environmental degradation as a cause of conflict in - Steiner Graphics

distributive centre and where the royal women, especially the sultan’s senior sister,played crucial roles. My impression, from the many documents I have collectedand read from the period, is that the mesakin or ordinary people could expect nottoo much zulm or ‘oppression’. In short, it was a well-run state. One example is adecree from the last sultan, ‘Ali Dinar (1898-1916), to his chiefs pointing to thefact that the rains that year were exceptionally good and ordering them to plant anextra field, whose yield was to be stored for the future. The evidence we have fromthe period of the sultanate, which is abundant, is that what would now be calledecological concerns, namely control over land-rights, water and grazing, were verycarefully monitored; under ‘Ali Dinar these concerns are very well documented.Under the sultanate the settled peoples, essentially non-Arab, were able to moreor less control (or keep out) the nomads by having a state on their side; the sultanate’sultimate sanction was heavy cavalry, riding imported horses (much larger thanthe local breeds) and wearing chain-mail. The nomads could not stand up againstthem; here the camel nomads of the north were more vulnerable than the Baqqara,who were always a problem for the sultans, since they could withdraw ever furthersouth in the Western Bahr al-Ghazal. As an historian I am struck by the parallelsbetween the present situation, although today the conflict is much bloodier, andthe position in the 1880s after the destruction of the sultanate in 1874 at thehands of a Northern Sudanese slave-trader, al-Zubayr Pasha, when a series of sultanicpretenders attempted to keep the cause of Darfur’s independence alive—myinformants called this period (1874-98) Umm Kwakiyya, the ‘killing period’. From myfield-notes written in the 1970s, Umm Kwakiyya sounds very much like today.When the sultanate was restored in 1898 by ’Ali Dinar he spent most of his reigndriving the nomads, north and south of the settled area, back, until he was killedby the British in 1916. The British then discovered that they had no alternativebut to continue his policy. They also kept the old ruling elite intact; indeed many ofthe educated Darfurians of today descend from that elite. A striking symbol of thiscontinuity was that up until the 1980s, the province governor lived in ’Ali Dinar’spalace and had his office in ’Ali Dinar’s throne room with the sultan’s throne behindhis desk. One flaw in British colonial policy was to attempt to fix all ‘tribes’ in theirdars or homelands as if they had immutable boundaries; a second was to legislateland-use and ownership as ‘tribal’ or communal, ignoring the sultanate’s practice ofgranting land as freehold.In the colonial period (1916-56) Darfur was a backwater ruled by a handful ofBritish officials; its only resource being the young men who migrated eastward tofind work in the cotton schemes between the Blue and White Niles.After independence in 1956, the situation did not change much, save for thebuilding of a railway to Nyala in 1959, which pulled the centre of gravity southwardsto Nyala. There was some economic development in the fertile region around25