ثــورة 1924 وتـزيـيـف التــاريخ فى السـودان والـمسـكـوت عنه حولها..

Quote: Sudanese political arena from 1930s onwards has advocated principles of legitimization drawn from Islamic-based descent narratives, which broadly consist in the claim by a family or of an ethnic group of a privileged social status on the basis of their genealogical ties with the Prophet Muhammad’s original religious community. The nationalist elites of the Umma and Unionist parties, and their predecessors in the Graduate Congress since the 1930s, appropriated these narratives in their nationalist programme, thus consolidating their role as an elite destined to lead the country. However, the first Sudanese nationalism, led by the White Flag League, and which culminated in the 1924 revolution, presented characteristics and dynamics very different from the later nationalism of the Graduate Congress. Some scholars have associated its failure to the fact that the White Flag League was led by the most disgruntled elements of the society, in particular by ex-slave, temporarily allied with a handful of ‘Arab’ intelligentsia. Racial reasons, ill-organization, and the failure to obtain a popular basis because of their independence from the traditional leaders, are seen as the principal reasons of its failure. This is the view for instance of Niblock or Deng. Even where these assumptions are not made, we see however that the 1924 events suffer of lack of historical analysis, and often merely constitute an explanatory background to the later Sudanese nationalism. Nevertheless, some historiography such as Bakheit’s thesis about the White Flag League in 1965, and Kurita’s more recent study about the White Flag League and its leader Ali Abdel Latif, have started to shift the focus of the research. The significance of these studies lies not only in having demonstrated the deep impact of this early nationalism in the Sudan, but also in having shown the inadequacy of the usual categories of analysis in understanding the early colonial period. This research therefore attempts to consolidate this re-interpretation of early Sudanese nationalism, and also to reformulate our perception of the mechanisms of empowerment and legitimacy in the society of the 1920s. This contribution will start with the analysis of the most important characteristics of the League, its origins, popularity and social background. Then, the different criteria of power legitimacy supported by the Sudanese traditional elites and the colonial administrators will be compared with the ones followed by the first nationalists, analyzing this difference in connection with the deep structural and economic changes that started from the colonial occupation. Finally, the reaction from the part of the traditional notables and British rulers, and the strategy employed to discredit the legitimacy of the movement will be briefly presented. The base of this study is the extremely rich amount of archival data in the NRO of Khartoum and PRO in London. It consists of more than 2000 documents, composed by Intelligence notes, telegrams and propaganda material by the White Flag League, newspapers cuttings etc, which in itself shows how much these events captured the attention of the Intelligence. At the same time, it has been possible to make use of a good amount of oral interviews both taken in the 70s by a team of researchers, and in smaller part by myself during my last period of fieldwork in 2004-2005. The rise of nationalism in the Sudan must be seen in relation to the rise of nationalist movements elsewhere in the colonial world. This process was accelerated after the end of the First World War by the affirmation of the principle of the nation-state in international politics and its necessary role in maintaining the peace in the world. The second crucial factor for the foundation of Sudanese nationalism was the Egyptian revolution in 1919 and her independence in 1921. This had immediate effects on the Sudan, which nominally was a colony of both Egypt and Britain. The status of the Sudan became one of the reserved points of the Egyptian Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1921. This event polarized the Sudanese between those who were pro-British and who sustained the idea of a Sudan for the Sudanese, and those who claimed that the Sudan should be put under the exclusive guardianship of Egypt in the name of a unity of the Nile Valley. The nationalist ideology was first brought to the Sudan by Egyptian officials, as well as by Egyptian newspapers and international press, and spread quickly among Sudanese officers and officials. However, before 1924, nationalism remained confined to these groups. A number of small ill-defined secret associations, like the Society of the Sudan Union, were founded in the most important urban centres. Nevertheless, their activities were rather concentrated on discussing political events, and on planning subversive political activities, rather than on the open diffusion of nationalist ideas. In contrast with these organizations, since its foundation as a dissident branch of the Society of the Sudan Union, the White Flag League was characterized by intensive militant activities and an open, yet peaceful struggle against the British colonial rule. Between June and September 1924, throughout the whole country, every day there were demonstrations in the streets, or protests in the form of telegrams to the high authorities in Khartoum and Cairo, speeches in the mosque during the Friday prayers, strikes or absences from work, and so on so forth. The White Flag League achieved great popularity. Demonstrations could gather even 1000 people, like in Port Sudan the 27 July 1924. Up to now, it has been possible to trace in the British documents the reference to more than 800 people as political agitators. There were branches of the White Flag League all over the country, from Khartoum to Medani, from Fasher to Port Sudan and Atbara, from Talodi to Wau; every province, except perhaps Kassala, was attained. Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, the White Flag League was far from being dominated by people of slave origins, or by individuals coming from the marginalized ‘non-Arab’ ethnic group of the country, the so-called Sudani, despite they covered key positions inside the League. The sources show instead that northern Sudanese were numerically slightly prevalent in the League, but, at the same time, there was a remarkable ethnic heterogeneity among its members. Together with the people classified as northern Sudanese, there was a high percentage of Sudani, people generally defined as de-tribalized individuals often with a slave non-Arab descent, among whom there was the League leader Ali Abdel Latif. Also, there were many so-called Muwalladin, a term used for the descendants of intermarriages between Egyptian (or rather Turco-Egypian) fathers and Sudanese mothers. Egyptians above all, but also Syrians and Yemeni actively collaborated with the movement. Also, it is striking to observe the diversity of occupational categories among the League’s members. The founders of the League consisted of five people, all educated, four of whom were government employees or ex-employees in the post and telegraph department, and one, Ali Abdel Latif, was a discharged army officer. Despite of their belonging to the educated elite, their nationalistic propaganda was directed to all the elements of the society, such as the working class, traders, soldiers and students, and even rural tribal notables. The workers’ branch of the League assumed a crucial role in spreading propaganda and organizing demonstrations, strikes and other peaceful protests, in particular in Khartoum, Port Sudan and Atbara. The traders were also important, since they carried prohibited material, such as money for propaganda or censored newspapers, spreading it from the cities to the rural areas. Army officers and students were extremely active, as it is demonstrated from the important mutiny of the cadets of the Military School and the mutiny of 27 November, which were led respectively by students and army officers. The great mobility of officers and government employees during their service fostered a capillary diffusion of the League in the Sudan, which involved the rural areas as well. Once the activists established a branch of the League in a new location, usually a urban centre, they started to co-opt the different social groups and also to send delegations to the chiefs of the surrounding tribes in the rural areas; and in certain cases their success was remarkable. For instance, Ali Mallassi, who was the leader of the White Flag League in Port Sudan, narrates that the nomads Hadendowa helped the League’s people to occupy Port Sudan for two days, driving back the police, who had to call for the support of the navy to regain control. In the perspective of the debate about genealogy as an instrument of legitimation, there are two interesting observations to make about the League. In this movement there were members of illustrious families, such as Obeid el Haj el Amin, whose brother was in the 1919 delegation of Sudanese notables to London; Mulazim Ali Dinar, son of the late sultan Ali Dinar; Ahmed Mudassir Ibrahim, whose father was keeper of the Privy seal for the Mahdi; Mohammed el Amin Abu el Gasim, son of the Sheikh Abu El Gasem, president of the board of Ulema, and so forth. However, their position inside the League was not determined by their descent. This is well illustrated by the following fact: the members of the second leading cell of the White Flag League in June 1924 included among them Mudassir Ibrahim, who belonged to an important family, together with the much less known carpenter El Tuhami Mohammed. They both remained leading figures of the League until the end. Even more strikingly, among all members, it was Ali Abdel Latif, a Sudani of both Dinka and Nuba origins, who was acclaimed as a leader both by the educated pro-Egyptian elite and by people in the streets. These are examples of the League indifference to genealogical hierarchies. The early Sudanese nationalist movement, far from being merely a struggle about whether to follow Britain or Egypt, sprang from the social changes and ruptures that took place in the country during the first 20 years of the condominium. The nationalist movement incarnated power conflicts that emerged from changing balances of social forces. It incorporated a struggle against the process of hegemonization of the descent-based legitimacy, representing perhaps the last strong attempt to build legitimacy on alternative bases, before that the policy of indirect rule and a more systematic empowerment of the traditional elites prevented similar situations from happening again. The colonial policy encouraged the consolidation of descent-based legitimacy. The whole doctrine of indirect rule rested ultimately on this principle, reinforcing and dogmatizing the well-established connection between social prominency and genealogical prestige. Certainly, the criteria of empowerment of a leader were determined by a much more complex set of reasons