Spies, Secrets, and a Story Waiting to Be (Re)Told: Memories of the 1924 Revolution and the...

Spies, Secrets, and a Story Waiting toBe (Re)Told: Memories of the 1924Revolution and the Racialization ofSudanese History

ELENA VEZZADINI, University of Bergen, Norway

ABSTRACT

This article attempts to trace a geography of the memory of the 1924 Revolutionin colonial Sudan. It springs from a glaring paradox: though the 1924 Revolutionis one of the best documented episodes of colonial history, it has not affectedcollective memory in the same way other episodes from the country’s modernhistory have. Eyewitness accounts were first produced in the 1930s and havecontinued to be published up to the present day; for some of the central episodesof 1924, there are as many versions as there are narrators. The purpose of thisarticle is to investigate the facets of these memories and those who have producedthem. It explores two characteristics central to the geography of memory of 1924:on the one hand, the idea that in spite of the number of accounts about therevolution, this event is not fully known, shrouded as it is in mystery, filled withunspoken truths. On the other hand, it is believed that certain people in 1924“said too much” and became spies, and that this is one of the main reasons whythe revolution failed. Finally, the article will tie this peculiar memory configura-tion into the social trauma that was one of the consequences of the Revolution of1924, along with the unspoken social divisions that followed it.

Northeast African Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013, pp. 53–92. ISSN 0740-9133.© 2013 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

This work originally appeared in Northeast African Studies, Fall 2013, published by Michigan State University Press.

“He had a rash on his forehead. Someone asked him: “What is that, onyour forehead?” He answered: “I know. Perhaps these are words thatcannot be spoken, so they took this shape to come out.”1

The memory of the episode of Sudanese colonial history known as theRevolution of 1924 is characterized by a paradox.2 This is perhaps one of mostrichly documented chapters in the country’s modern history: there is anextraordinary wealth of local accounts, besides the hundreds of pages of colonialdocuments that have been preserved in various archives.3 Several books anddozens of newspaper articles have been published by political activists or theirdescendants, by eyewitnesses from the time, and by people who claim to havefound—or are willing to reveal—new evidence or testimony about theinsurgency. There are pictures, television interviews, and radio series, and even atheatrical play that used to be taught to children at school.4And yet, the families of 1924 activists I met during my fieldwork

sorely complain that the 1924 Revolution has been lost twice; first,because it was crushed in blood by British officers; and second becauseSudanese people have forgotten it.5 In Khartoum, a neglected obelisk inshari‘a al-Jāma‘a recalls the death of ‘Abd al-Faḍīl al-Maz, one of theprotagonists of the November Mutiny, but one would hardly notice it as itis plastered with all kinds of advertising. There is no museum celebratingthe Revolution, aside from a small documentation center located in Baḥrī(Khartoum North) that is half-abandoned. Before it was closed down in2011, the newspaper Ajrās al-Ḥurriyya, press organ of the SPLM-North,occasionally included articles on the 1924 episode. One of the articles,published on 3 November 2009, was entitled “The house of the leader‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, a local restaurant. The most evident manifestation ofthe neglect of the heritage and the symbols of nationalism.”6 The articlewent on to discuss how the house of the “hero” and leader of the WhiteFlag League had become a restaurant in Khartoum, and the authorlamented that the house had not been turned into a museum, which couldhave become an important symbol for the “liberals of the country.” As afinal example, in 2005, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, northbranch, printed a poster in which John Garang, the late leader of theSPLM, was represented side by side with ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf (Figure 1) But

54 ▪ Elena Vezzadini


most of the people I spoke with had no idea who Garang’s companionwas, and wondered perhaps if it was his son.7The 1924 Revolution is a highly-contested episode among the Sudanese

both inside and outside the academic world. One strand of historiographysees it as the first step towards the independence of Sudan as a nation state.

Figure 1. John Garang and ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf.96

Spies, Secrets, and a Story Waiting to Be (Re)Told ▪ 55


Another sees it as a minor chapter of Sudanese history, which wasorchestrated either from Cairo—as the Sudan was an Anglo-Egyptiancondominium at that time—or from London. But aside from thesedebates on the endogenous or exogenous nature of the 1924 Revolution,there is a further reason why this episode is the subject of dispute. It is asomewhat open secret that it was an insurgency by “slaves”; in fact, onesegment of the political activists—the “black officers,” such as the leaderof the revolt, ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf—was of slave ancestry, whose familiescame from the marginalized peripheries of the country. This played afundamental role in shaping the nationalist movement, both ideologicallyand politically.8A few words should be dedicated to this group. The “black officers” were

descendants of southern Sudanese who were enslaved and signed up eitherinto the army of Muḥammad ‘Alī, the conqueror of what had become theSudan (1820–21), or later into the Mahdist army (1885–98), or finallyrecruited into the Anglo-Egyptian troops who were “reconquering” Sudanfrom 1896. The British considered them to be the martial race of Sudan.Even if during British colonial rule “black officers” made up only about one-half of the officer corps, with the remainder including men from all overSudan, from the Beja in the East to the Ja‘li of central Sudan, the armyrepresented the most powerful and rapid means of social mobility for peopleof southern descent. In particular, admission to the Military College offeredyoung cadets the path to a commission, a high salary, and above allprestigious administrative positions, such as that of sub-ma‘mūr.9 The systemwould be dismantled after 1924, however, as one of the consequences of theuprising. Most of the officers of 1924 either escaped to Egypt or after beingstripped of their ranks and privileges, and sometimes after some time inprison, were redirected towards civilian occupations, most notably withinthe Agricultural Department.10As I shall show later, “black officers” were by no means the only

actors of 1924, but they were at the forefront of events, and so the“slave” stigma that was attached to certain of the protagonists, as well astheir distance from the “traditional leaders” of the country, is oftenoffered as one of the reasons for the failure of the insurgency.11 It mighttherefore be imagined that the reason why the 1924 insurgency has not



made it into the pantheon of Sudanese heroic events is connected withthe slave status of its leaders. As I will try to demonstrate in this article,the reasons are multifaceted, and far more complex than this.

For a Geography of the Memory of 1924

When I asked why many Sudanese do not remember their (only) nationalistanti-colonial violent insurgency, people who had no relation to the 1924Revolution usually replied that the Sudanese have no time for such a thingas history, because they have other, more serious preoccupations, such asday-to-day survival. Yet these same people were perfectly capable ofremembering other chapters of Sudanese history, even though they mighthave disliked its protagonists and contested their role in the Sudanese past.This is why the forgetting of 1924 goes beyond the simple fact that

people may or may not have agreed with its slogan of unity with Egypt. The“Unity of the Nile Valley” slogan was taken up later by one of the two mainparties in Sudan, the National Unionist Party, which was supported by theleader of the Mirghanī ṭarīqa (brotherhood), sayyd ‘Alī al-Mīrghanī. Itsopposition to the Mahdist supporters of the Umma Party divided Sudanesepolitics deeply from the 1940s on, but today most people would have nodifficulty recognizing who the Mīrghanī or the Mahdī families are, just aseverybody knows of the Badrī family and is able to connect it with thehistory of female education in Sudan.12 Conversely, the “new rich,” wholive in recently-built neighborhoods in the suburbs of Khartoum, are oftenreviled as people “without a history.” Among northern Sudanese families,therefore, history lays the foundation for a person’s status: this is somethingI shall tentatively call historical symbolic capital.This is why not every “agitator” of 1924 has been forgotten to the same

degree. A few activists would later re-enter the collective memory throughtheir participation in the building of Sudan as a nation and its marchtowards independence starting in the late 1930s, either as politicians or asintellectuals and writers who shaped the national culture. One example isprovided by the Sudanese ṭabaqāt (a biographical dictionary of famousSudanese personalities) by Maḥjūb ‘Umar Bāshirī, Rūwād Al-fikr Al-Sūdānī.13 The only 1924 activists mentioned, with the exception of thepresident of the League, ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, and its vice president, ‘Ubayd Hājj



