The Kingdom of Kush
The Kingdom of Kush or Kush (/kʊʃ, kʌʃ/) was an ancient African kingdom situated on the confluences of the Blue Nile, White Nile and River Atbara in what is now the Republic of Sudan.
The kingdom of Kush
Despite the Egyptian presence in Upper Nubia, the indigenous culture of the region continued to flourish. This culture was deeply influenced by African peoples in the south and was little changed by the proximity of Egyptian garrisons or the imports of luxury articles by Egyptian traders. Indeed, the Egyptianization of Nubia appears to actually have been enhanced during the decline in Egypt’s political control over Nubia in the Second Intermediate Period (c. 1630–1540 BCE), when Nubians were employed in large numbers as mercenaries against the Asian Hyksos invaders of Egypt. This experience did more to introduce Egyptian culture, which the mercenaries absorbed while fighting in Egyptian armies, than did the preceding centuries of Egyptian military occupation. Conversely, the presence of these mercenaries in Egypt contributed to the growing African influence within Egyptian culture.The defeat of the Hyksos was the result of a national rising of the Egyptians who, once they had expelled the Hyksos from the Nile valley, turned their energies southward to reestablish the military occupation of Nubia that the Hyksos invasion had disrupted. Under Thutmose I (reigned 1493–c. 1482 BCE) the Egyptian conquest of the northern Sudan was completed as far as Kurqus, 50 miles south of Abū Ḥamad, and subsequent Egyptian military expeditions penetrated even farther up the Nile. This third Egyptian occupation was the most complete and the most enduring, for, despite sporadic rebellions against Egyptian control, Nubia was divided into two administrative units: Wawat in the north, with its provincial capital at Aswān, and Kush (also spelled Cush) in the south, with its headquarters at Napata (Marawī). Nubia as a whole was governed by a viceroy, usually a member of the royal entourage, who was responsible to the Egyptian pharaoh. Under him were two deputies, one for Wawat and one for Kush, and a hierarchy of lesser officials. The bureaucracy was staffed chiefly by Egyptians, but Egyptianized Nubians were not uncommon. Colonies of Egyptian officials, traders, and priests surrounded the administrative centres, but beyond these outposts the Nubians continued to preserve their own distinct traditions, customs, and crafts. A syncretistic culture thus arose in Kush, fashioned by that of Egypt to the north and those of African peoples to the south.
Kush’s position athwart the trade routes from Egypt to the Red Sea, and from the Nile to the south and west, brought considerable wealth from far-off places. Moreover, its cultivated areas along the Nile were rich, and in the hills the gold and emerald mines produced bullion and jewels for Egypt. The Nubians were also highly valued as soldiers.
As Egypt slipped once again into decline at the close of the New Kingdom (11th century BCE), the viceroys of Kush, supported by their Nubian armies, became virtually independent kings, free of Egyptian control. By the 8th century BCE the kings of Kush came from hereditary ruling families of Egyptianized Nubian chiefs who possessed neither political nor family ties with Egypt. Under one such king, Kashta, Kush acquired control of Upper (i.e., southern) Egypt, and under his son Piye (formerly known as Piankhi; reigned c. 750–c. 719 BCE) the whole of Egypt to the shores of the Mediterranean was brought under the administration of Kush. As a world power, however, Kush was not to last. Just when the kings of Kush had established their rule from Abū Ḥamad to the Nile delta, the Assyrians invaded Egypt (671 BCE) and with their superior iron-forged weapons defeated the armies of Kush under the redoubtable Taharqa; by 654 the Kushites had been driven back to Nubia and the safety of their capital, Napata.
Although reduced from a great power to an isolated kingdom behind the barren hills that blocked the southward advance from Aswān, Kush continued to rule over the middle Nile for another thousand years. Its unique Egyptian-Nubian culture with its strong African accretions was preserved, while that of Egypt came under Persian, Greek, and Roman influences. Although Egyptianized in many ways, the culture of Kush was not simply Egyptian civilization in a Nubian environment. The Kushites developed their own language, expressed first by Egyptian hieroglyphs, then by their own, and finally by a cursive script. They worshipped Egyptian gods but did not abandon their own. They buried their kings in pyramids but not in the Egyptian fashion. Their wealth continued to flow from the mines and to grow with their control of the trade routes. Soon after the retreat from Egypt, the capital was moved from Napata southward to Meroe near Shandī, where the kingdom was increasingly exposed to the long-established African cultures farther south at the very time when its ties with Egypt were rapidly disappearing. The subsequent history of Kush is one of gradual decay, ending with inglorious extinction in 350 CE by the king of Aksum, who marched down from the Ethiopian highlands, destroyed Meroe, and sacked the decrepit towns along the river.
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Christian and Islamic influence
Medieval Christian kingdoms
The 200 years from the fall of Kush to the middle of the 6th century is an unknown age in the Sudan. Nubia was inhabited by a people called the Nobatae by the ancient geographers and the X-Group by modern archaeologists, who are still at a loss to explain their origins. The X-Group were clearly, however, the heirs of Kush, for their whole cultural life was dominated by Meroitic crafts and customs, and occasionally they even felt themselves sufficiently strong, in alliance with the nomadic Blemmyes (the Beja of the eastern Sudan), to attack the Romans in Upper Egypt. When this happened, the Romans retaliated, defeating the Nobatae and Blemmyes and driving them into obscurity once again.When the Sudan was once more brought into the orbit of the Mediterranean world by the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 6th century CE, the middle course of the Nile was divided into three kingdoms: Nobatia, with its capital at Pachoras (modern Faras); Maqurrah, with its capital at Dunqulah (Old Dongola); and the kingdom of ʿAlwah in the south, with its capital at Sūbah (Soba) near what is now Khartoum. Between 543 and 575 these three kingdoms were converted to Christianity by the work of Julian, a missionary who proselytized in Nobatia (543–545), and his successor Longinus, who between 569 and 575 consolidated the work of Julian in Nobatia and even carried Christianity to ʿAlwah in the south. The new religion appears to have been adopted with considerable enthusiasm. Christian churches sprang up along the Nile, and ancient temples were refurbished to accommodate Christian worshippers. After the retirement of Longinus, however, the Sudan once again receded into a period about which little is known, and it did not reemerge into the stream of recorded history until the coming of the Arabs in the middle of the 7th century.
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE, the Arabs erupted from the desert steppes of Arabia and overran the lands to the east and west. Egypt was invaded in 639, and small groups of Arab raiders penetrated up the Nile and pillaged along the frontier of the kingdom of Maqurrah, which by the 7th century had absorbed the state of Nobatia. Raid and counterraid between the Arabs and the Nubians followed until a well-equipped Arab expedition under ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd ibn Abī Sarḥ was sent south to punish the Nubians. The Arabs marched as far as Dunqulah, laid siege to the town, and destroyed the Christian cathedral. They suffered heavy casualties, however, so that, when the king of Maqurrah sought an armistice, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Saʿd agreed to peace, happy to extricate his battered forces from a precarious position. Arab-Nubian relations were subsequently regularized by an annual exchange of gifts, by trade relations, and by the mutual understanding that no Muslims were to settle in Nubia and no Nubians were to take up residence in Egypt. With but few interruptions, this peaceful, commercial relationship lasted nearly six centuries, its very success undoubtedly the result of the mutual advantage that both the Arabs and the Nubians derived from it. The Arabs had a stable frontier; they appear to have had no designs to occupy the Sudan and were probably discouraged from doing so by the arid plains south of Aswān. Peace on the frontier was their object, and this the treaty guaranteed. In return, the kingdom of Maqurrah gained another 600 years of life.
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Islamic encroachments
When non-Arab Muslims acquired control of the Nile delta, friction arose in Upper Egypt. In the 9th century the Turkish Ṭūlūnid rulers of Egypt, wishing to rid themselves of the unruly nomadic Arab tribes in their domain, encouraged them to migrate southward. Lured by the prospects of gold in the Nubian Desert, the nomads pressed into Nubia, raiding and pillaging along the borders, but the heartland of Maqurrah remained free from direct hostilities until the Mamlūks established their control over Egypt (1250). In the late 13th and early 14th centuries, the Mamlūk sultans sent regular military expeditions against Maqurrah, as much to rid Egypt of uncontrollable Arab Bedouin as to capture Nubia. The Mamlūks never succeeded in actually occupying Maqurrah, but they devastated the country, draining its political and economic vitality and plunging it into chaos and depression. By the 15th century Dunqulah was no longer strong enough to withstand Arab encroachment, and the country was open to Arab immigration. Once the Arab nomads, particularly the Juhaynah people, learned that the land beyond the Aswān reach could support their herds and that no political authority had the power to turn them back, they began to migrate southward, intermarrying with the Nubians and introducing Arab Muslim culture to the Christian inhabitants. The Arabs, who inherited through the male line, soon acquired control from the Nubians, who inherited through the female line, intermarriage resulting in Nubian inheritances passing from Nubian women to their half-Arab sons, but the Arabs replaced political authority in Maqurrah only with their own nomadic institutions. From Dunqulah the Juhaynah and others wandered east and west of the Nile with their herds; in the south the kingdom of ʿAlwah stood as the last indigenous Christian barrier to Arab occupation of the Sudan.
