Destination: Sudan

History

Early human activity

Whilst we have a dearth of knowledge about prehistoric man in the north of Sudan, little is known about the development of indigenous cultures in other parts of the country. Therefore, any look at Sudan’s archaeological heritage inevitably has to focus on the north.

The first modern humans are thought to have appeared in what is now modern-day Sudan around 70,000 years ago, although archaeological evidence suggests that human ancestors lived in the regions as far back as 300,000 years.

The ancient Egyptians are thought to have originally ventured south of the First Cataract around 3000 B.C., in search of the riches of sub-Saharan Africa. By around 2000 B.C., the Egyptians had firmly established themselves south of the Third Cataract, and what is now known as Kerma had developed into a flourishing metropolis.

Around 2300 B.C., the ancient Egyptian kingdom started to fall apart. This prompted Egyptian withdrawal from Kerma and surrounding lands, allowing the emergence of the Nubian culture.

Egyptian power started to resurface around 1550 B.C., and lead to a power struggle between Egypt and Kush, as the country was then known, resulting in the sacking of Kerma by Thutmose I. His son Thutmose III continued the re-conquest of the southern lands, and drove his men almost to the Fifth Cataract.

Egypt remained in control until the eleventh century B.C. When they withdrew, many of the indigenous cultural traits started to reassert themselves. By the eighth century B.C. a new regime had emerged.

The Nubian dynasty

In 750 B.C., a Kushite king Kashta conquered Thebes, which was then capital of Egypt, and proclaimed himself Pharaoh. Under the reign of the Kushites, Egypt enjoyed a period of relative peace and prosperity, but this ended when the Assyrians, coming from Babylon, swept into Egypt and pushed the Kushite rulers south.

At this point, the histories of the two countries started to diverge, leading to the emergence of a more indigenous culture in the south. By the first century B.C., the use of hieroglyphics gave way to a Meroitic script that adapted the Egyptian writing system to the indigenous Nubian language spoken by the region's people.

Christian Nubia

By the second century A.D., the Kingdom of Kush was in decline. By the sixth century, Nubia had become divided into three kingdoms: Nobatia, Faras, and Muqurra.

Missionaries introduced Christianity to the region in the fifth century A.D, helping to put Nubia back in touch with the Mediterranean world. The church encouraged literacy in Nubia through its Egyptian-trained clergy and in its monastic and cathedral schools.

The rise of Islam

The Christian Nubian kingdoms prospered for several centuries, but they were constantly under threat by the establishment of Islam in the north. In 640 A.D., shortly after the death of Prophet Muhammad, Muslim Arab invaders conquered Egypt, which effectively severed Nubia’s links with the rest of the Christian world.

Coveting riches in the south, the Arabs pressed on into Nubia, raiding as far south as Dongola. But the Nubians were strong fighters, and forced the Arabs into a stand-off. The Arabs, seeing little of value in the land, signed a treaty with the Nubians. This agreement, known as the baqt, lasted until the fourteenth century.

The Turkiyah

By the middle of the eighteenth century, a delicate balance of power existed between the Ottoman rulers and the Mamluk forces in the country, who had been thrown out of power in 1517.

French forces, under control of Napoleon Bonaparte, arrived in Cairo in 1798 to find the city devastated by repeated clashes between Mamluk and Ottoman forces. He was therefore able to easily able to seize control of the country.

But his position was precarious, and by 1801 he had been beaten back by an Anglo-Ottoman invasion force. The Ottoman sultan appointed Muhammad Ali as governor of Egypt.

As soon as he had assumed power in Egypt, Muhammad Ali sought ways of dealing with his main opposition: the Mumluks. Many were forced south, into Sudan, where they settled in and around Sennar. In 1820, Muhammad Ali wrote to the Sultan of Sennar, Badi VI, to ask him to expel the Mamluks that had settled at Dongola and still posed a threat to Egypt. When Badi VI failed to comply, Muhammad Ali dispatched 4,000 soldiers to conquer Sudan by force.

Muhammad Ali’s rule in Sudan is known for its repression and brutality. This lead to widespread resentment throughout the country, and many native Arabs rebelled against the new regime.

Following Muhammad Ali’s death in 1849, Egyptian interest in the Sudan waned. It was revived, though, in 1863 when Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Ismail, took power. Ismail’s greatest legacy was his determined attempts to end the slave trade in Sudan once and for all. The slave trade had already been outlawed in Egypt by the time Ismail came to power, but the Egyptian armies failed to enforce this ban and the slave trade continued to prevail throughout the Sudan.