al-‘Amīn, were included more for their brilliant future after 1924 than fortheir participation in the revolution itself. This is the case with ‘AbdallāhKhalīl, the future Sudanese prime minister (1956–58); ‘Arafāt Muḥammad‘Abdallāh, the soon-to-be editor of the literary journal al-Fajr; ‘UthmānMuḥammad Aḥmad Hāshim, writer, poet, and intellectual; or al-DardīrīAḥmad Ismā‘īl, a politician and member of the first Sudanese parliament.14The process of remembering and forgetting has therefore not been blind tostatus. Another way to put this might be that participation in the Revolutionof 1924 does not in itself add to a person’s historical capital, and is not asufficient criterion for earning a place in the country’s pantheon of nationalheroes.However, the forgetting of 1924 is itself historical. In the 1970s, there

was a revival of the memories of 1924 associated with a significant attemptto democratize Sudanese politics. A popular movement organized by theSudanese Communist Party managed to overthrow the dictatorship ofGeneral Ibrāhīm ‘Abbūd in 1964, but on the reestablishment of democraticrule, the two religious-based parties linked to the Khatmiyya and theMahdī’s family managed to outlaw the Communist Party, as a consequenceof which the Communists helped to organize Ja‘far Muḥammad al-Numayrī’s coup d’état. The first five years of al-Numayrī’s rule were indeeda departure from the politics of the past. One of the many ways in which thisbecame manifest may be seen in the effort to rewrite a different, moreplural, and “popular” past, in which non-elite actors, such as women andworkers, could finally be represented as historical agents. Things changedonce again with the popular rise of the Islamic National Front in the late1970s and ‘Umar Ḥassan Aḥamd al-Bashīr’s coup d’état in 1989, when a newIslamic past had to be refashioned. Today, as we have seen, the SPLM isattempting to recover this past as a metaphor for a new Sudan (al-sūdānal-jadīd) that includes its multiple cultures.15The aim of this article, however, is not to provide a history of the

memory of 1920s nationalism; instead, my objective is to understand whatI call the “geography of memory,” the manner in which this memory isstructured, the configuration of its recurrences, silences, and omissions, andthe way in which various actors remember it, while always bearing in mindthe oscillations of 1924 in the national discourse. In other words, I believethat the heterogeneity of the narratives of 1924 is not only a product of thevarious national discourses that have followed one another since indepen-



dence—from an inclusive notion of the Sudanese nation of al-Numayrī to anew Islamic past of the present government—but also a consequence of thedifferent ways people felt about and reacted to the trauma of 1924 and itsgrim consequences. As I shall show, the aftermath of the insurgency wasdire both because the British tightened the screws on Sudanese political lifeand because this event brought about a social fracture in northern Sudanesesociety, which is still unspoken and unmended today. I believe that the“geography of memory” of 1924 coalesces and reveals thorny issues andunresolved tensions relating to social stratification and political marginal-ization in Sudanese society.16 Thus, the core of this article lies in a study ofthe juxtaposition of stories that have been retold many times, each timedifferently.The sources considered for this article includememoirs, interviews, and

books written by both 1924 activists and other kinds of witness. As myinvestigation focuses on the ways in which Sudanese participants in andobservers of the 1924 Revolution remember and write about this event, andhow they perceive the memory of 1924, a comprehensive analysis of thecolonial sources lies outside the scope of this work, even though I will referto them in order to compare the various versions of an event with colonialaccounts.17 It should be noted, however, that colonial accounts, just like thelocal sources I analyze here, were also based on a combination of first-handobservation, hearsay, rumor, and gossip. There is a certain amount ofoverlapping between the two, as well: in particular, the more recentaccounts of 1924 have been influenced by various academic publications on1924, which in turn were based in part on colonial records.18 It is not thequality of the information that concerns this article, however, or the fusionbetween colonial and local knowledge, but the way in which societyremembers, and what this can tell us about the history of 1924 and itsmultiple meanings.

A Short Narrative of the 1924 Revolution

The 1924 Revolution was the first episode of anti-colonial insurgency inwhich the idea of self-determination for Sudanese citizens was explicitlyarticulated through a nationalist ideology. After the Great War, Sudanentered a complex political phase. Like many other countries in the colonial



world, it was affected by new ideas about self-determination for its peopleand the right of a nationality to chose its own destiny, ideas that had beenwidely spread by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The hybrid status ofSudan as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium was unsettled first by the Egyp-tian Revolution of 1919, then by the partial independence gained by Egyptin 1922, and finally by the election in Egypt of a strong opponent of Britishcolonial rule, Sa‘d Zaghlūl, leader of the Wafd (“Delegation”) Party. Egyptwas the first African country in the British Empire to gain independence,and had become an example and an inspiration for Sudanese nationalists. Inaddition, thousands of Egyptians lived in Sudan and worked for the Suda-nese government and as soldiers and officers in the Egyptian Army, becauseSudan did not have an independent armed force. After the election ofZaghlūl, negotiations were scheduled to begin between Egypt and Britain todecide the political future of Sudan, and it is in that context that the WhiteFlag League became active in May 1924.19 Its objectives were to demon-strate openly and peacefully that the Sudanese nation supported the optionof “Unity of the Nile Valley” and independence from Britain. Between Mayand July, the White Flag League (Jamaʿiyyat al-liwā’ al-‘abyaḍ) staged aseries of political protests, including the organization of a number ofdemonstrations and the coordination of a campaign of telegrams addressedto the Sudanese government and the Egyptian authorities. In the middle ofJune, the League attempted to dispatch a delegation of two men,Muḥammad al-Mahdī and Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tam, to Cairo to makecontact with Egyptian politicians, but they were intercepted by the colonialpolice in Wadi Halfa. In June and July, the movement spread beyond thecapital, mobilizing provincial networks of disaffected officers and officials,who were encouraged to form local branches of the White Flag League. Inthis way, the main provincial urban centers, as well as more remote areas inthe south, north, and west, became involved in the movement.At the beginning of July, the British launched a severe crackdown, and on

4 July arrested ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, the leader of the movement. By the beginningof August, all its founders and most important members had been eitherarrested or exiled to remote places. This crackdown led to a wider and moreintense wave of demonstrations in Khartoum, Port Sudan, Atbara, and Shendi,however, and to attempted demonstrations inWadMedani and El Obeid, someof which mobilized thousands of people. One of the most spectacular of thesewas a demonstration and mutiny by all 51 cadets of the Khartoum Military



College on 9 August 1924, which led to a mass demonstration in the ThreeTowns (Khartoum, Khartoum North/Baḥrī, and Omdurman). All the demon-strations were forcefully put down, which led to some bloody episodes, such asthe one in Atbara where a dozen demonstrators were shot by the army.In October, negotiations between Egypt and Britain broke down. The

atmosphere in Sudan remained tense, and future developments appeared to beunclear, until on 19 November, the governor-general of Sudan, Sir Lee Stack,was assassinated in Cairo by Egyptian political “extremists.” In retaliation, theBritish high commissioner in Cairo, Viscount Allenby, launched his famousultimatum, in which—among other things—he demanded the immediatewithdrawal of the Egyptian Army from Sudan, which was promptly compliedwith. On 27 November, while Egyptian battalions were being evacuated fromKhartoum, the 11th Sudanese battalion of the Egyptian Army attempted to jointhem at the Khartoum railway station. On their way there, the soldiers werestopped by British troops led by Acting Governor General Huddleston. Whenthe Sudanese battalion refused to take orders from anybody but an Egyptianauthority, Huddleston ordered his troops to open fire. A desperate two-dayconfrontation ensued, in which the leaders of the mutiny, such as the officer‘Abd al-Faḍīl al-Maz, who was killed in action, put up exceptional resistance.After themutiny had been quelled, four officers were condemned to death, andthree of them, Thābit Ḥamza ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, Ḥassan Faḍl al-Mūlā, andSulaymān Muḥammad, were executed on 5 December 1924.The suppression of the 1924 Revolution was traumatic. Political activists

went to prison one after the other, and some never left it. In prison, manyturned King’s evidence, while others denied they had ever been a part of theWhite Flag League.20 Finally, the death penalty of the three young officers wholed the November mutiny was a shock for the residents of Khartoum. Theplatoon who had to carry out the execution was so distressed by what they hadto do that after three rounds of shooting, one of the threewas still not dead, andhe had to be shot with a handgun.21 It is to the landscape of memory producedafter this trauma that I shall now turn.