ʿAlwah extended from Kabūshiyyah as far south as Sennar (Sannār). Beyond, from the Ethiopian escarpment to the White Nile, lived peoples about which little is known. ʿAlwah appears to have been much more prosperous and stronger than Maqurrah. It preserved the ironworking techniques of Kush, and its capital at Sūbah possessed many impressive buildings, churches, and gardens. Christianity remained the state religion, but ʿAlwah’s long isolation from the Christian world had probably resulted in bizarre and syncretistic accretions to liturgy and ritual. ʿAlwah was able to maintain its integrity so long as the Arabs failed to combine against it, but the continuous and corrosive raids of the Bedouin throughout the 15th century clearly weakened its power to resist. Thus, when an Arab confederation led by ʿAbd Allāh Jammāʿ was at last brought together to assault the Christian kingdom, ʿAlwah collapsed (c. 1500). Sūbah and the Blue Nile region were abandoned, left to the Funj, who suddenly appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to establish their authority from Sennar to the main Nile.
The Funj
The Funj were neither Arabs nor Muslims, and their homeland was probably on the upper Blue Nile in the borderlands between Ethiopia and the Sudan. Under their leader ʿAmārah Dūnqas, the Funj founded their capital at Sennar and throughout the 16th century struggled for control of the Al-Jazīrah (Gezira) region against the Arab tribes who had settled around the confluence of the Blue and the White Niles. The Funj appear to have firmly established their supremacy by 1607–08.
The Nilotic Sudan from the 17th to the 19th century
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By the mid-17th century the Funj dynasty had reached its golden age under one of its greatest kings, Bādī II Abū Daqn (reigned 1644/45–80), who extended Funj authority across the White Nile into Kordofan and reduced the tribal chieftaincies scattered northward along the main Nile to tribute-paying feudatories. But as Bādī II expanded Funj power, he also planted the seeds of its decline. During his conquests, slaves were captured and taken to Sennar, where, as they grew in numbers and influence, they formed a military caste. Loyal to the monarch alone, the slaves soon came to compete with the Funj aristocracy for control of the offices of state. Intrigue and hostility between these two rival groups soon led to open rebellion that undermined the position of the traditional ruling class.
The spread of Islam
The Funj were originally non-Muslims, but the aristocracy soon adopted Islam and, although they retained many traditional African customs, remained nominal Muslims. The conversion was largely the work of a handful of Islamic missionaries who came to the Sudan from the larger Muslim world. The great success of these missionaries, however, was not among the Funj themselves but among the Arabized Nubian population settled along the Nile. Among these villagers the missionaries instilled a deep devotion to Islam that appears to have been conspicuously absent among the nomadic Arabs who had first reached the Sudan after the collapse of the kingdom of Maqurrah. One early missionary was Ghulām Allāh ibn ʿĀʾid from Yemen, who settled at Dunqulah in the 14th century. He was followed in the 15th century by Ḥamad Abū Danana, who appears to have emphasized the way to God through mystical exercises rather than through the more orthodox interpretations of the Qurʾān taught by Ghulām Allāh.The spread of Islam was advanced in the 16th century when the hegemony of the Funj enhanced security. In the 16th and 17th centuries, numerous schools of religious learning were founded along the White Nile, and the Shāyqiyyah confederacy was converted. Many of the more famous Sudanese missionaries who followed them were Sufi holy men, members of influential religious brotherhoods who sought the way to God through mystical contemplation. The Sufi brotherhoods played a vital role in linking the Sudan to the larger world of Islam beyond the Nile valley. Although the fervour of Sudanese Islam waned after 1700, the great reform movements that shook the Muslim world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries produced a revivalist spirit among the Sufi brotherhoods, giving rise to a new order, the Mīrghāniyyah or Khatmiyyah, later one of the strongest in the modern Sudan.
The “missionaries” were faqīhs (Islamic jurists) who attracted a following through their teachings and piety and laid the foundations for a long line of indigenous Sudanese holy men. They passed on the way to God taught them by their masters or founded their own religious schools or, if extraordinarily successful, gathered their own following into a religious order. The faqīhs played a vital role in educating their followers and helped place them in the highest positions of government, which allowed them to spread Islam and the influence of their respective brotherhoods. The faqīhs held a religious monopoly until the introduction, under Egyptian-Ottoman rule (see below), of an official hierarchy of jurists and scholars—the ʿulamāʾ, whose orthodox legalistic conception of Islam was as alien to the Sudanese as were their origins. This disparity between the mystical, traditional faqīhs (close to the Sudanese, if not of them) and the orthodox ʿulamāʾ (aloof, if not actually part of the government bureaucracy) created a rivalry that produced open hostility in times of trouble and sullen suspicion in times of peace. This schism has since diminished; the faqīhs continue their customary practices unmolested, while the Sudanese have acknowledged the position of the ʿulamāʾ in society.
Under Bādī IV Abū Shulūkh (reigned 1724–62), the ruling aristocracy was finally broken, and the king assumed arbitrary power, supported by his slave troops. So long as Bādī IV could command the loyalty of his army, his position was secure and the kingdom enjoyed respite from internal strife, but at the end of his long reign he could no longer control the army. Under the leadership of his viceroy in Kordofan, Abū Likaylik, the military turned against the king and exiled him to Sūbah. Abū Likaylik probably represented a resurgence of older indigenous elements who had been Arabized and Islamized but were neither Arab nor Funj. Thenceforward the Funj kings were but puppets of their viziers (chief ministers), whose struggles to win and to keep control precipitated the kingdom’s steady decline, interrupted by only infrequent periods of peace and stability established by a strong vizier who was able to overcome his rivals. During its last half century the Funj kingdom was a spent state, kept intact only through want of a rival but gradually disintegrating through wars, intrigue, and conspiracy, until the Egyptians advanced on Sennar in 1821 and pushed the Funj dynasty into oblivion.
Egyptian-Ottoman rule
Muḥammad ʿAlī and his successors
In July 1820 Muḥammad ʿAlī, viceroy of Egypt under the Ottoman Empire, sent an army under his son Ismāʿīl to conquer the Sudan. Muḥammad ʿAli was interested in the gold and slaves that the Sudan could provide and wished to control the vast hinterland south of Egypt. By 1821 the Funj and the sultan of Darfur had surrendered, and the Nilotic Sudan from Nubia to the Ethiopian foothills and from the Atbara River to Darfur became part of Muḥammad ʿAlī’s expanding empire.The collection of taxes under Muḥammad ʿAlī’s regime amounted to virtual confiscation of gold, livestock, and slaves, and opposition to his rule became intense, eventually erupting into rebellion and the murder of Ismāʿīl and his bodyguard. But the rebels lacked leadership and coordination, and their revolt was brutally suppressed. A sullen hostility in the Sudanese was met by continued repression until the appointment of ʿAlī Khūrshīd Āghā as governor-general in 1826. His administration marked a new era in Egyptian-Sudanese relations. He reduced taxes and consulted the Sudanese through the respected Sudanese leader ʿAbd al-Qādir wad al-Zayn. Letters of amnesty were granted to fugitives. A more equitable system of taxation was implemented, and the support of the powerful class of holy men and sheikhs (tribal chiefs) for the administration was obtained by exempting them from taxation. But ʿAlī Khūrshīd was not content merely to restore the Sudan to its previous condition. Under his initiative, trade routes were protected and expanded, Khartoum was developed as the administrative capital, and a host of agricultural and technical improvements were undertaken. When he retired to Cairo in 1838, he left a prosperous and contented country behind him.
His successor, Aḥmad Pasha Abū Widān, continued his policies with but few exceptions and made it his primary concern to root out official corruption. Abū Widān dealt ruthlessly with offenders or those who sought to thwart his schemes to reorganize taxation. He was particularly fond of the army, which reaped the benefits of regular pay and tolerable conditions in return for bearing the brunt of the expansion and consolidation of Egyptian administration in Kassalā and among the Baqqārah Arabs of southern Kordofan. Muḥammad ʿAlī, suspecting Abū Widān of disloyalty, recalled him to Cairo in the autumn of 1843, but he died mysteriously, many believed of poison, before he left the Sudan.
