The Sudan Handbook

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15. Sudan’s Regional Relations

GéRaRd PRuniER

Sudan is both the largest country on the African continent and the one with

most neighbours. Its regional relations are bewildering in their diversity.

With the formal development of independent external relations on the

part of the Government of Southern Sudan since 2005, this complexity

has already increased further. In order to grasp the significance of these

relations, Sudan’s relationship with each neighbouring country needs to

be considered separately.

Egypt

Cairo’s main preoccupation has long been with the great Nile river. For

Egypt, which receives 100 per cent of the Nile waters on which it depends

from upstream, securing the valley in one form or another is a matter

of life and death. Hence its cautious relationship with Sudan, its suspi-

cion of southern secessionist tendencies and its extreme wariness of

anything Ethiopia might want to do with the Blue Nile waters. Egypt’s

relationship with Sudan is also shaped by its own historical experience

as a conquering power. Sudan as we know it today is in part a product

of Egyptian imperial ambition; Turco-Egyptian conquest created ‘the

Sudan’ as a political unit in the nineteenth century. Nominally at least,

Sudan was ruled by Egypt jointly with Britain from 1898 to 1956. During

the period of Sudan’s negotiations for independence, Cairo’s under-

standing was that, in accord with the then popular slogan of ‘Unity of

the Nile Valley’, Sudan would slide out from under British domination

straight into union with Egypt. This would have returned Sudan to the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors colonial situation of the nineteenth century, before the Mahdist revolt

(www.riftvalley.net).