Authors and Narrations

In the following section, I will introduce a few of the accounts of 1924 inchronological order. It would be impossible to discuss in any comprehensive



manner all of them, and my aim here is first of all to present the memoriesproduced by the various social groups, and to highlight some differences interms of their contents and of forms of publication.The first written accounts of the Revolution of 1924 were authored by

a tiny elite of educated Sudanese, all of them civilians. It is important toobserve that the stratification of Sudanese society was—and still is—highlyembedded in literacy and education. The most “famous” Sudanese familieswere considered to be so not only because of their history and genealogicalor religious luster, but also because of their literary and cultural achieve-ments.22 Literacy in classical Arabic and in Arabic culture was constitutiveof the elite. Thus, it can be argued that these first authors came from an eliteof lineage and literacy. This is why it is particularly interesting to examinehow these texts portray the 1924 revolutionaries who had slave ancestryand who came from Southern Sudan and the Nuba Mountains, such as theleader ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf.One of the earliest works on the 1924 Revolution, al-S� ira� ʻ al-musallah�

ʻalā al-wah�da fi� l-Su�dan, was written by one of the first historians of modernSudan, Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, and published in 1948.23 The aim of thisbook was to celebrate the beginning of the nationalist movement in Sudanand denounce the evils of colonization. Born in 1878, and a senior clerk in1924, ‘Abd al-Rahim did not participate in the insurgency personally, buthis story is a patchwork of several eyewitness accounts by civilians andofficers.24 The book illustrates certain of the characteristics that werecommon to the first nationalist historians who narrated the story of 1924.First, it is a story of “great men” and “great deeds,” and makes a point ofconsidering all the people of 1924 as national heroes, whatever their originsmay be. Second, it is half a history of people and half a history of theliterature and cultural expressions of the time. Finally, it is a story riddledwith spies and betrayals. An indication of how the question of race andslavery is treated in this kind of literature may be found in one section of thebook, which is dedicated to an episode from 1924 in which ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīfis insulted by an anonymous writer from al-Ḥaḍārat al-Sūdān, the first localSudanese newspaper, because of his slave origins. For Muḥammad ‘Abdal-Raḥīm, this insult is a scandal: “what he wrote was nonsense and made-up,imaginary tales, and hemissed out the fact that ‘Alī Effendiwas from theDinka,which is one of the largest and sternest tribes in Sudan.” The author goes on to



accuse the anonymous writer of being an ignorant traitor and a coward, and ofwriting this just to put himself in a good light with the British:

It is a wonder how a writer could grant himself to go through politicalconflicts and think about the destiny of his nation while he has noknowledge about how many division this nation can have . . . maybeyou think that all these people are not human or they were only madefor slavery. . . . As Muslims, they are what we are, the same rights andobligations—all people are equal and no Arab is better than any bodyelse except in his belief.25

Perhaps the most influential account of 1924 is Najīla’s Malāmiḥ minal-mujtama‘ al-sūdānī (Features of Sudanese Society), published in 1964, abook dedicated to the origins and development of nationalism in Sudan.26The author was just a child in 1924; he bases his story on the eyewitnessaccount of a “shaykh” whom he never names, but who was apparently amember of the Sudan Union and the White Flag League. Najīla, like ‘Abdal-Raḥīm, places the Revolution of 1924 at center stage in his narrative, andhe dedicates a large part of his book to it, describing the insurgents as heroesand martyrs. But unlike ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, it does not consider the question ofslavery of ‘Alī as an issue worth discussing, and he describe in this way thechoice of ‘Alī as the leader of the revolt:

I said to the Sheikh, so the selection of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf as the leader ofWhite Flag League and 1924 revolution was not based on anything elsethan his honourable history of strife . . . yes of course chiefs do notcome by chance and weak persons do not lead the people. I thoughtabout that hard time, it was the peak of the colonization and this youngman the post he had was an ambition for many, he had thrown it awayto wrestle an irresistible power except with faith and the faithful do notfear whatever power.27

Another well-known author who has written about 1924 is Sulaymān Kisha.Born in 1892, he was a well-established merchant, a writer and an intellec-tual.28 He was a member of the Sudan Union, the most renowned of thesecret societies that was formed after the First World War in Khartoumamong students of the Gordon College, the only secondary school that



existed in Sudan at that time.29 Kisha began to write about the insurgencyvery early on, and his first recorded article dates back to 1932.30 In the1960s, he authored three books about different aspects of the beginnings ofnationalism of Sudan.31 Kisha, like Najīla and ‘Abd al-Raḥīm before him,honoured ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf and his colleagues in his writings, stressing theclose links between him and the “hero” ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, whom he knewpersonally and used to visit at his house.32The flow of memories of 1924 from this portion of the educated elite

who had been active in 1924 has not dried up. For instance, in 1996 thehistorian Maḥjūb ‘Umar Bāshirī, the same author who wrote the tabaqātmentioned before, published a book about the history of the nationalistmovement in which he included the memories of his father ‘Umar Bāshirīand his more famous relative Bāshirī ‘Abd al-Raḥmān, one of the protago-nists of the White Flag League in Port Sudan.33If the educated elites were the main writers of memoirs about 1924

right up until the late 1960s, things changed after the communist-lead coupd’état in 1969. In 1971, Sudan’s dictator, Ja‘far Muḥammad al-Numayrī(1969–85), sponsored awide-scale research project to rewrite the history ofthe Revolution.34 This included interviewing members of the White FlagLeague and the protagonists of the various demonstrations and mutinies.These interviews were later published in a two-volume book, Al-Riwa�ya� tal-shafawı�yah li-thuwwa�r 1924 (Oral Accounts of the Revolutionaries of 1924).The project, carried out by a team of scholars from the University ofKhartoum, was part of a broader initiative to restore this event of Sudanesehistory to its proper place.35 Their work had the great merit of capturing thesocial complexities of the national movement in 1924. They conductedinterviews with people who had been politically active in places as diverseas Port Sudan, El Obeid, Wad Medani, Shendi, Hassa Hissa, and El Fashir.They also interviewed a number of women, such as Nafīsa Surūr, the girlwho had sewn the flag that the cadets held up during their mutiny; al-‘Āzza,the wife of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf; and Amīna Bilāl Rizīq, wife of another 1924protagonist, Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tām.36 Finally, they interviewed work-ers and non-elite members of the movement, such as Musā Aḥmad ‘Antar,the owner of a coffee house in Khartoum, and Fūmu Jāmā, a soldier from theNuba Mountains who had taken part in the November mutiny.37 Theinterviews brought to light people and moments of the insurgency that hadbarely found any place in previous commentaries on 1924, and which



