Abstract
Abdullahi Gallab, in his masterpiece, has delved deep into the political development and role of colonialism of Sudan, including the relationship between its rulers and ruled. He has tried to capture the Sudanese experience from within. The author’s courage and merit are evident in the rational representation of an insider’s ideological underpinnings. The narratives in the book emphasize social, political, and cultural productions within the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial state, how these affected the written and unwritten rules for rising social and political groups, and how sociopolitical developments and institutions have produced various types of violence. The book is divided into eight chapters that address the earliest monarchies to the present.
Chapter 1 presents a historical overview of the rise of the Sudanese order while discussing the actual meaning of ‘Sudan.’ Through the long process of war, peace, trade, patterns of immigration, settlement, and intermarriage, the uneven and slow processes of Islamization and Arabization encouraged the Sudanese to establish their state. The internal and external factors were significant, although they were not able to hinder the Sudanese people’s propensity to revitalize and regenerate themselves. These factors and dialectical processes that acted to produce such a social construction of a society, a nation, a country, and their successive narrations, discourses, and shifting terrains are the subject of this chapter.
The conflicts and violence that have been present since the early days of the colonial state, discussed in Chapter 2, are intimately connected to the construction of different forms of totalitarian and semi-totalitarian regimes and practices of the colonial and postcolonial states. This situation and its conflict with emerging Sudanese identities and different emerging power groups produced manifest and latent clashes of interest, creating conditions for each group’s mode of existence, and shifting positions within civic life. The emergence and development of the colonial state, its various institutions, and the symbolic as well as direct forms of violence it exercised over Sudanese society came into being through peculiar and sometimes complicated relationships. These developments altered civic life in the Sudan.
Chapter 3 explores different types of resistance to the colonial order. Two opposing forces struggled to reshape Sudanese society, its population, and their material life. Faced with the colonial system and its control of resistance, various modes of struggle emerged with various outcomes. A variety of social and political modes of operation (supporting and maintaining resistance and social integration) strengthened the construction of self-identity, and contributed to the sound and passion of an uneasy rebirth as well as the suffocation of a civil society in the face of the coercive rule of the colonial and postcolonial states. These processes gave rise to a malignant tumor that begot and grew into the colonial state and has remained present, guiding the disciplinary and coercive forces of the postcolonial state.
Chapter 4 concentrates on the development and construction of the colonial state and its capital city, Khartoum, including progressive forms of colonization and modes of control. Khartoum was the colonial city, the citadel, and the center of operations for British direct and indirect rule. Different Sudanese communities developed, working with each other as well as with other emerging social groups with and against the state. The constituent community continued to develop structures through the course of their activities in order to build up the state’s system of domination. They all worked as ‘intimate enemies’ both to build and impede the very existence of that state.
Chapter 5 explains how that struggle was intertwined with the many forms of consciousness of an emerging Sudanese society. This chapter focuses on the rise, fall, and resurrection of Omdurnan, putting Sudanese nationalism on the social and political map.
Chapter 6 seeks to address how gradual forms of accommodation and marginalization participated in the creation of both the core and margins of the country. Muḥammad ‘Ali’s invasion was a point of departure, more than a mere event in history. It ends with a discussion of how Cairo, in its complex, changing, multilayered, and constrained roles, contributed to the emergence of modern Sudan.
Chapter 7 explores the development of the ideology of the center, along with hegemonic and counter-hegemonic trends. This ideology of the center could impose all kinds of conditions and rules to create and maintain modes of existence and styles of life. Thus, the state created and shaped the center and the margins.
Chapter 8 addresses the meaning and development of the concepts of the margin and marginalization in order to demonstrate that the outcome of the formal and informal processes, or structural socioeconomic changes, that governed the Sudanese people’s conduct was subject to polarizing colonial experiences of openness and closure. The dynamic relationship between openness and closure within the colonial system was the product of regional confinements that the ruling colonial states labeled as the South, the East, and the West as well as invisible forms of marginalization. At the heart of these labels and discourses lie the different forms of practice that need to be examined in order to discover how and to what extent the colonizers labeled, characterized, practiced, and created a hegemonic language, exercised power, and eventually used up that power. For Gallab, the creation of the margins was a complex process that was maintained by the invention of mechanisms that the state created and nurtured.
Nevertheless, the concluding lines of this book offer a direction for the Sudanese society. Viewed from the standpoint of the growth of the colonial state and its multidimensional formation, each of these constructions has continued to evolve with a life of its own, contained within one local system. This system was controlled from the constructed center, which interacted with the operations of the colonial state. Five major developments in the structure emerged or were transformed under the colonial state. These developments continued to function as conveyers of violence in the cross-generational regime production.
This book contains some rational and overarching theoretical perspectives on Sudanese class formation, and state and nation building. These perspectives are applicable to social, economic, and political contexts. First, Gallab’s views may sharpen the fundamental assumptions of discourse analysis regarding notions of colonial power. Obviously, in the Sudanese context, its value is considerable: it brilliantly illuminates the historical trail of violence within a wider context. This book is highly recommended for people interested in the Sudanese; it is an invitation for future scholars and researchers to explore new scholarly opportunities as well as politically exciting regions of meaning construction. I would particularly recommend this book to readers and researchers interested in quantitative historical methods. It is well-written, well-planned, and rich in theoretical interpretation. No doubt the issues raised will enrich our ideas about the place and its population.