This article was downloaded by: [151.42.46.80] On: 07 January 2013, At: 14:26 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcas20 Identity, history and power in the historiography of Sudan: some thoughts on Holt and Daly's A History of Modern Sudan a Elena Vezzadini a Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway To cite this article: Elena Vezzadini (2012): Identity, history and power in the historiography of Sudan: some thoughts on Holt and Daly's A History of Modern Sudan , Canadian Journal of African Studies/La Revue canadienne des études africaines, 46:3, 439-451 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2012.737533 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines Vol. 46, No. 3, December 2012, 439–451 REVIEW ARTICLE / E´TUDE BIBLIOGRAPHIQUE Identity, history and power in the historiography of Sudan: some thoughts on Holt and Daly’s A History of Modern Sudan Elena Vezzadini* Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway (Received 4 October 2012; final version received 2 November 2012) Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 One of the most authoritative works of Sudanese historiography, written by two leading historians in the field, P. M. Holt and M. W. Daly, A History of the Modern Sudan (6th ed. Pearson. 2011. xii þ 199 pp.) might rather be considered as the history of modern Sudan. In fact, students and academics who wish to become acquainted with Sudanese history will most probably begin their journey with this book, as I myself did. It has had an immense impact both inside and outside its field, and has been a source of information not only for Sudanese experts, but also for NGOs, practitioners and the media. It is sufficient just to take a look at popular websites such as the Library of Congress Country Studies1 or the United Nations Information Gateway2 on Sudan to see this point. This review has therefore been shaped by my own experience as a young historian writing about the social history of the colonial period. On many occasions during my career as a researcher I have had to deal with the persistence and wide dissemination of the historical paradigms proposed by the book. I also had to observe the extent to which it has had the unfortunate – and certainly unintended – consequence of flattening out the complexity and richness of the Sudanese past. Perhaps the most important objective of this review is therefore not so much to address the Holt and Daly book per se, but to expose some of the underlying premises and fundamental paradigms that inform it, and to stress the importance of questioning them if we as historians wish to capture this complexity. The late Peter M. Holt was an Orientalist of rare erudition. He was a former member of the Sudan Political Service, and later a Professor at the University of London, and pioneered the study of Mahdist rule in Sudan (1885 –1898). Martin W. Daly is the leading authority on the colonial history of Sudan. With his distinctive style, a mixture of sharpness, irony and extreme precision (historians often refer to his books to verify incorrect information written by distracted colonial officials), his two major works on the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, Imperial Sudan (1991) and Empire on the Nile (2000), are, in the words of one historian, the “seal of the history of the Sudanese Condominium” (Grandin, 1990, 522).3 The influence of these two historians, who are exceptional in many *Email: elena.vezzadini@ahkr.uib.no ISSN 0008-3968 print/ISSN 1923-3051 online q 2012 Canadian Association of African Studies (CAAS) http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2012.737533 http://www.tandfonline.com  440 E. Vezzadini ways, is such that they have become a sort of role model for all the later generations of researchers.4 Indeed, this book represents a considerable achievement, in that it provides a summary of more than 1400 years of Sudanese history in fewer than 200 pages. It has a tight structure. It is divided into five parts: part one (pp. 1– 32) begins with a short introduction on the land and its people, and then describes the initial contacts of the Sudanese with Islam and the Arabs, as they moved southwards from Egypt in the seventh century, setting in motion the process of Arabization in Sudan. The parallel process of Islamization accelerated at the end of the Middle Ages with the establishment of two sub-Saharan kingdoms, the Sultanate of Sinnar (in the sixteenth century) and the Sultanate of Dar Fur (in the seventeenth century), ruled by Muslim dynasties. Parts two to four (pp. 33 –112) focus on modern Sudan and its two colonial periods, the first of these being the era of Turco-Egyptian rule (known as the Turkiyya, 1821 –1885), and the second that of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899 – 1956). Between them came the interlude of the Mahdiyya (1885 –1898), which began with a millenaristic Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 revolution led by the Mahdi5 Muhammad Ahmad, which severed Sudan from Egypt. The Mahdist revolution prepared the ground for the idea of Sudan as an independent nation-state. Part five (pp. 113 –178) covers the period after the independence of Sudan in 1956. The intense years from 1956 to 2010 were marked by three military dictatorships, each more violent and destructive than the other (Abboud, 1958– 1964, Nimeiri 1969-1985 and the current Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, since 1989), by three short periods of democracy (1956 –58, 1964 –69 and 1985– 89), and above all by wars: the guerrilla war followed by the civil war in the South, which started even before independence (1955 – 2005, with an interlude of peace between 1972 and 1983),6 and