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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
As a pashalik of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had been
divided into several provinces, each of which was placed under a
Mamluk bey (governor) reponsible to the pasha, who in turn
answered to the Porte, the term used for the Ottoman government
referring to the Sublime Porte, or high gate, of the grand
vizier's building. In approximately 280 years of Ottoman rule, no
fewer than 100 pashas succeeded each other. In the eighteenth
century, their authority became tenuous as rival Mamluk beys
became the real power in the land. The struggles among the beys
continued until 1798 when the French invasion of Egypt altered
the situation. Combined British and Turkish military operations
forced the withdrawal of French forces in 1801, introducing a
period of chaos in Egypt. In 1805 the Ottomans sought to restore
order by appointing Muhammad Ali as Egypt's pasha.
With the help of 10,000 Albanian troops provided by the
Ottomans, Muhammad Ali purged Egypt of the Mamluks. In 1811 he
launched a seven-year campaign in Arabia, supporting his
suzerain, the Ottoman sultan, in the suppression of a revolt by
the Wahhabi, an ultraconservative Muslim sect. To replace the
Albanian soldiers, Muhammad Ali planned to build an Egyptian army
with Sudanese slave recruits.
Although a part of present-day northern Sudan was nominally
an Egyptian dependency, the previous pashas had demanded little
more from the kashif who ruled there than the regular
remittance of tribute; that changed under Muhammad Ali. After he
had defeated the Mamluks in Egypt, a party of them had escaped
and had fled south. In 1811 these Mamluks established a state at
Dunqulah as a base for their slave trading. In 1820 the sultan of
Sannar informed Muhammad Ali that he was unable to comply with
the demand to expel the Mamluks. In response the pasha sent 4,000
troops to invade Sudan, clear it of Mamluks, and reclaim it for
Egypt. The pasha's forces received the submission of the
kashif, dispersed the Dunqulah Mamluks, conquered
Kurdufan, and accepted Sannar's surrender from the last Funj
sultan, Badi IV. The Jaali Arab tribes offered stiff resistance,
however.
Initially, the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was disastrous.
Under the new government established in 1821, which was known as
the Turkiyah or Turkish regime, soldiers lived off the land and
exacted exorbitant taxes from the population. They also destroyed
many ancient Meroitic pyramids searching for hidden gold.
Furthermore, slave trading increased, causing many of the
inhabitants of the fertile Al Jazirah, heartland of Funj, to flee
to escape the slave traders. Within a year of the pasha's
victory, 30,000 Sudanese slaves went to Egypt for training and
induction into the army. However, so many perished from disease
and the unfamiliar climate that the remaining slaves could be
used only in garrisons in Sudan.
As the military occupation became more secure, the government
became less harsh. Egypt saddled Sudan with a parasitic
bureaucracy, however, and expected the country to be self-
supporting. Nevertheless, farmers and herders gradually returned
to Al Jazirah. The Turkiyah also won the allegiance of some
tribal and religious leaders by granting them a tax exemption.
Egyptian soldiers and Sudanese jahidiyah (slave soldiers;
literally, fighters), supplemented by mercenaries recruited in
various Ottoman domains, manned garrisons in Khartoum, Kassala,
and Al Ubayyid and at several smaller outposts. The Shaiqiyah,
Arabic speakers who had resisted Egyptian occupation, were
defeated and allowed to serve the Egyptian rulers as tax
collectors and irregular cavalry under their own shaykhs. The
Egyptians divided Sudan into provinces, which they then
subdivided into smaller administrative units that usually
corresponded to tribal territories. In 1835 Khartoum became the
seat of the hakimadar (governor general); many garrison
towns also developed into administrative centers in their
respective regions. At the local level, shaykhs and traditional
tribal chieftains assumed administrative responsibilities.
In the 1850s, the pashalik revised the legal systems
in Egypt and Sudan, introducing a commercial code and a criminal
code administered in secular courts. The change reduced the
prestige of the qadis (Islamic judges) whose sharia courts were
confined to dealing with matters of personal status. Even in this
area, the courts lacked credibility in the eyes of Sudanese
Muslims because they conducted hearings according to the Ottoman
Empire's Hanafi school of law rather than the stricter Maliki
school traditional in the area.
The Turkiyah also encouraged a religious orthodoxy favored in
the Ottoman Empire. The government undertook a mosque-building
program and staffed religious schools and courts with teachers
and judges trained at Cairo's Al Azhar University. The government
favored the Khatmiyyah, a traditional religious order, because
its leaders preached cooperation with the regime. But Sudanese
Muslims condemned the official orthodoxy as decadent because it
had rejected many popular beliefs and practices.
