ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom is always refractory, and nowhere is this truer than in African population history. Real societies sharing temporal space are radically separated from their interrelationships on the basis of their possession of lesser or greater numbers of modern traits and assigned to different abstract evolutionary stages. The traits themselves are represented as changing independently; population dynamics thus become a bounded set that changes in response to technology and education. The vast irrigated Gezira Scheme dominated the colonial economy of Sudan. Farmed by thousands of tenant families assisted by annual infusions of seasonal labor from peasant villages and pastoralist groups, it produced cotton for the mills of Lancashire. By the mid-1970s, escalating inflation was increasing the costs of all goods purchased and new cash needs were proliferating rapidly. El 'Igayla is a Joama' Arab village founded in 1898 near the route later followed by the western rail line in central Kordofan.