then, more recently, the civil war in Darfur, which officially broke out in 2003. The book was published too early to include the resumption of civil war on the Blue Nile and in the Nuba Mountains following the independence of the South on 9 July 2011, but it does include the general elections of 2010, which were won by the National Congress Party led by President al-Bashir. The book has a long history. This is the sixth edition of a volume that was first published by Peter Holt in 1961. Martin Daly began to co-author the book with the third edition of 1979, which included major revisions “in the light of the more copious source materials and greater body of research now available”.7 However, later editions (published in 1988, 2000 and 2011) principally updated the book to include political developments in new chapters. For example, the main difference between the fifth edition of 2000 and the sixth of 2011 is the presence of a longer chapter on the National Islamic Front, and a new chapter on the new millennium. Compared to the previous edition of 2000, the chapters have either been simply abridged or left untouched and they do not incorporate recent historical works produced during the last twenty years, except in the bibliography. Some examples of these, although my list is far from being exhaustive, are Sikainga’s Slaves into Workers (1996), Abduallhi Ali Ibrahim’s Manichean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary and Islamic Renewal in the Sudan, 1898-1985 (2008) and Sharkey’s Living with Colonialism (2003), just to mention works published in English.8 Despite this absence of thorough revisions, the book is still considered to be one of the most comprehensive summaries of Sudanese history, hence the publication of a sixth edition. To my eyes, there are two explanations for this. The first relates to the book’s intrinsic qualities. It is written in a way that remains a model for many historians, with its detached tone, careful structure and great attention to detail: it is, indeed, the work of two  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines 441 passionate and committed historians, who have dedicated their careers to Sudan. The second reason, as I will argue in this article, is that the book reinforces the way in which we are accustomed to thinking about Sudan, and makes us feel comfortable with it. I will return to this point in my conclusion. In this review, I will seek to demonstrate that this book actually grounds the existing hierarchical order of society in history. In other words, while it is indeed the history of Sudan, it is, in fact, the history of a specific group of people, the elites of Khartoum and of riverain Sudan, and it presents them as the principal agents and actors in Sudanese history. Parts of my argument are not new. For example, in his review of the fifth edition published in 2000, J. Willis writes: This book reads then, very much as the history of the Sudanese state, understood as a unique phenomenon. . . . This is a narrative in which conquest is called pacification . . . and in which coming to history is identified with subordination to a state whose forms and political orientation were northern, riverain and Islamic. (Willis 2001) Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 But Willis’ review, like other, earlier ones (Spaulding and Kapteijns, 1991), has not succeeded in undermining the historical paradigm communicated by the book. This is why I believe it is now necessary to try again, and to add some arguments based on my own experience. In the following sections, I will discuss three important ideas that subsume the narration of events in Holt and Daly’s A History of Modern Sudan. First, the book seems to forget that there is a difference between identity and history: it seems to maintain that, when the Arabs came to Sudan in the Middle Ages, some Sudanese became Arabs, and still are today. Second, they collapse social hierarchies into historiographical categories. Thus, theirs is a history of “important” people and “important tribes”. Third, as their narrative draws closer to the present day, the authors seems more to search whom to blame, rather than to attempt to understand the complexities of present-day Sudan. It would be appropriate to remind ourselves that this book is a political, and not a social, history of the country. However, there is a difference between writing a political history and writing a history of the powerful. To write a political history that includes reflections on both the complexity of the country and the agency and trajectories of ordinary men and women would mean allowing historians to embrace a new genre of historical work which makes a genuine attempt to reflect the richness of this country and of its past. The coming of civilization to Sudan It is often acknowledged that the tendency of classical historiography to identify the beginnings of the history of Sudan with the coming of Islam is flawed. However, considering how difficult debunking this idea has proven, and the number of times this paradigm has been evoked, the question is worth discussing again, and developing further. In their introductory section to the book, “The Land and the People” (pp. 1 –9), the authors describe the process by which, starting from the seventh century, Arab tribes from the Arabic peninsula moved into Northern Sudan, and as a result of that process, certain groups can be called Arabs today, and the others not: The arabization of the Northern Sudan resulted from the penetration of the region by tribes who had already migrated from Arabia to Upper Egypt. . . . With certain comparatively minor exceptions, those Northern Sudanese who claim Arab descent belong to one or other of two extensive, if