Ghosts of Empire (41 page)

The natural corollary of human inequality was the building up of a machinery of government in which the native chiefs ‘should play an
important part'.
⁶¹
This was at the heart of the idea of ‘indirect rule', through which local chiefs, the ‘natural leaders', were given power over their subjects by British overlords. Harold MacMichael had no real affinity with the pagan south of the country, being, like so many other imperial servants, a keen student of Arabic and Islamic culture. As civil secretary, the effective deputy to the Governor General, he issued a statement on ‘Southern Policy' in 1930, in which he declared that the administration of the south was to be developed along ‘African' rather than ‘Arab' lines, and that the future of the southern Sudan might ‘ultimately lie with the countries of British East Africa', like Uganda, Tanganyika and Kenya, rather than with the Middle East.
⁶²
This ‘Southern Policy' has been well documented, but what is less understood is the exact background to its adoption in 1930. In a paper entitled ‘Spread of the Arabic Language in the Southern Sudan' dating from June 1929, Lord Lloyd, the Resident in Cairo, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, the Labour Party's Arthur Henderson, stating that the ‘pagan blacks' in the south of the Sudan were ‘in a very early stage of civilisation, differing in every respect from the more sophisticated Arab tribes of the north'. Among the tribes of the south, the Dinka, Lord Lloyd continued, ‘show us pre-historic man at home in the twentieth century, as uncontaminated by outside influence as any race that can be found in the world today'. He used the imagery of the noble savage; the Dinka were ‘flourishing, virile, pastoral and in the early Iron Age'. A confirmed Conservative imperialist, Lloyd reported that MacMichael had argued ‘very forcibly that the encouragement of Arabic in the South would serve to promote the spread of Islam', leading perhaps to Islamic fanaticism. ‘Islam, though on a higher plane than their present pagan beliefs', was nevertheless in MacMichael's opinion a ‘stationary and therefore retrograde faith'. The general conclusion reached was that Arabic as a general language should disappear from the southern provinces, except in those places where it had become the vernacular. MacMichael was then quoted as referring to the ‘wide gulf' between the north, where the slave trade was extremely profitable, and the south, where memories of ‘slave raids are vivid'.
⁶³

Once the ‘Southern Policy' had been announced in 1930, officials lost no time in defending it. Sir Stewart Symes, the Governor General, spoke
in 1935 of ‘the distinction between the peoples of the northern and southern Sudan' as being ‘real and fundamental'. The people of the south were ‘for the most part primitive and pagan' and needed a ‘simple education system', in furtherance of which Christian missions would be encouraged and ‘northern subversive influences' excluded.
⁶⁴
By the early 1930s, governors of southern provinces would now be empowered to eject ‘immigrant undesirables from the North' who could be a ‘possible source of propaganda' in the ‘primitive' south. Under the Passports and Permits Ordinance of 1922, some southern governors were already empowered to expel from their provinces ‘individual natives of the Northern Sudan whose continued presence [was considered] undesirable from an administrative point of view'.
⁶⁵
MacMichael's ‘Southern Policy' merely made more explicit the fear of militant Islam corrupting the still largely pagan south and subverting British rule there. The policy was viewed sceptically by northern Sudanese politicians who believed that the ‘Southern Policy' was a deliberate attempt to divide the Sudan for the purposes of establishing imperial authority more easily over its peoples.

The Second World War had very little effect on the Sudan. By the early 1940s the ‘Southern Policy' had become so entrenched that it seemed likely that ‘in the fullness of time' the country would be divided, with the north becoming an ‘independent Arab state' and the south perhaps being joined to the British East African network of states, such as Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika.
¹
Certainly, there was a steady confidence in the British mission in the Sudan, and no one thought that independence would happen so soon. The British Civil Secretary, in effect the Governor General's right-hand man, was now Douglas Newbold, a cerebral man who was a popular workaholic. Newbold was lauded as a man of liberal disposition who once confided to a friend that he did not ‘hate or despise Dagoes' and that ‘colour' did not ‘worry him at all'. He boasted of his advanced views, suggesting that ‘as far as general appearance goes the average nonwhite is, I think, better looking than the average white, and usually more friendly'. His professed liberalism did not, however, stretch to matters of the internal government of the Sudan. Comparing Gilbert Murray, a well-known Greek scholar and humanitarian of the day, to Winston Churchill who, in the 1930s, had moved to the right of the Conservative Party, Newbold remarked, ‘What would Gilbert Murray do if he were Governor of Kassala [in the northern Sudan]? I'd rather have Winston Churchill–he
would
hang murderers and collect his taxes.'
²

