ABSTRACT
In August 1955, less than six months before Sudan’s declaration of independence, the newly ‘Sudanised’ administration faced a violent uprising in the southernmost province of Equatoria. Over a two-week period, 261 northern Sudanese men, women and children were killed by southern soldiers, police and prison officers and others who joined in the violence and looting. Many southerners fled the towns, including 55 who drowned trying to cross a river near Torit. Northern troops arrived in force towards the end of August and arrested a large share of the mutineers and many civilians; some fled to Uganda and Congo, and only some few mutineers stayed in ‘the bush’ in the eastern parts of Equatoria and the Sudan-Uganda borderlands. The Khartoum Government response was restrained but not lenient; perhaps as many as 1000 were imprisoned and at least 121 death sentences were carried out.1 This violent episode – known at the time as the ‘Southern disturbances’ and more commonly now as the ‘Torit Mutiny’ – has come to be regarded as a crucial moment in Sudan’s transition to independence in 1956. It is commemorated by many South Sudanese as the beginning of the ‘struggle’ against northern dominance. Scholars too have viewed the events of 1955 in hindsight as ‘a
fateful omen for the beginning of a half-century of bloody, unrelenting civil war’.2 The Torit Mutiny is thus understood as a rupture, separating the relative stability of the Pax Brittanica from an increasingly violent and repressive post-colonial southern Sudan.
