land & WateR 49under Turco-Egyptian rule in the nineteenth century, a telegraph line
reached Khartoum from Cairo. Railway construction from Egypt south
into Sudan made little headway under Turco-Egyptian rule; but the
Anglo-Egyptian invasion, the ‘reconquest’ of 1896–98, rolled forward on
the iron rails which carried the steam train. Within a few years of the
establishment of the Condominium a programme of railway building
connected Khartoum with Egypt, with the new Red Sea harbour at Port
Sudan, and with Kordofan’s provincial capital at El-Obeid. In the 1950s
and early 1960s, a further programme of investment took the railway to
Nyala in 1959 and, three years later, to Wau, in the south. (Today, there
are plans, not yet realized, to link the south to east Africa by rail.)
Like the political dispensation, the railways placed riverain northern
Sudan at the centre; all traffic had to pass through Khartoum, and the
links to the outside world also lay through the three cities. Steamer
services were established from Khartoum up the river to Juba, but the
road network of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was limited. When, after 1956,
a succession of independent governments began to develop this road
network, it too focused on the riverain north: that was where the roads
led, and where the roads were best.
In the 1970s, the railway network was deliberately run down: perhaps
because it was inefficient, perhaps because Nimeiri’s government resented
the political power of the railway workers union. As a consequence,
Sudan’s railways were barely functioning by the late 1990s (though there
was a small amount of new construction to service the oil industry),
but a new programme of road building re-emphasized the dominance
of the northern riverain centre – a programme which has accelerated
since around 2002, creating tarmac roads from Khartoum north to Wadi
Halfa, and improving and developing the roads from Khartoum to the
east and to the Gezira, as well as resurfacing the main roads in Greater
Khartoum. The failure to complete an asphalted road westwards, that
would link Darfur to the rest of the country, regarded by many Darfu-
rians as a deliberate act of neglect, has been a contributory cause of civil
conflict in the region.The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors While^ scant^ and^ unreliable^ rainfall^ have^ made^ flexibility^ and^ mobility^
(www.riftvalley.net).