somewhat artificial, divisions: the arabized Nubians . . . ; and the mainly nomadic or seminomadic Juhayna Group. (p. 3)9  442 E. Vezzadini In taking this position, the authors follow older, established narratives about Sudanese “arabization” (for example, Harold MacMichael (1967 [1922]) and Yusuf Fadl Hassan (1967)). However, the dividing line between Arab and non-Arab is far from clear in this work. First, the use of Arabic as a language is clearly not enough to make people Arabs: for instance, the authors explain that the Arabic-speaking Funj, the ruling dynasty of the Sultanate of Sinnar, were not Arabs but an autochthonous group, and yet they claimed descent from the family of the Prophet (p. 22ff). However, it is a well-known fact that it is very difficult to find any ethnic Muslim group in Northern Sudan that does not claim to be ancestrally connected to the family of the Prophet Muhammad in one way or another; this is as true of those Sudanese who are labelled today as “Arabs” as it is of those considered to be “Africans”. The legend of the “wise stranger”, the foreigner who settles down in a community, marries the daughter of the ruler and, through teaching Islam, takes over leadership of the community (causing it to switch from matrilinearity to patrilinearity), has spread throughout this area.10 This idea is crucial because it is associated not only with religious beliefs, but also with well- Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 entrenched mechanisms of legitimacy and distribution of power in these communities.11 But then if everybody claims to have an Arab “pedigree” (pp. 3, 6),12 why, then, are certain ethnic groups eligible to be Arabs and others not? More generally, why do historians continue to talk of the Arabization of Sudan, and never of the Sudanization of Arabs? While groups within which Arab immigrants intermarried were so permeable that they became “Arabs”, the contrary is hardly ever discussed. To say that Arab migrants were absorbed into local structures, that they became “Sudanized”, is an obvious – yet overlooked – aspect of this movement of population. In addition, the Arabization paradigm depicts this process as unilinear: once “arabization” had taken place, some time between the seventh and sixteenth centuries, people’s identities became permanently fixed. For example, in the book, the Ababda, a sub-group of the Hadendowa, speak Arabic and claim an Arab pedigree; they are “Arabized” or perhaps “Arabizing” and yet they do not belong to the category of “Arab tribes” (pp. 6 –7).13 The non-permeability of the categories of Arabs and non-Arabs is made clear in sentences such as: “[A]lthough surrounded by a flood of immigrant Arab tribes, [the Fur] succeeded in establishing a dynastic Muslim state which was not finally extinguished until 1916” (p. 7). This implies a clear-cut separation between what “Fur” is and the rest of the “Arab tribes” that precludes the very possibility of changes in identity, and dismisses the interconnection between the Fur people and their neighbours. Several anthropologists and historians have noted that the main differences among groups in Darfur can be better described in terms of livelihood and access to resources, rather than to “arabness” or a lack of it (De Waal, 2005). It is not my intention here to maintain that people who claim to be Arab are not “really” so; instead, my rather obvious point is that no identity claim is beyond history.14 To recognize the Arabness of a group does not mean rooting this identity in a timeless past. In a way, a group became Arab when it started to claim that it was. A comparison with the idea of nation might prove useful here: to say that the idea of nation is constructed and affects our perception of the past does not make the category of national identity any less real or less pertinent to everyday life, and yet it highlights the fact that nations are born in a past time much closer to ours than the image they convey, and that the very meaning of nation and nationhood changes over time.15 In Sudanese history, various historians have tried to understand the circumstances under which the idea of the “arabness” of the Northern Sudanese began to be meaningful (such as in McHugh, 1994; Ewald, 1990; Spaulding, 1985), but their work has not  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines 443 managed to eradicate the essentialist paradigm that the Northern Sudanese have an Arab past. It is equally important to emphasize that “being Arab” is not only a notion that has evolved through history but also takes on very different meanings according to who is endorsing it. The identification of Sudan as an Arab country has been downplayed at certain stages, while at others it has re-emerged. For instance, during the dictatorship of Nimeiri (1969 – 1985), who actively promoted North – South dialogue during the initial period of his rule, the idea that Sudan was as Arab as it was African emerged more visibly. Similarly, works such as those of Manger on the Nuba Mountains (1994 ) or Wendy James on Southern Funj (1988) show that Arabization is a process that advances at certain times, and retreats at others. Insightful studies such as these are absent from this work, however, just as they are in other popular political histories of modern or contemporary Sudan, such as Collins (2008). The tendency to treat the Arab/non-Arab divide as a fundamental truth in Sudan’s past has obfuscated more than it has explained. There are two themes in particular that have been obscured by this paradigm: Southern Sudan as a historical subject, and the extent to Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 which Sudan has been shaped by migration. If historians are to overcome the