116 the sudan handbookanticipated. Celebrated by some as a courageous victory for Sudanese
nationalism, the end of the Condominium was more the result of
Anglo-Egyptian rivalries and politicking. While Egypt was wriggling
free from British control after 1945, Britain and Egypt had each courted
and encouraged the small group of graduates who perceived themselves
as Sudanese nationalists, seeking to enlist their support one against the
other. The result was that at independence, the Sudanese state was more
or less handed over on a plate – to the effendiya and their allies among
the established sectarian groups, Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi’s Ansar, and
Ali al- Mirghani’s Khatmiyya. The Khatmiyya group nominally favoured
union with Egypt; while the graduates associated with Abd al-Rahman
al-Mahdi called for an independent Sudan. But as the end of the Condo-
minium drew rapidly closer, these contending parties reached agreement
on an independence which gave them control of the central state that
the graduates had served as functionaries. This was to the exclusion of
the majority of Sudanese.
They took control at a time of rapid state expansion. The expan-
sion was fuelled by good years of cotton prices and by the reformist
ambitions of a late colonial regime briefly devoted to projects of social
welfare: to the expansion of education, the creation of new development
schemes and improvements in wages and conditions for workers. But
as the boom years ended shortly after independence these expansionist
ambitions proved unsustainable. In politics, the economic downturn was
compounded by the assumption of the riverain elite that the pursuit of
modern nationhood required that other Sudanese – in the west, in the
east, and in the south – accept their culture and their view of the future.
The consequences of this narrow vision were already apparent before
the end of the Condominium, in the bloody events which followed the
Torit mutiny of August 1955, when southern Sudanese, suspicious of the
imposition of northern officials in the run-up to independence, turned
violently against vulnerable individual northerners in the south.
This contradiction between a northern elite with a restrictive view
of nationhood, and a wider population excluded from full participationThe Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors in^ the^ political^ process,^ has^ fuelled^ half^ a^ century^ of^ centre–periphery^
(www.riftvalley.net).