The Changing Sudan
By VERNON BARTLETT FROM the terrace of the Grand Hotel one looks across the Blue Nile (as yellow as the Blue Danube) to a sandy plain, beyond which rise the mosques of Omdurman. The avenue flanking the river outside the hotel—an avenue that is a tunnel beneath the interlocking branches of the ban- yan trees—is called after Kitchener. A few hundred yards along it is the White Palace, on the steps of which General Gordon was murdered by the followers of the Mandi. The port of call on the White Nile for B.O.A.C. flying boats is called " Gordon's Tree," although there is now no tree to be seen, and it is doubtful whether he ever sat under one when it was there. Even the names of the streets in Khartoum remind one of the romantic days when the soldiers of the Queen marched about in their scarlet tunics to secure order and obedience throughout her Empire.
Things have changed. The son of the Mandi is now so closely linked with the British that the Egyptians allege a British plot to make him King of the Sudan. The boy who sells one stamps at the post office must be descended from the Fuzzie-Wuzzies who harassed Kitchener in the Red Sea hills. Many of the servants in the hotel have negroid features which suggest that their parents or grandparents were brought from the southern Sudan as slaves. At all hours of the day and night airways buses bring to the hotel passengers who have just flown over desert too harsh even for bedouins, or jungle still crowded with wild game, or the great marshes of the Sudd, in southern Sudan, where the White Nile is so clogged up that—until it can be bypassed by the proposed new canal—evaporation will continue to rob this thirsty land of half its flow.
In this fantastically rapid opening-up of Africa the Sudan seems, at first glance, to have been spared most of the major difficulties. Unlike the other countries in the eastern half of the continent, it has no large infiltration of Indians to form a layer of tradesmen and minor civil servants which hinders the emergence of the Africans themselves. Co-operation between the Sudanese and their British officials is much closer than in the ordinary Colonial Service, and one is far less conscious of a colour bar than in other British African terri- tories. The Sudanese are now so far along the road to self government that they have a Legislative Assembly (copied faithfully from the House of Commons) and an Executive Council in which they already supply half the ministers.
But the Sudan has difficulties of its own, which are accen- tuated by this approach to independence. The Sennar Dam, built in 1925 across the Blue Nile, permitted the development of a cotton industry which assures considerable prosperity to the Sudanese as long as the price of long-staple cotton remains high. But they might be so much more prosperous if the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium by which they are still gov- erned allowed them the use of more of the Nile water that flows though their immense territory (one quarter of the area of Europe).
Egypt, however, needs the Nile even more than does the Sudan, the southern half of which can depend upon rainfall. The merest suggestion of Sudanese independence therefore causes deep alarm to the Egyptians. Partly through their own fault—for most Egyptian officials consider it rather a disgrace to serve in the Sudan—the Condominium is, in fact, government by the British. This they naturally resent as they also resent the way in which Sudanese are being educated to replace British in the higher milks of the civil service. Indeed, in their eyes, British rule is the lesser of two evils for, if the Condominium were to be replaced by Sudanese indepen- dence, they would no longer be sure of their steady supply of water, now guaranteed to them by British treaty. They are therefore tarrying out a campaign of ferocious propaganda designed to replace Condominium, not by Sudanese indepen- dence, but by Egyptian control.
The Sudanese, on their side, fear that, in the absence of British protection, the Nile would be used far more than it is now for the benefit of the Egyptians—and in so slow-moving a river a new dam may destroy the pathetically narrow strips of cultivation along its shores for hundreds of miles upstream. The Nile is so important to both Egyptians and Sudanese that neither dare trust the other.
Since the British can give them both what they really need —a steady water supply to the Egyptians and protection to the Sudanese—one might expect British rule to be welcomed.
And so it would be were it not for the existence of two " holy men " who between them command the allegiance of nearly all the Sudanese Moslems. One is Sayed Abdul Rahman el Mandi, son of the Mandi whose armies caused Gordon's death ; the other is Sayed Ali el Mirghani, whose family was exiled and persecuted for its refusal to join the Mandist campaign. The former probably has the fewer followers, but he is able and ambitious, and might in other circumstances have been an excellent King of the Sudan. The latter is much less inter- ested in politics, but he leads the orthodox Moslems and is therefore more closely in touch with Egypt.
Thus the Mirghanists, whose hostility to the Mandi half a century ago made them traditionally pro-British, now listen with increasing readiness to the anti-British campaign from Egypt, and for that reason they boycotted the elections eighteen months ago to the first Sudanese Legislative Assembly.
And the Mandists, who fought fanatically against Kitchener's superior arms—it was at Omdurman that the Maxim gun was used for the first time—are vociferous in their support of the British policy for Sudanese self-development. Their only complaint is that progress towards independence is far too slow. And, to complicate matters, certain Egyptians are busily encouraging Sudanese nationalism against the British, although they have so much reason to fear that it would ultimately turn against themselves.
The British problem is a difficult one. The Legislative Assembly is proving successful, and in particular the harassing of Ministers at " question time " must make the Mirghanists wonder whether they were wise to boycott the last elections. There is a belief, therefore, that they might take part in next ones. But if progress towards independence were accelerated, the Mandists, who now supply the members of this Assembly, would be so strengthened that the Mirghanists would be driven • back into their non-co-operative opposition.
Such difficulties are to be found wherever the yeast of nationalism is working. They can be solved by patience and good sense, and have been so solved in India, Ceylon and elsewhere. But the strategic importance of Egypt is a disturbing factor—it might seem sensible for the British Government to make concessions to the Egyptians over the Sudan in return for some Egyptian concession over defence. These responsibilities, seized by our grandfathers in the days of expansive imperialism, are now so embarrassing ; their maintenance can so easily be attacked as reactionary.
But there are at least three reasons why, whatever the urgency of an Anglo-Egyptian military agreement, there should be no weakening of British policy in the Sudan.. One, most Sudanese are better off than most Egyptians, and should not be subjected to a system of government which keeps the mass of the people in such poverty. Two, the Sudan should ultimately be governed by the Sudanese\ themselves, and responsibility is being placed on their shoulders even faster than they can be trained to bear it.. Three, one-third of the Sudanese are very primitive Nilotics in the extreme south, who belong geographically rather to Kenya and Uganda than to the Sudan and to whom both Mirghanists and Mandists are apt to refer contemptuously as slaves. " Imperialism " is a nasty crime, but desertion of the weak and helpless is a worsa one.
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