In 1874, the anti-slavery baton was taken up by the legendary British office General Charles Gordon. Ismail made Gordon the governor-general of the whole of Sudan in 1877, but he resigned just two years later, beaten by ill health and immense frustration at being unable to completely stifle the slave trade.

The Mahdist uprising

In 1881, when Sudan was firmly in the hands of the British and Egyptians, a well-known preacher of Islam, Muhammad ibn Abdalla, proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the prophesised redeemer of Islam

Some people followed the Mahdi because of the religious message that he preached. Others followed him through dissatisfaction with the current regime in the country, particularly the determination of Egyptian and British forces to root out slavery, which many tribes in the North had been profiting from.

At first, many doubted Muhammad ibn Abdalla’s claim to being the Mahdi, dismissing it as either delusional or politically-motivated. But, as he was joined by more and more followers, the celebrity of the Mahdi grew. His status was boosted by a number of key victories over British and Egyptian troops, against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Once Sudan's governor, Muhammad Abd-al-Ra’uf heard, that there was an Islamic preacher calling himself the Mahdi, he dispatched a military force to Aba Island to confront him. However, the mission was a disaster and the government troops had to retreat.

Meanwhile, London and Cairo were taking relatively little interest in the goings-on of Sudan. It was only when El Obeid, a strategic outpost, fell to Mahdi forces in 1883 that the two colonial forces sat up and took notice.

Still, there was little appetite in Britain for direct embroilment in Sudanese affairs, and so they offered only minimal assistance for an invasion force, dispatched by the Egyptian government. Colonel William Hicks was the officer chosen to lead the band of Egyptian soldiers into Sudan. Woefully under-resourced, the mission was doomed to failure almost right from the start, and was eventually wiped out by Mahdi forces in an area of Kordofan.

This further hardened British views against defending Sudan, and British Prime Minister William Gladstone prepared for a complete withdrawal of the country. He re-appointed General Gordon to carry this out.

Unfortunately for London, though, Gordon saw things rather differently than the British government did, and believed that evacuation was not the best move for either Sudan or Britain.

It is this divergent viewpoint, coupled with his own religious convictions, that was ultimately to lead to his execution at the hands of the Mahdi. As the Mahdist forces marched on Khartoum, Gordon petitioned London to send a relief expedition. But, preoccupied with withdrawal rather than combat, Britain hesitated. Eventually, when the clamour to rescue Gordon became too much, the British did send a relief force along the Nile, under the command of Sir Charles Wilson. But it came too late. Khartoum fell on January 26, 1885, just two days before the relief force arrived.

The Mahdi’s reign was short-lived. Just five months after capturing Khartoum, the Mahdi became ill and died, probably from typhoid. He was succeeded by the Khalifa Abdullah, his second-in-command.

Whilst the Khalifa pledged to continue the campaign of the Mahdi against corrupt forces in the world, he lacked both the charisma and the religious self-belief of his former mentor. Without the unifying power of the Mahdi, the tribal alliances, which at best had been fairly shaky, started to fall apart.

The ousting of the Khalifa

The Khalifa’s rule lasted fourteen years, until a British invasion force was sent to reclaim the country.

Unlike previous British endeavours in the Sudan, the campaign to depose the Khalifa was meticulously planned. General Herbert Kitchener was in charge of the operation. He landed in Dongola in 1896, and set in place an elaborate plan to lay hundreds of miles of railway across barren desert in order to transport troops closer to Khartoum. The campaign also involved the haulage of several huge gunboats through the Nile’s notorious cataracts, as well as the deployment of 20,000 men.

The British troops met with the Khalifa’s forces at Karrari, just outside Omdurman, on September 2, 1898. The ensuing battle left 10,000 of the Khalifa’s men dead. The Kalifa was forced to flee to Kurdofan. Although pockets of Mahdi resistance continued in Sudan for many years, there was no doubt that Britain was now firmly back in control.

The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium

In 1899, Britain and Egypt signed an agreement that established Sudan as a condominium, jointly ruled by the two powers. In practice, what this meant is that Britain would now take all the major political decisions, and Egypt would retain a nominal role in the administration of the country.

Reginald Wingate became the first governor of the new condominium in 1899. His early years of ruling Sudan were devoted to quashing the remnants of Mahdism in the country, and establishing a program of economic modernisation, combined with a strengthening of the construction and agriculture industries.

The problem with the condominium administration was that all the modernisation programs were focused on economic development in the north, whilst the south was largely cut off from the modern world.