Arabization paradigm, they must deal with these two topics more seriously. Looking at the country from the point of view of its Arabization and Islamization means that the farther we go from the centres of diffusion of “civilization”, the less we know about the rest of Sudan, except as a victim of more or less violent involvement from the North. The most noteworthy absentee in all this is the South, and yet this is hardly because of an absence of literature on the subject: one just needs to consider the works of Richard Gray (1961) and, more recently, of Stephanie Beswick (2004) on pre-colonial Southern Sudan; that of the Sandersons on politics and education in the South in the twentieth century (Sanderson and Sanderson, 1981); the broad scholarship of the late Robert O. Collins on colonial and post-colonial Sudan and South Sudan (1971, 1975, 1983, 2005, etc.); and the works on war, which are too numerous to be quoted here.16 In the book under review nothing is known about Southern Sudan prior to Turco- Egyptian rule. The South becomes a historical subject only as a slaving frontier during the Turkiyya, as a marginalized periphery during the Condominium and as a site of civil war after that. The absence of the South as a historical subject is obviously not a consequence of a lack of knowledge on the part of the authors, but rather of the historical paradigm that has drastically reduced the history of the South to a history of war and violence. The second theme that is overlooked by the Arabization paradigm is that of internal and external migrations. The former historical phenomenon is becoming better known: archaeologists and linguists have brought to light the significance of the internal spread of the autochthonous Nilotic people (generally called Nuba or Nubian in archaeological sources) as the most significant component of the human geography of the country. The second aspect is less often acknowledged the arrival of the Arabs was but one of the many significant migrations that have taken place in Sudan, at least since the Middle Ages, which is the time when migrations were first recorded. This is immediately evident when one thinks of the geographical position of the country at the crossroad of three continents: Africa, Europe (via Egypt) and Asia. It was a particularly important territory for transit because of its proximity to the Red Sea and Mecca. For centuries now, Sudan has seen a constant flow of pilgrims from the whole of the Sahel. In particular, the land route that passed the southern outskirts of the Sahara and that crossed central Sudan across central Sudan was the favourite path of poorer pilgrims, compared to the faster and more prestigious north-south caravan routes (such as that which connected Wester Africa to Kanem-Bornu, Kawar, the Fezzan, Awjila, Cairo and Mecca). (Birks, 1977; Delmet, 1994;  444 E. Vezzadini Yamba, 1995; Schmitz, 2000).17 Many of these people settled in Sudan permanently and married locally.18 In addition, traders travelled to Sudan from the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Maghreb, Ethiopia and the east coast of the Arabic Peninsula because of the important caravan routes across Sudan that linked the Sahel to Egypt and the Red Sea. Another crucial movement of populations was that of enslaved people from Ethiopia and the margins of the Sudanic states. Slave armies and slave administrators were a pillar of the Sultanates of both Dar Fur and Sinnar, even more so during Turco-Egyptian times. Even during the Condominium, and until the 1920s, the battalions of the Egyptian Army consisted primarily of Southerners and Nuba soldiers. The signs of all these other types of migration are concealed within classical historical narratives. Those ethnic groups in Northern Sudan that assert that they are Arab are so because this is their claimed identity, rather than due to the migration of Arabs to Sudan. An additional layer of complexity needs to be added to this process of identification: being Arab takes on different meanings according to what group is making the claim, be it a local community, the Sudanese upper class, for whom Arabness is a form of legitimizing high culture, or a Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 government such as the current one, which manipulates it as a ‘divide and rule’ tool.19 Peoples without history Many of those who would define themselves as upper-class Sudanese of Arab descent share another belief about the nature of society and politics: that in order to be involved in politics, one needs to come from an “important family” which belongs to an “important tribe”. In a way, it is considered natural that people from notable families should rule: history has proved the political aptitude of these families, as they have distinguished themselves either politically or religiously, or both, on a number of occasions (especially during the “heroic ages” of the Mahdiyya or Turco-Egyptian rule). In this way, history serves to reveal and confirm what we is already known: that origin makes destiny. At the time of the Anglo- Egyptian Condominium, the views of colonial officers were quite consistent with this. The assumption that it is the political history of these “important tribes” that is the driving force behind Sudanese history as a whole is also an underlying theme of this book. As an example of this kind of presupposition, let us consider the way in which the authors narrate the history of the development of nationalism, starting from the Revolution of 1924, which was an episode of anti-colonial insurgency informed by a nationalist ideology, and which significantly weakened Egyptian partnership in the Condominium. I have chosen this particular episode since it is my own area of