Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (review)

One of the many paradoxes of imperialism is that the dominated elite it educates to serve its purposes turns against it, eventually ridding itself of the imperial yoke. Education in the European colonies was a double-edged sword as colonial officials soon came to realize. On the one hand it provided the regime with the bureaucracy necessary to run its colonies; on the other it undermined the system by creating an awareness among its graduates that the superior values and rights touted by the colonial power as being intrinsic to their civilization were not implemented in their colonies. If education in the colonies laid bare imperialism’s double standards in a particularly telling way, it also provided those it educated with the ideological wherewithal to hit back at the regime.

With the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan as her focus, Heather Sharkey examines those she aptly terms “colonialism’s intimate enemies”, the local functionaries, who made “colonial rule a reality while hoping to see it undone.” (1) Sharkey constructs her arguments around three basic questions, which she believes are as relevant to post-colonial countries in their continuing quest for national identity as they are to understanding the colonial period itself. Her first line of enquiry concerns the way colonialism functioned. She does not analyse the system in the abstract but concentrates on the way it operated on a day-to-day basis. A close examination of daily activities and exchanges, she argues, will shed light on the second basic question, namely the way in which nationalism arose. Finally, she seeks to explain the way the shaping of the colonial state led to the evolution of the nation state. The two, she believes, are connected in so far as nationalism is the ideological expression of the social changes colonialism engendered. It was, among other things, a literary undertaking and it is nationalism as a sentiment and not as a political activity that she develops.

Sharkey traces the Sudanization of the colonial bureaucracy as an educated Sudanese elite gradually replaced first the Egyptian personnel, then the Lebanese and finally the British. The majority of these men were educated at Gordon College, established in 1902 along the lines of elite British public schools with a view to training future bureaucrats and administrators. The school, which was variously known as the “Eton of the Soudan” or the “Winchester by the Nile”, turned out to be the “crucible” for Sudanese nationalism. (7)

British educational policy in the Sudan was based on patronage. Rather than reshuffle the existing social hierarchy, Sharkey explains, the British reinforced it by establishing enrolment policies according to gender, region, social status and religion (21). Certainly patronage and the creation of hierarchies were essential to colonial methods, but having implied that the hierarchy should have been altered Sharkey does not adequately explain why it should have been so. British motivation in this regard was one of appeasement stemming from fear of creating tension and unrest; upsetting the social apple cart might have provoked undesirable results. As for the enrolment policies of Gordon College, these were very much in line with schools in the United Kingdom. Eton and Winchester were (and still are) elite schools for boys many of whose graduates obtain top jobs in the civil service. Unlike the French schools for the sons of chiefs in West Africa, which were a colonial anomaly, Gordon College replicated the British system. In view of the importance of education to the development of national identity, a more nuanced discussion of the significance of this similarity would have amplified the question of how colonialism, national identity, and nationalism interacted, as well as elucidating distinctive features of British colonial policy.

If Gordon College provided the necessary acculturation to produce the “native” bureaucrats needed to assist the British in running their empire, it also created an old-boy network that aided the development of nationalism. The elite nature of the college convinced its graduates that they were capable leaders, but...