Politics in the Southern Sudan

Bibliographic Data

ID6028802
AuthorsJohn Howell (0000-0001-6814-2345, University of Khartoum, corresponding author)
Year1973
Volume72
Issue287
Pages163-178
Publication date1973-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9909 • E-ISSN: 1468-2621
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a096358
OpenAlexW2100330988
LanguageEN
Citations received8

As A 'PROBLEM', the Southern Sudan was barely recognized until the years immediately after the second world war. Up to that time, British policy towards the Southern Sudan had been formed largely by colonial civil servants acting in what they considered to be the best interests of the indigenous population. In the years after 1945, however, British policy towards the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and hence its Southern provinces, became increasingly bound up with post-imperial strategy and, in particular, with the desire to maintain a degree of amnity with Egypt and thus protect the Suez route to the Far East. At the same time, the movement for self-determination in the Sudan could not be forestalled by the British, whose major policy aim had become the establishment of a united state as independent as possible of Egypt. In the face of Northern nationalist pressure and the vagaries of Foreign Office realpolitik, the old 'Southern Policy', of excluding Northern influence and administering the Southern provinces virtually as a separate entity, clearly had to be dropped. It had never been a particularly successful policy anyway. As an occupying administration, the British had administered considerably more territory than their nineteenth century predecessors, the Egyptians and the Mahdists. But until the 1920s it was a crude military occupation, and subsequently a strategy of Indirect Rule foundered against the failure to find suitably powerful and effective local collaborators.1 This attempt to extend administration through native authorities was not simply based on British parsimony. The more idealistic administrators saw the Southern Sudan as an area devastated by the nineteenth century slave trade from the north: thus the re-creation of a stable political order would depend on the restoration of a discipline and authority which many tribes appeared to have lost in the decades of ravage and plunder. It seemed only logical therefore that Northern (that is Arab and Islamic) influence should be eliminated from the South while this hoped-for tribal renaissance took place. This colonial 'romanticism' owed something, of course, to an innate prejudice against the more sophisticated and self-reliant Northerner, and there was occasionally talk of detaching the South completely and joining John Howell is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Khartoum. His other published work on Sudanese politics has ranged from local government to foreign policy. 1. For a stimulating discussion of British policy, see G. M. A. Bakheit, British Administration and Sudanese Nationalism 1919-39, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, (St John's College, Cambridge, 1965). Also of interest is an essay by R. O. Collins on 'Autocracy and Democracy in the Southern Sudan: the rise and fall of the chiefs' courts'in, A. Rivkin, ed., Nations by Design (New York, 1964)

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