Self-Determining Sudan
By THOMAS HODGKIN ETURNING to the Sudan after six years I was glad to find the Sudanese as friendly and full of vitality as I had remembered them. It was pleasant to travel on a bus from the airport with a student, on his way home from the University of the Punjab, who explained that solu- tions to all African problems could be deduced from a few self-evident first principles; pleasant to be picked up in the low dive in which the bus deposited me by a serious Moslem, who expressed regret to hear that I was an unbeliever, and offered me a pinch of strong snuff; pleasant to sit in the sunshine in a cafe beside the mosque, listening to simple little Egyptian love songs played fortissimo on the gramophone—' I am happy this beautiful morning : you are life, and I love life.' In the course of six years of rapid political change many who were comparatively humble have become great: leaders of opposi- tion parties on whom the police kept a careful eye have become Ministers; schoolteachers have become members of Parliament; promising students have become distinguished civil servants, newspaper editors and university lecturers. But they have not, on the whole, become pompous or stiff. Sitting in the Cultural Centre (an invention of the late Sir Douglas Newbold—an admirable place in which to drink coffee and meet your friends) in the evening, listening to Sudanese of very divergent opinions—Umma and Unionists, Radicals and Tories —discussing the Trade Union movement, I wondered what it was that made them so rational in their attitude to politics. Partly, perhaps, a tradition of social equality, with its roots in the village and the family; partly their intellectual curiosity, stimulated by a couple of generations of good teachers. There is no doubt about the political capacity of the Sudanese. One test of this capacity, during the next two or three transitional years, will naturally be their handling of relations with Egypt. The mistake which many British made in the past was to imagine that a vote for Al-Azhari meant a vote for Egypt. What in fact gave Al-Azhari's National Unionist Party its driving force, and its appeal to the young intelligentsia, was not its Egyptian connections, but the fear that ' self-government for the Sudan' might turn out to mean a marriage between the dynastic ambitions of Salyid Abder-rahman Al-Mandi and the imperial interests of Britain. ' We didn't want to become another Trans-Jordan' was how 1, Yahia Al-Fadli, Minister for Social Affairs and National Guidance and one of Al-Azhari's chief lieutenants, expressed it. But now, as Yahia Al-Fadli agreed, the situation is trans- formed. The defeat of the Umma Party, which enjoyed the moral support of Saiyid Abder-rahman, in the recent elections, and the party's lack of an efficient machine, make it unlikely that 'SAR for king,' or even SAR for President,' could be a successful rallying cry in the immediate future. And even the most sceptical Sudanese recognise that the withdrawal of British military and political power is now almost an accom- plished fact. The process of self-determination has already begun. Far from being disillusioned about the prospects of parliamentary democracy, politically minded Sudanese are in the main optimistic about its possibilities, and not at all likely to be attracted by the alternative of government by a military junta. Sudanese civil servants, with new and interesting careers ahead of them, are equally unlikely to wish to be sub- ordinated to an Egyptian bureaucracy.
In the altered circumstances the idea of union (in any normal sense of the word) with Egypt has lost its former attraction. Special arrangements with Egypt there are bound to be (the Nile makes them inevitable), but no Sudanese with whom I talked seemed to expect, or want, these to involve any limitation on the power of the Sudan to behave as an independent State. The parallel of India's relations with Britain is quoted; not Scotland's relations with England. Leaders of both Government and Opposition are well aware of the need for the Sudan to function as an African as well as a Middle Eastern Power. (Both were represented last mont at the opening of the new Gold Coast House of Assembly. Its common frontiers with Ethiopia, Uganda, the Belgia Congo and French Equatorial Africa, are strong arguments against the Sudan becoming too deeply involved in Arab League politics.
Egyptian propaganda ? Its influence can be greatly exaggerated. People listen, of course, to the Sudanese prod gramme from Radio Cairo, but more for the music than the matter. Sudanese Ministers sometimes find it embarrassing, since propaganda, about British conspiracies in Darfur can be interpreted as implying that the Government doesn't know its job. I talked to a senior Egyptian officer in Khartoum, whose main point was that from 1924 till 1953 Egypt was virtually out of the Sudan. The Egyptians, he argued, had neither the resources nor the ability to produce in three years a mord profound effect on the minds of the Sudanese than that pro+ duced by British administrators and teachers over a generation. ' After me the deluge' is the normal way in which manY responsible officials regard the consequences of their elimina' tion. Whether the deluge ever in fact occurs depends partly on how you define a deluge. The Sudanese—Ministers included—are quite ready to admit that some temporary lower• ing of administrative 'standards is bound to follow the Sudanisation of the Political Service and the sudden withdrawal of some 140 senior British officials. But they would also agree with the cheerful view expressed by Mohammed Ahmed l' Mahgoub, leader of the Opposition in the House of Represen' a tatives, that ' any Sudanese with common sense can fill the a vacancies in the administration, army and police." (Besides, t' many of the decisions which most affect the lives of ordinal (1 people don't depend upon the professional administrators, but 1' upon elected local councils, which will carry on their functions as before.) What worries the Sudanese, as it worried Mahgoub, is not the Political Service but the position of the European technicians—agriculturalists, railwaymen, irrigation experts, and so on. While the Government has made dear that it wants these technicians to stay, it has, by the terms of its recent Com. pensation Ordinance, been obliged to give some of them 3 financial inducement to go. No one can blame the technician who, in the interests of his family and his future, decides to take his money and seek a fresh job. But if this happens 00 a large scale, neither the Sudan nor Britain will benefit—'
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