Abstract
The years leading up to the 1898 British-led conquest of Umm Durman, the capital of the Sudanese Mahdist state, were marked by food insecurity and famine. Starting in 1896, fear of a looming British-led advance drove Mahdist officials and urban elites to stockpile grain, which, in turn, caused grain prices in Umm Durman to rise sharply. As the British-led joint Anglo-Egyptian force slowly made its way from Upper Egypt to Umm Durman, the crisis deepened. Between the end of 1896 and the beginning of 1898, the price of dhura (sorghum), the staple grain, rose nearly 3,500 percent as demand vastly outstripped supply. Many townspeople could not afford to purchase the limited stocks left in the market and, therefore, either subsisted on charity or starved.1 However, the Anglo-Egyptian force slowly advancing south from the Egyptian frontier was well supplied. Colonel Herbert Kitchener, who commanded the conquest, had ordered a railroad to be built from the Egyptian frontier so as to ensure that the advancing Anglo-Egyptian force could draw supplies from Egypt and, if necessary, overseas.
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Notes
Babikr Badri, The Memoirs of Babikr Bedri, trans. George Scott (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 204.
George Warrington Steevens, With Kitchener to Khartoum (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1898), 297.
Bennet Burleigh, Khartoum Campaign 1898 or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan (London: Chapman and Hall, 1899), 213.
Winston Churchill, The River War: An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan, 3rd ed., 1951 print (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1899), 305.
A number of scholars assert that the British-led force’s victory at Karari was a result of differences in armament. These scholars point out that, though the Mahdist force on the battlefield was nearly double the size of the Anglo-Egyptian force, the Anglo-Egyptian force was better armed. Al-Khalifa commanded nearly 52,000 men during the battle, but only 14,000 of these men were armed with rifles. The rest had swords and spears. Kitchener, on the other hand, commanded 8,200 British and 17,600 Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers. However, all of the men under Kitchener’s command were armed with rifles. In addition, these soldiers were supported by 44 guns and 20 Maxim machine guns on land and an additional 36 guns and 24 Maxim machine guns on steamboats strategically placed on the Nile. See Mekki Shibeika, British Policy in the Sudan, 1882–1902 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 389;
Martin Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 5–7;
Ian Beckett, “Kitchener and the Politics of Command,” in The Reconquest of the Sudan, 1898: A Reappraisal, ed. Edward Spiers (London: Frank Cass Publishing, 1998), 35–53.
For studies of the Turko-Egyptian government see Richard Hill, Egypt in the Sudan, 1820–1881 (London: Oxford University Press, 1959);
Anders Bjørkelo, Prelude to the Mahdiyya: Peasants and Traders in the Shendi Region, 1821–1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
For studies of the pre-Turko-Egyptian period see Jay Spaulding, The Heroic Age in Sinnar (East Lansing: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1985);
Janet Ewald, Soldiers, Traders and Slaves; State Formation and Economic Transformation in the Greater Nile Valley, 1700–1885 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
Famines plagued Sudan before the 1880s. Anders Bjørkelo shows that agricul-tural reforms introduced by the Turko-Egyptian government in the 1820s and early 1830s led to the 1835–1837 famine in Barbar Province. De Waal demonstrates that Turko-Egyptian officials dismantled local social safety nets in the 1870s, which intensified local food crises in Darfur. Similarly, elsewhere in Sudan, Turko-Egyptian officials implemented policies that eroded the resource base of some segments of Sudanese society. Jay Spaulding shows that Turko-Egyptian policy in Northern Nilotic Sudan in the 1850s and 1860s forced many small cultivators to sell their land holdings and migrate south to work as itinerant merchants. However, the present study demonstrates that the exploitative processes that structured the food economy under Turko-Egyptian rule were upended by the Mahdist Rebellion. Anglo-Egyptian and Mahdist policies in the 1880s unleashed an alternative set of processes and instigated a new cycle of famine and food insecurity that weakened indigenous communities and, ultimately, allowed for the expansion and consolidation of the Anglo-Egyptian state. See Bjørkelo A, Prelude to the Mahdiyya, 74; Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur Sudan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 62–66;
Jay Spaulding, “Land Tenure and Social Class in the Northern Turkish Sudan,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 15 no. 1 (1982): 1–20.