Britain's idea for the south was that it should be allowed to develop along indigenous lines, which had been badly disrupted by the slavery trade, and eventually integrated into British East Africa (now Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania).

The struggle for independence

Egypt gained formal independence from Britain in 1922, thereby setting a precedent for self-rule in Sudan. A nationalist movement was already gaining prominence in the country. However, when the governor-general of Sudan was assassinated in 1924 during a visit to Cairo, Britain ordered Egypt out of the country and suppressed any potential nationalist threat.

There were two main nationalist factions in the country. The Umma Party was lead by the Mahdi's son, Sayed Abdel Rahman al Mahdi. The other was an uneasy alliance between the National Unionist Party (NUP) and the Khatmiyyah brotherhood, led by Sayyid 'Ali al-Mirghani.

The Umma Party and the Khatmiyyah brotherhood lobbied the British government hard for independence, and in 1943 issued a memorandum calling for self-determination in Sudan and an end to North-South separation.

By the end of World War II, British colonial administrators were starting to question the economic and political viability of keeping the southern and northern provinces separate. A landmark conference, convened in Juba in 1947, effectively ended separate administration in the country.

In 1948, the Umma pro-independence party won a landslide victory in national elections and, in 1952, negotiated a self-determination agreement with Britain, which would give Sudan responsibility in all areas except military and foreign affairs. Cairo, though, refused to recognise Sudan's claims to self-rule, and instead declared Egyptian sovereignty over Sudan.

Anglo-Egyptian relations were patched up in a 1952 coup, during which Colonel Muhammad Naguib overthrew the reigning monarchy in Egypt. In 1953, London and Cairo signed an agreement that allowed for a three-year transition period to independence. Sudan finally became an independent country on 1 January 1956.

The first civil war (1955-1972)

Many southerners were unhappy that north and south Sudan had been unified and launched a military uprising in 1955. This rebellion was quashed by government forces, and many southerners fled to Uganda, where they set up the Sudan African Nationalist Union (SANU).

In, 1958, General Ibrahim Abboud staged a military coup in Khartoum and overthrew the post-colonial government. Fiercely pro-Arab, General Abboud embarked on a program of "Islamicisation" that was to ultimately lead to civil war and create divisions in the country for decades to come.

At first, the southern rebels were a loose-knit group with little to hold them together. But, by 1969, they had strengthened into a formidable fighting force, with strong foreign contacts that provided them with weapons and supplies.

Joseph Lagu, from the Madi tribe, became leader of the rebel movement in 1971. Despite persisting tribal differences, Lagu helped develop a tremendous sense of unity within the movement, and succeeded in driving the government from large areas of the southern territory.

In 1969, faced with insurgents in the south, political instability and economic turmoil, the government was forced to hand over to military rule once again - this time to Jaafar Nimeiri. At first, Nimeiri was welcomed by southerners, because he seemed to have a genuinely progressive and secular agenda. Nimeiri was also more concerned with consolidating power in the north than confronting rebellious southerners.

Nimeiri opened a dialogue with the South Sudan Liberation Movement (SSLM), as the rebel movement was then known, in 1971. He believed that, by allowing independent regional governments in the south, he could bring stability to the region, thereby removing another potential threat to his powerbase. The two sides agreed on autonomy for three provinces: Equatoria (present-day Al Istiwai), Bahr al Ghazal, and Upper Nile (present-day Aali an Nil). The agreement also recognised English as the principal language of South Sudan, and established a 12,000-man southern command of the Sudanese army, consisting of an equal number of northern and southern officers.

This brought the country's first civil war to an end.

A brief respite (1972-1983)

For a time, the Sudanese economy was booming and Sudan seemed destined to go down in history as an African success story. Unfortunately, though, like so many other cases in Africa, many of the projects that development aid helped set up were doomed to failure: too ambitious and consumed by corruption. The economy was also hit by a severe famine in 1984. By the early 1990s, Sudan had become the world’s largest debtor to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The worsening economy forced Nimeiri on to the back foot and, in 1983, under pressure from fundamentalists both inside and outside of his government Islamic forces, he tore up the Addis Ababa Agreement. The decision to do this was also inspired by the discovery, in 1981, of large amounts of oil in the south. The end of the Addis Ababa Agreement meant, among other things, that revenues from this newly-discovered oil would now accrue to central government and not the regional administrations.

In a final controversial move, Nimeiri decided to impose Shari'a law on the north of the country, which introduced harsh Islamic punishments such as amputations for theft and public flogging for possession of alcohol. In principle, the south was not affected by this new law, but southerners living in the north were.

