8 - Gaining Access to Land: Everyday Negotiations and Rashaida Ethnic Politics in North-eastern Sudan

Summary

In view of recent foreign interests in Sudan’s arable land and its subterranean resources, the hold of rural people over this crucial resource is insecure. Land is not only a productive resource for rural people, but also in principle enables an access to other spatially fixed state resources, such as education, water and health services. This chapter analyses how landless pastoral people, ‘the Rashaida’, articulated a need for land and gained an access to it. Their classification as a newcomer tribe without a homeland (dār), based on their immigrant and occupational backgrounds, profoundly affected how these people organize access to land, even after having lived in Sudan for generations.

This chapter focuses on a process of land appropriation from below and links it to social stratification and processes of group formation. To develop my argument, I juxtapose people’s land relations in two regions, the Lower Atbara area and Kassala, focusing attention on the entanglements between regional economic opportunities, political mobilization and the modes in which belonging is articulated. I will argue that processes of social stratification, which resulted in the formation of an elite in Kassala, are fundamental to representing ‘the Rashaida’ as an ethnic group in the Sudanese political sphere. This affects the modalities of land access. In the Lower Atbara, where people are still largely disconnected from the benefits of recent political developments in Eastern Sudan, individuals have to make sense of their situations and find their own pragmatic arrangements with landowning groups. In Kassala, through a process of ethno-political mobilization, specific land-related grievances were translated into a concern of the ethnic group, resulting in an access to some resources (settlement land, government offices).

To theorize this jump in scale from individual to collective organization of land access, I draw upon Thévenot’s notion of ‘investments in forms’ (1984), which highlights the difficult and arduous work of establishing/ maintaining any form that could facilitate co-ordination against a background of uncertainty. Invested forms are conceived as the things that hold together in situations and enable co-ordination, such as rules, classifications, codes, habits, laws, etc. In this case ethnicity figures as invested forms, a label that is (re)established and stabilized through arduous and repetitive semantic investments.