than descent, such as the leader’s readiness to collaborate with the British rulers, but also by his ability to present himself convincingly as the ‘natural leader’ of the tribe. Hegemony is firstly connected with mechanisms of power and prestige internal to a group, as well as with a leader’s ability to obtain social capital. At the same time, his hegemony has to be translated into a political narrative that would render his power understandable and acceptable for the community. In our case, the legitimization consisted in presenting power as ‘naturally’ derived from descent. This kind of narrative is of course all but new. However, alternative legitimizing principles have very often challenged, limited or overcome descent as the main mechanism of empowerment. For instance, descent-based legitimization was refused by the Mahdist rule, at least as a narrative of power. The Mahdi’s supremacy rested on his spiritual position, and the same principle should regulate the future accession to power; other legitimating factors such as descent were present, but were not crucial. The same could be said for other millenaristic African movements during the 19th Century, as much as the religious insurrection of the various Nabi Isa in the northern Sudan during the first 20 years of the colonial rule. Linked to the mechanism of hegemonization there is the more general problem of the distribution of power within a community and the social hierarchy that results from it. A community is organized along social hierarchies as a result of material conditions and ideological frameworks: for instance, the Mahdist state organized the individuals according to a hierarchy determined by their loyalty to Mahdist principles and their readiness to take part in its struggles. The first nationalism proceeded in the same way: groups’ identities and classifications, such as Sudani with its derogatory implications, Mahas, Jaali, did not vanish at all, but nevertheless became irrelevant in the context of the national struggle. The individual was judged mainly according to his adhesion to nationalist values and projects. The shift in political narrative came as a consequence of two main factors: on the one hand, the diffusion of a new nationalist ideological framework encouraged the rethinking of social relations in the perspective of belonging to a shared egalitarian community; and on the other hand, the mechanisms of power that previously structured ethnic and class hierarchies were being challenged and weakened as an effect of colonialism. As it has been demonstrated by much post-colonial literature, colonialism, while being empowering for certain elites on the basis of an alleged tradition, was also mining the very mechanism of legitimization that it was claiming to defend. In the Sudan, Mahdism had destroyed the old hierarchy and created a new one. Then, colonialism provoked the rise of different elites, according to its political necessities. These elites, despite their power narratives and their manipulation of the past, were still not consolidated enough to obtain a wide popular consensus, and their authority was curtailed by their alliance with the colonial rulers. The slow and contested affirmation of Sayed Abdel Rahman as leader of the Mahdist sect during the colonial time is an example of this process. At the same time, the deep economic and structural changes that took place in the Sudan after 1898 highlighted an internal contradiction within colonial conservative policy, which contributed to keep the mechanisms of empowerment unstable. The colonial state fostered the formation of new social classes, which were necessary for the transformation of the Sudan in view of the industrial global economy. These classes were, first, the administrative class, represented by clerks, officers and officials, who shared the experience of the colonial education, and, second, a new working class, arisen from the requirements of the colonial state, such as the building and maintenance of the railway and steamer systems, the implementation of large agricultural scheme, the construction of colonial infrastructures and facilities. The recruitment of pupils in the colonial schools was only partially based on descent; the tribal leaders were initially reluctant to have their sons educated, while officers and officials were much more willing to send their sons to schools. In the multi-ethnic, multinational, and multi-confessional colonial schools, such as the Gordon Memorial College, the Military school, but also in the missionary schools, people of various backgrounds found themselves being evaluated according to their school achievements, and not according to their descent. For example, it was Ali Abdel Latif who won the medal as the best student of the Military School, which certainly was not due to his blood ties. Inside these schools, the pupils were taught the same curriculum and code of behaviour. They would later work together in the ever expanding bureaucracy, another place in which people was mixing and interacting irrespectively to their origins. The same argument can be applied to the working class, which included people from a variety of origins, as it is apparent from the sources. By working together in the areas with heavy labour demands, they experienced greater social interactions. Another crucial factor was the chronic scarcity of manpower, which gave to the mobile and volatile working class a greater possibility for social mobility according to criteria independent from descent, but also a stronger position to negotiate their