The rebel response was unsurprising: an immediate and uncompromising return to war.

The second civil war (1983-2005)

In 1983, John Garang, a former rebel colonel from the Dinka tribe, appeared on the scene. From a rebel stronghold in Ethiopia, Garang launched the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) with the aim of overthrowing the military dictatorship in the country and assuming autonomous control of the southern regions.

Nimeiri was swept from power in 1985 by a military coup, led by Abdul Rahman Suwar ad-Dahhab. In 1986, elections handed power to a civilian government under the leadership of Sadiq al-Mahdi. Sadiq al-Mahdi made some attempt to restore peace to the country, but his strong Islamic convictions made things difficult.

In February 1989, the army presented Sadiq with an ultimatum: either he moved towards peace or he would be kicked out of government. However, Sadiq's attempts to do this alienated some hard-line elements in the government, such as the National Islamic Front (NIF), lead by Hassan al-Turabi. Accordingly, the NIF leant its support to a newcomer on the political scene: a military officer called Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

In 1989, al-Bashir staged a successful coup and became President of the country. Both Bashir and al-Turabi believed that the only solution to the civil war was a military one and refused to negotiate with the SPLM/A.

The SPLM/A, meanwhile, was experiencing a number of problems with its armed struggle. In 1991, Rick Machar, an rebel commander, reignited tribal rivalries in an attempt to displace Garang. Garang clung on to his position, but the initiative succeeded in dividing and weakening the SPLM/A down the middle.

In the 1990s, Sudan was perceived by many western nations as a hotbed of fanaticism. In 1991, Osama Bin Laden, who has since leapt to notoriety as head of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, moved from Saudi Arabia to Sudan, bringing with him ample cash and fundamentalist ideals. The government irked the West further when Turabi voiced support for Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. There was also a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in which Sudan was implicated.

The turning point in relationships between Sudan and the West came in 1998, when the US bombed the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, claiming that it was manufacturing chemical weapons. The Sudanese government was genuinely shocked by the US attack, and decided to engage with the international community again.

It was not just the West that Bashir was worried about, though. By the end of the 1990s, factions in his own coalition were rallying against him. In 1998, Turabi's, Bashir's former ally, sought to appease the SPLM/A, in a bid to shore up his own powerbase. Bashir responded by declaring a state of emergency in the country, and seeking to suppress political dissent in his country.

Turabi was arrested at his home in Khartoum later that year, and charged with being a threat to national security. Since then, his outspoken criticism of the current political framework in Sudan has seen him frequently in and out of gaol, or detained under house arrest.

Peace

In January 2005, after two years of negotiation, the SPLM and the government finally signed a peace agreement. The main terms of the agreement are:

• South Sudan shall hold a referendum on secession in 2011.
• If South Sudan decides not to separate, then both the north and south armed forces will merge into a single unit.
• Income from oilfields is to be equally partitioned between north and south.
• Islamic law is to remain in the north, while continued use of the sharia in the south is to be decided by the elected assembly.
• The SPLM will share power with the National Congress Party, until the elections in 2009 decide the country's political future.

As one of the conditions of the CPA, John Garang, head of the SPLM, assumed the position of vice-president within government. However, he was killed three weeks later in a helicopter crash. Salva Kiir assumed his position as both head of the SPLM and vice-president of Sudan.

Despite the signing of the peace agreement, the government has been widely criticised for not fully living up to its implementation: failing to withdraw troops from the south and to equally share oil revenue.

Darfur

The north-south civil war is often confused with the separate conflict in Darfur. Although the rebels in the south do have strong ties with the rebels in Darfur, it is wrong to see the two wars as part of the same struggle.

A new rebellion erupted in Darfur in 2003. The rebels accused the government of neglecting the Darfur region, and called for a greater share of the wealth, as well as more of a say in the government of the country. The Darfur crisis was further exacerbated by inter-tribal hostility, as neighbouring ethnic groups vyed for increasingly scarce resources, such as water. Khartoum has been fiercely criticised by the international community for providing support for the brutal Janjaweed militia, in order to suppress the uprising.

The Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) was signed in 2005, between one of the largest rebel groups and the government. As part of the agreement, the government promised to disarm the Janjaweed militia and integrate them into the armed forces. They also agreed to transfer $200 million a year to the region, as well as an initial payment of $300 million. The deal also provided for a regional government in Darfur, if approved by a vote. A number of rebel groups have refused to sign the DPA, though.