114 the sudan handbooksocial and political culture of the riverain northern heartland. One
of those who played this game with some success was the son of the
Mahdi. Despite the suspicion and hostility of some officials, Sayyid Abd
al-Rahman al-Mahdi (known to officialdom as SAR) obtained a degree
of assistance from the British, establishing himself as a wealthy and
powerful man. In return he became a reliable supporter of the Condo-
minium government. This was invaluable to the British in times of crisis,
such as the two World Wars and the Egyptian revolution of 1919–22. As
head of the Ansar sect established by his father, Sayyid Abd al-Rahman
was in perpetual rivalry with the head of the Khatmiyya tariqa, Sayyid
Ali al-Mirghani (known as SAM). Both combined political and religious
leadership with the role of entrepreneur, as their successors do today.
Riverain northern Sudan also provided the bulk of another increas-
ingly wealthy and important group in Sudanese society – those whom the
British called the effendiya Arabic-speaking Muslims with some formal
western education who occupied clerical posts in the lower ranks of the
government. British attitudes to this group were decidedly complex;
they viewed them as a political danger, they disliked their presumption
and their adoption of patterns of dress from outside the Sudan; they
identified them – probably accurately – as the most important group
in the anti-British and pro-Egyptian agitation of the early 1920s, which
culminated in 1924 in the unrest known as the White Flag revolt. After
the suppression of the White Flag Movement, the British expelled most
Egyptian officials from the Sudan. But the British relied on the effendiya- all of them men – to keep the bureaucracy working. They were much
cheaper than British employees, and they shared at least some aspects
of political culture with them. They were, after all, more often than not
the products of Gordon College, or ‘Eton on the Nile’, created to train a
small body of Sudanese in the tasks of the modern state.
By the end of the 1920s, some members of this group were beginning
to invest the word ‘Sudanese’ with a new meaning. Up to this point
‘Sudanese’ was not a term that most inhabitants of the country would
have used to describe themselves. Peoples in the heartland referred to
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors themselves^ as^ Arabs.^ ‘Sudanese’^ (its^ root^ form^ meaning^ ‘black’)^ was^ a^ term^
(www.riftvalley.net).