During the next two decades the country stagnated because of ineffective government at Khartoum and vacillation by the viceroys at Cairo. If the successors of Abū Widān possessed administrative talent, they were seldom able to demonstrate it. No governor-general held office long enough to introduce his own plans, let alone carry on those of his predecessor. New schemes were never begun, and old projects were allowed to languish. Without direction the army and the bureaucracy became demoralized and indifferent, while the Sudanese became disgruntled with the government. In 1856 the viceroy Saʿīd Pasha visited the Sudan and, shocked by what he saw, contemplated abandoning it altogether. Instead, he abolished the office of governor-general and had each Sudanese province report directly to the viceregal authority in Cairo. This state of affairs persisted until Saʿīd’s death in 1863.
During these quiescent decades, however, two ominous developments began that presaged future problems. Reacting to pressure from the Western powers, particularly Great Britain, the governor-general of the Sudan was ordered to halt the slave trade. But not even the viceroy himself could overcome established custom with the stroke of a pen and the erection of a few police posts. If the restriction of the slave trade precipitated resistance among the Sudanese, the appointment of Christian officials to the administration and the expansion of the European Christian community in the Sudan caused open resentment. European merchants, mostly of Mediterranean origin, were either ignored or tolerated by the Sudanese and confined their contacts to compatriots within their own community and to the Turko-Egyptian officials whose manners and dress they frequently adopted. They became a powerful and influential group, whose lasting contribution to the Sudan was to take the lead in opening the White Nile and the southern Sudan to navigation and commerce after Muḥammad ʿAlī had abolished state trading monopolies in the Sudan in 1838 under pressure from the European powers.
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Ismāʿīl Pasha and the growth of European influence
After Saʿīd’s death in 1863, Ismāʿīl Pasha became viceroy of Egypt. Educated in Egypt, Vienna, and Paris, Ismāʿīl had absorbed the European interest in overseas adventures as well as Muḥammad ʿAlī’s desire for imperial expansion and had imaginative schemes for transforming Egypt and the Sudan into a modern state by employing Western technology. First he hoped to acquire the rest of the Nile basin, including the southern Sudan and the Bantu states by the Great Lakes of east-central Africa. To finance this vast undertaking and his projects for the modernization of Egypt itself, Ismāʿīl turned to the capital-rich nations of western Europe, where investors were willing to risk their savings at high rates of interest in the cause of Egyptian and African development. But such funds would be attracted only as long as Ismāʿīl demonstrated his interest in reform by intensifying the campaign against the slave trade in the Sudan. Ismāʿīl needed no encouragement, for he required the diplomatic and financial support of the European powers in his efforts to modernize Egypt and expand his empire. Thus, these two major themes of Ismāʿīl’s rule of the Nilotic Sudan—imperial expansion and the suppression of the slave trade—became intertwined, culminating in a third major development, the introduction of an ever-increasing number of European Christians to carry out the task of modernization.
In 1869 Ismāʿīl commissioned the Englishman Samuel White Baker to lead an expedition up the White Nile to establish Egyptian hegemony over the equatorial regions of central Africa and to curtail the slave trade on the upper Nile. Baker remained in equatorial Africa until 1873, where he established the Equatoria province as part of the Egyptian Sudan. He had extended Egyptian power and curbed the slave traders on the Nile, but he had also alienated certain African tribes and, being a rather tactless Christian, Ismāʿīl’s Muslim administrators as well. Moreover, Baker had struck only at the Nilotic slave trade. To the west, on the vast plains of the Baḥr al-Ghazāl (now in South Sudan), slave merchants had established enormous empires with stations garrisoned by slave soldiers. From these stations the long lines of human chattels were sent overland through Darfur and Kordofan to the slave markets of the northern Sudan, Egypt, and Arabia. Not only did the firearms of the Khartoumers (as the traders were called) establish their supremacy over the peoples of the interior but also those merchants with the strongest resources gradually swallowed up lesser traders until virtually the whole of the Baḥr al-Ghazāl was controlled by the greatest slaver of them all, al-Zubayr Raḥmah Manṣūr, more commonly known as Zubayr (or Zobeir) Pasha. So powerful had he become that in 1873, the year Baker retired from the Sudan, the Egyptian viceroy (now called the khedive) appointed Zubayr governor of the Baḥr al-Ghazāl. Ismāʿīl’s officials had failed to destroy Zubayr as Baker had crushed the slavers east of the Nile, and to elevate Zubayr to the governorship appeared the only way to establish at least the nominal sovereignty of Cairo over that enormous province. Thus, the agents of Zubayr continued to pillage the Baḥr al-Ghazāl under the Egyptian flag, while officially Egypt extended its dominion to the tropical rainforests of the Congo region. Zubayr remained in detention in Cairo after going there in 1876 to press his claims for a new title.
Ismāʿīl next offered the governorship of the Equatoria province to another Englishman, Charles George Gordon, who in China had won fame and the sobriquet Chinese Gordon. Gordon arrived in Equatoria in 1874. His object was the same as Baker’s—to consolidate Egyptian authority in Equatoria and to establish Egyptian sovereignty over the kingdoms of the great East African lakes. He achieved some success in Equatoria but none in the lakes region. When Gordon retired from Equatoria, the lake kingdoms remained stubbornly independent.
In 1877 Ismāʿīl appointed Gordon governor-general of the Sudan. He returned to the Sudan to lead a crusade against the slave trade and, to assist him in this humanitarian enterprise, surrounded himself with a cadre of European and American Christian officials. In 1877 Ismāʿīl had signed the Anglo-Egyptian Slave Trade Convention, which provided for the termination of the sale and purchase of slaves in the Sudan by 1880. Gordon set out to fulfill the terms of this treaty, and, in whirlwind tours through the country, he broke up the markets and imprisoned the traders. His European subordinates did the same in the provinces.
Gordon’s crusading zeal blinded him to his invidious position as a Christian in a Muslim land and obscured from him the social and economic effects of arbitrary repression. Not only did his campaign create a crisis in the Sudan’s economy but the Sudanese soon came to believe that the crusade, led by European Christians, violated the principles and traditions of Islam. By 1879 a strong current of reaction against Gordon’s reforms was running through the country. The powerful slave-trading interests had, of course, turned against the administration, while the ordinary villagers and nomads, who habitually blamed the government for any difficulties, were quick to associate economic depression with Gordon’s Christianity. And then suddenly, in the middle of rising discontent in the Sudan, Ismāʿīl’s financial position collapsed. In difficulties for years, he could now no longer pay the interest on the Egyptian debt, and an international commission was appointed by the European powers to oversee Egyptian finances. After 16 years of glorious spending, Ismāʿīl sailed away into exile. Gordon resigned.
Gordon left a perilous situation in the Sudan. The Sudanese were confused and dissatisfied. Many of the ablest senior officials, both European and Egyptian, had been dismissed by Gordon, departed with him, or died in his service. Castigated and ignored by Gordon, the bureaucracy had lapsed into apathy. Moreover, the office of governor-general, on which the administration was so dependent, devolved upon Muḥammad Raʾūf Pasha, a mild man ill-suited to stem the current of discontent or to shore up the structure of Egyptian rule, particularly when he could no longer count on Egyptian resources. Such then was the Sudan in June of 1881 when Muḥammad Aḥmad declared himself to be the Mahdī (the “Divinely Guided”).
