Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  In 1972, a peace agreement between the Sudan’s north and south was signed. The Addis Ababa Agreement, which allowed a measure of autonomy to the south, was an initiative promoted by Colonel Gaafar Nimeiri, who had launched a successful coup in Khartoum in May 1969. Nimeiri was aged thirty-nine at the time of the coup and had been born the son of a postman in a district of Omdurman. A football fanatic, he graduated from Khartoum Military College in 1952 and had travelled widely, taking various military training courses, including a two-year spell in the United States at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.35 Like many other leaders in developing countries at the time, Nimeiri came to power on the back of communist support and his military coup was described as a coalition between a military junta, the Sudan Communist Party and Arab nationalists. This led to a period in which the influence of the Soviet Union in the Sudan was significant.36 The agreement was fragile and, during the 1970s, new tensions arose, while the desire of the southern Sudanese for greater independence was openly acknowledged by foreign diplomats. In his valedictory dispatch, written in September 1977, to David Owen, the new British Foreign Secretary, the British Ambassador to Khartoum observed that a member of his staff had called on a southern politician and found the man studying designs for a new, separate flag for the south.37

  Tensions were increased by the discovery of oil in the south of the Sudan in 1978. The southern regional government was anxious that an oil refinery be built in the south close to the oilfields. Nimeiri ignored its protestations and ordered that the refinery be built in the north, combined with a pipeline to the Red Sea, from which the crude oil could be directly exported.38 In the south itself, a demonstration occurred in Juba in September 1978 when 3,000 secondary school pupils protested, demanding that the oil located in the south be used exclusively for that region. Although, during the summer of that year, the topic was ‘never mentioned officially’, it was clear to Foreign Office officials in London that some of the southern leaders were thinking in ‘regional rather than national terms’.39 The final cause of the outbreak of the second Sudanese civil war in 1983 was the general drift of Nimeiri’s government from a secular Arab nationalism, which was strongly influenced by socialism, to a more overtly religious, Islamic ideology.

  Already in 1977, Nimeiri had sidelined his erstwhile communist friends and begun to flirt with Islamic ideologues. After an abortive communist coup in July 1971, he purged the communists from his government and banned the Communist Party. In 1977 he expelled the last Soviet military advisers from the country.40 Needing to broaden the base of his support, he then brought two prominent Islamic politicians into his government: Sadiq al-Mahdi, the great-grandson of the nineteenth-century Mahdi, and Sadiq’s brother-in-law Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and founder of the National Islamic Front, a militant Islamic party. Turabi was appointed attorney general and immediately pressed for Islamic reform of the legal system and for greater Islamic influence throughout the country. When the British Ambassador, D. C. Carden, met him in December 1978, he was struck by Turabi’s charm, but also by his insistence on the ‘Islamisation of the Law’, and even more by his stated desire to ‘push Islam in the South’, a region which had not been penetrated by the Islamic faith.41

  With his new friends, Nimeiri embarked on a radical programme of Islamization of the Sudan which culminated in 1983, when he declared an Islamic revolution in Sudan, which would now be a country governed by Islamic law. The traditional penalties–amputation for theft, flogging for alcoholic consumption and death for apostasy–would be rigorously applied across the whole country. To show his determination in enforcing this strict regime, Nimeiri made the lavish gesture of pouring $11 million worth of alcohol into the Nile, and ‘European-style’ dancing was banned.42 The attempt to impose sharia law in the south proved highly controversial and led to the founding of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), whose declared aim was not a separate state of southern Sudan, but rather more democracy in the whole country. The second civil war was an obscure conflict, largely forgotten by a wider world which had tired of concerning itself with wars in Africa. Sudan earned its reputation as ‘Africa’s most dysfunctional country’, a title used as a headline by the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in its obituary of Nimeiri in June 2009.43 Nimeiri himself was deposed in a bloodless coup in 1985, and elections were held the following year which were won by Sadiq al-Mahdi’s Umma Party, the heir to the Mahdist tradition. This tradition, perhaps ironically, was dominated by moderate Islamists, compared with other parties in modern Sudan. Graham Thomas has even suggested that the ‘Mahdist state of a century ago was comparatively liberal and compassionate compared with the present Islamic Fundamentalist Military Regime’.44

