32 the sudan handbookentity, or whether it should rather become a part of a greater Egypt.
As this debate faded, rather abruptly after independence in the 1950s,
the debate – and violent conflict – came instead to revolve around the
shape and political nature of Sudan itself. Should Sudan incorporate
all of the territory ruled by the Anglo-Egyptian state, or should this
colonial creation dissolve with the departure of the foreign rulers who
had brought it? If the state was to maintain the physical shape of the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, how could it move beyond the stern, centralizing
ethos which had maintained imperial rule? For more than fifty years
these questions have persisted. The central state has been challenged
from the South and the West and the East. And today the Sudan created
through those acts of nineteenth-century imperial expansion, having
failed to escape its authoritarian heritage, has ceased to exist.
But that will not end the questions over where lines should be drawn
on maps, or over what Sudan is, or was, or should be. The legacy of
map-making is a complex one. The outline of Sudan on the map was
itself not completely fixed by 1900: in the early twentieth century, the
‘Lado Enclave’ in the south-west, which was briefly a personal domain
of King Leopold of Belgium, ruler of the Congo Free State, became part
of Sudan; in 1916 the western sultanate of Darfur, which had largely
maintained its independence and only briefly been under Egyptian rule,
was violently incorporated into ‘the Sudan’ by the British; in the 1930s, a
wedge of land in the north-west was given to the Italian colony of Libya.
Even now, in the extreme north-east and south-east, Sudan’s borders
remain the subject of dispute, with the Halaib Triangle and the Ilemi
Triangle, formally claimed by Sudan, effectively controlled, respectively,
by Egypt and Kenya.
And within those borders, there have also been multiple disputes.
As the spaces on the maps have been filled in – with the lineaments
of rivers and hills, internal administrative boundaries, the names of
settlements, the territories of particular communities – the accumu-
lation and recording of knowledge has itself functioned as a kind of
violent incorporation. Here, as elsewhere, maps have been an essentialThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors tool^ of^ government:^ for^ administration,^ ordering^ and^ control,^ and^ in^
(www.riftvalley.net).