A partial list of the studies that employ this periodization include: Daly, Empire on the Nile; Tim Niblock, Class and Power in Sudan: The Dynamics of Sudanese Politics, 1898–1985 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1987);
Dirar Salih Dirar, Tarikh al-Sudan al-Hadith (Beirut: Manshurat Dar Maktabat al-Haya, 1968);
Mohamed Omer Beshir, Educational Development in the Sudan, 1898–1956 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969);
Muhammad Fu’ad Shukri, Miṣr wa-al-Sudan: Tarikh Wahdat Wadi al-Nil al-Siyasiyya Fi al-Qarn al-Tasi’ ‘Ashar, 1820–1899 (Cairo: Dar al-Ma’arif, 1957);
Peter Woodward, Sudan, 1898–1989: The Unstable State (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1990);
Robert Collins, A History of Modern Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008);
Heather Bell, Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Scholars subscribing to this theory, which dominated the field of famine studies until the 1980s, make a distinction between food scarcity and food absence. They claim that famine is not caused by the complete and total absence of food in a region. Rather, they assert that a famine can be precipitated by a reduction in the total available food in a region by as little as 20 percent. They posit that sudden small reductions in the total quantity of available food lead to price spikes, thereby rendering the most vulnerable unable to secure their sustenance. As a result, there is an increased mortality from starvation. Though the “food availability decline” theory does not posit a necessary cause of famine, proponents of the hypothesis routinely link the reduction in the quantity of food to ecological disasters that directly affect crop yields. As a result, proponents of this theory assert that famines are, generally, natural disasters. However, these scholars do not rule out the possibility of manmade famines. Nonetheless, they assert that, during these famines, human action reproduces the effects of a “typical” natural disaster by disrupting the normal cultivation cycle and producing decreased crop yields. For examples of scholarly analysis that employs this theory see Wallace Ruddell Aykroyd, The Conquest of Famine (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974);
Geoffrey Bussell Masefield, Famine: Its Prevention and Relief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963);
Jean Mayer, “Preventing Famine,” Science 227 no. 4688 (February 15, 1985), 707;
D. Gale Johnson, World Food Problems and Prospects (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975).
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 45.
Sen recognizes that his theory has some limitation in application in that it is unable to account for famines resulting from illegal transfers, such as looting and brigandage. See Sen, Poverty and Famines, 45. Subsequent scholars have pushed Sen’s auto-critique even further. For example, Jenny Edkins questions Sen’s differentiation between legal and illegal transfers. Edkins asserts that Sen does not account for the ways in which entitlements are produced and reproduced by force, especially during times of crises such as famines. See Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine, Practices of Aid (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
David Keen shows that Sudanese officials implemented policies in South Sudan in the 1980s designed to push the Dika into famine as part of a strategy designed to strip Dinka pastoralists of their wealth. See David Keen, The Benefits of Famine: A Political Economy of Famine and Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
In this way, the study of famines can draw from recent scholarship on the anthropology of war. Stephen Lubkemann writes that for inhabitants of regions that experience protracted wars, war “become[s] the normal—in the sense of ‘expected’—context for the unfolding of social life.” Lubkemann calls on researchers to study war in terms of the “transformation of social relations and cultural practices throughout conflict,” and to treat war “as a transformative social condition and not simply as a political struggle conducted through organized violence.” See Stephen Lubkemann, Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1.
Amrita Rangasami, “‘Failure of Entitlements’ Theory of Famine: A Response,” Part 1, Economic and Political Weekly 20 no. 41 (October 12, 1985): 1749–1750.