  The history of the modern Sudan is dominated by Islamic fanaticism. This would hardly be surprising to people like G. W. Steevens, the journalist who described the Sudan as the ‘home of fanaticism’, more than a hundred years ago.45 The moderate Mahdi was himself toppled in a bloodless coup in 1989 led by Omar al-Bashir, a colonel in the Sudanese army. This coup proclaimed an even more vehement form of Islamic fundamentalism and sharpened the conflict with the south by emphasizing the hegemony of Islamic culture. The war against the south was ‘reaffirmed as jihad’. Breaking with precedent which was almost as old as Islam itself, Christians were denied special status; women’s relative freedom in public and the workplace was severely restricted. To some historians, the approach of the new militant Islam in the Sudan was similar to the concept of ‘Manifest Destiny’, adopted by nineteenth-century Americans who aspired to colonize and subdue the entire continent of North America. In much the same way, Sudanese nationalists embarked on their divine mission to ‘spread their civilization to non-Muslims’.46

  The leading intellectual figure behind this recrudescence of militant Islam was the man whom Nimeiri had appointed attorney general in the 1970s, Hassan al-Turabi. Turabi is a figure who has not only had an effect on Sudanese politics, but, through his brand of militant Islam, has had a wider impact in the field of international relations. It was he who first invited a Saudi Islamic dissident, Osama bin Laden, to Sudan in 1990. Turabi was a small man, with a white wisp of a beard, who, unlike many Islamists, was familiar with Europe and the United States. As a student in 1960, he had wandered across America, even staying ‘with Red Indians and farmers’–an experience that had shown him the folly of capitalism and secularism. After this trip, he returned to London, where he obtained a master’s degree in Law from the London School of Economics in 1961, followed by a doctorate in Law from the Sorbonne, in Paris, in 1964. Turabi now wanted to create an international community –the ummah–which would be based in the Sudan, and could then transform other countries in the region. The Sudan, in this highly ambitious scheme, would become the intellectual centre of an Islamic reformation. To further this plan, Turabi invited all Muslims, regardless of nationality, to the Sudan. He represented the moderate face of the Islamic revolution, while Prime Minister Bashir was portrayed as the military strongman.47

  Attracted by Turabi’s idea of establishing an ‘Islamic international’, bin Laden spent many happy years in Sudan, where he indulged his passion for horse-breeding, while his wealth was appreciated as a source of investment, as Sudan’s economy gradually crumbled under the pressure of civil war. At a reception given soon after bin Laden’s arrival, Turabi even described the Saudi as the ‘great Islamic investor’.48 Sudan’s embrace of Islamic fundamentalism led to the country being listed by the United States as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ in 1993. Despite tensions between Bashir and Turabi, the Sudanese government continued to back terror attacks, most notably the 1995 assassination attempt on Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, as he drove from Addis Ababa’s airport into the city for a meeting of the Organization of African Unity. Turabi openly boasted about this attack, proclaiming that ‘the sons of the Prophet Moses, the Muslims, rose up against him’ and ‘sent him back to his country’.

  Such overt enthusiasm
for acts of terror contributed to the growing sense of isolation which permeated the Sudanese government in the late 1990s. The consequence of this growing isolation was the expulsion of bin Laden from the Sudan in May 1996. The Sudanese, to repair their credit with Washington, even offered to hand bin Laden over to the Americans. The Clinton administration did not see bin Laden as the mortal threat he later became and declined the offer.49 Bin Laden, after remonstrating with his former friends and arguing that he had commited no crimes against the Sudan, then progressed to Afghanistan to continue his jihad against the United States. In the Sudan, militant Islam had more local battles to fight. The doctrine the Islamists espoused in the Sudan was infused by a racial arrogance, which is foreign to Islamic fundamentalism. In the Islamic faith, adherence to Islam is of paramount importance, whereas issues of race and ethnicity are comparatively unimportant. It was this relative tolerance which led to the rapid spread of the religion in Africa and Asia, from its earliest days in the seventh century to more recent times. In the Sudan, the racial element was often regarded as being a key factor, even though intermarriage had made the distinction between Arab and African blurred to the point of being meaningless.