expertise; I have encountered the historical paradigm expressed in this book on innumerable occasions. For Holt and Daly, the political opposition was of two sorts during the 1924 crisis: low-status and high-status. This first dichotomy is multiplied endless times in a series of oppositions, and, thus, low- status politicians are also described as radical, unrepresentative, “detribalized”, disorganized and failures: “The shadowy ‘leagues’ and ‘unions’ had very limited appeal, and were composed mainly of ex-NCOs and clerks, and prominently Muslim Southerners. They had no tribal basis and lacked mass support” (p. 93). On the other hand, high-status Sudanese are described thus: “Less obtrusive but far more important were government officials, officers and merchants, of higher social origins, who were unwilling to place their future unrestrictedly in British hands” (p. 93). This more respectable group would eventually take the country to independence. According to this interpretation, political success is equated with moderation, education and, above all, higher social origins; moreover, noble descent and high culture are almost synonymous. This kind of narrative obscures the fact, however, that there was no social difference between one group of the  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines 445 1924 activists, defined here as “clerks”, and those who would later become the protagonists of the independence struggle: several key politicians of independent Sudan, such as Prime Minister Abdallah Khalil, took part in the 1924 insurgency. The second prominent social group in 1924 was drawn from the army. These “ex-NCOs” were actually ranking officers from the Egyptian Army, many of whom – albeit not all – were descendants of slaves. This group belonged to a cultural and political elite, due both to their education and to their important position in the Sudanese government as officers of the Egyptian Army (Vezzadini 2008, 2012). These representations of the 1924 Revolution reveal the way in which the predominance of a certain kind of elite is essentialized and legitimized by means of a selective representation of the past. Another glaring example of the authors’ view of elites as almost the only political actors may be discovered in a further foundational narrative about Sudanese nationalism: that of the influence of the two religious sectarian leaders of Northern Sudan, Sayyid ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, spiritual heir of the Mahdi and leader of the Ansar, on the one hand, and Sayyid ‘Ali al-Mirghani, religious head of the Khatmi Sufi tariqa, on the other.20 Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 For Holt and Daly, from the late 1930s the national movement grew under the shadow of one of these sectarian leaders or the other (Chapter 10, “The Development of Sudanese Nationalism”, pp. 99 – 108). In addition, the sectarianism of politics is seen as one of the main causes of the failure of Sudanese democracy (part five, “Independent Sudan”). The influence of the two sayyids in Sudanese history cannot be questioned. However, the complexity of politics in the country has been gravely compressed by reducing political history to that of the conflict between Khatmi’s National Unionist Party (later called the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP), and the Ansar’s Umma Party. The many details on the squabbles between the two contrast sharply with the book’s silence on any other political agent. The attention paid to the DUP and the Umma Party is understandable, because during the three short democratic interludes (1956–1958, 1964–69 and 1985–89), the majority of the electorate voted for one of the sectarian religious parties or the other.21 However, the DUP and the Umma, far from being monolithic parties, should be seen as umbrella organizations that were also able to represent interests that were very far from those of their leaders. For instance, Sikainga writes of a political association of people of Southern descent living in Khartoum called the Black Block, which %also included several sons of 1924 officers. After a time, the Black Block disintegrated, and a section of its members who were striving for a more effective political strategy joined the Umma (Sikainga, 1996, 169–170). Similarly, the Umma had a women’s branch, as women sought to gain political influence through their support for the party.22 There was vibrant political life beyond the Umma and the DUP as well: a host of different parties have been represented in Parliament since 1956, including several Southern regional parties, the Communist Party and the Muslim Brotherhood (Willis and al-Batthani, 2010).23Also Holt and Daly observe a high level of grassroots activism. For instance, they mention that “by 1953, it was estimated that some 100,000 Sudanese were unionized” (p. 107); indeed, the Sudanese trade unions with close links to the Communists were among the strongest on the continent (see Warburg, 1978; Niblock, 1987), and yet the Communists, together with the Muslim Brotherhood, are quickly labelled by the authors as an extremist group (p. 120), and their fortunes and misfortunes are reviewed all too rapidly, so that the reader is left wondering about their actual social impact. My third and final point is that the level of attention to elite politics goes hand in hand with another blind spot: the simplistic way in which religion is associated with mass politics, because of the customary difficulty authors generally experience in seeing the masses as “modern” political agents. In this book, as in several political narratives on modern Sudan (for example, Warburg, 2003; Collins, 2008), the fact that during the three  446 E. Vezzadini democratic interludes