The Sudan Handbook

36 the sudan handbook

And they took copious notes on such things. But the nature of the project

was decided by the superior knowledge brought by the state and its

experts, just as the defining elements of the map – the need for borders,

unambiguous names, points and lines – were ordained elsewhere.

The Almanac carried by officials of the Condominium is no more, but

successive generations of officials and experts have continued to apply

external sources of systematized knowledge in a not dissimilar way,

particularly in the rural areas of Sudan. Experts still come from outside

• from Britain or Egypt, as in earlier generations – or from the US, China
  or India. And, increasingly, they come from within Sudan itself. This
  does not mean that the projects that Sudanese specialists design are
  drawn up in any more productive consultation with the communities
  they affect. The language of such projects is likely to invoke an idea of
  national development, or a global philanthropic imperative, or the pure
  spirit of exploitative resource extraction. It may assert the need to earn
  foreign exchange, or raise revenue from taxes, or ensure food security,
  or provide health services. What such projects seldom do is stress local
  knowledge and self-determination. Most development projects in Sudan
  are still driven by a state which sees its subjects from a distance, from
  a commanding height: they are large-scale projects driven by the urgent
  needs of the state for resources and revenues, to be forced through without
  consultation; dams, oil wells and pipelines plotted onto the spaces on the
  maps, imposed on the landscape, and then recorded by new maps.
  Other projects are devised by international agencies who see their
  work as a matter of global poverty reduction and their ‘clients’ as undif-
  ferentiated members of a class of needy people. But the poverty they seek
  to alleviate is largely the result of the policies of the governments under
  whose auspices they work. Effective intervention in such a paradoxical
  situation needs to be informed by a careful understanding of local inter-
  ests and long-term development possibilities. It is only in this nexus
  between local knowledge and global information that sustainability is
  possible.
  Yet international experts rely heavily on forgetting. Sudan’s past

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors is^ littered^ with^ development^ projects.^ Some^ have^ vanished^ without^

(www.riftvalley.net).