  Yet the ‘race war’ element of the struggle was what characterized the latest manifestation of the conflict in Darfur, in the west of Sudan, which, as already noted, had been an independent sultanate before 1916. It was incorporated into the government of the Sudan in January 1917, but remained a backward and uncultivated region. In 1935, Darfur had only one primary school, while in 1956 it had the lowest number of hospital beds of any Sudanese province.50 It emerged as a problem in 2005 just as the second civil war between the north and south was coming to its conclusion. In January that year, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement was signed in Nairobi that finally ended the war between Khartoum and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which was intended to lead the way to full independence for the south. The cost of the war, in terms of displacement of people and lives lost, has never been accurately measured. International agencies reported a figure of 1 million dead, but the consensus figures have crept towards 2 million in more recent estimates.51

  The crisis in Darfur began as a sideshow to the seemingly never-ending conflict between north and south. After a severe famine in the province in 1984–5, the mid-1990s saw an increasingly chaotic situation develop, embittered by virulent Arab Islamism. It was this fervour which inspired the activities of the gangs of marauders, known as the janjawid, a word whose precise meaning is disputed but has generally been understood to signify ‘an armed man on horseback’ in Arabic.52 Tensions and violence had been simmering in Darfur until 2004, when an operation by the African rebels killed seventy-five Sudanese government soldiers. It was at that moment that Omar al-Bashir, who had elevated himself to the presidency in 1993, called on local tribes in Darfur to fight the African insurgents. Despite the general truce, signed in Nairobi in 2005, the Darfur conflict continued to the point where, regardless of ethnic labels, gangs of armed thugs simply used the confusion as an opportunity ‘to grab land and livestock’, under the banner of a ‘state-sanctioned military operation’.53

  In March 2009 an extraordinary warrant was issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. For the first time in history, a serving head of state was indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. A panel of three judges accused Omar al-Bashir of personal responsibility for ‘murder, extermination, rape and other crimes’ in the country’s western province, Darfur, ‘where an estimated 300,000 people had been killed and millions displaced since 2003’. This indictment was spurned by the Sudanese government, which swiftly responded by revoking licences for Oxfam and other aid agencies to operate in Darfur.54 Darfur was described by UN officials as early as 2004 as the ‘worst humanitarian crisis in the world’, but it was only the latest episode of a recurring conflict which had paralysed the Sudan for nearly forty years. For as long as the country remained a united state, seeds of future conflict existed; the conflict between Arab and African, between north and south, seemed never ending.

  Between 9 and 15 January 2011 a referendum was held in the southern Sudan in order to determine whether the region should remain part of a unified Sudanese state. The referendum gave a decisive result, as 99 per cent of voters supported the creation of an independent state of southern Sudan. The Sudan, after fifty-five violent years of independence, seemed destined to be formally divided into two independent states. Yet whether this solution would finally end the bloodshed and turmoil experienced in the region over so many decades remains unclear.