The Mahdiyyah
Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn ʿAbd Allāh was the son of a Dunqulahwi boatbuilder who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Deeply religious from his youth, he was educated in one of the Sufi orders, the Sammāniyyah, but he later secluded himself on Ābā Island in the White Nile to practice religious asceticism. In 1880 he toured Kordofan, where he learned of the discontent of the people and observed those actions of the government that he could not reconcile with his own religious beliefs. Upon his return to Ābā Island, he clearly viewed himself as a mujaddid, a “renewer” of the Muslim faith, his mission to reform Islam and return it to the pristine form practiced by the Prophet. To Muḥammad Aḥmad the orthodox ʿulamāʾ who supported the administration were no less infidels than Christians, and, when he later lashed out against misgovernment, he was referring as much to the theological heresy as to secular maladministration. Once he had proclaimed himself Mahdī, Muḥammad Aḥmad was regarded by the Sudanese as an eschatological figure who foreshadowed the end of an age of darkness (his arrival coincided with the end of a century—in this case, the 13th—of the Islamic calendar, a period traditionally associated with religious renewal) and heralded the beginnings of a new era of light and righteousness. Thus, as a divinely guided reformer and symbol, Muḥammad Aḥmad fulfilled the requirements of mahdī in the eyes of his supporters.Surrounding the Mahdī were his followers, the anṣar (“helpers,” a Qurʾānic term referring to one group of Muhammad’s early followers), and foremost among them was ʿAbd Allāh ibn Muḥammad, who came from the Taʿāʾishah tribe of the Baqqārah Arabs and, as caliph (khalīfah, “successor”), assumed the leadership of the Mahdist state upon the death of Muḥammad Aḥmad. The holy men, the faqīhs who had long lamented the sorry state of religion in the Sudan brought on by the legalistic and unappealing orthodoxy of the Egyptians, looked to the Mahdī to purge the Sudan of the faithless ones. Also in his following, more numerous and powerful than the holy men, were the merchants formerly connected with the slave trade. All had suffered from Gordon’s campaign against the trade, and all now hoped to reassert their economic position under the banner of religious war. Neither of these groups, however, could have carried out a revolution by themselves. The third and vital participants were the Baqqārah Arabs, the cattle nomads of Kordofan and Darfur who hated taxes and despised government. They formed the shock troops of the Mahdist revolutionary army, whose enthusiasm and numbers made up for its primitive technology. Moreover, the government itself only managed to enhance the prestige of the Mahdī by its fumbling attempts to arrest him and proscribe his movement. By September 1882 the Mahdists controlled all of Kordofan, and at Shaykān on November 5, 1883, they destroyed an Egyptian army of 10,000 men under the command of a British colonel. After Shaykān, the Sudan was lost, and not even the heroic leadership of Gordon, who was hastily sent to Khartoum, could save the Sudan for Egypt. On January 26, 1885, the Mahdists captured Khartoum and massacred Gordon and the defenders.
The reign of the Khalīfah
Five months after the fall of Khartoum, the Mahdī died suddenly on June 22, 1885. He was succeeded by the Khalīfah ʿAbd Allāh. The Khalīfah’s first task was to secure his own precarious position among the competing factions in the Mahdist state. He frustrated a conspiracy by the Mahdī’s relatives and disarmed the personal retinues of his leading rivals in Omdurman, the Mahdist capital of the Sudan.
Having curtailed the threats to his rule, the Khalīfah sought to accomplish the Mahdī’s dream of a universal jihad (holy war) to reform Islam throughout the Muslim world. With a zeal compounded from a genuine wish to carry out religious reform, a desire for military victory and personal power, and an appalling ignorance of the world beyond the Sudan, the Khalīfah sent his forces to the four points of the compass to spread Mahdism and extend the domains of the Mahdist state. By 1889 this expansionist drive was spent. In the west the Mahdist armies had achieved only an unstable occupation of Darfur. In the east they had defeated the Ethiopians, but the victory produced no permanent gain. In the southern Sudan the Mahdists had scored some initial successes but were driven from the upper Nile in 1897 by the forces of the Congo Free State of Leopold II of Belgium. On the Egyptian frontier in the north the jihad met its worst defeat, at Tūshkī in August 1889, when an Anglo-Egyptian army under General F.W. (later Baron) Grenfell destroyed a Mahdist army led by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Nujūmī.
The Mahdist state had squandered its resources on the jihad, and a period of consolidation and contraction followed, necessitated by a sequence of bad harvests resulting in famine, epidemic, and death. Between 1889 and 1892 the Sudan suffered its most devastating and terrible years, as the Sudanese sought to survive on their shriveled crops and emaciated herds. After 1892 the harvests improved, and food was no longer in short supply. Moreover, the autocracy of the Khalīfah had become increasingly acceptable to most Sudanese, and, having tempered his own despotism and eliminated the gross defects of his administration, he, too, received the widespread acceptance, if not devotion, that the Sudanese had accorded the Mahdī.
In spite of its many defects, the Khalīfah’s administration served the Sudan better than its many detractors would admit. Certainly the Khalīfah’s government was autocratic, but, while autocracy may be repugnant to European democrats, it not only was understandable to the Sudanese but appealed to their deepest feelings and attitudes formed by tribe, religion, and past experience with the centralized authoritarianism of the Ottomans. For them the Khalīfah was equal to the task of governing bequeathed him by the Mahdī. Only when confronted by new forces from the outside world, of which he was ignorant, did ʿAbd Allāh’s abilities fail him. His belief in Mahdism, his reliance on the superb courage and military skill of the anṣar, and his own ability to rally them against an alien invader were simply insufficient to preserve his independent Islamic state against the overwhelming technological superiority of Britain. And, as the 19th century drew to a close, the rival imperialisms of the European powers brought the full force of this technological supremacy against the Mahdist state.
The British conquest
British forces invaded and occupied Egypt in 1882 to put down a nationalist revolution hostile to foreign interests and remained there to prevent any further threat to the khedive’s government or the possible intervention of another European power. The consequences of this were far-reaching. A permanent British occupation of Egypt required the inviolability of the Nile waters—without which Egypt could not survive—not from any African state, which did not possess the technical resources to interfere with it, but from rival European powers, which could. Consequently, the British government, by diplomacy and military maneuvers, negotiated agreements with the Italians and the Germans to keep them out of the Nile valley. They were less successful with the French, who wanted them to withdraw from Egypt.Once it became apparent that the British were determined to remain, the French cast about for means to force the British from the Nile valley. In 1893 an elaborate plan was concocted by which a French expedition would march across Africa from the west coast to Fashoda (Kodok) on the upper Nile, where it was believed a dam could be constructed to obstruct the flow of the Nile waters. After inordinate delays, the French Nile expedition set out for Africa in June 1896, under the command of Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand.
As reports reached London during 1896 and 1897 of Marchand’s march to Fashoda, Britain’s inability to insulate the Nile valley became embarrassingly exposed. British officials desperately tried one scheme after another to beat the French to Fashoda. They all failed, and by the autumn of 1897 British authorities had come to the reluctant conclusion that the conquest of the Sudan was necessary to protect the Nile waters from French encroachment. In October an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Sir (later Lord) Horatio Herbert Kitchener was ordered to invade the Sudan. Kitchener pushed steadily but cautiously up the Nile. His Anglo-Egyptian forces defeated a large Mahdist army at the Atbara River on April 8, 1898. Then, after spending four months preparing for the final advance to Omdurman, Kitchener’s army of about 25,000 troops met the massed 60,000-man army of the Khalīfah outside the city on September 2, 1898. By midday the Battle of Omdurman was over. The Mahdists were decisively defeated with heavy losses, and the Khalīfah fled, to be killed nearly a year later.
Kitchener did not long remain at Omdurman but pressed up the Nile to Fashoda with a small flotilla. There, on September 18, 1898, he met Captain Marchand, who declined to withdraw: the long-expected Fashoda crisis had begun. Both the French and British governments prepared for war. Neither the French army nor the navy was in any condition to fight, however, and the French were forced to give way. An Anglo-French agreement of March 1899 stipulated that French expansion eastward in Africa would stop at the Nile watershed. (See Fashoda Incident.)
The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium
The early years of British rule
Having conquered the Sudan, the British now had to govern it. But the administration of this vast land was complicated by the legal and diplomatic problems that had accompanied the conquest. The Sudan campaigns had been undertaken by the British to protect their imperial position as well as the Nile waters, yet the Egyptian treasury had borne the greater part of the expense, and Egyptian troops had far outnumbered those of Britain in the Anglo-Egyptian army. The British, however, did not simply want to hand the Sudan over to Egyptian rule; most Englishmen were convinced that the Mahdiyyah was the result of 60 years of Egyptian oppression. To resolve this dilemma, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was declared in 1899, whereby the Sudan was given separate political status under which sovereignty was jointly shared by the khedive and the British crown, and the Egyptian and the British flags were flown side by side. The military and civil government of the Sudan was invested in a governor-general appointed by the khedive of Egypt but nominated by the British government. In reality, there was no equal partnership between Britain and Egypt in the Sudan. From the first the British dominated the condominium and set about pacifying the countryside and suppressing local religious uprisings, which created insecurity among British officials but never posed a major threat to their rule. The north was quickly pacified and modern improvements were introduced under the aegis of civilian administrators, who began to replace the military as early as 1900. In the south, resistance to British rule was more prolonged; administration there was confined to keeping the peace rather than making any serious attempts at modernization.
The first governor-general was Lord Kitchener himself, but in 1899 his former aide, Sir Reginald Wingate, was appointed to succeed him. Wingate knew the Sudan well and, during his long tenure as governor-general (1899–1916), became devoted to its people and their prosperity. His tolerance and trust in the Sudanese resulted in policies that did much to establish confidence in Christian British rule by a devoutly Muslim, Arab-oriented people.
