Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- General introduction
- Part One FROM ZARIBA TO MERKAZ: THE CREATION OF THE NODAL STATE FRONTIER, c. 1840–1920
- Part Two FROM MAKAMA TO MEJLIS: THE MAKING OF CHIEFSHIP AND THE LOCAL STATE, 1920s–1950s
- 3 Constituting the urban frontier: chiefship and the colonial labour economy, 1920s–1940s
- 4 Claiming rights and guarantees: chiefs' courts and state justice, c. 1900–1956
- 5 Containing the frontier: the tensions of territorial chiefdoms, 1930s–1950s
- 6 Uncertainty on the urban frontier: chiefs and the politics of Sudanese independence, 1946–1958
- Part Three FROM MALAKIYA TO MEDINA: THE FLUCTUATING EXPANSION OF THE URBAN FRONTIER, c. 1956–2010
- Conclusion
- Interviews
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastern African Studiues
6 - Uncertainty on the urban frontier: chiefs and the politics of Sudanese independence, 1946–1958
from Part Two - FROM MAKAMA TO MEJLIS: THE MAKING OF CHIEFSHIP AND THE LOCAL STATE, 1920s–1950s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Glossary
- General introduction
- Part One FROM ZARIBA TO MERKAZ: THE CREATION OF THE NODAL STATE FRONTIER, c. 1840–1920
- Part Two FROM MAKAMA TO MEJLIS: THE MAKING OF CHIEFSHIP AND THE LOCAL STATE, 1920s–1950s
- 3 Constituting the urban frontier: chiefship and the colonial labour economy, 1920s–1940s
- 4 Claiming rights and guarantees: chiefs' courts and state justice, c. 1900–1956
- 5 Containing the frontier: the tensions of territorial chiefdoms, 1930s–1950s
- 6 Uncertainty on the urban frontier: chiefs and the politics of Sudanese independence, 1946–1958
- Part Three FROM MALAKIYA TO MEDINA: THE FLUCTUATING EXPANSION OF THE URBAN FRONTIER, c. 1956–2010
- Conclusion
- Interviews
- Bibliography
- Index
- Eastern African Studiues
Summary
The final decade of the Condominium heightened popular expectations of government and opened up new avenues of communication and opportunity for southern Sudanese to access the state. Burton claims that it was from the 1940s that towns were ‘accepted’ by local people, ‘when it became clear that in order to protect their own political and economic interests, it was essential to participate in town-oriented affairs more directly’. Yet the effect of an urbanrural, state-society divide was nevertheless being sharply crystallised in this period, firstly through the consolidation and political activism of an increasingly self-conscious, town-dwelling, literate ‘class’ (as the government increasingly termed them). By the 1950s, many of these educated men, in common with nationalist politicians in the rest of Sudan and Africa, were presenting themselves as distinctly modern in comparison to the ‘traditional’ chiefs, a discursive bifurcation that would endure subsequently in southern Sudan.
Secondly, wider political change and events in the 1950s also fed into the cultural and cognitive hardening of a rural-urban divide. Over the preceding decades of colonial rule, the hakuma had – particularly for the people living in the vicinity of the towns – acquired aspects of predictability and recognisability, whether in the person of a few long-serving, vernacular-speaking British officials, or in the wider regularisation of taxation demands, justice and policing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dealing with Government in South SudanHistories of Chiefship, Community and State, pp. 125 - 142Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013