  It is perhaps unfair to judge Britain’s contribution to the Sudan purely in terms of the conflict which has plagued the country almost continuously since 1955. British achievements in Sudan were undeniable. Theodore Roosevelt remarked as long ago as 1910 that he doubted if, in any part of the world, there was ‘a more striking instance . . . of genuine progress achieved by the substitution of civilization for savagery’. This was a bold claim, but estimates of the population decline during the time of the Mahdi and his bloodthirsty successor, the Khalifa, from a figure of about 8 million to some 2 million, showed that Sudan had enjoyed some benefits from the stability provided by colonial rule. A note of self-congratulation, combined with an awareness of the ingratitude of the natives, was expressed most eloquently by Rudyard Kipling, the unofficial poet laureate of empire, in 1913: ‘In due time the Sudanese will forget how warily their fathers had to walk in the Mahdi’s time to secure even a bellyful. Then, as happened elsewhere, they will honestly believe that they themselves created . . . the easy life which they were bought at so heavy a price.’55

  Yet, whatever the material benefits of British rule, the most enduring imperial legacy in Sudan was the policy incoherence. The British adopted a ‘Southern Policy’ only to reverse it after sixteen years. The Sudan is an outstanding example of how the enormous degree of individualism which imperial government fostered often led to policy inconsistency and tragedy. That theme is a central argument of this book: individualism, the reliance on individual administrators to conceive and execute policy, with very little strategic direction from London, often led to contradictory and self-defeating policies, which in turn brought disaster to millions. As one historian observed, ‘the British administration had certainly vacillated between uniting the south with the north and making the south a black Christian buffer region against the spread of Islam in the north’.56 Another observed, at the end of the first Sudanese civil war in 1972, that ‘even pro-British historians admit that British policy at the time was not consistent or far-sighted’ with regard to the Sudan.57

  Back in the 1890s, Lord Cromer identified lack of policy coherence as a prominent trait in British administration: ‘The absence of consistency which is so frequently noticeable in the aims of British policy is indeed a never-ending source of embarrassment to those on whom devolves the duty of carrying that policy into execution.’58 Cromer saw democracy as the principal cause of this inconsistency. Like so many of his contemporaries, he believed in personal rule and influence. He was an individualist, who fundamentally distrusted democracy, and yet the subsequent history of the empire he spent his life serving shows that it was the very individualism he praised that created instability, as it provided no over-arching framework under which consistent policies could be conceived and executed. The adoption and rejection of MacMichael’s ‘Southern Policy’ was a tragic example of the shortcomings of individualism, devoid of any strategic aim.

  PART V

  NIGERIA: ‘THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD’

  14

  Indirect Rule

  Perhaps no other country in the modern world is more a creature of empire than Nigeria. Even the name ‘Nigeria’ was a consciously invented one, first appearing in an article of the London Times on 8 January 1897, at the beginning of the year in which Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. Flora Shaw, a journalist and commentator on colonial affairs, suggested the name, which she thought would
be a good title for the ‘agglomeration of pagan and Mohammedan states which have been brought . . . within the confines of a British protectorate’. For the ‘first time in their history’, these states needed to ‘be described as an entity by some general name’.1

  Flora Shaw was the very model of Victorian womanhood. Her friend and younger contemporary Mary Kingsley described her as a ‘fine, upstanding young woman, as clever as they make them, capable of any immense amount of work’. She was also, according to Kingsley, ‘as hard as nails’, and she talked ‘like a Times leader all the time’. She was a committed patriot and was ‘imbued with the modern form of public imperialism’ which was ‘her religion’. Unusually for her time, Flora Shaw was a professional woman. She had been born into a middle-class family in Ireland in 1852 and, in 1897, looked a good deal younger than she actually was. She had written a popular novel based on her Irish childhood, Castle Blair, which had been published as long ago as 1878. As yet unmarried, she had turned herself into a crusading journalist, after giving up writing novels in her thirties. Early in 1892 she had gone to South Africa, where she went down both diamond and gold mines. Nothing, it seemed, could stop her; she asked questions, investigated and then wrote hundreds of letters about labour conditions, agriculture and other aspects of colonial development. Her letters so impressed the management of The Times that she was sent to Australia and New Zealand. On her return from the round-the-world trip in 1893, she settled in London to take up a permanent position on the newspaper as colonial editor. She was given an annual salary of £800 a year, much higher than other women journalists of the time.2 She had become one of the best-travelled women of her day.