Modernization was slow at first. Taxes were purposely kept light, and the government consequently had few funds available for development. In fact, the Sudan remained dependent on Egyptian subsidies for many years. Nevertheless, railway, telegraph, and steamer services were expanded, particularly in Al-Jazīrah, in order to launch the great cotton-growing scheme that remains today the backbone of Sudan’s economy. In addition, technical and primary schools were established, including the Gordon Memorial College, which opened in 1902 and soon began to produce a Western-educated elite that was gradually drawn away from the traditional political and social framework.
Scorned by the British officials (who preferred the illiterate but contented fathers to the ill-educated, rebellious sons) and adrift from their own customary tribal and religious affiliations, these Sudanese turned for encouragement to Egyptian nationalists, and from that association 20th-century Sudanese nationalism was born. Its first manifestations occurred in 1921, when ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Laṭīf founded the United Tribes Society and was arrested for nationalist agitation. In 1924 he formed the White Flag League, dedicated to driving the British from the Sudan. Demonstrations followed in Khartoum in June and August and were suppressed. When the governor-general, Sir Lee Stack, was assassinated in Cairo on November 19, 1924, the British forced the Egyptians to withdraw from the Sudan and annihilated a Sudanese battalion that mutinied in support of the Egyptians. The Sudanese revolt was ended, and British rule remained unchallenged until after World War II.
The growth of national consciousness
In 1936 Britain and Egypt had reached a partial accord in the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty that enabled Egyptian officials to return to the Sudan. Although the traditional Sudanese sheikhs and chiefs remained indifferent to the fact that they had not been consulted in the negotiations over this treaty, the educated Sudanese elite were resentful that neither Britain nor Egypt had bothered to solicit their opinions. Thus, they began to express their grievances through the Graduates’ General Congress, which had been established as an alumni association of Gordon Memorial College and soon embraced all educated Sudanese.
At first the Graduates’ General Congress confined its interests to social and educational activities, but, with Egyptian support, the organization demanded recognition by the British to act as the spokesman for Sudanese nationalism. The Sudanese government refused, and the Congress split into two groups: a moderate majority, prepared to accept the good faith of the government, and a radical minority, led by Ismāʿīl al-Azharī, which turned to Egypt. By 1943 Azharī and his supporters had won control of the Congress and organized the Ashiqqāʾ (Brothers), the first genuine political party in the Sudan. Seeing the initiative pass to the militants, the moderates formed the Ummah (Nation) Party under the patronage of Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Mahdī, the posthumous son of the Mahdī, with the intention of cooperating with the British toward independence.
Sayyid ʿAbd al-Raḥmān had inherited the allegiance of the thousands of Sudanese who had followed his father. He now sought to combine to his own advantage this power and influence with the ideology of the Ummah. His principal rival was Sayyid ʿAlī al-Mīrghānī, the leader of the Khatmiyyah brotherhood. Although he personally remained aloof from politics, Sayyid ʿAlī threw his support to Azharī. The competition between the Azharī-Khatmiyyah faction—remodeled in 1951 as the National Unionist Party (NUP)—and the Ummah-Mahdist group quickly rekindled old suspicions and deep-seated hatreds that soured Sudanese politics for years and eventually strangled parliamentary government. These sectarian religious elites virtually controlled Sudan’s political parties until the last decade of the 20th century, stultifying any attempt to democratize the country or to include the millions of Sudanese remote from Khartoum in the political process.
Although the Sudanese government had crushed the initial hopes of the Congress, the British officials were well aware of the pervasive power of nationalism among the elite and sought to introduce new institutions to associate the Sudanese more closely with the task of governing. An advisory council was established for the northern Sudan consisting of the governor-general and 28 Sudanese, but Sudanese nationalists soon began to agitate to transform the advisory council into a legislative one that would include the southern Sudan. The British had facilitated their control of the Sudan by segregating the animist or Christian Africans who predominated in the south from the Muslim Arabs who were predominant in the north. The decision to establish a legislative council forced the British to abandon this policy; in 1947 they instituted southern participation in the legislative council.
The creation of this council produced a strong reaction on the part of the Egyptian government, which in October 1951 unilaterally abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 and proclaimed Egyptian rule over the Sudan. These hasty and ill-considered actions only managed to alienate the Sudanese from Egypt until the revolution in July 1952 led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Muḥammad Naguib placed men with more understanding of Sudanese aspirations in power in Cairo. On February 12, 1953, the Egyptian government signed an agreement with Britain granting self-government for the Sudan and self-determination within three years for the Sudanese. Elections for a representative parliament to rule the Sudan followed in November and December 1953. The Egyptians threw their support behind Ismāʿīl al-Azharī, the leader of the NUP, who campaigned on the slogan “Unity of the Nile Valley.” This position was opposed by the Ummah Party, which had the less-vocal but pervasive support of British officials. To the shock of many British officials and to the chagrin of the Ummah, which had enjoyed power in the legislative council for nearly six years, Azharī’s NUP won an overwhelming victory. Although Azharī had campaigned to unite the Sudan with Egypt, the realities of disturbances in the southern Sudan and the responsibilities of political power and authority ultimately led him to disown his own campaign promises and to declare Sudan an independent republic with an elected representative parliament on January 1, 1956.
The Republic of the Sudan
The triumph of liberal democracy in Sudan was short-lived. Compared with the strength of tradition, which still shaped the life of the Sudanese, the liberalism imported from the West was a weak force, disseminated through British education and adopted by the Sudanese intelligentsia. At first parliamentary government had been held in high esteem as the symbol of nationalism and independence. But, at best, the parliament was a superficial instrument. It had been introduced into Sudan at precisely the time parliamentary forms were rapidly disappearing from other countries in the Middle East. Political parties were not well-organized groups with distinct objectives but loose alliances motivated primarily by personal interests and loyalty to the various religious factions. When the tactics of party management were exhausted, parliament became debased, benefiting only those politicians who reaped the rewards of power and patronage. Disillusioned with their experiment in liberal democracy, the Sudanese turned once again to authoritarianism.
Coups and conflict with the south
On the night of November 16–17, 1958, the commander in chief of the Sudanese army, General Ibrāhīm ʿAbbūd, carried out a bloodless coup d’état, dissolving all political parties, prohibiting assemblies, and temporarily suspending newspapers. A Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, consisting of 12 senior officers, was set up, and army rule brought rapid economic improvements. The ʿAbbūd government at once abolished the fixed price on cotton and sold all the Sudanese cotton, rebuilding the nation’s foreign reserves. On November 8, 1959, the government concluded an agreement with Egypt on the Nile waters, by which Egypt not only recognized but also appeared to be reconciled to an independent Sudan. In southern Sudan, ʿAbbūd’s policies were less successful. In the name of national unity, the army officers introduced many measures designed to facilitate the spread of Islam and the Arabic language. Important positions in the administration and police were staffed by northern Sudanese. Education was shifted from the English curriculum of the Christian missionaries, who had long been solely responsible for education in the south, to an Arabic, Islamic orientation. Foreign Christian missionaries were expelled between 1962 and 1964.
In the southern Sudan itself, the measures of the central government met ever-increasing resistance. In October 1962 a widespread strike in southern schools resulted in antigovernment demonstrations followed by a general flight of students and others over the border. In September 1963 rebellion erupted in eastern Al-Istiwāʾiyyah (Equatoria) and in the Aʿālī al-Nīl (Upper Nile) province, led by the Anya Nya, a southern Sudanese guerrilla organization that believed that only violent resistance would make the government of General ʿAbbūd seek a solution acceptable to the southerners. In return the generals in Khartoum increased repression.
Although the northern Sudanese had little sympathy for their countrymen in the south, the intelligentsia was able to use the government’s failure there to assail authoritarian rule in the north and to revive demands for democratic government. By 1962, numerous urban elements, including the intelligentsia, the trade unions, and the civil service, as well as the powerful religious brotherhoods, had become alienated from the military regime. Moreover, the tribal masses and growing proletariat had become increasingly apathetic toward the government. In the end the regime was overwhelmed by boredom and overthrown by the reaction to its lassitude. The means of its overthrow was the southern problem.
In October 1964, students at the University of Khartoum held a meeting, in defiance of a government prohibition, in order to condemn government action in the southern Sudan and to denounce the regime. Demonstrations followed, and, with most of its forces committed in the southern Sudan, the military regime was unable to maintain control. The disorders soon spread, and General ʿAbbūd resigned as head of state; a transitional government was appointed to serve under the provisional constitution of 1956.
