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Educational Development and Administrative Control in the Nuba mountains region of the Sudan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
Abstract
In 1899 the Condominium Government was faced by administrative problems which, whatever their complexity in detail, fell into two broad divisions: those of the northern Sudan, and those of the Sudan south of the tenth parallel. Pacification was of course the first task everywhere; but even here there was a sharp contrast. In the north this was a politically urgent matter. The remote and heterogeneous tribes of the south, on the other hand, offered no political threat to the new government; and their pacification and administration would have been a heavy, perhaps a crushing, financial burden in the early years of the Condominium. The pacification of the south was therefore a process which lasted not for years but for decades; and the more constructive aspects of administration were correspondingly delayed. Moreover, in the north there was a recognizable foundation on which to build. The north was a part, if an outlying and culturally impoverished part, of the literate world of Islam; nor had it lost the traditions and techniques of ‘westernizing’ administration introduced during the Turco-Egyptian régime.
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References
1 For the basic policy, see Salisbury's despatch to Cromer No. 109 of 2 Aug. 1898, printed in British Documents on the Origins of the War, I, No. 185. Until 1904 the revenue of the Sudan did not exceed half a million pounds; and it did not exceed expenditure until 1913.Google Scholar
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