The Sudans in the Twenty-First Century

Many recent books on Sudanese history and politics have fallen into two broad categories: analyses of the Sudan’s problems (what may be called Failed State Studies), and more specifically, accounts of the civil war that ended in 2005 and led to the independence of South Sudan in 2011. The seven books reviewed here (with one partial exception) fall into one or another of these categories or straddle them. As such they share attributes and defects, but in representing recent scholarship they are noteworthy too in pointing to a marked change in the focus of academic interest and in the approaches concomitantly eschewed and permitted by that change.

For various reasons (most worthy of attention themselves), a Golden Age in historical writing on the modern Sudan ended in the 1970s. Although much of lasting importance has appeared since then (and several historians have produced superb bodies of work), the ability of Sudanese and foreign scholars to conduct original research in Sudanese archives, and the scarcity of expert supervision of postgraduate study in the Sudan and elsewhere, have in part been responsible for this decline. Originality has suffered as well-worn themes have been repeatedly reworked, often badly (the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1896–98; the regime of Lord Cromer; colonial education policy; the Juba Conference; the 1972 Addis Ababa Agreement, etc.). Overall quality has been diminished by shoddy or inexpert supervision in European and American universities. For political, financial, and other reasons, good Sudanese historians and promising Sudanese students have abandoned the field. In general, the result has been the substitution of deadline-driven ephemera for studies of modern history, and the deracination of political or sociological studies from history.

It might be expected that the dearth of modern historical textbooks makes The Sudan Handbook a welcome addition to the literature. Proceeding from an annual Sudan Course held at the Senior Secondary School at Rumbek under the auspices of the Rift Valley Institute, the book is meant as “a critical guide to current knowledge.” This, at least, it is not. Of as uneven quality as one would expect of a volume with four editors and a score of contributors, the book is a medley rather than a summary and critique. None of the chapters is original, although one (Wendy James’s “Religious Practice and Belief”), is a real essay with a beginning and an end and is a gem of concision. Other chapters have errors of detail and interpretation (e.g., Justin Willis’s “The Ambitions of the State”) or are warmed-up leftovers of authors’ work elsewhere (Peter Woodward’s “Sudan’s Fragile State”; Douglas Johnson’s “Twentieth-Century Civil Wars”), poorly conceived (Daniel Large’s “The...