Under the leadership of Sirr al-Khātim al-Khalīfah, the transitional government held elections in April and May 1965 to form a representative government. A coalition government headed by a leading Ummah politician, Muḥammad Aḥmad Maḥjūb, was formed in June 1965. As before, parliamentary government was characterized by factional disputes. On the one hand Mahjūb enjoyed the support of the traditionalists within the Ummah Party, represented by the Imām al-Hādī, the spiritual successor to the Mahdī, while on the other hand he was challenged by Sayyid Ṣādiq al-Mahdī, the young great-grandson of the Mahdī, who led the more progressive forces within the Ummah. Unable to find common objectives, parliament failed to deal with the economic, social, and constitutional problems in Sudan. Moreover, the earlier hopes expressed by the transitional government of cooperation with the southerners soon vanished. Conflict continued in the south, with little hope of resolution. A group of young officers led by Colonel Gaafar Mohamed el-Nimeiri (Jaʿfar Muḥammad Numayrī)—tired of having no workable constitution, a stagnant economy, a political system torn by sectarian interests, and a continuing civil conflict in the south—seized the government on May 25, 1969.
The Nimeiri regime
When Nimeiri and his young officers assumed power, they were confronted by threats from communists on the left and the Ummah on the right. Nimeiri disbanded the Sudanese Communist Party, which went underground; its leader, Imām al-Hādī, was killed and his supporters dispersed. An abortive coup by the resilient communists in July 1971 collapsed after popular and foreign support held steadfast for the reinstallation of Nimeiri. The abortive coup had a profound effect on Nimeiri. He promised a permanent constitution and National Assembly, established himself as president of the state, and instituted the Sudanese Socialist Union (SSU) as the country’s only party. The affair also produced the incentive to press for a resolution to the southern rebellion.
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The Addis Ababa Agreement
In 1971 the southern Sudanese rebels, who had theretofore consisted of several independent commands, were united under General Joseph Lagu, who combined under his authority both the fighting units of the Anya Nya and its political wing, the Southern Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM). Thereafter throughout 1971 the SSLM, representing General Lagu, maintained a dialogue with the Sudanese government over proposals for regional autonomy and the ending of hostilities. These talks culminated in the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement on February 27, 1972. The agreement ended the 17-year conflict between the Anya Nya and the Sudanese army and ushered in autonomy for the southern region, which would no longer be divided into the three provinces of Al-Istiwāʾiyyah (Equatoria), Baḥr al-Ghazāl, and Aʿālī al-Nīl (Upper Nile). The region’s affairs would be controlled by a separate legislature and executive body, and the soldiers of the Anya Nya would be integrated into the Sudanese army and police. The Addis Ababa Agreement brought Nimeiri both prestige abroad and popularity at home.
Economic development
The signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement enabled economic development in Sudan to proceed using funds that had previously been allocated for the civil war. This redirection of government resources to peaceful projects coincided with the dramatic growth of petroleum revenues in the Persian Gulf, and the Arab states there began investing large sums in Sudan in order to transform it into the “breadbasket” of the Arab world. The resulting spate of development projects in the 1970s was followed by investments from private multinational corporations and generous loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The highest priority was placed on expanding Sudan’s production of sugar, wheat, and cotton in order to provide foreign exchange. The new projects were accompanied by efforts to expand the national infrastructure.
Though these projects were laudable in conception, their flawed implementation plunged Sudan into a severe economic crisis by 1980. Few projects were completed on time, and those that were never met their production targets. The steady decline of Sudan’s gross domestic output from 1977 left the country in a cycle of increasing debt, severe inflation, and ever-diminishing standard of living.
There were two fundamental causes for the failure of Sudan’s economic development. First, planning was deficient, and decisions were increasingly precipitous and mercurial. There was no overall control, so individual ministries negotiated external loans for projects without the approval of the central planning authority. The result was not only incompetent management but also innumerable opportunities for corruption. The second cause of economic failure lay in external events over which Sudan had no control. Rising oil prices dramatically increased Sudan’s bill for petroleum products, while the concomitant development projects in the Persian Gulf siphoned off from Sudan its best professional and skilled workers, who were lured by high wages abroad only to create a “brain drain” at home. The Nimeiri regime did not prove successful in breaking this cycle of persistent economic decline.
The rise of Muslim fundamentalism
In the elections of 1965, the Islamic Charter Front, a political party that espoused the principles of the Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwān al-Muslimīn), received only an insignificant portion of the popular vote. But the election roughly coincided with the return from France of Ḥasan al-Turābī, who assumed the leadership of the party, renamed the Islamic National Front (NIF). Turābī methodically charted the Brotherhood and the NIF on a course of action designed to seize control of the Sudanese government despite the Muslim fundamentalists’ lack of popularity with the majority of the Sudanese people. Tightly disciplined, superbly organized, and inspired by the resurgence of Islam in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood consciously sought to recruit disciples from the country’s youth. It was relentlessly successful, and by the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood and the NIF had successfully infiltrated the country’s officer corps, the civil service, and the ranks of secondary-school teachers.
Despite its relatively small size, the Muslim Brotherhood began to exert its influence, which did not go unnoticed by President Nimeiri, whose SSU had failed to galvanize popular support. In the face of deteriorating relations with both the southern Sudanese and the traditionalists of the Ummah-Mahdī grouping, Nimeiri turned increasingly to the Muslim Brotherhood for support. He appointed Turābī attorney general and did not object to the latter’s designs for a new constitution based partly on Islamic law, the Sharīʿah. In September 1983 Nimeiri modified the nation’s legal codes to bring them into accord with Islamic law. This measure was bound to be resisted by the Christians and animists of southern Sudan. Moreover, Nimeiri was coming to accept the arguments of the Muslim Brotherhood and other northern political groups that the Addis Ababa Agreement had been a mistake. In June 1983 Nimeiri unilaterally divided the southern region again into three provinces, thereby effectively abrogating the Addis Ababa Agreement.
Resumption of civil war
Even before the official demise of the agreement, the civil war between the south and the north had resumed with even greater ferocity than before. There had been sporadic uprisings in the south since the signing of the Addis Ababa Agreement in 1972, but they had been quickly suppressed. In May 1983, however, an army battalion stationed at Bor mutinied and fled into the bush under the leadership of Colonel John Garang de Mabior. The rebels had become disenchanted with Nimeiri and his government, which was riddled with corruption and was contemptuous of southerners. Led by Garang, the ranks of the Bor garrison, which had taken up sanctuary in Ethiopia, were soon swollen by discontented southerners determined to redress their grievances by force of arms under the banner of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and its political wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM).
Nimeiri’s overthrow and its aftermath
Although Nimeiri at first sought to crush the rebels by military force, his deployment of the Sudanese army only succeeded in disrupting the distribution of food, which, when coupled with drought and diminished harvests, created widespread famine in the southern Sudan. Without popular support, Nimeiri found himself facing a successful armed rebellion in the south and growing criticism in the north over the rigour with which he sought to carry out the corporal punishments prescribed under Islamic law. In response, Nimeiri softened his hard-line policies: he annulled the state of emergency that he had invoked five months earlier, he rescinded the tripartite division of the south, and he suspended the more brutal aspects of the Islamic courts. But these futile gestures were too late. Nimeiri was overthrown in a bloodless coup in April 1985 by his chief of staff, General ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Siwar al-Dahab. Although the new military government held elections in 1986 that returned Ṣādiq al-Mahdī as prime minister, the next three years were characterized by political instability, indecisive leadership, party manipulations resulting in short-lived coalitions, and abortive attempts to reach a peaceful settlement with the SPLA. These years of indecision came to an end on June 30, 1989, when a Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation led by Lieutenant General Omar Ḥasan Aḥmad al-Bashir seized power. The Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) was in fact the vehicle for the NIF.
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Sudan under Bashir
Bashir and his colleagues realized that, as a minority with little popular support, they would have to resort to harsh measures to curtail the educated elites who had been instrumental in organizing populist revolutions in the past. With a ruthlessness to which the Sudanese were unaccustomed, the RCC imprisoned hundreds of political opponents, banned trade unions and political parties, silenced the press, and dismantled the judiciary. It sought to prosecute the war in the south with vigour, inhibited only by the deterioration of the national economy. With the support of the NIF, the Muslim Brotherhood, and a ruthless and efficient security system, the most unpopular government in the modern history of Sudan remained firmly in power as the country entered the last decade of the 20th century.
