20712. Twentieth-Century Civil Wars
douGlas h. Johnson
The civil war in southern Sudan has often been represented as Africa’s
longest civil war, starting in August 1955, before the country gained
independence. Like all characterizations this simplifies the truth. This
chapter will give a streamlined account of the Sudan’s civil wars, but in
doing so it will attempt to highlight the complexities of the conflicts.
The Sudan’s pre-independence past is a history of colonialisms that
were imposed on a succession of conquest states. This had a marked
effect not only on the way the Sudan was governed, but on the way
the Sudanese peoples responded to government. ‘To understand native
feelings,’ the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard told a group of adminis-
trators attending the Oxford University Summer School on Colonial
Administration in 1938, ‘we have to bear in mind that the southern Sudan
was conquered by force and is ruled by force, the threat of force, and
the memory of force. Natives do not pay taxes nor make roads from a
sense of moral obligation’, he went on to say, ‘but because they are afraid
of retaliation. The moral relations between natives and Government
provide the most fundamental of administrative problems, for the natives
have to integrate into their social system a political organization that has
no moral value for them.’
While Evans-Pritchard was speaking specifically about the south, his
observation could have applied to many other parts of the Sudan. By the
end of the Condominium period administration may have taken on a
more benign aspect, and the application of force may have declined, but
both the threat of force and the memory of force remained. The admin-
istration still conducted periodic ‘flag marches’ where detachments of
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors soldiers visited areas ‘to show the flag’, often burning down the huts
(www.riftvalley.net).