A Civil Society Deferred: The Tertiary Grip of Violence in the Sudan

4. A Tale of Three Cities: Khartoum

4 A Tale of Three Cities Khartoum The colonial communities of conversation in the Sudan, their regime, and its new disciplinary order emerged not only to put down all forms of resistance in the Sudan but also to establish a new state as “a corporate institution,”1 firmly connected to the British mini-imperial system. Builders of that system and of the colonial state in the Sudan came of age when “the flowering of the middle-class British evangelical spirit, began to ascribe cultural meanings to the British domination, and colonialism proper can be said to have begun.”2 In all these instances, the colonial state had continued to develop as a contradiction and an antagonist of all forms and representations of an emerging Sudanese civil society. At the same time, “the cultural technologies of rule . . . and the brutal modes of conquest that first established power”3 in the country had acted violently against all the emerging modes of mobilization of moral and normative resistance to the colonial system. Violence became a tool of control, symptomatic of a malignant tumor, which arose on the first day of the invasion , continued to take different shapes, and increased in intensity only to remain a prominent part of the heritage of the colonial state. From that point on, the eminence and attributes of a powerful, power-bestowing , and power-denying centralized state apparatus continued to grow throughout the lifetime of the colonial state, eventually transferring that ascribed status to the postcolonial state. At the same time, the integrity of the colonial regime had been frustrated from both inside and out; this frustration transformed it into a violent “contact point” with unmatched “technologies of domination.”4 That is, the colonial experience engaged and shaped the postcolonial state as well as the lives of the colonizers. A Tale of Three Cities: Khartoum · 67 Over the past century, the colonial state—and its heir, the postcolonial state—have killed, banned, and violently devastated several individuals, peoples, and civil institutions. Through these developments, an uneasy relationship between the colonial and postcolonial states and the very foundation of a civil society were continually shrouded in conflict. This history of both discursive and physical violence constituted the postcolonial predicament. Ultimately, no single event has had such a profound influence on the sociopolitical life of the Sudan as the colonial experience . Both the structured and the amorphous forms, the magnitude, the “ghostly residues”5 of the colonial experience, and the growth of the state’s malignant tumor that plagued institutions and technologies of domination and their collective effects on Sudanese society continued to influence not only the most particular, but also the less particular forms of violence by adding more barriers to resurrecting a civil society. In its physical form, the colonial regime withered half a century ago. Nevertheless , the inherited state, the ghostly residue, and its innate malignancy of violence that divisively reshaped anticolonial communities of conversation have continued to develop and to fight back in an attempt to expand , or at least maintain, the postcolonial state, its space, and its fields of power. The synergy and resource mobilization that endowed all Sudanese movements with their violent and nonviolent modes of resistance to the colonial state and its orders took more than two decades to effectively appropriate a force that was engaged with both rural and urban developments of capitalism and elective affinities that enthused and revitalized competing sociopolitical movements. At the same time, as much as it had been resisted, the colonial state and its constituent community continued to develop, employ, and force structures through the course of their activities , in order to build up the state’s system of domination as an enterprise . This enterprise grew within what Anthony Giddens describes as the powers of the “allocative resource” and the “authoritative resource.” Giddens explains, “By the first of these I refer to dominion over material facilities, including material goods and the natural forces that may be harnessed in their production. The second concerns the means of dominion over the activities of human beings themselves.”6 Over time, the colonial regime was able to create the state we know today as a regulator of most aspects of life, an order-endowing and order-enforcing entity, 68 · A Civil Society Deferred a disciplinary power, and, as perceived by most, an eternal body. This chapter addresses the development of the colonial state and the construction of the colonial...