would not have otherwise been preserved. The interviewers also cast morelight on the experiences of former officers of the Egyptian Army and ofcadets who had mutinied in 1924. These widely different accounts share astriking similarity with the first type of sources analyzed, in that they hardlyever mention the origins of Alī and his companions as a relevant factoreither in the national struggle or in the failure of 1924. I shall come back tothis important point in the final sections of this article.However, it is to be noticed that there is an important difference in the

type of support by which elite and non-elite actors have recorded theirmemories. From the 1970s until today, the stories of Egyptian Army officershave been mostly published in newspapers.38 For instance, one of theofficers of the November mutiny, Sayyid Faraḥ, who managed to save hisown life by escaping to Egypt, chose to publish an account of his adventuresin various installments, and had them published in dozens of issues ofnewspapers.39 The fact that former officers of 1924—a category that at leastuntil 1924 was highly educated—have not published their memoirs inbooks may indicate that it has been more difficult for them to gain access tothis kind of publication. Finally, there are also differences as to the topicstouched upon in such accounts.While civilian elite intellectuals emphasize firstof all the political and culturalmaking of Sudanese nationalists, the accounts ofthe officers—and not only the “black” ones—tend to devote more space to theduress and lack of recognition that they had to endure after 1924, andmany leftto live in exile in Egypt.40But at least they have their memories. In contrast, wage-workers who

were members of the national movement have been even more forgotten: inthe collected volume from 1974, there is only one such interview.41 It isdifficult to know if this was because no one was found from this group, orbecause no one looked for them. In the history of twentieth-century Sudan,a lack of education is equated with political delegitimization, and theuneducated political activists who took part in the national movement havefound very few channels through which to express their own views of thepast.

A Proliferation of Narratives

This summary presentation of the authors writing about 1924 leads us to thenext point. Given that certain key events of 1924 are recounted by many



different actors, is there a pattern to be found in the way different actorsnarrate the same event? Are there versions of the past that are moreinfluential than others, and as such present in modular forms in the variousaccounts?One of the most striking characteristics of the narratives of 1924 is their

variability. Even a superficial overview reveals the extent to which the geog-raphy of memory is marked by fragmentation and contradictions. I shall startfrom one example that will clearly illustrate this point, about the story of asmall delegation thatwas organized by theWhite Flag League on16 June1924,to travel to Cairo and express the will of the Sudanese to stay with Egypt. Thisdelegation included an army officer, Mulāzim Awwal (First Lieutenant) Zaynal-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tām, who had Southern Dinka ancestry, and a young em-ployee of the Irrigation Department from a powerful family, Muḥammadal-Mahdī ibn al-Khalīfa ‘Abdallāhi, a nephew of the Sudanese MahdīMuḥammad Aḥmad and a son of his successor, the Khalīfa ‘Abdallāhi.The first two versions considered here are those of the wife of Zayn,

Amīna Bilāl Riziq, and that of Zayn himself, included in the two-volumetypescript Al-Riwa�ya� t. Amīna Bilāl Riziq was the wife of the second mar-riage of Zayn, and was the daughter of one of his colleagues in politics andin the army, but of higher rank, Yuzbashi (captain) Bilāl Riziq.42 Amīna wassignificantly younger than Zayn, and had not yet been born in 1924.43 AsZayn died in 1971, it is possible that the team of interviewers did not havethe time to meet him personally, hence their desire to interview Amīna evenif she was not an eyewitness. And it is likely that the account by Zayn,included in the collection, was not an interview but a text written earlierthan the 1970s. In any case, this is what the two had to say about Zayn andMuḥammad’s journey to Cairo:

Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tām: “At the time, the Egyptian leader Sa‘dPasha Zaghlūl negotiated with the British Labour [Prime] Minister,Ramsay MacDonald, regarding the principle of the complete indepen-dence of Egypt and Sudan. . . . Afterwards, sayyid Muḥammad al-Mahdīal-Khalīfa and I were chosen. . . . On the 22nd of June, 1924, we went bytrain to the rail station, and I was handed a confidential envelope to bedelivered to Ḥāmid Pasha al-Bāsil, a Deputy in the Egyptian Wafd, ofwhich Sa‘d Pasha Zaghlūl was President, as is known because Sa‘d Pashahad gone to Britain at the time to negotiate, as mentioned above.



When we reached station no. 1, the last one before Halfa,44 the trainstopped until the morning. Then the train started again, and wereached Halfa around 8 in the morning. We heard some of thepassengers saying that that the doors of the wagons had been locked. Itcame to my mind that something was happening. So I handed theenvelope to officer ‘Alī ‘Abd al-‘Alīm, who was with me, and I told himeverything that was necessary. Meanwhile, I saw some soldiers aroundthe train, and then the ma‘mūr al-markaz45 entered along with somepolice officers after the train doors had been opened. He asked me if Ihad any political documents. I answered that I had nothing of this kindwith me. Then he asked: ‘Where is Muḥammad al-Mahdī al- Khalīfa?’I replied that the person who was with me was called MuḥammadYūsif. He looked at him and called him over, and asked: ‘Are youMuḥammad al-Mahdī?’ He answered: ‘My name is Muḥammad Yūsif,’as agreed between us. Afterwards, the māmūr took us to the customsoffice. The police carried my luggage. . . . The mudīr46 ordered that webe searched. So the ma‘mūr and the ma‘mūr of the customs officesearched us. I opened the trunk, which contained my clothes, for themand among the things they found was a white jacket, and in one of thepockets they found a document that turned out to be a leave certificatewith the full name of Muḥammad al-Mahdī. . . . So they told us to gointo the room and searched us again, and collected all the privatedocuments we had, which they handed to the mudīr.”47

Amīna Bilāl Riziq: “The bey Zayn al-‘Ābdīn was amulāzim48 at the time:he was in charge of the Nuba Mountains, he was working as a māmūrin the center of Shiban station. He was on leave in Khartoum, butinterrupted his vacation and went back to the Nuba Mountains. . . . Itwas theMawlid al-Nabī,49 he took advantage of his opportunity; all thetribes were gathered there, and he took his chance and he was able tocollect them and make all the tribes sign. There were the Shibanal-Misiriya, and all the [people from] the mountains and the tribes ofal-Humr and the Misiriya al-Zurq, Humr Azaqr, Humr ‘Abu Kalām . . .

He went to all the leaders of the tribes one by one, and did not fail tocollect one single signature. The papers he had were about 500documents, and all of them contained this wording: ‘We are the people



of the south of the valley, we do not want the presence of any soldiersin our country, and we all are happy to demand our right to freedomand sovereignty,’ and this was written on every document, and peoplewould sign under it, which meant that they were for it. And theydelegated their rights and sovereignty to Sa‘d [Zaghlūl], and he filledfour suitcases with them. He filled four suitcases for Sa‘d [Zaghlūl] andagainst the English so that the negotiations would work. . . . He wentback with them straight to the house of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf. . . .

And while they were gathered there, there was one called Ḥussayn‘Abd al-Hādī and Muḥammad al-Khalīfa Sharīf, they came and walkedup to them and greeted them, and joined them, and then they inter-rupted their discussions. . . . They agreed that the one whowould carrythe bags would be Zayn al-‘Ābdīn, and he would deliver them to Egyptand would request sick leave, saying he was going to get treatment inEgypt. . . .

