Jay Spaulding

A Premise For Precolonial Nuba History

Near the center of the Democratic Republic of the Sudan lies a tract of broken, elevated terrain about the size of South Carolina. The region, by common convention, is called the Nuba Mountains, and the people who live there, through a familiar if misleading generalization, the Nuba. The inhabitants of the Nuba Mountains have long attracted the attention of students of African languages and cultures, for in these respects they exhibit very great diversity among themselves as well as distinctiveness in relation to the Arab and Nilotic cultural traditions that dominate the surrounding lowlands on every side. No scholar has yet deliberately undertaken to write a history of the Nuba, but many have found themselves constrained to make tangential statements or assumptions about Nuba history in the course of constructing studies with some other primary focus. The sum of these tangential comments and assumptions may read as the current state of Nuba historiography. The present study addresses a stimulating clash of opinion among those whose interests have led them to comment peripherally on the more remote Nuba past. The issue at stake is the existence, or non-existence, of a state form of government among the Nuba in precolonial times. Students of the Nuba during the colonial and post-colonial periods have seldom failed to assign considerable importance to the role of successive Sudan governments in directing the destiny of the Nuba, however they may differ in assessing the quality of this intervention.

The micropolitics of elite marriage on Echo Island.

The modern culture of the northern Sudan, and not least those aspects of culture that bear upon the issue of gender relations, have often been interpreted in terms of Arab and Islamic principles. While the importance of this paradigm to understanding the present and very recent past is obvious, a satisfying historical perspective must also include an understanding of when and how present realities were constructed.1 An unusually rich collection of nineteenth-century private legal documents from the community of Echo Island (Jazirat Abu Ranat) in the Shaiqiyya country allows the exploration of this theme in some detail. For example, it is possible to demonstrate that as recently as the middle years of the nineteenth century, father’s-brother’s-daughter marriage (or indeed, cousin marriage in any form) was not a preferred cultural practice, nor was virginity at marriage particularly valued.2 Familiar modern conceptions of marital propriety may therefore not be taken as infallible guides to past behaviors. The present study explores the complex micropolitics that governed the conduct of marriage on Echo Island among the families of the community that may be considered elite in the sense of being an old family, a large family, a family of special religious distinction, or a family who owned a saqiyya (a unit of land irrigated by an ox-driven waterwheel) landholding.3 The study begins with the hypothesis that at least in the beginning, there may have been a certain amount of social distance between families of long-standing repute in the area and newly rich

The Government of Sinnar

The Sinnar sultanate dominated much of the northern Nilotic Sudan during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and has been generally recognized as one of the important states in northeastern Africa during that era. It seems, however, that historians of Africa know less about Sinnar than, about the contemporary states of the western Sudanic region.1 In large part this situation is a result of the fact that the colonial period in the Sudan began early (1820-1821), and the hand of foreign rule was, heavy. Although visitors to the Sudan in the nineteenth century were deficient neither in numbers nor in intellectual vigor, they were denied the opportunity afforded to their contemporaries such as Heinrich Barth olf observing their hosts in a state of independence. A second barrier to a better understanding of Sinnar has been the familiarity of historians with sources in English and Arabic tol the neglect of equally relevant materials in French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Turkish. In particular, historians, have relied excessively upon the accounts of James Bruce and John Lewis Burckhardt.2 Both explorers visited Sinnar

The Funj: a reconsideration

Three lines of evidence regarding the Funj prior to the rise of the Sinnār Sultanate about 1500 have been considered. Shilluk tradition remembers the Funj as the previous inhabitants of the present Shilluk homeland, while many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to Sinnār were told that the Funj came from the White Nile. While neither set of traditions should be accepted without question, the fact that they tend to confirm each other lends weight to both. In the Shilluk country, the early Funj seem to have lived on elevated settlement mounds, and perhaps the putative Funj homeland should be extended to include the region in which these mounds are found. That would suggest that the Funj culture centred primarily along the White Nile approximately between Renk and Malakal, but the possibility of a homeland even more broadly defined need not be excluded. Archaeological evidence derived from pottery finds on the White Nile mounds may be interpreted to imply that the Funj were a southern Nubian people, an hypothesis that must be weighed against alternatives that would suggest an unknown or even Meroitic cultural identity. The presence of red brick structures along the White Nile south of the generally accepted borders of the Sultanate, as well as in the capital itself, tends to support the ‘Nubian’ hypothesis. Further research concerning the Funj language and the archaeological cultures south of the latitude of Sinnār should help resolve these ambiguities; many aspects of government and society in the Sinnār Sultanate are clarified by considering the era a Nubian Renaissance.

African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (review)

B O O K R E V EW S 52 about the fate of this pan-Africanist tradition once it is no longer completely engaged with the question of national self-determination. Additionally, this history will serve to empower groups and individuals wanting to take up once again Kadalie’s and Namapare’s demands for better living standards, social justice, and egalitarianism in Zimbabwe. Timothy Scarnecchia Georgetown University

Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

Histories written in the aftermath of empire have often featured conquerors and peasant rebels but have said little about the vast staffs of locally recruited clerks, technicians, teachers, and medics who made colonialism work day-to-day. Even as these workers maintained the colonial state, they dreamed of displacing imperial power. This book examines the history of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1898-1956) and the Republic of Sudan that followed in order to understand how colonialism worked on the ground, affected local cultures, influenced the rise of nationalism, and shaped the postcolonial nation-state. Relying on a rich cache of Sudanese Arabic literary sources, including poetry, essays, and memoirs, as well as on colonial documents and photographs, this perceptive study examines colonialism from the viewpoint of those who lived and worked in its midst. By integrating the case of Sudan with material on other countries, particularly India, Sharkey gives her book broad comparative appeal. She shows that colonial legacies--such as inflexible borders, atomized multi-ethnic populations, and autocratic governing structures--have persisted, hobbling postcolonial nation-states. Thus countries like Sudan are still living with colonialism, struggling to achieve consensus and stability within borders that a fallen empire has left behind.

The Public Treasury of the Muslims: Monthly Budgets of the Mahdist State in the Sudan, 1897

In 1885 Khartoum fell into the hands of the Mahdist movement which put an end to 60 years of Egyptian rule in the Sudan. An independent state was founded along Islamic principles, which also affected fiscal institutions like the Public Treasury. Through the translation and edition of the monthly budgets of nine and a half months in 1897, one can study closely the various items of revenue and expenditure, the currencies in circulation, the system of accountancy, and the organisation of the Treasury. In addition to an analysis of the revenues, the introduction focuses on the organisation of the Treasury and on the system of accountancy and concludes that the Mahdists relied heavily on early Islamic as well as on Ottoman models, which they modified to suit local conditions.

The African Experience.

EdenEden OutgrownThe Fruits of the EarthThe Bricks of BabelThe Flesh-pots of EgyptThe Men of IronPeoples of the BookCities of the PlainPastures GreenMasters and SlavesThe Swelling CaravansPomp and PowerStrangers at the GatesThe Drawing of the MapThe New TaskmastersThe Things of GodThe Fullness of TimeThe Birth of NationsThe Slippery SlopeThe Past and the Present