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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
In this regionally and ethnically differentiated country,
peoples and communities have been identified as Sudanese only by
virtue of orientation to and control by a common government. They
seemed not to share significant elements of a common value
system, and economic ties among them were tenuous. If a national
society and elites were emerging, it was in the Three Towns
constituting the national capital area. It was in Khartoum,
Khartoum North, and Omdurman that the national politicians, highlevel bureaucrats, senior military, educated professionals, and
wealthy merchants and entrepreneurs lived, worked, and
socialized. Even those who had residences elsewhere maintained
second homes in Omdurman.
These elites had long recognized the usefulness of
maintaining a presence in the capital area, invariably living in
Omdurman, a much more Arab city than Khartoum. The other, truly
urban elites also tended to live in Omdurman, but the
concentration of northern Sudan's varied elites in one city did
not necessarily engender a common social life. As in many Arab
and African cities, much of Omdurman's population lived in
separate if not wholly isolated quarters.
Two components of the elite structure were not dominantly
urban, however, although they were represented in the cities.
These were the heads of important religious groups, whose
constituencies and sources of power and wealth were largely
rural, and what may be termed tribal elites, who carried some
weight on the national level by virtue of their representing
regional or sectional interests.
To the extent that the elites were Muslim and Arab--most were
both--they shared a religion and language, but they were
otherwise marked by differences in interest and outlook. Even
more divergent were the southerners. Most elite southerners were
non-Muslims, few spoke Arabic fluently, and they were regarded -
and saw themselves, not primarily as a professional or
bureaucratic elite, but as a regional one. Many were said to
prefer a career in the south to a post in Khartoum. These
southern elites exercised political power directly or gave
significant support to those who did. But so diverse and
sometimes conflicting were their interests and outlooks that they
did not constitute a cohesive class.
Changing Sudanese society had not developed a consensus on
what kinds of work, talents, possessions, and background were
more worthy than others and therefore conferred higher status.
There had long been merchants, entrepreneurs, and religious
leaders in Sudan. The latter had a special status, but wealth and
the influence and power it generated had come to carry greater
status in the Sudan of 1991 than did religious position. The
educated secular elite was a newer phenomenon, and some deference
was given its members by other elites. In the Muslim north, the
educated ranged from devotees of Islamic activism to Islamic
reformers and a few avowed secularists. Despite the respect
generally given the educated, those at either extreme were likely
to make members of other elites uncomfortable.
The younger, larger generation of the educated elite were not
all offspring of the older, smaller educated elite. Many were
sons (and sometimes daughters) of businessmen, wealthy
landowners, and the tribal elite. It had not been established
where the interests of first-generation educated persons lay,
whether with a growing educated elite or with their families of
very different backgrounds. A peculiar feature of the educated
Sudanese was the fact that large numbers lived outside Sudan for
years at a time, working in Middle Eastern oil-producing states,
Europe, or North America. Some of their earnings came back to
Sudan, but it was not clear that they had much to do with the
formation or characteristics of a specifically Sudanese elite.
Tribal and ethnic elites carried weight in specific
localities and might be significant if the states were to achieve
substantial autonomy; however, their importance on the national
scene was questionable.
Socializing and intermarriage among members of the different
elites would have been significant in establishing a cohesive
upper class. But that had not happened yet, and movement in that
direction had suffered a severe blow when the government of
Colonel Umar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir that came to power on June
30, 1989 imprisoned and executed leaders of the elite. Until the
Bashir government displaced it in favor of Islamists, the elite
regarded itself as the arbiter of social acceptance into the
company of those riverine Arab families who had long lived in the
Omdurman-Khartoum area, had substantial income from landholding,
and had participated in the higher reaches of government during
the condominium or engaged in the professions of medicine, law,
and the university. Men from these families were well educated.
Few engaged in business, which tended to be in the hands of
families of at least partial Egyptian ancestry.
Beginning in the late 1960s, northern Muslims of non-Egyptian
background began to acquire substantial wealth as businessmen,
often as importers and exporters. By the early 1980s, perhaps
twenty of them were millionaires. These men had been relatively
young when they began their entrepreneurial activity, and unlike
members of the older elite families, they were not well educated.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, many of these
businessmen had started sending their children to Britain or the
United States for their education. Reflecting trends in other
societies, whereas the sons of the older elite had been educated
mainly for government careers, by the 1980s business education
was increasingly emphasized. In contrast to the more secular
elites in the professions, the civil service, and the military,
however, many members of these newer economic elites gravitated
toward religion and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Typically, the older elite intermarried and excluded those
whose backgrounds they did not know, even if the families were
wealthy and successful in business, religion, or education.
Gradually, after independence, Arabic speakers of other sedentary
families acquired higher education, entered the bureaucracy or
founded lucrative businesses, and began to participate to a
limited degree in the social circle of the older families. The
emphasis on "good family" persisted, however, in most marriages.
Sedentary Arabs were acceptable, as were some persons of an older
mixture of Arab and Nile Nubian ancestry, for example, the people
around Dunqulah. But southern and western Sudanese--even if
Muslims--and members of nomadic groups (particularly the darker
Baqqara Arabs) were not. A southern Sudanese man might be
esteemed for his achievements and other qualities, but he was not
considered an eligible husband for a woman of a sedentary Arab
family. There were some exceptions, as there had been decades
ago, but they were generally perceived as such.
Data as of June 1991
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