the ambitions of the state 115reserved for people from the south. But in the 1930s educated members
of the northern riverain Arab elite began to apply it to themselves as a
statement of an aspiring national identity. They also called themselves
‘graduates’, in self-conscious affirmation of their identity as secondary
school graduates.
Suspicion of these educated men as a subversive group was one of the
factors that led the British to develop a different system of administration
for outlying parts of the country, for the more remote parts of the north
and the whole of the south. This sought to engage with local ideas of
authority to create an articulation between the centralized state and what
were labelled ‘traditional’ local authorities. ‘Native administration’, as
the British called this approach, had the advantage of keeping the cost of
administration low. With its precursors in the Turco-Egyptian adminis-
tration and successors in several post-independence governments, it can
be seen as the longest lasting of all administrative systems in modern
Sudanese history.
But British policy towards the south was complex and contradictory.
On the one hand the south was made subject to and part of the central-
ized state run from Khartoum, a state to which southerners had no access
and in which the importance of Arabic and Islam was unquestioned; on
the other hand, British officials sought – not always consistently – to keep
the south distinct and separate, and to exclude from most of its extent
not only northern officials but any Muslim or Arab influence. For a time
from the end of the 1920s this approach was formalized as ‘Southern
Policy’. The contradiction encouraged neglect: government-provided
education, most British officials thought, was liable to be bad for south-
erners, bringing them under the influence of the northern ‘graduates’,
so education in the south was for many years left to under-resourced
Christian missions. The rush to reverse these policies in the last years
of the Condominium, from around 1947, was as belated and ineffectual
as the attempt to create a new, more inclusive political culture of repre-
sentation in the same years.
The ineffectiveness of these measures was partly due to the rapidThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors end^ of^ the^ Condominium.^ This^ came^ much^ more^ swiftly^ than^ had^ been^
(www.riftvalley.net).