The Sudan Handbook

intRoduction: many sudans 33

fulfilment of the state’s ambitions to change the lives of people through

the provision of services.

The Anglo-Egyptian government was quick to create a survey depart-

ment, which by the 1930s had produced maps for the whole of the

Sudan; until relatively recently these maps were still the best available

for much of the country. Mapping made administration possible, but

the cartographic enterprise is never a simple recording of knowledge.

Names – and the spaces they described – were changed and distorted,

as strangers (whether Europeans, Egyptians, or people from other parts

of the Sudan) struggled with pronunciation and spelling, or with the

existence of competing claims to land on the part of different commu-

nities on the ground. The act of mapping can be a process of physical

dispossession: entire communities may find that maps misplace them,

or omit them, and so compromise their established use of land or water.

It can also involve social or cultural depletion: the name for the hill

where you live may, deliberately or inadvertently, be obliterated by

cartographers in favour of the name given to it by your neighbour, an

ethnic group that has more educated members and administrative influ-

ence and harbours expansionist ideas. Or your community may find

itself arbitrarily confined – by the drawing of a line on the map – to an

administrative unit with other people whose lives and language are very

different.

Today, maps are again at the centre of political debates over Sudan’s

future. The argument over the boundary line between north and south

Sudan has shown both the power and the weakness of cartography. When

the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) stipulated that the Abyei

dispute should be settled through a commission which would determine

the boundaries of the Ngok chiefdoms that were transferred to Kordofan

in 1905, it both acknowledged the potential power of maps and showed a

misplaced faith in their straightforwardness. There were no maps which

showed those boundaries as they were; and when the chosen Commis-

sion tried to create one as the basis for a judgment, it was rejected as

inaccurate. The CPA also referred to the provincial boundaries of   1   

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors January^1956 as^ marking^ the^ line^ between^ north^ and^ south^ –^ a^ line^ which^

(www.riftvalley.net).