The confidence of the RCC and its supporters in the Muslim Brotherhood enabled Bashir to reintroduce Islamic law, including corporal punishment, in March 1991 and emboldened the government to support Iraq in the Persian Gulf War. Both these acts isolated Sudan not only from the West but from its Arab neighbours as well (although the Libyan government was supportive). The economy continued to deteriorate, precipitated by this isolation and also by civil war in the south, fallen productivity, and rampant inflation. There were widespread shortages of basic commodities, particularly in the sensitive urban areas, creating disturbances which were ruthlessly suppressed.
Ongoing civil war
In the south the army continued to lose towns to the SPLA, but it managed to hold the three provincial capitals of Malakal, Wau, and Juba. Unable to defeat the SPLA on the field of battle, the government armed and unleashed an Arab militia against their traditional African rivals, principally the Dinka. Moreover, it consistently ignored pleas for food and obstructed the efforts of Western humanitarian relief agencies to provide food aid. Caught between two armies, plundered by the Arab militia, and scourged by a persistent drought, countless Africans fled to northern towns and cities or sought sanctuary in Ethiopia. Thousands perished while fleeing the endemic East African famine or died in the camps for the displaced, where they received no relief from the RCC-led government, which was determined to crush the SPLA as the initial step in a policy to Islamize the non-Muslims of southern Sudan.
Transition to civilian rule
The RCC ruled until 1993. That year it oversaw the transition from military rule to a civilian government. Nonetheless, it was a civilian government in which the NIF was securely in power, as the RCC appointed Bashir to the presidency of the new government before disbanding. The first presidential and legislative elections since the 1989 coup were held in 1996; Bashir won the presidency and was also reelected in 2000. The ostensible transformation of the government continued with a 1998 referendum in which a new constitution was overwhelmingly approved. The introduction of multiparty politics in 1999, although viewed with pessimism by many, also seemed to support the transition to a more democratic approach to government. The partial suspension of the new constitution later that year, however, tempered optimism, as it appeared Sudan was clinging to an authoritarian regime. Also that year, Sudan began to export oil, providing the opportunity to bring in much-needed revenue to the country’s blighted economy.
Peace with the south
Meanwhile, the civil war continued to rage. Numerous cease-fires, agreements, and peace discussions occurred during the 1990s and in the early years of the 21st century but yielded very little success. The government of Sudan and rebels eventually signed an agreement in January 2005, known as the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), finally ending the country’s long-running civil war. The CPA provided for a new constitution and outlined new measures for sharing power, distributing wealth, and providing security in the country. It also allowed for a separate administration for southern Sudan and stipulated that a referendum on independence for that region would be held in six years—key issues for the rebels.
southern Sudan
Semiautonomous region of southern Sudan, 2005–11.
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In addition, three sensitive areas—the Abyei region and the northern states of Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile—were given special status under the CPA. The disputed Abyei region, which both the north and the south claimed as part of their territories, was to be jointly administered by northern and southern Sudanese state governments until its final status could be determined in a referendum scheduled to coincide with the vote on southern independence. The Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states were given a different status and a slightly different government structure than that of the other northern states. The changes were meant to address the issues specific to those two states, which bordered southern Sudan, had seen much of the fighting during the war, and were home to many who fought on the side of the south. The two states were to hold “popular consultations” at a later date to evaluate the implementation of the CPA and decide whether to keep the agreement or negotiate a new agreement with the northern government.
A separate conflict that remained unresolved centred on the Darfur region in western Sudan. The conflict began in 2003 when rebels launched an insurrection to protest what they contended was the Sudanese government’s disregard for the western region and its non-Arab population. In response, the government equipped and supported Arab militias—which came to be known as Janjaweed (also Jingaweit or Janjawid)—to fight against the rebels in Darfur. The militias, however, also terrorized the civilians in the region and prevented international aid organizations from delivering much-needed food and medical supplies. Despite a 2004 cease-fire and the presence of African Union (AU) troops that followed, by 2007 the conflict and resulting humanitarian crisis had left hundreds of thousands of people dead and more than two million displaced, internally as well as externally, as they were forced to flee from the fighting. On July 31, 2007, the United Nations Security Council authorized a joint UN-AU peacekeeping mission (UNAMID) to replace the AU mission, although UNAMID troop deployment did not begin until 2008.
Multiparty elections and preparations for southern independence
The ICC warrant seemed to have little bearing on Bashir’s popularity in Sudan, and in April 2010 he was reelected president with some 68 percent of the vote in the country’s first multiparty elections in more than 20 years. Salva Kiir, who had been serving as national first vice president under Bashir and as president of the semi-autonomous government in southern Sudan since the death of John Garang in 2005, received almost 93 percent of the vote to continue serving in that capacity. The election results were clouded by the withdrawal of Bashir’s two main opposition candidates prior to the contest, who alleged that there were already indications of fraudulent practices, and by the declaration by some international observers that the elections fell short of international standards.Per the terms of the 2005 CPA, southern Sudanese citizens voted January 9–15, 2011, in the eagerly awaited referendum on southern independence. Other than a few isolated incidents of violence, the referendum transpired peacefully, and international observers declared the vote to be credible and largely free and fair. The other referendum initially scheduled to occur at the same time for the inhabitants of the Abyei region, regarding whether that region would be part of the north or the south in the instance that the latter opted for independence, was postponed indefinitely because of disagreements over voter eligibility in the region.
Preliminary results in the southern independence referendum, released at the end of January, indicated that almost 99 percent of voters opted in favour of seceding from the north; this was confirmed with the announcement of the final results in February. The country then looked toward the final preparations for the south’s secession, scheduled for July 9, 2011. Preparations for the split did not go smoothly, however. As the July independence date grew closer, several key issues remained unresolved between the north and the south, such as the sharing of the country’s oil wealth, distribution of the country’s collective debt, and establishment of the final border demarcation.
Related to the unresolved border issue was an alarming situation in the disputed Abyei region. Under the terms of the 2005 CPA, the region was jointly administered by northern and southern Sudanese until its final status could be determined, which, with the indefinite postponement of the Abyei referendum, was still pending. There had been scattered amounts of low-level violence in Abyei, but tensions reached a new height in May 2011 when Bashir ordered the invasion of the region’s primary town, also named Abyei. He maintained that the invasion was a justified response to southern provocation, citing an attack by southern fighters on northern forces and their UN peacekeeping troop escorts a few days earlier, but the invasion was widely denounced in international circles and elicited cries of protest from the southern Sudanese government. Tens of thousands of Abyei residents were displaced by the conflict. Days later, when Bashir proclaimed Abyei to be northern land and refused to withdraw the northern troops, many feared that the heated situation could reignite civil war in the country, but an agreement was reached in June that provided for a new, temporary north-south administration of the region as well as for the withdrawal of both northern and southern forces from the region. Ethiopian peacekeeping troops agreed to form an interim security force for Abyei.
Abyei region
Abyei region, claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan.
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Meanwhile, another conflict had developed in the central Sudanese state of Southern Kordofan, which shared a border with the soon-to-be-independent south. Although technically in the northern portion of the country, Southern Kordofan was home to the Nuba people and to thousands of fighters who had allied themselves with the south during the civil war; the state also held much of the oil reserves that were to remain in the north after southern Sudan’s independence. Fighting between the southern-aligned forces and the Sudanese army broke out in early June, with each side accusing the other of instigating the clashes, and the hostilities escalated when the Sudanese army launched a violent campaign to end what they deemed to be a rebellion. The conflict resulted in many civilian casualties and widespread displacement of the state’s population. In late June the AU negotiated an agreement between the Sudanese government and the opposition party in Southern Kordofan, the SPLM (later SPLM-North), to end the fighting and address the status of the northerners who had fought on the side of the south during the civil war, providing for either their demobilization or integration into the Sudanese army. The agreement also extended to the neighbouring Blue Nile state, which, although not gripped with the same level of violence as found in Southern Kordofan, also was home to many former southern fighters.
The recent hostilities and remaining unresolved secession issues loomed heavily as the south’s scheduled independence date grew closer. With less than a week before the south was scheduled to secede, the north and the south agreed to continue discussions on their unresolved matters—including the key issues of oil-revenue sharing and a final border demarcation—after the south declared independence. The south’s secession took place as scheduled on July 9, 2011.A new Sudan
Days after the loss of the south—and the lucrative oil fields there—Bashir announced that a three-year program of austerity measures would be implemented to help Sudan adjust to its new fiscal reality. He also spoke of changes in Sudan: speaking of a “second republic,” he included in his statements promises of more transparency in government and greater political freedom for the Sudanese, although those claims were met with some skepticism by his opponents. Bashir also indicated that discussions regarding a new constitution would soon begin, and he pledged that the government would engage in active dialogues to resolve the remaining conflicts in the country. To that end, the government signed a peace agreement with one of the smaller rebel groups of Darfur in July 2011. The AU-mediated agreement between the government and groups in the Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states did not hold, however, as fighting resumed in the former state in July and in the latter in September.
