| This study explores the dynamics of colonialism and nationalism in the Sudan, a de facto colony of Great Britain (in nominal alliance with Egypt) from 1898 to 1956, and today the largest country in Africa. Many of the earliest articulators of Sudanese nationalism were graduates of the Gordon Memorial College, a school opened by the colonial government in 1902 to train young males of high-status, Arabic-speaking, Northern Sudanese families for petty jobs in the administration. The great majority of these graduates went on to fill government positions as translators, engineers, accountants, and so on. Their daily interactions at work with local peoples, British superiors, and Egyptian, Lebanese, and fellow Northern Sudanese employees shaped the culture of colonialism and influenced the content of their nationalist ideologies. Ultimately, even while these nationalists nurtured hopes of dismantling the system of British domination, their collaboration made colonial rule a logistical possibility.;In the late 1920s, some members of this educated Northern Sudanese group began to assert and define a "Sudanese" literature and, by extension, a "Sudanese" identity, which they believed was relevant to the entire territory. Their literary conceptions of this "Sudanese" identity rested on ideologies of religion (the role of Islam), language (the significance of Arabic), gender (the proper behavior of women), and technology (the importance of material development as an index of progress). These values found expression through Arabic poems, essays, and stories, and were stimulated by the introduction and development of commercial printing. The bias of colonial education policies, which privileged a narrow social segment of the territory's diverse population, translated into culturally narrow conceptions of Sudanese nationalism among this educated class. In particular, their ideological emphasis on Islam and Arabism as platforms of "Sudanese" nationalism alienated non-Arabic-speaking or non-Muslim groups, particularly in the South, and stimulated a civil war which has been raging intermittently since independence. |