the majority of Sudanese voted for one or the other of the sectarian parties appears not to be considered worthy of discussion, as if to vote according to one’s faith were a natural phenomenon. What is troubling about this interpretation is that it portrays religious beliefs as being something above and beyond the reach of human beings, something that acts on them. Instead, religion in politics may, in fact, serve to articulate a political discourse, to provide a basis for political claims, to legitimate or invalidate political groups, or to voice needs and dissent. In short, religion is a dynamic force that can be combined with a political agenda, but it is not a causative force per se. The most powerful example of this may be seen in the latest election of 2010, which was a serious debacle for the traditional sectarian parties, to the benefit not only of the National Congress Party – the party of the current president, Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir – but also of a completely new party in Northern Sudan, the SPLM-North, which has a secular base, and which won more than the 20% of the vote. The DUP, on the other hand, had less than 2%, and the Umma less than 1%.24 The sectarian parties and their historical leaders, such as Sadiq al-Mahdi, have lost Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 political influence, in spite of the fact that people do continue to be affiliated with the Ansar or the Mirghaniyya. This clearly shows that religious affiliation cannot explain people’s political choices on its own. And the multi-layered and complex reasons behind such choices throughout the history of twentieth-century Sudan are still to be uncovered. A tale of blame and politics We have seen that, in A History of the Sudan, the political elites are identified as the main agents of history, and its narrative reflects their perspectives in many ways. However, it should not be inferred from this that the authors adopt a compliant and uncritical attitude towards them. In most of the work, all kinds of elite, be they Turco-Egyptian, Sudanese or British, are exposed to criticism, and the authors offer a nuanced view of the shortcomings and strengths of each (see, for instance, their assessment of the Mahdist rulers, pp. 81 –82). However, starting with the section that describes the ascent of Nimeiri to power (1969), the tone of the book suddenly changes. In this section, a proliferation of derogatory adjectives is used to describe Sudanese politicians. At the time of the fall of Nimeiri, demoralized and without credibility, its opponents’ energies were spent in irrelevant ideological debate and personal intrigue . . . . Through 1984 the regime lurched from one crisis to another, it seemed to many that the end was at last in sight. Yet still no clear focus of opposition, no party, interest group or individual emerged to challenge Nimeiri directly. (p. 140) If this had been the true situation, one wonders how the Sudanese could have found the strength to organize the wave of strikes described in the same passage, which took place in April of the same year – strikes that were bloodily crushed. Chapter 15, which discusses the history of the National Islamic Front regime from 1989 to 2010 (pp. 148 – 160), is even more damning: for the authors, the period is a long dark age. The regime is described as brutal but weak (p. 165): it was unable to reach the masses (“attempts to broaden the popular base of the regime were transparently self- serving” [p. 150]); it gained “pariah status” in international relations due to its “self- defeating support of Iraq’s conquest” (p. 151); it was militarily inept, as its military capabilities were, at least at the outset, “confused and unimaginative” (p. 150); and so on. These attributes are not reserved for those in power, but are also ascribed to the opposition, which is described as being equally dismaying and chronically divided. For example, the opposition that was formed after the al-Bashir coup is described thus: “The effectiveness of the NDA [National Democratic Alliance] was vitiated by its political heterogeneity and  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines 447 personal ambitions; members were irreconcilable over Sharı¯‘a, and a fac¸ade of unity was permitted only by a programme of obfuscating platitudes” (p. 150). Similarly, for the authors, it was not the “mumbo-jumbo” of the regime’s ideology but the “inefficacity of its opponents” (p. 161) that kept the National Islamic Front in power. Finally, the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement, the main opposition party in the South, is described in this way after the Nasir split in 1991: “While old ethnic tensions were revived in support of each rebel faction and indeed degenerated even into intra-tribal civil war . . . there was often nothing but egoism dividing various rebel leaders” (p. 153).25 Sudan is therefore portrayed as being trapped in a spiral of evil caused by irrational and unrestrained politicians who are motivated only by self-interest, and who condemn the country to disaster. This view emerges very clearly in the last chapter, which describes the peace process in the period between the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005 and the 2010 elections, but which was written before the referendum that marked the independence of the South in 2011. It reflects the scepticism of the many international observers who doubt that things will ever go well in Sudanese politics: Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 Few observers, in or out of the Sudan, expected a peaceful process, and speculation was rampant about which of a dozen possible scenarios – each ending in the cancellation of the referendum