A History of Sudan

"A History of Modern Sudan, by an American historian called Robert Collins. It’s probably the best narrative academic study of the country ever produced. He manages to draw a lot of his own scholarship and other people’s books together to get a comprehensive view of the country. Although he was writing before the conflict in Darfur, there’s an appendix dealing with the causes of the war there, so he gives us an understanding of it. It’s also the best book on internal Sudanese politics: he really gets into the governments of the 1970s and 80s. He’s very good on the regime of Numeiri and the appalling government of Bashir, and Hassan al-Turabi in the 1990s: how they destroyed the country and erected this repressive Islamic state. I think that it’s the best history of Sudan written by an outsider. Many books on the Sudan are pretty impenetrable: they tend to get lost replaying these micro-political disputes of the Sudanese élite in the mid-1970s. It’s very Khartoum-based. One of the problems with Sudan historically is that it’s been a very over-centralised state. This is a legacy of the British: basically they constructed Khartoum as the centre of economic activity and devoted almost no attention to the rest of the country, despite it being so big. So the people who held power in Khartoum held power in the rest of Sudan. They were traditionally from the Northern tribes – the ‘Nilotic’ or ‘Riverine’ élite: Arab Muslim tribes who settled on the banks of the Nile, the source of wealth being water for centuries of Sudan’s existence. It’s been a pretty exclusive monopoly of power: very few presidents have come from other regions."