Making racism: Racial Relationships, Identity, and the State in Colonial Sudan, 1898-1956

The history of Sudan in 20th Century is often seen as one of struggle between the dominant ?Arabs? of the North and the subject ?African? inhabitants of the South. The seemingly intrinsic inability to come to terms with each other, as well as the centuries-old feeling of ?racism? of Northern Sudanese towards the South are seen as the main cause of the multiple civil wars that have occurred in the country from the 1960s until the present, eventually leading to the separation of the South in 2011. Against this common perception, this project stated the hypothesis that racial categorizations in Sudan are a twentieth century phenomenon, and I sought to understand in particular the role of the colonial State in shaping racial relations, as well as that of the groups effected by state racial labelling. The colonial period marks the first time in Sudan in which the categories Arab/African have been rendered operative by the State. In particular, they were summoned in institutions such as the colonial school, the Labour Bureau and the army. My aim was to understand how this worked, and how people reacted to it. Moreover, I wished to explore how the literary and cultural production by upper class Sudanese who identified themselves as Arabs influenced the construction of that category. Finally, I sought to understand the way in which people defined as ?Africans? worked with the label attributed to them, and the cultural -or counter-cultural- forms by which they proposed alternative models of nationhood. The research has yielded the following results, be divided into four major findings. First, I have inquired how colonial administrators understood Sudanese as divided into ?races? and constructed an academic knowledge based on such assumption. I have explored how the disciplines of history and anthropology were used by colonial administrators to establish a radical difference between Northern and Southern Sudanese: the Southerners could only be known by the means of anthropology (so that Sudan has become the land of choice of anthropologists such as Edward Evans-Pritchard), because they were people without literacy and thus without history. On the other hand, colonial administrators who were also amateur historians competed to write articles about the history of the ?Arab? North. Second, I have examined how colonial institutions (colonial schools, the army, labour, etc.) contributed to the construction of racial difference. I have discovered that some sort of silent racial quotas were applied by these institutions during the years 1900 to 1940. Notably, the British administration considered that ?Arabs? were made for schooling and intellectual work, while ?Africans? for manual labour and the army. At the same time, a detailed analysis of how this racial categorization was implemented on the ground shows that it was poorly applied, to the point that few really understood the racial logic that was at work. In the 1940s, the racial quotas disappeared. This new era just preceding independence saw the triumph of the development paradigm and the diffusion of universal services, notably of education. The number of pupils accepted in schools increased exponentially, and so did the salaried labour force. However - and this represents the third finding - while racial categorizations ceased to be operative in colonial institutions, they entered fully in the political language of the time, and in particular in the context the problem of the South that began to arise in that period. As Southern politicians refused to be represented by Northerners in the negotiations leading to independence and forwarded their own demands - notably the request for a federation - Northern intellectuals in their literary productions described Southerners as unwilling to collaborate for national liberation. However, this was not justified on the ground of political arguments, but on that of the ?backwardness? of the Southerners. The Arab identity of Sudan became central in these debates. Finally, I have sought to explore the construction of the category of ?Sudanese Blacks? (in Arabic, Sudani) by the actors so defined. I discovered that between 1900 and 1930 this label was attributed to a heterogeneous group of people of enslaved people, ex-slaves, and people with a distant slave background; and even when it indicated enslaved individuals, they came from all over Sudan. Second, in the period between 1940 and 1950, the by then numerous population of slave descendants constituted themselves into a liminal category, in-between southerners and northerners. Their liminality was obvious at the political level, as in the case of a political movement called the Black Block, whose stated aim was ?to defend the rights of African people in Sudan?; and this position is present until today, as until 2011 Sudani were numerous in the Southern opposition movement of the Sudan People Liberation Movement.

Racism and racial relations are a core issue in Sudan's long history of conflict. Sudan has the sad record of being the country with the longest civil war in Africa (1955-1972 and 1983-2005), and racism is seen as one of the major causes of conflict betwe en Northern and Southern Sudan. Also within Northern Sudan, racial relations feed a constant low-intensity social strife. Thus racism is seen as opposing the 'Arabs' of the North from the 'Africans' of the South. This is one of the reasons given for the p lanned separation of the country, and in 2011 the Sudanese will be called to decide whether the North and the South will be divided or not. The proposed post-doctoral project shall investigate the construction of racial relations in the colonial Northern Sudan. This has special significance for broadening our understanding of what triggered the many conflicts of the country. In this project I will analyze the emergence of racist ideology and relations during the colonial time by researching into three d omains: the colonial state's racist attitudes and practices, the process of construction of 'Arabness', and the parallel construction of 'Blackness'. From the theoretical point of view, the project will make use of a branch of social theory called theor y of racial formations. Accordingly, I consider racism as a political construct, a set of relations, and as a historically determined and dynamic process. Racism informs behaviours and beliefs of individuals, but individuals still retain the power of infl uencing it in several ways. I aim to show that racist relations in colonial Sudan were ridden in ambiguities, changed over time, and never went unchallenged. Methodologically, the project will rely on British archival sources, on Arabic literary sources, and on interviews collected during fieldwork. It will be facilitated by my previous research and by a well-established network of informants, but will embrace new avenues both theoretically and empirically.