The Colonial Mission
The Making of the Modern Sudan. By K. D. D. Henderson. (Faber and Faber. 30s.) THERE has recently, and unexpectedly, emerged from the voluminous, enshrouding folds of a series entitled "Colonial and Comparative Studies" the life of a man, humane, vigorous, conscious always of the compelling urgency of his colonial mission, who was in many ways synonymous with the making of the modern -Sudan. It is no theoretical study of colonial administration. It is the study of government through the eyes of a governor, a governor of a country part Moslem, part pagan, much of it desert, swamp and jungle, that lies midway between dark Africa and the lighter airs of the Mediter- ranean and which has only recently emerged from a comparatively quiet and sheltered childhood to become a prey to its northern neighbour, Egypt. The guardian of that childhood for a good deal more than a quarter of a century has been the Sudan Political Service. It would be hard to find a man more typical of the high qualities of that service than the late Sir Douglas Newbold, whose life and letters form the subject of Mr. Henderson's book. I 1 The chief value of the documents which Mr. Henderson has so well and so unobtrusively linked together will be as a source book for students. But with the fate of the Sudan now hanging in the balance, this book has a more immediate interest. From these letters—and Newbold was both a tireless and a vivid correspondent—even the casual reader will gain a new insight into the events that have grown so relentlessly into the present tangled situation. Whether as a district commissioner among the camel-riding Beja of the Eastern Desert, as Governor among the Nuba of Kordofan, or as Civil Secretary in Khartoum, in the bureaucratic atmosphere he had always hated, the basic problem for Newbold the administrator was the same. It was to find ways and means of putting into practice the guiding principles, Indirect Rule, Devolution, and Native Admini- stration. Local units, relics of the earlier paternal days, had to be Welded into federations capable of handling their own finances. Possible opposition from a growing urban intelligentsia had to be countered by a drive for wider rural education.. Then, with the wider horizon of the Civil Secretary's office which Newbold held from 1939 until his premature death in 1945, came the first demands for Sudanese self-determination which complicated still further the Sudan's delicate relations with Egypt. His sooner had Newbold become Civil Secretary than war broke out. His first anxiety; naturally, was for the safety of the country, then Bo scantily defended, against the multitudinous Italian armies crowding along the eastern frontier. With defeat turned somehow into victory, the internal crisis broke. Encouraged by promises of new freedoms under the Atlantic Charter and by Stafford Cripps's Prophecies of a new place for the Sudan in the post-war era, the (' Graduates Congress in April, 1942, presented their demands, headed ! by a claim for early self-determination. Newbold's reply was blunt, Uncompromising, disciplinarian. The class, in fact, was called to order. The result of this brusque reaction, according to his critics, Was to reinforce the existing sectarian divisions within the country and to drive the extremists into the arms of Egypt. No doubt, Miss Perham says in her admirable preface to Mr. Henderson's . book, there were reasons in mitigation: the prior urgency of the war Itself, the overstrain due to mounting work and lack of staff and lack of leave that accelerated, if it did not cause, Newbold's death; ,, genuine doubt, perhaps, whether the Graduates Congress was as Lally representative of the Sudanese public as it claimed to be. In ny event, Newbold was first and foremost representing the views of the Sudan Government and the Sudan Government in its earlier days had not always been as progressive as it had been benevolent. I,. .is strange, indeed, as Miss Perham remarks, that in the later thirties after the first movement towards freedom and national BAelketerznination had shown itself, following the signing of the V.'nglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, no representative Council of notables had been set up through which the opinions of the Sudanese could have been consulted or made known. The treaty itself contained generous clauses about the welfare of the Sudanese. On these, the Sudanese do not seem to have been consulted at all.
The position of Egypt, equal partner with Great Britain in the Condominium, may come as something of a revelation to those who do not know the background of Mr. Henderson's book. The Egyptian flag was flown side by side with the Union Jack, Egypt's rights to the Nile waters' were scrupulously observed but, beyond that, it was mainly a matter of keeping Egypt out and of protecting the Sudanese from her machinations. It was an attitude regrettable but probably inevitable. In the Sudan, memories of the murder of Lee Stack in Cairo and of the Egyptian part in the Sudan mutinies of 1924 died hard. In Egypt, bitterness at her continued exclusion increased. And Newbold no doubt reflected official opinion in the Sudan when he showed himself unmoved by any proposals for concessions to Egypt, even those psychological concessions tentatively suggested by Miss Perham which might have done something to bridge the ever-widening gulf.
Mixed in with Newbold's political letters and memoranda are accounts of remarkable desert journeys, erudite notes and lectures on archaeology, on tribal history, on geography. Through them all, one senses the excitement and romance which coloured the colonial adventure of this outstanding official. "The Colonial Service," Newbold wrote to a friend, "needs romantics particularly. It was romantics who put down the slave trade and stopped child labour in factories and climbed Everest and found the Poles." That should be a stimulating text to hang in the world's colonial offices.
L. P. KIRWAN.
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