38 the sudan handbookhistory of the Sudan is represented as a history of lost opportunities, of
agreements with the government in Khartoum that have been repeat-
edly dishonoured. Before that, for many Southerners the story of Sudan
is a story of slavery, of the nineteenth century depredations of raiders
from the north. But among the people of the riverain north the story is
different. Here slaves are invisible; the main story is one of struggle for
independence from external powers – external, that is, to the country
that was not yet then Sudan. Thus, in Khartoum, primary school children
are trained to re-enact the story of Mek Nimr, a traditional leader who,
in 1822, killed the tyrannical son of Muhammad Ali of Egypt. These
schoolchildren, growing up in a divided country, are rehearsing what
is seen in the north – or parts of the north – as the seminal, unifying
moment in the history of Sudanese nationalism. Yet Mek Nimr himself
lived before there was anywhere called Sudan and had no idea of a Sudan,
or of himself as Sudanese. And in southern Sudan, few people have ever
heard of him.
A version of Sudanese history which celebrates the idea of a unified
state, shaped by the encounter with Egyptian and British colonialism has
been inscribed onto the map of Khartoum, where the names of streets
are a roll-call of characters from a northern nationalist version of history:
Mahdist generals, the sectarian leaders of the early twentieth-century
and the young men of the White Flag movement who proclaimed resis-
tance to British rule in the 1920s. But not all the people who live in Sudan
share a sense of the significance of these names. In Khartoum, the name
of Abu Garga may be synonymous with heroic national struggle against
Egypt or Ethiopia; but in the Nuba Mountains it evokes another bleak
episode in a history of state violence; in Equatoria it means nothing. For
southerners, Zubeir Pasha Street brings to mind not a great national
figure, but a slave trader.
The Islamist project of the 1980s was an attempt to impose a new kind
of national identity on Sudan, one that saw the country’s religious and
cultural diversity as something to be overcome in the name of a single
unifying belief system. Some Islamist thinkers hailed 1989 as the momentThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors of^ final^ liberation^ from^ colonial^ rule,^ blaming^ the^ country’s^ troubles^ after^
(www.riftvalley.net).