6 - Uncertainty on the urban frontier: chiefs and the politics of Sudanese independence, 1946–1958

Summary

The final decade of the Condominium heightened popular expectations of government and opened up new avenues of communication and opportunity for southern Sudanese to access the state. Burton claims that it was from the 1940s that towns were ‘accepted’ by local people, ‘when it became clear that in order to protect their own political and economic interests, it was essential to participate in town-oriented affairs more directly’. Yet the effect of an urbanrural, state-society divide was nevertheless being sharply crystallised in this period, firstly through the consolidation and political activism of an increasingly self-conscious, town-dwelling, literate ‘class’ (as the government increasingly termed them). By the 1950s, many of these educated men, in common with nationalist politicians in the rest of Sudan and Africa, were presenting themselves as distinctly modern in comparison to the ‘traditional’ chiefs, a discursive bifurcation that would endure subsequently in southern Sudan.

Secondly, wider political change and events in the 1950s also fed into the cultural and cognitive hardening of a rural-urban divide. Over the preceding decades of colonial rule, the hakuma had – particularly for the people living in the vicinity of the towns – acquired aspects of predictability and recognisability, whether in the person of a few long-serving, vernacular-speaking British officials, or in the wider regularisation of taxation demands, justice and policing.