Kordofan Invaded: Peripheral Incorporation and Social Transformation in Islamic Africa (review)

This volume consists of twelve essays (one introductory) about the his-tory of Kordofan in northwest Sudan. In chapter 1, Spaulding gives a well-crafted summary of what is known about early Kordofan, drawing on inferences from comparative linguistics and a wide range of precolonial historical texts. In chapter 2, Stiansen analyzes the economic practices and local connections of foreign traders in Kordofan's nineteenth-century export trade in gum arabic. Using some of the correspondence of Mahdist military commanders in Kordofan, Decker, in chapter 3, shows how the Mahdist state categorized and treated women who came under its control. Whether slave or free, unmarried or married, the state appears to have had clear and at times drastic policies toward them.

Chapter 4, by Daly, focuses upon H.A. MacMichael, a central figure in the Anglo-Egyptian era (1898-1956), and his perceived and real impact on British indirect rule policies. In chapter 5, Abu Shouk deals with this same topic of indirect rule and "native administration" and analyzes how the British transformed the tribal mosaic of Kordofan into a few large "supertribes," whose nazirs derived their power and functions primarily from the colonial state. Although the educated Sudanese middle class at independence resented this colonial legacy of tribal institutions, it proved very difficult to undo. In chapter 6, Beswick presents the history of a particular group of Dinka, the Ngok of southern Kordofan. Basing her work on an impressive range of sources, she documents how this "stateless" society, in particular during Anglo-Egyptian rule, adopted increasingly centralized political institutions. Not until the 1970s did new policies of the central state reverse this process.

Chapter 7 deals with new developments in the conceptualization of Sudanese national identity in the 1930s. Sharkey describes how four Sudanese literary figures from this period not only shared the experience of government service in Kordofan but also incorporated aspects of Kordofanian life and landscape into their writing. Thus they helped create a "Sudanese" Arabic literature which purposefully looked beyond the northern Nile Valley. Chapter 8 examines the role the Tijaniyya order played in shaping class and ethnic relations in al-Nahud, an important town in western Kordofan. Al-Karsani shows how the Tijaniyya, in the context of a market economy invigorated by the extension of the colonial railway system in the 1910s, was able to constitute itself as a local institution that cut across ethnic, class, and geographical identities. On the eve of independence, however, new national agendas and policies led to splits in what had been a cohesive Tijani coalition. It was thus on the national level that the Tijaniyya failed to become an alternative to the political blocs of the Mirghaniyya and Ansar.

Chapter 9 deals with the history of land tenure in Kordofan. Babikr disproves the persistent notion that colonial governments always destroyed communal land-ownership and introduced individual and commercialized systems of land tenure. For example, in Dar Hamr the British implemented their own version of communal land tenure in ways that served their own administrative goals. Chapter 10 analyzes the interplay of ethnicity and the allocation of resources by the central state in the politics of the Nuba Mountains from 1950 to 1990. Saavedra documents increasing group conflict and a "hardening" of local ethnic identities in the context of the unequal and divisive distribution of resources by the central state. Chapter 11 analyzes the spread in Kordofan of cultural notions of propriety developed in the Nile Valley. While Beck bases his arguments on a wide range of sources, his analysis and data cover the same ground as Spaulding's The Heroic Age in Sinnar, to which he, inexplicably, fails to refer.

In the introduction to this volume the editors conceptualize its central themes and its relationship to the wider historiography of Sudan and Islamic Africa. The editors criticize the literature for its overemphasis on the state at the...