The Sudan Handbook

intRoduction: many sudans 35

landscape are more complicated than those that simply impose borders

and names. And development programmes that engage long term with

local institutions are far harder to design and maintain.

Sudan’s economic history in the modern era, by contrast, has been

characterized by top-down state interventions. These have been osten-

sibly designed to improve, to make more productive. The extent of

governmental ambitions has varied, but the servants of a succession

of regimes have all have believed that they possess kinds of knowledge

which are superior to local knowledge; it is those kinds of knowledge

which have informed their policies and give them the right to instruct,

cajole and sometimes coerce, and to reshape the land. The imperial

project, and the state-building projects that succeeded it – in Sudan as

elsewhere – incorporated mapping as an element in the imposition of

order on places and populations under their control. The maps reveal

the authoritarian character of the project. The aim is transformation. The

assumption, all too often, is the superior knowledge of the government

servant or technical consultant.

In the Condominium era the government of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

produced an Almanac: a small reference book for the use of officials. The

information in the Almanac included weights and measures, ranks and

titles, travel times and postage costs; within its pages an official could

find instructions for building a platform on which to take the salute from

his subject, or details of the penetrating power of a .303 bullet at different

ranges. The Almanac was a summary guide to the knowledge by which

Sudan and its people were ordered and ruled: practical in its relevance to

the tasks of administration, and at the same time reassuring to those it

was intended for in its evocation of a system of knowledge which reached

far beyond Sudan itself. With map in hand and Almanac in pocket, the

official was a travelling locus of order. Of course, the Almanac did not

contain all the information that an official might require. Local knowl-

edge was sometimes required to help implement projects of change,

whether these involved collecting tax, setting up a market or imposing

new laws. The official might well need to know who lived in a place, the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors name^ for^ a^ river,^ or^ the^ time^ of^ year^ when^ people^ planted^ certain^ crops.^

(www.riftvalley.net).