Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map of Darfur showing colonial administrative divisions and ethnic groups
- Introduction
- 1 State Authority and Local Politics before 1916: The Darfur Sultans, Turco-Egyptian Rule and the Mahdiyya
- 2 Colonial Conquest and the Politics of Alliance in Darfur, 1916–1921
- 3 ‘Healthy Oppression’? Native Administration and State Violence in Western Darfur, 1917–1945
- 4 Native Courts and Chieftaincy Disputes in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1937
- 5 Defining Territories, Policing Movement and the Limits of Legibility in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1950
- 6 Late Colonialism in Darfur: Local Government, Development and National Politics, 1937–1956
- Conclusion: State Formation, Violence and Conflict in Historical Perspective
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastern African Studies
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- Map of Darfur showing colonial administrative divisions and ethnic groups
- Introduction
- 1 State Authority and Local Politics before 1916: The Darfur Sultans, Turco-Egyptian Rule and the Mahdiyya
- 2 Colonial Conquest and the Politics of Alliance in Darfur, 1916–1921
- 3 ‘Healthy Oppression’? Native Administration and State Violence in Western Darfur, 1917–1945
- 4 Native Courts and Chieftaincy Disputes in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1937
- 5 Defining Territories, Policing Movement and the Limits of Legibility in Pastoralist Darfur, 1917–1950
- 6 Late Colonialism in Darfur: Local Government, Development and National Politics, 1937–1956
- Conclusion: State Formation, Violence and Conflict in Historical Perspective
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastern African Studies
Summary
Graham Dudley Lampen first set foot in Khartoum at the age of a mere 23. He was soon to join the Sudan Political Service, the corps of British officials governing Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The capital was a disappointment: Lampen recalled in his memoirs that it was ‘sadly unlike an Arab city of my imagination with imposing mosques or elegant minarets’. That night, restlessly anticipating his future, Lampen pored over his map of Sudan. His memoirs claimed ‘my eye was caught by a province called Darfur where large tracts were marked unexplored or uninhabited forest.’ The far north of the province met the Libyan desert and showed only ‘a few dotted tracks and wells of which many had a question mark beside their names’. This was apparently enough to ignite Lampen's imagination: Darfur…
seemed the kind of place I had hoped to find in Sudan. Pioneering, little office work and much trekking, independence of command, no telephones and few telegraph lines, no cars, no bridge or tennis parties or dance nights at the Club…. If I had come to the Sudan not to lead a comfortable town life and carry out local regulations and try the petty criminals, but to rule someone – and I fear this was my undemocratic wish – Darfur seemed to call me!
This anecdotal material encapsulates the perceptions that shaped colonial governance in Darfur under the British. This region of western Sudan was remote from the centre of colonial power in Khartoum; and in the British imagination, therefore also isolated and removed from the modern world. Elsewhere in his memoirs, Lampen wrote of his later return from leave in England to southern Darfur and his first subsequent meeting with Ibrahim Musa Madibbu, nazir (paramount chief) of the Rizayqat Baqqara nomads, and his retainers:
They dismounted in dead silence while the Nazir grasped me by the hand: Kaif Halaf… the well known greetings were soothing to my ear and plunged me from London, Europe and the twentieth century straight back into the timeless desert life. The thick bush closed behind me and shut me off from Western Civilisation like a soundproof door.
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- DarfurColonial violence, Sultanic legacies and local politics, 1916-1956, pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015