demands, as it is shown by the ever-increasing salaries. The labourers were aware of their rights and in 1924 there are several episodes of strike, in particular in Atbara and Port Sudan, both for nationalistic and economic reasons. In conclusion, it can be affirmed that the Sudanese society in the 1920s was extremely fluid, and by consequence social mobility tended to be unrelated to descent and connected to factors such as education and wealth. The most important consequence of this process is that the young, rising intelligentsia and those classes who were benefiting from the new opportunities offered by economic expansion did not search in descent a legitimizing basis, or a power narrative, but, on the contrary, they were deliberately trying to overcome it. In the centres of economic development, the generation that grew after the establishment of the condominium was very different from the previous one. Social relations were being reformulated toward a partial detachment from the more direct ethnic and familial links. The reality that the young nationalists experienced in their daily life had been reshaped not only by the colonial state, through educational and bureaucratic institutions, but also by economic expansion, which was changing the human geography of many areas. Their conscience of being different, together with their awareness of being indispensable for the expansion of the state and economy, gave them a great strength in presenting their requests. They believed they should achieve a greater negotiating power in the political arena because of their ‘modernity’, their progress and their new political sensibility. Nationalist narratives of power translated these material changes into a new ideological framework and a new vision of the society and its hierarchies. Because of the great heterogeneity of its members, their ideology was rather oriented toward a pluralistic nationalism: they acknowledged the composite nature of the Sudan, and the necessity to include all ethnic groups and social classes in the nationalist project if independence was to be achieved. This is illustrated by the symbol of the movement, a white flag in which was drawn the Nile from the sources to the Delta, to indicate that the whole Sudan had to take part in the struggle. The mobility of the working class, and the fact that both the government employees and the army officers had to travel continuously across the country during the period of their service surely had an impact in imagining a nation characterized by diversity. In the propagandistic material of the White Flag League, it is possible to notice how the nation was defined in its most general terms, in order to offer identity categories open to a public as large as possible. It was composed by a mix of common symbols, values and experiences, such as the love for their homeland, represented by the Nile from the sources to the delta, but also the collective humiliating experience of colonialism, which was restraining individual liberty and collective progress. At the same time, while being based on Islamic universalism and civic values, but in their pluralist formulation, they also aimed at including the non-Muslim groups. For instance, a large number of Copts took part in or collaborated with the League. However, except perhaps in the urban centres such as Wau, Shambe, Talodi, there are no records of non-Muslim members from the Southern Sudan or from the Nuba Mountains in the movement; this can be explained by the fact that the rural areas in the South and in the Nuba Mountains were excluded from the mechanisms of change mentioned above. The British reacted violently and systematically to the nationalist movement. The events of 1924 determined a rethinking in the colonial policy toward a rigid adoption of indirect-rule. This implied a stricter control of the classes who had access to education, a marginalization of the groups defined as non-Arabs, who were held responsible for the revolution, the suspension of the connections between the north and the south of the country, a beheading of the Sudanese intelligentsia. However, the most crucial response consisted in de-legitimizing the requests of the League’s members, by refusing to consider them as partners for any political negotiation. This even led the British rulers to overlook the popularity of the League and to commit various grave strategic mistakes. The fact that the League was headed by men who were indifferent to descent-based criteria, made the whole of them ‘rattle of nobodies’, as a British administrator defined them, and the only possible response against the League was to ‘hit, hit, and go on hitting’. They fabricated a narrative about the League based on the fact that these young nationalists were illicitly arrogating to themselves the right to speak on behalf of the Sudanese, while they had no authority to do so, since they had no descent to legitimize their claims. This narrative was sustained by the all those who had interiorized, or had interested in, the belief in the natural order of the society based on genealogy. The case of the White Flag League shows how descent legitimacy was a mechanism of empowerment far from being unquestioned and unchallenged; on the contrary, this contribution has aimed to demonstrate how these two mechanisms of legitimization, one based on descent and the other on nationalist narratives, were strongly competing in the Sudan of the 1920s. They represented opposing criteria of social standing, two different scale of measure to weight the value of an individual.