The Sudan Handbook

land &  WateR    49

under Turco-Egyptian rule in the nineteenth century, a telegraph line

reached Khartoum from Cairo. Railway construction from Egypt south

into Sudan made little headway under Turco-Egyptian rule; but the

Anglo-Egyptian invasion, the ‘reconquest’ of 1896–98, rolled forward on

the iron rails which carried the steam train. Within a few years of the

establishment of the Condominium a programme of railway building

connected Khartoum with Egypt, with the new Red Sea harbour at Port

Sudan, and with Kordofan’s provincial capital at El-Obeid. In the 1950s

and early 1960s, a further programme of investment took the railway to

Nyala in    1959     and, three years later, to Wau, in the south. (Today, there

are plans, not yet realized, to link the south to east Africa by rail.)

Like the political dispensation, the railways placed riverain northern

Sudan at the centre; all traffic had to pass through Khartoum, and the

links to the outside world also lay through the three cities. Steamer

services were established from Khartoum up the river to Juba, but the

road network of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was limited. When, after 1956,

a succession of independent governments began to develop this road

network, it too focused on the riverain north: that was where the roads

led, and where the roads were best.

In the 1970s, the railway network was deliberately run down: perhaps

because it was inefficient, perhaps because Nimeiri’s government resented

the political power of the railway workers union. As a consequence,

Sudan’s railways were barely functioning by the late 1990s (though there

was a small amount of new construction to service the oil industry),

but a new programme of road building re-emphasized the dominance

of the northern riverain centre – a programme which has accelerated

since around 2002, creating tarmac roads from Khartoum north to Wadi

Halfa, and improving and developing the roads from Khartoum to the

east and to the Gezira, as well as resurfacing the main roads in Greater

Khartoum. The failure to complete an asphalted road westwards, that

would link Darfur to the rest of the country, regarded by many Darfu-

rians as a deliberate act of neglect, has been a contributory cause of civil

conflict in the region.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors While^ scant^ and^ unreliable^ rainfall^ have^ made^ flexibility^ and^ mobility^

(www.riftvalley.net).