DISASTER IN DARFUR - UCSB Department of History - University of ...

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fifty years of British rule became a sophisticated if not worldly ruling class that
reinforced the disdain and derision of their grandfathers and fathers for the rustic illiterate
folk from the West, East, and South. It was among these simple farmers and coarse
herdsmen in the western Sudan of Kordofan and Darfur that the Umma Party of Sayyid
Abd al-Rahman could count on support from his fervent followers, for his father,
Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abdallah, the Mahdi, had recruited among the Baqqara and Fur
the shock troops for his army that destroyed Egyptian rule in the Sudan and established
the Mahdist State. They have remained passionately loyal to Mahdism, and after the
independence of the Sudan in 1956 the Umma began to introduce selected sons of the old
Darfur elite into the political life of Omdurman and Khartoum. Here they became
assimilated into the ruling riverain awlad al-bahar or in the contemptuous words of the
Darfurian political activist, Dr. Sharif Harir, they were corrupted by “riverization” after
abandoning their traditional roots in Darfur for the political highlife of Khartoum.
The ethnic and cultural discrimination by the riverain ruling elite in Khartoum for
those Sudanese living on the periphery has historically established the pattern of
governance by the awlad al-bahar, which constitutes a circumference of no more than a
few hundred miles from the confluence of the two Niles, and those lands beyond where
the authority diminishes with the distance from the heartland. At no time in the last two
hundred years has the central government of the Sudan—neither nineteenth century
Turks or twentieth century British and certainly not the independent Sudanese—actually
governed Darfur, the southern Sudan, or even the Red Sea Hills. Officials from the
central government occupied the periphery with scattered symbolic posts in the
countryside and a garrison and governor in the traditional capital, but at no time have