196 Scarcity and SurfeitIslamic polity developing in the central and northern zones came to establish
hegemony over the more humid regions to the south. Control of the state has
facilitated the exploitation of environmental resources by the mainly 'north-
ern' elite. The secession movement embodying the southern peoples'
response suffers from the region's endemic f~agmentation.~
This inversion of the modernised Christian agriculturalist domination of
the traditional agro-pastoralist and marginalised nomad theme in Sudan is
also at variance with the general pattern for the greater Sahel. When we use
the optic of environmentally conditioned dynamics to analyse the greater
region, the Nile River emerges as the chief feature distinguishing the region
that became modern Sudan from the rest of the original Bilad es Sudan.
Eastern and western Sahel share a common set of historical attributes: a
tradition of long-distance trade dating back to the proto-history era; the rise
of regional states since the early period of the last millennium; the spread of
Islam via mystical sects; ethno-linguistic units that decrease in size as humid-
ity increases; consistently unpredictable nature of rainfall across irregular
cycles of dry and wet climate over the last 2000 years, and a relatively stable
configuration of ethnic communities - at least for the past several hundred
years. The pilgrimage to Mecca long provided the only traditional albeit ten-
uous link to the outside for the otherwise spatially isolated region.
The historical role of the Nile, the only major river in the world running
from south to north, contrasts markedly with West Africa's waterways.' The
Niger, Senegal, and Volta Rivers provided a basic communication network
spanning West Africa's forest savanna continuum. The Nile axis has funnelled
external influence into the African interior since pharaonic times. Until recent-
ly the influence was mainly episodic; the expanse of desert separating central
Sudan from Egypt limited the impact to a spatially circumscribed pocket.
But outside forces exerted a certain accumulative effect owing to the com-
bination of physical and spatial barriers and the twin-pronged connection to
Egypt and the Arabian peninsula provided by the river and land route to Port
Sudan. The result was the emergence of the 'riverain Arabs', a mercantile
class that assumed control of the centralised modern state and has success-
fully expanded large-scale agriculture while capturing resources from the
south to concentrate power in the hands of the traditional-modern elite.
Deng asserts that Sudan's economy has long been the domain of these
'riverain Arabs'. Mansour Khalid, one of the few SPLM members from the
north, states that all power in Sudan is concentrated within a ruling elite,
composed of:
"... the politicised Arab/Islamic rulers coming from the urban and semi-
urban centers of the northern and central Sudan in Khartoum, White Nile,
Gezira, and Kordofan provinces, which exert a political and economic
hegemony over the marginalised social and cultural groups living in rural