and renewal of civil war – was most likely. (p. 171) A vision of the last 40 years of Sudanese history such as this is far from being unique to the authors; on the contrary, it is widespread among many humanitarian practitioners and Sudan experts, and this is why I believe it is important to reveal its flaws. On the one hand, this attitude is more than understandable: the Khartoum regimes, and in particular the latest one, have acted ruthlessly towards society at large, and even more so towards its peripheries. In particular, since the second civil war (1983 –2005), the country has experienced an unprecedented degree of devastation, with millions of displaced Sudanese and war-related deaths.26 Considering the immensity of the tragedies that have plagued Sudan since independence, the authors’ pessimism regarding the future of the country, and their anger at what successive governments have inflicted on its citizens, are more than understandable. However, this attitude transforms history in a teleology of disaster. According to this approach, the past becomes a place where to seek for the causes of the country’s many calamities. However, what is being sought in the past is in reality already known, because origins create destiny. This type of process has unfortunate consequences: first, only certain elements of the past are worthy of note, because the past is interesting mostly to demonstrate the accountability of Sudan’s politicians and to reveal all the lurid details of a murderous quest for power. Second, attention to complexities and nuances is unnecessary, and multi-causality, structural conjunctures and, once again, the agency of the common people hardly enter into the equation. For example, Daly (the last addition was written after P. M. Holt passed away) describes the Darfur crisis thus: “Khartoum’s empowerment of, and alliance with, Arab Janjaweed terrorists was the response of a weak but brutal regime to the desperate self-defence of the long-suffering ‘African’ (Fur, Masalit) population” (p. 165).27 Since September 11, the use of terms such as “Arab terrorists” is laden with political implications, and does not seem to be appropriate here, because the Janjaweed have little in common with al-Qaida. Furthermore, the politicization of Arabness in Darfur is very recent, and is connected to a process set in motion by a complex conjuncture in which a multitude of factors interacted (the famine and drought situation, interference from the war between Libya and Chad, Libya’s training of armed militia of unemployed Darfuri youth who had been indoctrinated with an Arabist and racist ideology, and the return of this militia to a Darfur that had been severely hit by a drought, during which thousands died of starvation).28  448 E. Vezzadini Another problem lies in seeing the cause of the country’s tragedies in the ineptitude of its politicians, so that people irremediably become victims of the irresponsibility of their leaders. One example will suffice: the authors seem to link the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood to the political acumen and strategies of its leader, Hassan al-Turabi. While it is often maintained that the chameleon-like qualities of this politician have turned a small, unimportant party of “extremists” into a mass party (p. 149), in reality Turabi’s success has rested less on his political talent than on the fact that he has formed a political organization that was, and still is, able to attract the masses. In other words, people were not duped by him, but chose him because his programmes were more meaningful to them than those of the traditional parties. Similarly, politicians in the North may have wished for and organized the civil war with the South, but it was the common people who fought it. The authors never discuss which circumstances and which ideology made people embrace the “jihad against the South” (p. 150), as Khartoum depicted it. On the other side of the coin, if politicians are irremediably evil, in this book the people appear to be trapped in their own tribal destinies. For instance, during the period of the Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 third democratic government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, “the government armed Baqqara militias in the west. These murahalin reverted to the ways of their ancestors and raided into the Southern provinces, with devastating effects” (p. 144). Baqqara and Rizaiqat nomads must carry out raids, Dinka must submit to them and history is something that forever repeats itself. Every book reflects the times in which it is produced, and A History of Modern Sudan is no exception. Its shortcomings are associated with the story of historiography in Sudan and the African continent: namely, the long-lasting closeness of the relationship between colonial and post-colonial historiographies and the degree of attention paid to local elites as the makers of the nation, which was typical of early Africanist historians. To this I would add the difficulty historians, and not only them experience with making sense of Sudan’s tragic present. Why, then, does this book remain an essential reading, in spite of the fact that it does not integrate new trends in Sudanese history, and in African history generally? I believe that it would be more appropriate to address this question to the academic community that is doing work on Sudan. On the one hand, the book has no competitors, which may relate to the situation of Sudan Studies, as the country has attracted comparatively less research than other neighbouring areas such as Egypt or Ethiopia. On the other hand, the paradigm presented by the book is continually reinforced by the way in which many observers and experts continue to view the country. Holt and Daly’s book is a comforting work, one that provides sustenance to the beliefs about Sudan’s past and present that are widespread in the West, and, to some extent, among Sudanese, too. These include the so- called backwardness of rural communities, the deep-rootedness and inalterability of social hierarchies, the tribal organization of society and, the perception that Islam is the causative agent of politics above all, the idea that Sudan, like all of Africa, has a violent destiny. For so long as no historian takes up the challenge of writing a new history of Sudan, we will continue to read Holt and Daly’fine work, which to date remains the best and most comprehensive review of Sudanese history. