The Sudan Handbook

intRoduction: many sudans 37

trace, others have spawned monstrous offspring, like the mechanized

farming schemes in the East and the central belt. These were imagined

as the route to food security and prosperity, but have instead generated

insecurity and conflict across swathes of land. The history of deleterious

development interventions is rarely considered. And few experts are

prepared to locate themselves in this history of failure and unintended

consequences. For them, Sudan’s history is too often told simply as a

story of conflicts produced by local rivalries, probably between one ethnic

group and another, usually over resources, sometimes over religion,

which have raged despite the best efforts of benign interventions to settle

them. This history is conceived as a tabula rasa.

The old Almanac was important to colonial officials, not simply because

it gave them useful information; but more fundamentally, because it

offered reassurance that they belonged to a system of knowledge which

was internally consistent and which transcended the communities which

they governed, one that was not constrained by the complicated local

histories they found themselves unknowingly intervening in. It was this

which gave them confidence and self-belief – in combination with their

access to superior technologies of communication and, on occasion,

violent coercion. This kind of ideological reinforcement has made genera-

tions of experts powerful. The awareness that there are other kinds of

knowledge – that there might be more than one kind of chief, that the

river has different names, that people’s movements across the landscape

follow a logic of their own, and that they may owe no loyalty to govern-

ments nor any other power – such awareness is liable to complicate both

the lives of experts and the rule of autocrats.

Many Sudans

Debate over what shape Sudan should be, and over the relationship

between the state and its people have characterized political discussion

in Sudan since well before Independence. Such debates are bound up

with the telling and retelling of history, as people explain, justify and

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors make^ claims^ through^ reference^ to^ the^ past.^ In^ the^ South,^ the^ recent^

(www.riftvalley.net).