Land Tenure and the State in the Precolonial Sudan

Everyone knows that an agricultural country practices agriculture.

Ouologuem Yambo, "1901"

History is a form of reasoning about the human experience, in which one uses evidence derived from primary sources to test interpretive ideas. Both evidential corpus and conceptual architecture deserve most careful scrutiny. This study addresses both evidential and interpretive aspects of land tenure in the precolonial Sudan, a topic concerning which, at present, no historiographical orthodoxy prevails.¹ The Sudan's place in the world is controversial, and there is disagreement concerning the choice of appropriate frames of reference for the conduct of comparative historical discourse.² The very notion that "land tenure" is a fit concept for the analysis of Sudanese history is still a new and far from universally accepted idea.³ While considerable information about land tenure is available for some places and periods within the broad sweep of Sudanese history, wide empirical lacunae also exist. All this places a heavy burden upon the interpretive assumptions of practicing scholars.

Arranging the Toolkit of Theory

Theoretical statements may be ranked hierarchically on the basis of the scale of the problems they address.⁴ Satisfying historiography requires the application of a level of theory appropriate to the scale of each situation to be analyzed. Low-level theory should not ordinarily be used to explain very large-scale historical phenomena (kingdoms are not routinely lost through the want of a horseshoe-nail), nor high-level theory very small ones (it was probably not the greenhouse effect that caused the plant in my window box to die last winter). Within the wider Africanist discourse, much discussion relevant to land tenure in the precolonial Sudan suffers from the misplaced application of otherwise-useful theoretical concepts to situations at a level to which they are ill-suited. While an exhaustive treatment of this topic lies beyond the scope of this essay, a series of illustrative examples may serve to demonstrate the problem. These examples will be arranged in ascending order of scale, corresponding in a heuristic sense to what the Marxian tradition terms forces, relations, and modes of production.

The Problem of the Application of Low-Level Concepts to Large-Scale Historical Phenomena

To cite the most obvious example, Jack Goody has maintained that a handful of low-level technological variables should be taken as major determinants of African social structure and historical process.⁵ Common sense supports Goody to the extent that significant changes must indeed have accompanied the introduction of ironworking or the camel, of animal traction or machine irrigation, of the broadsword, the horse, or the plow. But the claim that these traits, singly or in combination, define the meaningfully distinctive qualities of a society, let alone a reified "African society," is refuted concretely by the historical experience of the Sudanese kingdom of Sinnar: the more northerly provinces possessed and used all the technological items mentioned while the central and southern provinces, clearly by choice rather than ignorance or deprivation, did not.⁶ Similarly, the Sudan's four-thousand-year record of intermittent literacy in a wide variety of languages both native and borrowed vitiates by its very existence a questionable but popular school of thought that attributes very large and irreversible historical effects to the introduction of the written word.⁷ The point of this demonstration (aside from proving that Sudan's literature is not as widely known among Africanists as it deserves to be), is to illustrate the limitations of social analysis based exclusively and superficially upon changes in a few selected forces of production alone.

Land tenure is a concept that, at a minimum, should involve both human beings and land. By definition it cannot rightly be reduced to one variable. However, before leaving the realm of monocausal, materially grounded interpretations, it is worth noting that conventional liberal wisdom has undertaken to isolate land as a factor of production and then to remove it from the historical consideration of precolonial Africa by claiming it to be so abundant as to constitute "virtually a free good." As Goody expressed it, "land was not a very scarce...