Until its gradual suppression in the 1860s, the slave trade
was the most profitable undertaking in Sudan and was the focus of
Egyptian interests in the country. The government encouraged
economic development through state monopolies that had exported
slaves, ivory, and gum arabic. In some areas, tribal land, which
had been held in common, became the private property of the
shaykhs and was sometimes sold to buyers outside the tribe.
Muhammad Ali's immediate successors, Abbas I (1849-54) and
Said (1854-63), lacked leadership qualities and paid little
attention to Sudan, but the reign of Ismail (1863-79) revitalized
Egyptian interest in the country. In 1865 the Ottoman Empire
ceded the Red Sea coast and its ports to Egypt. Two years later,
the Ottoman sultan granted Ismail the title of khedive (sovereign
prince). Egypt organized and garrisoned the new provinces of
Upper Nile, Bahr al Ghazal, and Equatoria and, in 1874, conquered
and annexed Darfur. Ismail named Europeans to provincial
governorships and appointed Sudanese to more responsible
government positions. Under prodding from Britain, Ismail took
steps to complete the elimination of the slave trade in the north
of present-day Sudan. The khedive also tried to build a new army
on the European model that no longer would depend on slaves to
provide manpower. However, this modernization process caused
unrest. Army units mutinied, and many Sudanese resented the
quartering of troops among the civilian population and the use of
Sudanese forced labor on public projects. Efforts to suppress the
slave trade angered the urban merchant class and the Baqqara
Arabs, who had grown prosperous by selling slaves.
There is little documentation for the history of the southern
Sudanese provinces until the introduction of the Turkiyah in the
north in the early 1820s and the subsequent extension of slave
raiding into the south. Information about their peoples before
that time is based largely on oral history. According to these
traditions, the Nilotic peoples--the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and
others--first entered southern Sudan sometime before the tenth
century. During the period from the fifteenth century to the
nineteenth century, tribal migrations, largely from the area of
Bahr al Ghazal, brought these peoples to their modern locations.
Some, like the Shilluk, developed a centralized monarchical
tradition that enabled them to preserve their tribal integrity in
the face of external pressures in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The non-Nilotic Azande people, who entered southern
Sudan in the sixteenth century, established the region's largest
state. In the eighteenth century, the militaristic Avungara
people entered and quickly imposed their authority over the
poorly organized and weaker Azande. Avungara power remained
largely unchallenged until the arrival of the British at the end
of the nineteenth century. Geographic barriers protected the
southerners from Islam's advance, enabling them to retain their
social and cultural heritage and their political and religious
institutions. During the nineteenth century, the slave trade
brought southerners into closer contact with Sudanese Arabs and
resulted in a deep hatred for the northerners.
Slavery had been an institution of Sudanese life throughout
history, but southern Sudan, where slavery flourished
particularly, was originally considered an area beyond Cairo's
control. Because Sudan had access to Middle East slave markets,
the slave trade in the south intensified in the nineteenth
century and continued after the British had suppressed slavery in
much of sub-Saharan Africa. Annual raids resulted in the capture
of countless thousands of southern Sudanese, and the destruction
of the region's stability and economy. The horrors associated
with the slave trade generated European interest in Sudan.
Until 1843 Muhammad Ali maintained a state monopoly on slave
trading in Egypt and the pashalik. Thereafter, authorities
sold licenses to private traders who competed with government-
conducted slave raids. In 1854 Cairo ended state participation in
the slave trade, and in 1860, in response to European pressure,
Egypt prohibited the slave trade. However, the Egyptian army
failed to enforce the prohibition against the private armies of
the slave traders. The introduction of steamboats and firearms
enabled slave traders to overwhelm local resistance and prompted
the creation of southern "bush empires" by Baqqara Arabs.
Ismail implemented a military modernization program and
proposed to extend Egyptian rule to the southern region. In 1869
British explorer Sir Samuel Baker received a commission as
governor of Equatoria Province, with orders to annex all
territory in the White Nile's basin and to suppress the slave
trade. In 1874 Charles George Gordon, a British officer,
succeeded Baker. Gordon disarmed many slave traders and hanged
those who defied him. By the time he became Sudan's governor
general in 1877, Gordon had weakened the slave trade in much of
the south.
Unfortunately, Ismail's southern policy lacked consistency.
In 1871 he had named a notorious Arab slave trader, Rahman Mansur
az Zubayr, as governor of the newly created province of Bahr al
Ghazal. Zubayr used his army to pacify the province and to
eliminate his competition in the slave trade. In 1874 he invaded
Darfur after the sultan had refused to guard caravan routes
through his territory. Zubayr then offered the region as a
province to the khedive. Later that year, Zubayr defied Cairo
when it attempted to relieve him of his post, and defeated an
Egyptian force that sought to oust him. After he became Sudan's
governor general, Gordon ended Zubayr's slave trading, disbanded
his army, and sent him back to Cairo.
Data as of June 1991
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