, while the British had prevented the oppression and exploitation of the southern Sudanese by their northern countrymen, they did little to help the south develop economically or otherwise participate in the modern world. Regional differences resulted in a deeply divided and economically differentiated Sudan—an Arab-dominated north, economically and politically stronger than the underdeveloped African south. (full article by Kim Searcy, June 2019)
During the colonial era, the struggle against the joint British-Egyptian occupation of Sudan tended to subsume or suppress conflicts between parts of Sudanese society that hoped to either maintain or undo these patterns of uneven development. However, they exploded during the 1960s under the independent state with the emergence of armed movements in the South demanding redress for decades of economic inequality and political marginalisation. With incomes in the South only one third of the level in the central provinces, the economic basis for these grievances was plain to see. The army officers led by Ja’afar al-Nimeiri who seized power in 1969 attempted to solve “the Southern Question” by building a state that would manage the resources of the South through investment in large-scale agricultural projects and at the same time offer those Southern political and military leaders who were prepared to ally with them a place within the system. Strongly influenced by the state capitalist regimes of the Soviet bloc and by similar attempts taking place in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Libya to solve the problems of uneven development through massive state investment in agriculture and industry, the Nimeiri regime, however, initially also held out the promise of redistribution of some wealth to the periphery through parallel state investment in public services and social development projects.
Within barely ten years, Nimeiri’s project was foundering, and he began to look for new allies inside Sudan and ways to reorient his economic policies towards more dynamic hubs of capital accumulation, in particular the powerful regional bloc of capital emerging in the Gulf.
Nimeiri was unable to ride out the storms, which saw the downfall of his regime in a wave of mass protests in strikes in 1985, but the military-Islamist alliance survived and took power again in 1989 with Omar El Bashir’s successful coup. (full article is by Anne Alexander, March 2020)
From a broader perspective the political scientist Jack Goldstone … suggests that the Arab Spring followed the same pattern as any other revolution, beginning with socioeconomic strain and elite opposition, followed by popular anger, shared views, and benefit of favorable international relations. He predicted that they “will unfold as all revolutions do” with “ongoing struggles for power between radicals and moderates.” It is true that the Arab uprisings had similar preconditions, which tell us about revolution as movement or the way a revolutionary mobilization develops. They do not tell us about revolution as change or the outcome, nor do they reveal the ideology, vision, or choice of organization that has a crucial bearing on the outcome. Did the notion of radicals and moderates have any meaningful relevance in the experiences of Egypt, Tunisia, or Yemen? Where were the radicals, and was the role they played similar to those in the French, Russian, or Iranian revolutions? (Asef Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, 2017, p. 15)
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