Newbold's pragmatism, when it came to matters of administration, was matched by the other members of the Political Service who, by the 1940s, were stuck in their ways and seemed to younger men to embody the conservatism and reactionary tendencies associated with retired army officers between the wars. Graham Thomas was a young recruit to the
service in the late 1940s and he remembered being distinctly out of step with the majority of his colleagues. He had been educated at a Welsh grammar school and had even been a Labour Party candidate. Sir James Robertson, a bluff Scottish rugby Blue from Oxford, who had succeeded Newbold as chief secretary, befriended the young Welsh firebrand, but was clearly puzzled by him. Thomas remembered Robertson as ‘physically a big man, with tremendous energy and a strong personality'. Robertson was surprised when Thomas refused to join the Sudan Club on the grounds that he considered it ‘repugnant to have a club based on race'.
³
Sir James replied that the Egyptians, the Lebanese and the Indians all had their own clubs, so why should the British not have one?

His other colleagues, Thomas remembered, were ‘almost totally composed of Oxbridge “blues” from upper middle class family backgrounds', quite a few of whom had ‘joined the service before the General Strike', which had taken place in 1926. These men had ‘no knowledge or understanding of the social changes which had taken place in Britain'.
⁴
Even the officials back in the Foreign Office in London (Sudan, because of the unusual condominium arrangement, fell under the Foreign Secretary's jurisdiction rather than that of the Colonial Secretary) complained of the ‘Sudan Civil Servant, who, with all his admirable qualities, has a rather limited and parochial public-school outlook'.
⁵
As in other parts of the empire, it seemed that nothing had changed, as officials complacently believed that their lives would simply continue as they had before the war.

Thomas's recollections of the mood and style of Khartoum in those years after the Second World War would have been recognized by Sudan veterans of an earlier vintage. The Grand Hotel in Khartoum still put on lavish entertainment, and there was the usual endless circuit of cocktail, lunch and dinner parties, with the traditional formalities of protocol: Thomas and his wife, Ismay, were informed, when they told a middle-aged woman that they were attached to the education department, that ‘you won't be invited to the Palace for years'. This turned out to be false, but the mood of stuffiness still very much prevailed. The Grand Hotel itself was remembered as a ‘multi-racial' meeting place and it was there, for the New Year's celebrations in 1951, that Prince Aly Khan and the Hollywood
actress Rita Hayworth took the whole first floor to stay with their entourage.
⁶

Despite the occasional glamour of Khartoum, there were signs that the imperial system was under strain. The ‘Southern Policy' had resulted in neglect of large parts of the south, which were administered by a particular type of British official who enjoyed the relative freedom that the remoteness of their postings had given them. The highly individualistic nature of the administration in the Sudan is revealed by the startling fact that there were only 140 officials in the whole country, at a time when the population was 9 million.
⁷
The sparseness of the population meant that, in the southern Sudan, immense tracts of land were ruled ‘by just a handful of men'. This feeling of openness and independence was compounded by the fact that the man who ruled ‘with paternal despotism vast and populous territories in the Southern Sudan' would have been, under normal circumstances, ‘just another London commuter swept along with the flow of mankind, emerging from the tube to a job'.
⁸
The delusion of grandeur entertained by district commissioners in the south of the Sudan was aggravated by their tendency to remain in the same district for years, even decades. These men, often coming from a military background, were a ‘tough, motley' crew, and were given the nickname ‘Barons of the Bog' by their colleagues in the Muslim northern Sudan. The unorthodox methods of these district commissioners in the south by the end of the 1930s often led to administrative chaos.
⁹
The Bog Barons supported the ‘Southern Policy', because it protected their power and independence from officials in the north, and many of them were believers in the system of ‘indirect rule', of building up self-contained ethnic or tribal units in the south of the country, which could then be used as bulwarks against the encroachments of Islam and Arab culture.

