Part Two - FROM MAKAMA TO MEJLIS: THE MAKING OF CHIEFSHIP AND THE LOCAL STATE, 1920s–1950s

Summary

In Moru District in 1918, a police attack on an Atuot community was blamed on the district mamur, a subaltern Egyptian or Sudanese officer:

On investigation it transpired that the police had attacked the followers of a friendly Atwot Chief called Dubbai who had lived on the Moru boundary for two years. As the attack was unexpected and came as a complete surprise about 100 Atwots were killed including women and children and their cattle captured and driven in to Amadi. The police of course were acting on the instructions of the Mamour [mamur].

Over the next few years, British officials would use such evidence to urge the removal of Egyptian mamurs from the southern provinces, as part of the wider reaction in the Condominium government against educated Egyptian and northern Sudanese. The growing preference for traditional, tribal authority has generated analysis of the early 1920s as a turning-point in histories of the Condominium. But in southern Sudan, this shift was largely rhetorical, as the new language of ‘Indirect Rule’ provided fresh justification for the existing pragmatic reliance on the local intermediaries and agents appointed as chiefs and headmen.

The more significant shift in the southern provinces after the First World War was instead in the gradual bureaucratisation and regularisation of government. As Fields writes, Indirect Rule was a legitimising theory which ‘aimed to give the present and future actions of the rulers consistency and order’ [my emphasis].