Beginning in 1922, the Sudan Government regularized the so-called ‘customary’ authority of chiefs of various kinds across northern Sudan – an approach which would also later be adopted in southern Sudan under the aegis of Southern Policy. The elevation of the pragmatic policy of ruling through local intermediaries into a governing ideology of ‘Indirect Rule’ – or ‘Native Administration’ as it was termed in Sudan – is a process that has attracted much attention from scholars of colonial Africa. Yet the ground-level conflicts and negotiations that shaped the functioning of this system remain worthy of our attention as revealing central dynamics of state formation and local politics. The case of Darfur reminds us that deeper histories of pre-colonial state formation in Africa, which provided well established local elites that might be co-opted by colonial government, did not preclude innovation and violence, shaped by the structures, discourse, and the ultimate weaknesses of the colonial state, as well as by the interests and practices of those who it recognized as its agents on the ground. Indeed, given the continually shifting and violent processes of state formation in pre-colonial Darfur, this should be no surprise. As Spear has argued more widely of colonial Africa (albeit with rather less emphasis on state violence), state power was ultimately both constituted and constrained by its reliance on local elites.

Moreover, a close examination of these processes reveals considerable differences in historical experience in various areas of Darfur, alongside significant commonalities. The analytical unity of ‘Darfur’ is too often assumed in scholarship and reporting; Darfur needs to be examined as a collection of diverse regions and cultures. Accordingly, the following chapters are divided in their coverage between Western Darfur District, or Zalingei District as it was sometimes called – the heartland of the Fur people – and the pastoralist peripheries of the region, in both southern and northern Darfur. Part of the reasoning behind this division is the rather different character of chieftaincy politics and protest in each case. Protest among the sedentary Fur, compared to that of the (semi-) nomadic pastoralist peripheries, reveals to a considerable extent the relative weakness or strength of the state in these different locales.