ABSTRACT
Many factors, geographical, historical, and social, have militated against the development of a national consciousness in the Sudan. In a sense the state within its present boundaries is an artificial creation, the product of nineteenth-century conquests and Great Power diplomacy. Within its frontiers are the territories of two former indigenous sultanates: the Funj Kingdom of Sennar, which fell to the forces of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha in 1821, and Darfur, which was finally absorbed only in 1916. Suakin in the east had been an Ottoman possession since the sixteenth century. The remnant of the Mamluks, fleeing from Egypt after the massacre of 1811, retained
for a few years their independence in Dongola. The Shayqiyyah, farther south, dominated the great bend of the Nile. The autonomy of these and other petty states was brought to an end by the expansion of Egyptian power. Under the Khedive Isma‘il (1863-79), Egyptian rule was extended over vast areas in the south and west which had previously known no social and political organization higher than the tribe. The negroid and Nilotic peoples of the upper Nile and the Bahr al-Ghazal, pagan in religion and speaking a great variety of languages, were thus incorporated under one administration with the more advanced northern Sudanese, Muslims by religion and for the most part Arabic-speaking. The Condominium perpetuated this assembling of peoples of diverse ethnic origins and historical experiences, under a common and alien administration. The competition of the Great Powers for the control of Africa led to the delimitation of precise frontiers in place of the often vague and elastic boundaries that had been possible as late as the reign of the Khedive Isma‘il. But a frontier, however artificial, becomes sacrosanct once it is drawn, and the suspicion that Britain wished to detach the southern from the northern Sudan has profoundly influenced the attitude of the Sudanese.