After they travelled, the traitors played their part, of course. Theyinformed the intelligence services that Mulazim Zayn al-‘Ābdīn andMuḥammad al-Mahdī were carrying suitcases filled with signaturesagainst them, against the English-Egyptian negotiations, in support ofSa‘d Zaghlūl. Just as the train was about to reach Halfa, it stopped, andthe train was surrounded by police, and there was an Egyptian māmūrcalled ‘Aṭṭiya Sulaymān, ma‘mūr markaz of Halfa, who quickly got onthe train and whispered to Zayn al-‘Ābdīn and helped to carry the threesuitcases until they arrived, and they quickly put the papers into postbags, and sealed the bags as if they were letters and things from thetravelling mail, but the suitcase that was with Muḥammad al-Mahdīwas discovered, and he was caught because they were not sitting nextto each other. So they confiscated the suitcase from him but the threeothers suitcases reached Egypt.”50

There are many discrepancies between the two accounts, therefore: inAmīna’s version, a single letter becomes 500 petitions, Zayn andMuḥammad were not traveling together, and three bags were smuggled toEgypt. Perhaps sensing the interviewers’ incredulity, Amīna adds: “these aresnapshots from [Zayn’s] work, the ones I came to know from his own



mouth, the ones he recounted to me, and God knows I am not a liar.”51Indeed, her story cannot simply be discarded as the flowering of a vividimagination. Several of the particulars she recalls are to be found in otheraccounts of the event, as well as in colonial sources, which explicitlymention a huge petition from the Nuba Mountains.52 There are similarities,as well: both accounts refer to a spy who caused the expedition to fail, andshe seems to be aware of what can and cannot be said; as Amīna remarks, “Ihave said a lot already, because I do not really care [any more].”53 Zayn toomust have had some awareness of this, as he recounted only a very smallfraction of his many adventures in 1924.It is quite hard to understand why a wife who was retelling a story that

she had heard from her husband should have recounted such a differentversion. My conclusion is that a part of this story was a League secret thatwas not supposed to be told. One of the two narrators was revealing thesecret, while the other was withholding it. But who had the correct accountit is impossible to know. Other people offer yet more versions, as is the casewith the account below, given by Aḥmad Ṣabrī Zāyd, a member of theLeague in Port Sudan, who worked as a clerk for a private company there:

We used to collect [the petitions] and send them to the headquartershere in Khartoum, and I don’t know how they dealt with them, but wefinally found out, while we were in prison, that sayyid Muḥammadal-Mahdī al-Khalīfa and another person I don’t know were caught inHalfa carrying some of these documents. These documents were beingsmuggled from Sudan to Egypt, and after that Egypt would send themby special mail to London, but some of these documents were caughtwith sayyidMuḥammad al-Mahdī in Halfa and they brought them backto Khartoum again. This is roughly the story of the documents.54

Thus here, the monster petition does not come from the Nuba Mountainsbut from all over Sudan, they were to be sent to London and not to Egypt,and Muḥammad al-Mahdī was who carried the petitions, and not Zayn.A historian who turns to the colonial records to validate one or the

other of the stories will find them to be of no help. For instance, in 1924, animportant report on political agitation known as the Ewart Report gives thesame version of events as Amīna: “Some such petition [in support of Egypt]purporting to emanate from certain sheikhs of the Nuba Mountains Prov-



ince, was being taken down by Zain-el-Abdin Abd-el-Tam . . . and Moham-med-el-Mahdi . . . when they stopped at Halfa on the 14th of June.”55 But inJune 1924, the head of the Intelligence Department, C. A. Willis, had yetanother idea and he wrote in a report that the two men had been stoppedmerely on the grounds of “misuse of government warrant,” and herepeated this version in several other official documents.56 And again, inAugust 1925, the version had already changed and another Intelligencereport affirmed that Muḥammad al-Mahdī “was alleged to be carryingwith him papers containing signatures of Sudanese who wished forEgyptian Rule.”57It is no surprise that colonial narratives were so unstable: they were

pieced together from informants, who told them what they believed theyknew. There were no fewer versions on that “delegation” during colonialtimes than there were in the 1970s at the time of Amīna’s interview, and thestory continued to circulate and change even after this.It is often thought to be a historian’s job to establish taxonomies of

credibility among various narratives by comparing them to discover whichis the most plausible.58 On the other hand, the fragmentation of thenarratives, and the difficulties entailed in establishing which might be morecredible, are often perceived as a limitation for the historian whose workinvolves a search for an historical “truth,” or at least at something very closeto it. But as Luise White and others have shown, the question is notwhether what is recounted is true or false, but why it is recounted in thatway, and what the rules that govern the giving of these accounts are ableto tell us about the world in which people lived.59 In this case, theaccounts have proliferated to such an extent that it is scarcely possible toestablish which is the most credible, as each account is validated andthen invalidated, and corroborated and then contradicted by otheraccounts. Hence, a more pertinent question to ask is not which accountis the most “credible,” but rather why such multiplication of narrativeshas occurred, and what does this proliferation of narratives tells us about1924.Every historical event can be seen from a multiplicity of points of view,

and these can be almost as many as there are people who wish to recollectit. That various witnesses of a certain event should have completelydifferent perceptions of it is a well-known phenomenon in psychology,sociology, and legal theory, and is sometimes called the Rashomon effect.



But there usually comes a moment when new narratives are no longerproduced, or are simply no longer heeded, and this habitually indicates thata consensus has been either reached, constructed, or imposed. It occurswhen certain accounts and points of view become more authoritative thanothers: this generally depends on the nature of the narration as much as itdoes on the reputation of the narrator, and both these elements favor thecirculation—or lack of circulation—of a certain version of an event. Aconsensus of this nature can, of course, be challenged at any time, such as inthe context of regime changes, civil strife or war, or political projects suchas the construction of a new national identity, as in the case of al-Numayrī’sproject on a new Sudanese national past.However, this seems not to have happened for 1924 narratives, which

are fragmented and appear to multiply endlessly. Now, in the case ofextremely traumatic occurrences it may be particularly difficult to come toa consensus about the past, especially for events for which accountabilityhas still not been determined, or is blurred, or caught in an “epistemicmurk.”60 There is a common perception that the major obstacle encoun-tered by historians digging into traumatic events is silence on the part oftheir informants, and that a painful experience is also an experience that itis hard to talk about. But this is not always the case. An awareness of havingbeen a victim of an injustice may have the opposite effect of pushing peopleto keep talking. Difficulties in dealing with a trauma can also prevent somenarratives from becoming the most authoritative, and from being acknowl-edged as such by the community. This is why narratives continue to beproduced, as if something were continually missing. This is a symptom of apast that is not at rest.Zayn’s and Muḥammad’s journey to Cairo is a very good example of the

difficulty of making various memories of the event connect with each otherand shape a common representation of the past. In the next section, I shalltry to demonstrate that the intricacies and contradictions that emerge whenwe compare these memories reflect not only the social heterogeneity ofthose who produced them, but also—and above all—the various ways inwhich different social components experienced the trauma of 1924 andtried to make sense of what had happened. Thus, I interpret the fragmen-tation of representations discussed here as a trace, or a shadow, of a socialfracture that happened after 1924.



