The Sudan Handbook

thE WaR in thE WEst 227

From the Centre to the Margin

Like many conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Darfur rebellion can be seen
primarily as a revolt by the inhabitants of a formerly powerful historic
centre which has become marginalized. From the seventeenth to the
early twentieth century, the sultanate of Darfur lay at the centre of trade
routes running north and south, and pilgrimage routes from west to east.
For a time its sultans ruled Kordofan; and it was only briefly conquered
by the Turkiyya in the 1870s. The sultans re-established their indepen-
dence as the Mahdist state crumbled; it was only the Anglo-Egyptian
conquest in 1916 which reduced Darfur to a subordinate status on the
periphery of Sudan. Under the Condominium, power and wealth became
concentrated in the Nile valley. Since that time, Darfur’s inhabitants
have consistently felt that they are contributing to the country’s wealth
without benefiting from it in return. The greatest symbol of this has
been the project to build an asphalt road from Khartoum to El-Fasher,
an undertaking made by the National Islamic Front, for which Darfurians
paid a sugar surtax in the early 1990s, increasing the price of this vital
commodity threefold. The money disappeared and the road still has not
been built.
Quite apart from the symbolic asphalt, provision of government
services in Darfur – and the west in general – has been marked by clear
geographical inequalities. In 2003, the state of West Darfur only had
26 doctors, or less than one doctor per 75,000 inhabitants (a record in
northern Sudan), compared to one doctor per thousand inhabitants in
Khartoum. It had 11,000 inhabitants per water point, compared with 2,000
per water point in Northern State, on the Nile north of Khartoum.
Beyond economic underdevelopment, the term ‘marginalization’ –
omnipresent in the discourse of Darfur rebel movements – encapsulates
a strong feeling of discrimination. In the Nile valley, Darfurians were and
still are gharbawin, ‘the people of the West’, migrants in search of work,
mainly in the Gezira cotton fields. For a time, they themselves were
ambivalent about their culture. From the 1960s, there was a widespread
tendency to seek an escape from marginalization by imitating the Arabs
The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).