The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 295

regime that followed it saw the emergence of political movements in the

periphery – such as the Darfur Development Front – which regarded

modernization and development as a way to mitigate the economic

marginalization of the region. It was also the heyday of Sudan’s Commu-

nist Party. Since 1948 the Communist party had established its bases

among workers in railways and factories – bringing a familiar Marxist

vision and strategy for future transformation, one that had wide influ-

ence on Sudanese political life. In the 1960s, some party members briefly

experimented with Maoism – a revolutionary strategy starting in the

countryside rather than the town. All these movements sought to shift

the country’s centre of economic gravity to the periphery.

Modernization and development were international fashions, and they

were adopted in Sudan after another coup. In 1969, the military regime

of Jaafar Nimeiri took over with the support of the Communist Party.

Nimeiri’s government hoped that development could rework the contra-

dictions inherited from the colonial era. It was a time of optimism and the

government attracted foreign capital to a network of agricultural schemes

which it proposed would make Sudan a breadbasket of the world. But the

late 1970s combinations of energy price rises and stagnation hit Sudan

hard. The country borrowed more to keep its mismanaged development

plans afloat just as world interest rates soared, leaving it with a legacy of

debts that still exposes it to the force of financial markets today.

War in the South

Self-determination has been the political objective of many southerners

since it was first mooted by southern political leaders in 1954. Their

experience as subjects of a state has been, in historical terms, brief,

and usually coercive. Most southern Sudanese societies existed outside

any state until the nineteenth century. And resistance to colonial rule

continued until the 1930s, well after the conquest of Sudan by the British.

The Mahdi had mobilized people in many areas of northern and western

Sudan against the Turco-Egyptian regime. But the Mahdist state did not

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors resolve the unequal relationship between the centre and the periphery,

(www.riftvalley.net).