Secrets

Themeaning and value assigned to a “representation of pastness” is not onlyto be found in the content of the narration—what a person actuallysays—but also in what I have termed the “geography of memory.” In everynarrative of the past, the narrator constantly makes choices about what tosay and what to leave out. In the same way as empty spaces are used to drawattention to a body, so omission and secrets also form integral parts of anarration. As it transpires from Zayn and Amīna’s narratives, secrets arecentral both to the historical revolution of 1924 and to its memory. I havebeen warned by many Sudanese that secrets wrap the “truth” of 1924. Thisperception is also one of the reasons why people continue to write about it:Even today, activists’ descendants want to want disclose “what has reallyhappened.”In 1924, the White Flag League was partially an open movement, and

partially a secret one.61 The movement needed to stay hidden in order toorganize its political actions, but at the same time the plan was to demon-strate the will of Sudanese people “openly.” Its organization was a complexone: there were secret members, who had to stay undercover for strategicreasons and others who took part in actions such as demonstrations, thusexposing themselves to arrest. It was also organized into branches, eachwith a specific function, but not every member of a branch was also amember of the League. Typically, army officers would not be members, buthad their own association, which worked to a greater or lesser extent incoordination with the League.When a newmember joined the League, he had to take an oath.62 The oath

sworn by newmembers was very important and represented a very substantialcommitment. It was never taken lightly, andwas not forced on people, becauseto swear it implied that the giver of the oath was ready to make an extremesacrifice, such as the loss of a job, or arrest. However, only those who took theoath were informed of the League’s “secrets.” A clear example of this is ‘AlīṢāliḥ al-Ḥājj. In his testimony to the Intelligence Office, he stated that hemanaged to avoid taking the oath of theWhite Flag League for somemonths, inspite of the fact that he was an important supporter of the League and a friendof ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf.63 However, if he did not take the oath, he could not haveaccess to the League’s “secrets”: the other leaders spoke English in front of himto prevent him from understanding.64



Secrets were even more important among Sudanese officers. With a fewremarkable exceptions, such as Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tām, the officers kepttheir political participation absolutely secret, because the law forbade theirinvolvement in politics,65 and their role in the national movement could not becompromised by exposure to arrest. Theywere to support themovement at anytime the occasion arose: for instance, by sharing intelligence or helping activistsduringdemonstrations.Theywere remarkably successful inkeepingundercover—much more so than their civilian colleagues: for example, the IntelligenceDepartmentwas ignorant of the political involvement of officers such asḤassanFaḍl al-Mūlā, Sayyid Faraḥ, or ‘Abd al-Faḍīl al-Maz, the leaders of the Novem-ber munity, until the time of the mutiny itself. Although information isfragmentary, there was a Society of the Sudan Union, which should not beconfusedwith the pre-war nationalist association formed by civilian graduates.This Sudan Union took over the League from August 1924 after most of theLeague’s members had been arrested. Its main activities, according to fragmen-tary colonial information, consisted of sending protest telegrams, writing andputting up circulars. According to a list found by (or given to) the IntelligenceOffice in 1924, the Sudan Union was overwhelmingly composed of Sudaneseofficers of the Egyptian Army.66 The Intelligence Office did not seem to havegathered much information about this group, however, and in fact few officersbesides Zayn gave sufficient cause for the Intelligence Service to arrest themprior to the mutiny of November 1924.During the interviews taken at the beginning of the 1970s, the presence of

secrets is revealed by silences. For instance, the narratives of Zayn and Amīnado represent a peculiar “bundle of silence,” to use the words of Michel-RolphTrouillot.67 Besides having taken part in the delegation to Cairo, Zayn was acentral figure in a number of other episodes: he took part in a demonstration on23rd of June;68 hemade a political speech at the Officer’s Club in Rahad on the29th of July;69 and he was involved in instances of insubordination in Wau, inSouthern Sudan, in September.70 Why should it be, then, that in his account of1924 he only mentions the “delegation” to Egypt?71 Additionally, some of theinterviews in the two volumes of accounts appear to be bundles of carefullyweighed drops of “truth.” They are so fragmentary that at times there almostseems to be signs put there on purpose to signal that there were pieces ofinformation that they did not wish to share.72 This echoes my own fieldworkexperience in Khartoum, where at least in one case people refused to speak tome because they had to ask permission of some unnamed person before telling



me their story—which they never did. It is possible that they were reacting tomy rather unusual position as a young, Italian, female researcher studying aforgotten Sudanese revolution, as it is equally possible that in the 1970s otherformer activists may have not trusted their interviewers.73What reallymatters, however, is not their hidden secret truth. It is not even

certain that there is any truth to be told anymore. What is crucial is the imagethat the officers, and in particular the “black officers” and their descendants,projected in their interviews and during our meetings. This image told of anuneasy, painful past. Michel Taussig observed that “people delineate theirworld, including its large as well as its micro-scale politics, in stories andstory-like creations and very rarely, if ever, in ideologies . . . surely it is in thecoils of rumor, gossip, story and chit-chat where ideology and ideas becomeemotionally powerful.”74 In other words, what is narrated or withheld is muchmore than the event itself. The secrets that the offices allowed to be half-seen,the secrets that continued to have a life well after 1924, and the half-hiddenpast to which the interviewees were so attached, all this told of a strongemotional core situated in this past, a core which could not be expressedotherwise. In this sense, silence is a strategy of resistance.

Spies

The other side of a secret is betrayal; every secret, even the best-kept one,brings with it the possibility of being revealed. The more vital an oathappears to be, the more lingering and painful the suspicion that it may bebroken, and the more weighty people feel it to be.The importance of betrayal in the narratives about the Revolution is

clear from the pervasiveness of the theme. Stories of betrayals are found inoral interviews, newspaper articles, or books, by officers and by civilians. Inthese stories, spies make things happen, and bring situations to a crisis:in both Zayn and Amīna’s stories, the “traitor” denounced the delegation to theBritish. In the book of Najīla, betrayals even precede 1924: “duplicity wasbegun by one person who enjoyed high standing among us [in the SudanUnion]. He then pulled in another friend, and soon the news spread amongtheir comrades, and their contact with Samuel ‘Aṭṭiya was discovered’”75;Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm dedicates lengthy passages to the best known ofthe British informants, ‘Alī Aḥmad Ṣāliḥ or ‘Alī al-Hājj.76 Spies are a



powerful causative agent in all these accounts: for instance, the arrest of theleaders of the White Flag League is popularly attributed to a crackdown onthe association triggered by information supplied by spies. And yet, all theleaders signed anti-colonial telegrams in their own names, so the British didnot need spies to know who the leaders of the League were.Accusations of being a spy were based on rumors and suspicions. Their

deductions were, however, logical inferences of the partial information theyhad. For example, one officer in Wad Medani told the following story: theofficer ‘Abdallāh Khalīl—the future prime minister of Sudan (1956–58)—wastransferred in 1924 to Wad Medani. He swore the oath, and was given theresponsibility of keeping a list of League members. After some time, he waspromoted tomiralai, and all the other officers were transferred.77 A similar yeteven more telling case is that of ‘Alī al-Bannā. He was one of the four officersaccused of the mutiny of November, and was condemned to death penalty.When the firing squad was about to open fire, a messenger arrived and put astop to his execution, and his life was spared. Apparently, sayyid ‘Abd al-Raḥmān al-Mahdī, one of the most prominent religious notables of the countryand a relative, had interceded to save ‘Alī’s life. Since that time and until today,he is accused of having betrayed his fellow officers during the mutiny, in spiteof his dozen years of prison in Malakal and his own long share of suffering.78Even if everybody could turn into a spy, some groups tended to be

defined as potential spies more often than others—even if this is not thecase all the time. This is well illustrated in the story of a former cadet whowas imprisoned after their mutiny in August:

Of course they had secrets, those White Flag League people. Some ofthem were informants, and we tied them up inside the prison.Question: From within the White Flag League?Answer: Yes, some of them used to spy.Question: Do you remember their names?Answer: I don’t remember them much, I don’t remember, I swear to

God, I cannot remember, but we gave them a good beating.79

These rumors indicate that those most often imagined as, or suspected tobe, spies were the civilian members of the League and certain Sudanese from“well-known” families, such as ‘Alī al-Bannā or ‘Abdallāh Khalīl. It is alsowidely believed that Sulaymān Kisha himself, the very person who described



‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf as a hero, was a traitor, and that he became a spy because, inreality, he despised ‘Alī’s “low birth.”80 At the same time, it is remarkable thatthe narrator should refuse to state the names of those he beat openly; this isanother common characteristic ofmost of the accounts of 1924, be they journalarticles or books, or written by elites or related by officers: the names of these“spies” are hardly ever uttered, with the exception of ‘Alī al-Hājj, the mainwitness for the prosecution, who used to wander round Khartoum with ahandgun given him by the British. Even the stories of the betrayal of ‘AbdallāhKhalīl or Sulaymān Kisha are uttered from “behind the curtains,” half-told,half-insinuated, and in most cases hushed up.Spy stories and unbreakable oaths are powerful because they have multi-

layered levels ofmeaning. As symbols, betrayal and oaths are richmetonyms ofa series of concepts and problems experienced by the Sudanese during and aftercolonialism. They talk of colonization and the loss of social unity, of economicchange and capitalism, because spies were paid for their information. Whatinterests me here, however, is the way in which by their contradictions, thesestories tell a tale of a traumatic social division.

