The Sudan Handbook

34 the sudan handbook

may become an international border. Choosing a date, and a definition,

gave those who drafted the agreement the feeling that they had made

an unambiguous decision, sanctioned by the authority of the map. Yet

that line is uncertain; both because there were multiple minor changes

in administrative boundaries over the years, and because of confusions

and errors in the maps of the 1950s, which make exact delineation of

the boundary problematic. The precise boundary between north and

south will take a long time to agree on. The quarrel over this line and

other, pre-existing border disputes between Sudan and Egypt, Kenya and

Ethiopia, mean that the very shape of Sudan has become problematic

once again.

Local Knowledge, Global Power

The story of the maps of Sudan also illustrates the problem of knowledge

itself. It is a reminder that the developing technologies of information

gathering – compass and rule, plane table and alidade, aerial survey and

satellite image – exist in a relation of tension with local knowledge, with

indigenous understandings of rights in land and natural resources, and

the meanings given to features of the natural world. Reconciling these

two forms of knowledge is a process similar to what cartographers call

‘ground-truthing’ – the process of walking the land and discussing its

features with those who live there. Only such a process can turn latitude

and longitude, and contours and boundary lines, into a landscape which

is recognizable to those who live in it.

The work of getting to know a place and its inhabitants has too often

been neglected by the agents of development, by aid officials and govern-

ment employees in a hurry to finish a survey, or complete a project.

Enduring errors in cartography, on the one hand, and long-term failure

of projects, on the other, are the result of such haste. Ground-truthing is

time-consuming; and it is not without its own areas of ambiguity. Thus

there may be competing truths on the ground: different ways of seeing

the landscape; more than one name for the same feature; and more than

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors one^ claim^ to^ a^ single^ area^ of^ land.^ Maps^ that^ show^ local^ understandings^ of^

(www.riftvalley.net).