Darfur

Flogging, humiliation and extortion contributed to the everyday culture of violence that marked British colonial rule in Darfur. Chris Vaughan builds a persuasive case for this claim while drawing on reports, diaries, memoirs and letters from the British National Archives, the Sudan Archive at Durham University and the National Records Office in Khartoum. He focuses on the four decades after 1916, when British military authorities, with locally-recruited, Baqqara Arab ‘friendlies’ (p. 59), invaded Darfur, overthrew its last sultan, Ali Dinar, and incorporated the region into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Vaughan also considers the nineteenth-century antecedents to British rule, and connects his story to the early twenty-first century wars that ravaged Darfur after 2003. Taking this long view, the book argues that a succession of ‘incoherent’ (p. 6) but rapacious states (including the British colonial state) contributed to patterns of destabilisation while seeding conflict as a tactic of rule. This book grew from Vaughan’s doctoral thesis in African history at the University of Durham. It pays close attention to the institution of colonial chieftaincy, which arose from the British colonial policy of ‘Native Administration’ or ‘indirect rule’. In this regard, Vaughan draws inspiration from the research of Cherry Leonardi and Justin Willis, his Durham advisors, who studied chieftaincy elsewhere in the Sudan. In Darfur, this policy led to the appointment and empowerment of strongmen who went by various titles—malik, shartay, nazir and so on. Their mandates included meting out justice (or injustice, sometimes by concocting ‘Sharia’ and ‘customary’ laws to their advantage), rounding up labourers and soldiers for colonial state service, and collecting taxes. Owing their positions more to invention than tradition, chiefs became linchpins of colonial rule

Ancient history · Colonial rule · Colonialism · Economic history · Economic Justice · Humiliation · Indirect rule · Injustice · Memoir · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · African history and culture analysis · Global Peace and Security Dynamics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law