Differential Punishment and Social Fracture

The various accounts of the revolution we have examined so far do not talkexplicitly of social cleavages based on status and origin in the 1924 Revolution.On the contrary, the nationalist movement was consistently described as a siteof unity. As seen, thememoirs ofḤassanNajīla,Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīmandothers depict the “black officers” as heroes, and as such well inside, and notoutside, the epic of the national history. On the other hand, the same tendencyis reflected by the heterogeneous interviewees of the 1970s: for instance,Mudaththir al-Būshī, a member of the famous al-Azharī family and Minister ofJustice between 1956–58, describes ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf thus:

I actually felt that this officer was extraordinary, because he used toread the Egyptian press frequently and he had worked in Egypt andwas proud of himself: he was a straight person, and this is why I reallyadmired him from this point of view, and he really admired me. Heappreciated this thing, he used to tell me; this movement had to reachits goals and be beneficial.81



Similarly, former “black officers” underlined their collaborations and close-ness with civilians. For instance, Officer ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ‘Abd al-Ḥay, who likeal-Būshī was based in Wad Medani, remembered him well:

Military and civilians used to meet. The work of the Shaykh AḥmadMuhaththir al-Būshī was causing trouble, because he was brave, andwrote several articles against the government and flyers, he wouldbring circulars and distribute them in Wad Medani.82

Even at the time of my fieldwork in 2005, one of the people I interviewed,an officer himself and the son of one of the officers of 1924 with Dinkaorigins, told me:

There was no such thing as racism between Arabs and southernersbefore, and this is why the White Flag League was able to exist. If therehad been such a racial division, they would not have been able to formanything like the League. When the League was destroyed, thingsstarted.83

The contradiction is a clear one: on the one hand, all the accounts discussedhere describe the political activists as having been “united like brothers,” whileon the other, the authors complain in all their accounts about spies andbetrayals, and express the opinion that the revolution failed because of them. Ibelieve that the textual diffusion of the trope of the spy and that of the secret area way of expressing the painful social fracture that followed 1924.The same interviewee added:

After the revolution, there was a new system, which worked in this way:if you were Nuba or Dinka, there was no way for you; you could not go tothe armyandfindaplace there. TheDinka especially suffered a great deal:they did not want them anymore—they were too brave. In this situation,people from the northern tribes took advantage of this to get closer to theBritish; that is why there was racism later.84

Indeed, the colonial documents I have examined reveal that from the end of1924, the British began to interpret the 1924 Revolution along racial lines.They attributed responsibility for the Revolution almost exclusively to the“black officers” and to Egyptian elements living in Sudan. As most of the



Egyptians were expelled after 1924, the group of “black officers” had to bearthe gravest consequences. The social heterogeneity of the national movementwas silenced, and the government devised different punishments for its partic-ipants. Many examples show that the most severe penalties were inflicted onthe “Black Sudanese”: four people were condemned to death for the NovemberMutiny, but only the “black officers” were killed, while ‘Alī al-Bannā waspardoned because of his family connections. The episode of the Cadets’ mutinyis particularly emblematic for gaining an understanding of the racialization of1924. TheMilitary School cadetsmade a point of all parading together to showen bloc that the army disagreed with the British quelling of the demonstrations,and yet, only 34 were sentenced to prison, with punishments ranging fromthree years to three months.85 Those who had powerful family connectionssuffered the least severe sentences, and most were immediately released.86There are two elements of the strategy of differential punishment that are

crucial. First, it created lines of division within a political movement thatexplicitly made a point of overcoming social differences. Second, because the“black officers” were identified as the culprits of the revolution, they were alsosingled out as being essentially different from their Arab colleagues. This isevident, for instance, in the following quote from a British officer, referring tothe cadets of the Military School:

. . . as regards punishment in all cases I think severity to ringleadersmightwell be followed by leniency to others. I think this is especially sowith thecadets as I believe the Arab boys to have been simply intimidated by thesehulking blacks87 whom it was our fault ever to have trusted or put in suchan impossible position vis à vis Arabs.88

This attribution of blame served to obliterate the unity of the action of thecadets and offered a racialmotive for it: themutiny had taken place because the“blacks” had pushed the “Arabs.” In this version, the action of the “blacks” isover-determined by their racial nature: “blacks” to whom toomuch power wasgiven—as in the Army—become arrogant and “sullen.”89 This lessonwould belearnt in the construction of the new Sudanese army, the Sudan Defence Force,in which there were to be no native officers.This all took place in conjuncture with another important political trans-

formation, the affirmation of the policy of Indirect Rule in Sudan. This policy,which had already been inaugurated before the Revolution, was implemented



vigorously after 1924.90 Several works have addressed the issue of IndirectRule and its broad and multifaceted repercussions in the country, included thede facto administrative separation of the South—which was known as the“Southern Policy.”91 It is sufficient simply to note here that this policy gaveinstitutional and administrative concretization to the idea that Sudan was acountry neatly divided into separate “tribes,” which in turn belonged tobroader “races,” which were not to be mixed; the very existence of blackofficers—as Muslim, Arabic-speaking Sudanese of “African” ancestry— repre-sented a degeneration of the natural order of society.92 Moreover, the Britishgrew more cautious of associating education with origin, admitting fewerSudanese from a southern background into colonial schools and shutting downthe Military College.93 In this way, it became difficult for people from thisbackground to maintain and reaffirm their position as an elite.In conclusion, by deterring any group other than the Arabs from having

access to education and prestigious government posts, and by forgiving andforgetting the participation of the sons of notables in the Revolution of 1924,the colonial rulers de facto turned this particular educated elite into their mainpolitical interlocutors in Sudan. The first historians, as we have seen, camefrom this intelligentsia. Historiography also reflects this displacement. Theorigins of activists not only led to different punishments, but also to differentways of making, being a part of, and being remembered by, national history.

Conclusion: Unspoken Social Divisions

In this last section, I will seek to pull together all the various threads I havefollowed, and to interpret the bundles of silences and palavers that charac-terize the memory of 1924.In the first section, I mentioned that the most notable feature of the

geography of memory of 1924 was that is was extremely rich and extremelyfragmentary at one and the same time. Like a river that never dries up, new“eyewitness” accounts continue to be written today. The flow of memories iselicited not only by the feeling that this episode is not considered “gloriousenough,” but also by a sense that it is still riddled with secrets and mysteries. Ihave shown that talking too much goes hand in hand with talking too little, injust the sameway as spies who have “talked toomuch” are juxtaposedwith thekeepers of secrets that have remained faithful to their obligation of silence up



to this day. Finally, the flowofmemory is provoked by the idea that none of theexisting accounts really do justice to the “heroes” of 1924, bywhich Imean thatthe existing accounts are perceived as being somehow inadequate. Out of themany versions available, none has emerged as the most authoritative or hashushed the cacophonyof differing accounts or put this enticement to rememberat rest.I believe that this particular configuration is connected not so much with