Robertson, appointed civil secretary in 1945, did not share these views. He disliked what he felt to be the obscurantism and eccentricity of the southern district commissioners, and believed that the southern Sudan had to be ‘opened up and brought into touch with reality'.
¹⁰
The nature of this ‘reality' was probably as unclear to Sir James as to everyone else. He certainly misjudged, as did so many others, the pace of change in the colonial empire and the speed with which parts of it were hurrying along the
path to independence. While Robertson was directing the political affairs of the Sudan, the governor general became a figurehead who, in many cases, had not served much time in the Sudan. The men appointed under this arrangement were very different from the soldier administrators like Kitchener and Wingate who had served in the region for decades and were fluent in Arabic. Yet even the more desk-bound administrators like Robertson were allowed to direct policy themselves, in much the same way that MacMichael had done in the 1930s; as always in the British Empire, it was the individual that mattered. A strong, masterful governor general like Sir Reginald Wingate could direct his own government, but when the governor general was less forceful, or more ignorant of Arabic and the Sudan in general, as Sir John Maffey had been in the 1920s and 1930s, the civil secretary took charge and imposed his vision on the country. Robertson, a powerfully built man with a strong independent will, did not foresee in the 1940s the ‘sudden change in the world situation which led to the rapid colonial emancipation of the 1950s and 1960s'.
¹¹
He did, however, succeed in reversing MacMichael's ‘Southern Policy', just before independence was granted to the Sudan, which upset the precarious balance that prevailed there.

In the words of a modern expert on the Sudan, Robertson ‘rushed in where Mandarins feared to tread'.
¹²
He announced the effective end of the ‘Southern Policy' in 1946. As the Sudan groped its way to self-government, it was decided that the only basis for progress was for the two parts of the country to be welded together to form one country, which might then, over time, move towards full independence. The forum where all this was decided and put in place was a conference held in the capital of the southern Sudan, Juba, in June 1947. The conference lasted only two days, but the fundamental decision to combine the south with the north was taken. There had been an initial difficulty because the southern delegates had stated clearly that they did not feel their region was ready for self-government, while the northern delegates were insistent that they needed self-government immediately. Robertson himself realized the danger in which the southerners were placed, since the south was less well developed and had fewer educational facilities, with little infrastructure of any kind. Without ‘safeguards' to their culture, he believed that the south would be
‘overwhelmed and swamped' by the north. The ideal safeguard would, of course, be the ‘maintenance of a British controlled administration with British governors and District Commissioners'.
¹³
This judgement was naive given that, in 1947 when the independence of India was imminent, it was becoming clearer that the British might have to leave the Sudan at some time in the not too distant future, and what would become of the south then?

Privately, Robertson was not too optimistic about the ability of the south to compete in the united Sudan, as there were still ‘limited facilities for education above the elementary level' in the region. From what he had seen, he had concluded that the educated southern Sudanese made ‘good clerks', but that a large proportion failed ‘when given positions of financial responsibility'. Many of the educated southerners, in his view, showed an ‘instability of character and proneness to alcoholic excess which is a little disturbing'. This, he believed, was due to the fact that education lifted them out of their ‘tribal environment' and thus disorientated them. Robertson recognized that very little advance had been made in the ‘evolution of social equality' between north and south, and he did not hesitate to blame the south for this disparity and lack of progress. In the same report, dating from 1950, Robertson railed against ‘Nilotic Conservatism' which regarded cattle as a ‘social institution and a means to the acquisition of wives', instead of as an economic asset. He was quite open about his anti-southern bias. The lack of ‘social equality' was partly the fault of the average southern Sudanese man, who was ‘not readily responsive or companionable outside his own immediate circle'.
¹⁴