Later in July the Central Bank of Sudan introduced a new version of its currency, the Sudanese pound. The launching of Sudan’s new currency, months earlier than expected, came just one week after South Sudan had introduced its own currency. The influx of two new currencies within a narrow time frame raised concerns about economic instability in the region, especially in the wake of all the unresolved issues lingering between the two countries.
Conflict with South Sudan
The lingering unresolved issues with South Sudan continued to pose problems, despite international attempts to mediate between the two countries. The issue of how much money the Sudanese government should receive for the oil pumped in South Sudan but transported through Sudan’s pipelines and exported via Sudan’s infrastructure was particularly troublesome, and the failure to reach an agreement regarding those fees came to a head in December, when the Sudanese government began confiscating oil that South Sudan was transporting through Sudanese pipelines as compensation for the unpaid fees. In response, the South Sudanese government shut down oil production in January 2012 and made long-term plans to construct a new pipeline that would not travel through Sudan. In the short term, both countries were deprived of oil revenue, which was a vital component of their budgets.
In September 2012 the two countries signed a series of agreements regarding not only the contentious issue of oil fees but also border demarcation and other items, but the implementation of the agreements lagged for some time when both countries couldn’t agree upon how to proceed. Progress was made in March 2013, when Sudan and South Sudan committed to implementing the previous agreements, with specific time frames driving the terms of implementation. Oil production resumed in April, and the transport of the oil through Sudan soon followed.
Meanwhile, tensions between the two countries were further exacerbated by the Sudanese aerial bombardment beginning in late 2011 of what it held to be rebel areas near the border within South Sudan and border skirmishes between Sudanese and South Sudanese troops. One such notable incident was the conflict that began in March 2012 over the Heglig area along the border between the two countries. In the absence of final demarcation, the area was generally recognized as part of Sudan and was home to one of Sudan’s most-important oil fields. South Sudan, however, also laid clam to the area, and South Sudan occupied Heglig for several days in response to Sudan’s aerial bombardment and ground attacks in South Sudan and ostensibly to prevent additional assaults on its territory. After pressure from the AU and UN, which considered South Sudan’s occupation of Heglig to be illegal, the troops were withdrawn. Altercations in the vicinity persisted, however, as did Sudan’s aerial bombardments of South Sudan. Fighting spread to include the disputed Abyei region before eventually dwindling in May, when both countries began pulling their troops from the area.
In October 2013 the permanent residents in the disputed oil-bearing area of Abyei—the Dinka, who identified themselves as being aligned with the South Sudanese—unilaterally held a nonbinding referendum in which the overwhelming majority of them voted to join South Sudan. The vote was boycotted by the seasonal Abyei residents aligned with Sudan, the Misseriya. The referendum was not recognized by Sudan or South Sudan.
Domestic challenges and the 2015 general elections
In the years following the south’s secession, Sudan continued to be challenged by ongoing rebel activity in Darfur and the Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile states. The government often used brutal campaigns to quell resistance, deploying air bombardment, tanks, and sophisticated weaponry. Bashir had vowed to defeat rebel opposition by 2015, but the national army did not possess the resources or the capability to do so, given the degree of public support for the rebels in their strongholds. The ongoing conflict led many Sudanese to flee from their homes, and by the end of 2014 about 650,000 people had sought refuge in Ethiopia, Chad, and Egypt while another 1,873,000 were internally displaced.
Meanwhile, the public increasingly voiced dissatisfaction with the ruling National Congress Party’s (NCP) policies, the lack of presidential and government transparency, and the worsening economic conditions, including rising inflation and a decline in the value of the Sudanese pound. Cuts in fuel and other subsidies triggered antigovernment protests, including occasional calls for regime change. In June 2012, weeklong protests in Khartoum spread from students to the general public and turned into clashes with police. The next year, in what was the worst period of unrest since the events leading up to the 1985 coup, violent protests occurred across the country beginning in late September. The government quickly took harsh steps to end the disturbances, arresting some 800 protesters and killing many; it also undertook unprecedented measures to silence local and international media coverage of the protests.
Bashir, who had been in power since 1989 and had promised to step down from office at the end of his current term, changed course in October 2014 when he accepted the NCP’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate in the 2015 elections. Later that year he appeared to receive a temporary reprieve from the ICC, which had issued arrest warrants for him in 2009 and 2010 in regard to criminal action in Darfur, when in December the ICC prosecutor announced that she was suspending the investigation of the case because the United Nations Security Council was not taking any action to compel Bashir and other defendants to appear in court.
As the 2015 general elections approached, there were calls by opposition groups to postpone the polls because of the unresolved issues facing the country, such as the ongoing rebel activity and the need for constitutional reforms. In the absence of a postponement, they called for a boycott. Even with the boycott by much of the opposition, Bashir still faced more than a dozen candidates in the presidential race. The polls opened on April 13, 2015, and were expected to close on April 15, but general voting was extended for an extra day—allegedly because of low voter turnout as well as reported logistical problems. Bashir was reelected by a landslide, with the official results showing that he received about 94 percent of the vote in the presidential election. The NCP also did well in the legislative elections, winning some three-fourths of the seats in the National Assembly. The election results were dismissed by the opposition, which claimed the polls lacked credibility, and there was international criticism of Sudan for not providing a conducive environment for credible elections.
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Challenge to Bashir’s rule
The most significant threat to date to Bashir’s decades-long reign began in December 2018. Against the backdrop of a deteriorating economy, Sudanese citizens took to the streets to express their discontent. The protests, which were initially about the rising prices and shortages of bread and other commodities and about proposals to discontinue certain subsidies (spurred by IMF recommendations), soon evolved into anti-government demonstrations accompanied by calls for Bashir to step down. During one of the first large protests, held in ʿAṭbarah (Atbara) on December 19, the local headquarters for the NCP was set on fire by demonstrators. Protests were soon seen in other cities and continued in the following weeks, sometimes turning violent when demonstrators and security forces clashed. In January 2019, as protests continued, a rally was held in support of Bashir, who vowed that he would stay in power until he was voted out of office in an election.
With the protests showing no sign of abating, Bashir declared a state of emergency on February 22. He dissolved the central and state governments and, in the following days, appointed military leaders to the state governorships and named a new prime minister . Bashir also banned unauthorized rallies. Protests continued, nonetheless, and, while Bashir made additional gestures, such as stepping down as head of the NCP, reshuffling his cabinet, and promising to hold a dialogue with the opposition and implement reforms, he refused to step down from the presidency.
The largest demonstration since the protests began was held on April 6, the anniversary of the uprising that overthrew Nimeiri in 1985. Protesters marched to the compound in Khartoum that housed the military headquarters, where they began a sit-in that lasted for days. Although security forces attempted to use violence to disperse the crowds, some segments of the military moved to protect the protesters, signalling a fissure in the armed forces regarding support for the regime.
On April 11, 2019, Bashir was overthrown in a military coup and placed under arrest. The military announced that it had dissolved the government, suspended the constitution, and planned to create a military council that would lead a transitional government for two years, after which elections would be held for a new civilian government. Protesters, while happy that Bashir had been removed from office, rejected any plans that included a military-led transition and continued their sit-in, demanding a civilian transitional government.
Transition
In the months that followed, talks between civilian groups and military leaders regarding the composition of a new transitional government continued, with periods of progress interspersed with talks collapsing over disagreements. Demonstrations and strikes to keep pressure on the military-led transition council continued as well. The military response was at times criticized for being heavy-handed, most notably with what came to be known as the June 3 massacre, which occurred when forces cleared demonstrators from one of their primary spots in Khartoum; more than 100 people are thought to have been killed. The incident led to the AU suspending Sudan’s membership in the organization.
With ongoing mediation efforts, led by Ethiopia and the AU, a power-sharing agreement between civilian groups and the military was finally signed in August 2019. On August 21, 2019, a transitional Sovereignty Council, comprising military and civilian representatives, took power; it was expected to rule until democratic elections, scheduled for 2022, were held. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who had been leading the military-led transition council, was named president. Abdalla Hamdok, selected by the civilian groups’ alliance, was appointed prime minister, and he formed a cabinet on September 5. Citing the civilian-led government now in place, the AU lifted its suspension of Sudan the following day.
Bashir, meanwhile, had been charged with corruption-related acts and was convicted in December 2019. He still faced other charges, including those in connection with the death of demonstrators protesting against his rule in 2019.
https://www.britannica.com/editor/The-Editors-of-Encyclopaedia-Britannica/4419
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