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

Conclusion

Conclusion “Hurrah Mahdism finished,” cabled a jubilant Francis Reginald Wingate to his wife on November 24, 1899. However, Wingate lived in the Sudan as one of the long-reigning rulers of the country for long enough to discover that was merely wishful thinking. Kitchener, Wingate, and their army could justifiably say that they successfully defeated the Mahdist army that day at what was considered by them the final battle of Omdurman on September 2. That day also marked the first day of the displacement of a Sudanese independent imperial state by a different, peculiar, alien one. However, the cracks in the structure of that British imperial state and its system were opened through the persistent Sudanese resistance to that state design and its order. The cracks were not wide enough for the colonial regime to crumble, but nevertheless they opened the way for the Khatmiyya and Mahdism, in their new guises, together with other Sudanese resistance groups that were hostile to the new environment and its oppressive regime to emerge while undergoing different forms of transformation. The new construction of neo-Mahdism and neo-Khatmiyya began by way of adhering to faith-based practices of community. Gradually, however , the spirit of that community and the †ar•qa invested in the work ethic of each group was behind the emergence of a rural agricultural form of capitalism around Sayyid 'Abdel Ra˙man al-Mahdi and a merchant form of capitalism around Sayyid 'Ali al-Mirghani. This emergence gave rise to a number of opposing regimes of meaning, practice, and incongruent elements of power relations within the Sudanese sociopolitical sphere. Each of these developments was oriented and identified by its own discourse. Conclusion · 187 While the state used its hegemonic and military power and structural violence to write down the basic principles of creating a center and marginalized zones, the emerging Sudanese entities and their communities of conversation continued to utilize and mobilize their resources and frame their discourses to meet the challenge of the age. Hence, the colonial period not only embodied but also produced—in its comprehensive form of life—ideology and experience, not only to counter but also to restrain these opposing regimes. The colonial experience here takes the period from 1898 to 1956 as an epoch and the state as a structure, and they both continue to reproduce their discontents and their system of opposition to each other as colonization, which is, in its very essence, “a ‘reinvention of difference’ and not an act of cultural uniformity.”1 Hence, the reinvention of difference remains one of the main functions of the colonial state and its system of categorization of open and closed districts, its inherent stimulus to totalitarianism, and its reliance on violence as a mode of operation. The reinvention of difference, which had the force of state hegemonic power and its tools of mass destruction, imposed unprecedented transactions of control, discipline, exploitation, and coercive restrictions. The initial framework in which all that was happening enforced, through the state’s centralized power, a regulatory system based on the creation of peoplehoods, and an uneven distribution system of division of labor, rewards , and a residue of the aftereffects of regulatory systems of a previous colonial experience during the Turkiyya (1821–85). The resultant developments that have come out of that experience continued to have very specific consequences for the entire population. The colonial state had the capacity to create different and unequal groups of “peoples.” Its different attempts to control them separately included the following: first, by causing new groups to coalesce—such as white-, khaki-, blue-collar, and white-'arråqi workers—through the creation of new types of work and workers whose lifeworld was colonized by the state; second, by pushing other groups of the population en masse to the fringes of progressive underdevelopment. Both strategies remain within the colonial state’s pattern of promotions “associated with the axial division of labour.”2 In the historical-cultural formation of both the center and the margin, the colonial racial reading of closeness and distance between inhabitants of the Sudanese space was perceived within a differentialist racism 188 · A Civil Society Deferred and a discourse that categorizes people as different, even though they can easily be seen as “genetically continuous groups.” Within all that, and according to that situation, a system of identity engineering—which a whole host of hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses, entitlements , and exercises of...