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Noah Salomon, Øystein Rolandsen, Jay Spaulding, Anders Bjørkelo and Mohanad Hashim for their insightful comments. The views expressed in this article are, however, solely my responsibility.  Canadian Journal of African Studies / La Revue canadienne des e´tudes africaines 449 Notes 1. See, for instance, the page on Sudanese nationalism in the Library of Congress Country Studies, at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?frd/cstdy:@field%28DOCID þ sd0029%29, accessed on 25.9.2012. 2. http://www.unsudanig.org/new_gateway/sudan/index.php#history, accessed on 25.9.2012. 3. “Pour conclure cette imposante etude, qui paraıˆt bien devoir eˆtre, pour le moment du moins, le ‘sceau’ de la recherche´ sur l’histoire du Condominium . . . .” Translation of the reviewer. 4. This expression is taken from Lamothe (2011, xi). 5. In Islam, the Mahdi is a millenaristic figure who will come at the end of time to re-establish the kingdom of justice on earth. This figure is particularly central to Shia Islam, but also exists in Sunni Islam, which is the branch followed in Sudan. 6. For a different view on the beginnings of the civil war, see Rolandsen (2011). 7. Holt and Daly (2000, “Preface to the Third Edition”, xi). 8. In Arabic, see for instance Fadwa Abd al-Rahman Ali Taha (2004). 9. Where only the page numbers are indicated, they refer to the book being reviewed. 10. A few examples: the wise stranger is connected to the royal dynasties of Darfur and Sinnar (Holt, 1963; O’Fahey, 1973; Ewald, 1985). Downloaded by [151.42.46.80] at 14:26 07 January 2013 11. For a similar argument, see Spaulding (2000); for an opposite view about the historicity of genealogy, see Lobban (1983). 12. This word was often used to describe genealogies of Sudanese. See, for instance, MacMichael (1967 [1922]). 13. In the context of African studies, the word “tribe” is carefully avoided because of its racist connotations, but it is still widespread in Middle Eastern history, although the tendency in the latest historiography of Sudan is to eschew it. This confirms that Sudan stands at the crossroads of two disciplines. In this book, a more critical use of the term “tribe” would have been desirable. 14. For this question, see the useful introduction of McHugh (1994, 1 – 32). 15. This oft-quoted sentence of Renan is enlightening, if applied to Arabness: “Oblivion, indeed I would even go as far as to say historical error, is a most essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies often puts nationality in danger” (Renan 1990, 11). The italics are mine. 16. For a comprehensive bibliography on Southern Sudan, see Tvedt (2005). 17. I wish to thank Re´mi Dewie`re, CEMAf-University of Paris 1, for drawing my attention to this point. 18. For the twentieth century, there are several good works that study the settlement of “West Africans” – of Fallata – in Sudan. See, for instance, Duffield (1981, 1983) and the more controversial Balamoan (1981). 19. For an enlightening comparison in Eastern Africa, see Glassmann (1995, 2004). 20. See, for example, Warburg (2003), Sidahmed (1996), Abu Hasabu (1995), and many others. This interpretation has become even more popular on the one hand since September 11, and on the other following the growing popularity of the National Islamic Front since the 1970s, and political Islam has become one of the preferred topics of research on Sudan. For an interesting comparison between the two, see Ronen (2007). 21. However, in the last election of the third democratic period in 1986, the Muslim Brotherhood saw a significant increase in the number of votes it received. 22. The literature is rather scarce, but see Hale (1997). 23. I am grateful to Øystein Rolandsen for having brought the presence of a number of Southern parties to my attention. 24. Dr Noah Salomon reminded me of this point. For an overview of the results, see BBC News, “Dream election result for Sudan’s President Bashir”, James Copnall, Khartoum, 27 April 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8645661.stm. 25. The italics are mine. 26. Guess estimates usually indicate 2 million war-related deaths, and 4 million internally and externally displaced people. 27. The italics are mine, except for the word “janjaweed”, which was in italics in the text. 28. See, in particular, De Waal (2005), Manger (2006a, 2006b) and Takana (2008).  450 E. Vezzadini Notes on contributor Elena Vezzadini is a research fellow at the Department of History, Archaeology, Religion and Cultural Studies (AHKR) at the University of Bergen, with a research grant from the Norwegian Research Council. She is also a research affiliate of the Center for African Studies (CEAf), EHESS, Paris. She has earned her PhD at the University of Bergen in 2008. Her main research focuses on the social history of colonial Sudan (nationalism, the army, labour, slavery, etc). Bibliography ‘Ali Taha, Fadwa Abd al-Rahman. 2004. 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