Amrita Rangasami, “‘Failure of Entitlements’ Theory of Famine: A Response,” Part 2, Economic and Political Weekly 20 no. 42 (October 19, 1985): 1797.
Holt and Daly were typical of this approach when they wrote: “The north is, with certain exceptions, Arabic in speech, and its people are largely Arabized in culture and outlook. Its indigenous inhabitants are universally Muslim… The southern Sudan contains a bewildering variety of ethnic groups and languages. Unlike the northerners, its peoples are not generally Muslims, nor do they claim Arab descent.” In their study, Holt and Daly do not discuss the origin and evolution of this “bewildering variety of ethnic groups” in Southern Sudan. However, they detail the process of “Arabization” and “Islamization” in Northern Sudan, which began shortly after the seventh-century Arab conquest of Egypt, in order to show that these processes were incomplete and that indigenous “tribal” identities remained in Northern Sudan despite the adoption of outward expressions of Arabness. Peter Malcolm Holt and Martin Daly, A History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day, 4th edition, (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 3–9 and 15–25.
In his seminal chapter in an edited collection on invented traditions, Terance Ranger demonstrates that key elements of “tribal” identity and structure in Africa were invented by colonial administrators as part of their strategy of indirect rule. Scholars have subsequently debated the extent to which colonial states had the power to fundamentally reshape African identities. See Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
Thomas Spear, “Neo-Traditionalism and the Limits of Intention in British Colonial Africa,” Journal of African History 44 (2003): 3–27;
Sara Berry, No-Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).
Analysis of the atrocities in Darfur must address the origin and meaning of “tribal,” “ethnic,” and “religious” identities because the 1948 UN convention defines genocide in terms of the planned destruction of an ethnically, racially, nationally, or religiously defined group. Scholars, who claim that the Sudanese government sponsored genocide, must assert that there are salient, identity-based divisions in the country. Mahmood Mamdani counters this form of analysis by showing that “Arab” and “African” have multiple meanings in Sudan and that these meanings can be both exclusive and inclusive. Mamdani argues that the focus in the West on the role of identity in the conflict in Darfur occludes the true cause of political struggle in Sudan—that is, a contest for political control of the region. See Martin Daly, Darfur’s Sorrow: A History of Destruction and Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
Robert Collins, “Disaster in Darfur; Historical Overview,” in Genocide in Darfur: Investigating the Atrocities in the Sudan, ed. Samuel Totten and Eric Markusen (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–24;
Gerard Prunier, Darfur: A 21st Century Genocide, 3rd edition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008);
Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2009).
Scholars have similarly problematized the role of identity in the protracted civil war that led to the secession of South Sudan. Many scholars have minimized the role of interethnic and interreligious conflict in causing and sustaining the civil war and have highlighted the role of contrasting political ideologies and exploitative economic policies. See Ann Mosley Lesch, The Sudan: Contested National Identities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998);
Douglas Johnson, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (Oxford: James Curry, 2003).
See Paul Lovejoy and Toyin Falola (eds), Pawnship, Slavery and Colonialism in Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003);
Gwyn Campbell (ed.), The Structure of Slavery in Indian Ocean Africa and Asia (London: Frank Cass, 2004).
Scholars have offered a variety of reasons why colonial officials in a number of colonies in the 1920s and 1930s changed course and adopted policies designed to end slavery, including the mounting pressure from international bodies and humanitarian organizations and the demands of evolving economic conditions. For studies on the end of slavery in twentieth-century colonial Africa, see Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (New York: Altamira Press, 2003);
Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers (eds), The End of Slavery in Africa (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988);
Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (London: Frank Cass, 1999).
For studies of the end of slavery in Sudan see Daly, Empire on the Nile; Gabriel Warburg The Sudan under Wingate: Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1916 (London: Frank Cass, 1971);
Taj Hargey, “Festina Lente: Slavery Policy and Practice in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan,” in Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Martin Klein (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 250–271;
Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
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© 2013 Steven Serels
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Serels, S. (2013). Introduction. In: Starvation and the State. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137383877_1
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