what happened in 1924, or the political defeat of the revolutionaries, but withwhat has happened since: on the one hand, it further consolidated the power ofthe “famous” families associated with an Arab identity, while on the other itbrought about the political marginalization of the intellectual elites of slavedescent. But above all, this configuration reiterated—even to the people whotook part in the insurgency—the distinction between the two, a distinction thatwas translated into racial terms. The juxtaposition of silences and talk reveals apast that is both difficult to discuss and still painfully present.Aswe have seen, the first Sudanesewho published theirmemories, like the

first historians who reported the insurgents’ testimonies, belonged to an edu-cated civilian elite, and came from precisely that group of Sudanese that theBritish government forgave and forgot at the close of 1924. Writing in thedecade before and after the country’s independence, these people considered1924 to be a stepping-stone in the national struggle. They believed that thishistory could be a model for the new nation and offer a reservoir of exemplarylives to inspire the Sudanese people. There was a particularly importantmessage to be transmitted through this historical episode, however, which isthat of unity, as Sudanese from the all over Sudan had fought together againstcolonialism in 1924. This was significant because in the 1950s and 1960snorthern and southern Sudanese were starting to get to know each other, andthings were not going very well: the 1955 mutiny in Torit, in Equatoria,Southern Sudan, one year before the independence, set off 40 years of guerrillaand civil war between north and south. This is why even today some historiansreject the idea that there was any significant racist theme in 1924: for them, itwas simply a struggle by Sudanese citizens against British colonial rule.94And yet, the group from where the early historians came was also that to

which the first politicians belonged. These politicianswere clearlymarked by adouble standard: they claimed theybelieved in the equality of all Sudanese, andyet theywere incapable of putting it into practice. Indeed, this double standardseems to be incarnated in some of the people who were interviewed in 1924,



such as Mudaththir al-Būshī. The same person who defined ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf as“an extraordinary officer” became one of the champions of the Arabization ofeducation in southern Sudan, and was a later supporter of the Islamic CharterFront.95At the same time, those who were labeled as the culprits of 1924, the

“black officers,” were caught up in a trauma thatmade it extremely complex totalk about 1924. For them, 1924was both a great political victory and a terribleloss. Itwas both amoment of social unity and themomentwhen this sameunitywas lost, and when the “black officers” came to be a politically marginalizedentity. Those whom the government defined as Arabs, the educated civilianelite, were not responsible for the division among the same elite that followed1924, and yet they failed to acknowledge it. This makes it very difficult toattribute responsibility and heal the wounds caused by this involuntary,posthumous betrayal. It is probably for this reason that the accounts of elitecivilian historians are perceived as not telling the complete “truth,” or as beingsomehow inadequate, as if this groupwere not fully entitled to discuss the gloryof an event for which they did not bear the most severe consequences. It is notthe quality of the narrative that represents the problem, therefore, but thegroup that is relating it.This resentment is sometimes explicitly expressed in testimony. For

instance, in 2005 the family of one of the three men who were executed,Thābit ‘Abd al-Rahīm, resentfully complained that ‘Alī al-Bannā’s andThābit’s families were neighbors and close friends, and that ‘Alī’s relativesshould have insisted that Thābit’s life be saved as well. Thābit died when hewas only 21, leaving a wife and an infant child, and his death, for his family,is anything but past. What counts here is not whether these allegations aretrue or not, but what these perceptions reveal: a story of shattered solidar-ities and painful divisions, for which there has never been redress.The lingering resentment of the “black officers” is hardly ever expressed so

openly, however, because 1924 is, after all, a story of unity. The social fracturethat occurred later is generally present in all the narratives through stories ofspies and betrayals. These stories are powerful metaphors for social disunionand fragmented solidarity, but above all, they reveal how difficult it is to talkopenly about broken trust where there are no culprits, because the 1924civilian “Arab” elite never asked to be forgiven for their political participationin 1924, and yet, it was the “black officers” who paid the highest price andcontinued to do so, long after 1924 had ended.



Today, the officers’ families are both careful about what they say and themost effective guardians of these memories. It was with them that I found themost precious documents, such as pictures of the revolution, or lists of mem-bers. For this group, the past appears to be something that is still waiting to betold, and these documents stand as a promise that one day there will be a“rightful” memory of the 1924 Revolution. It is the silence of the officers, thedifficulties experienced in speaking about 1924, and the splintering and ca-cophony of the narratives that express their struggle against a state of affairs,and a State, that has dislodged them from history.

NOTES

This article would not have been possible without a grant from the NorwegianResearch Council. A draft of this paper was presented at the workshop “Au delàdes dichotomies: le Soudan de la formation du pays à l’indépendence du Sud,1869–2011,” 12 November 2012, EHESS, Paris. I am grateful to MohanadHāshim, Yoshiko Kurita, Pierre Guidi, Heather Sharkey, and to the anonymousreviewer for their insightful comments on earlier drafts. The views expressed inthis article and any mistakes it may contain are of course my responsibility.

1. Al-Riwa�ya� t Al-shafawı�ya Li-thuwwa�r 1924 (Khartoum: Maʻhad al-Dira�sa�tal-Ifrı�qı�yah wa al-A� sı�wiyah, 1974), interview with Al-Ṭayb Bābikr, 354. Anote on transliteration of Arabic names: I have transcribed the names ofpolitical activists, but not the names of places and cities that are commonlyused in English. I have reported Arabic names of authors writing in Englishas they have chosen to spell them.

2. In Arabic, the term thawra indicates both revolt and revolution. There is anongoing debate about whether 1924 should be called “uprising,” “revolt,”or “revolution.” Here, I have chosen to use consistently the term“revolution,” following Mohamed Omer Beshir, Revolution and Nationalismin the Sudan (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1974) and that strand ofSudanese historiography that sees even this as bearer of fundamentalchange in Sudanese history.

3. The National Records Office, Khartoum; the National Archives, Kew,London; the Sudan Archive, Durham University, Durham, U.K.

4. Muawyia al-Badrī shared this piece of information with me during aninformal conversation. He is a great-grandson of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, leader



of the Revolution of 1924, and the idea of writing this article also camefrom our conversations. I am, however, the only one responsible for theviews expressed in this article.

5. I am especially grateful to the family of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf for our manyconversations.

6. Ajrās al-Ḥurriyya, 3 November 2009, issue 540, 1.7. Another case: ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, the leader of the revolt, was also oftenmistaken with for ‘Abd al-Faḍīl al-Maz, one of the Sudanese officers whodied in one of the mutinies. Much of that information came fromdiscussions and conversations I had during my fieldwork in the ThreeTowns (Khartoum, Baḥrī, and Omdurman, between 2004 and 2005, in2006, 2008 and 2011.

8. Yoshiko Kurita, “The Role of ‘Negroid but Detribalized’ People in ModernSudanese History,” Nilo-Ethiopian Studies, no. 8–9 (2003): 1–11; YoshikoKurita, ‘Alī ‘Abd Al-Laṭīf Wa-Thawrat 1924: Baḥth Fī Maṣādir Al-ThawraAl-Sūdāniyya (Cairo: Markaz al-Dirasat al-Sudaniyya, 1997).

9. A title that indicated the position immediately subordinate to that of theDistrict Commissioner, who at that time was always British.

10. On this topic, see: Elena Vezzadini, “Une ‘élite exclue’: Les militairessoudanais entre ordre et révolte au Soudan colonial britannique(1900–1924)” in Maintenir L’ordre Colonia: Afrique et Madagascar,XIXe–XXe Siècles, ed. Jean-Pierre Bat and Nicolas Curtin (Rennes: PresseUniversitaire de Rennes, 2012), 85–110; Ronald M. Lamothe, Slaves ofFortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War, 1896–1898 (Woodbridge,Suffolk; Rochester, NY: James Currey; Boydell & Brewer Inc., 2011);Douglas H. Johnson, “The Structure of a Legacy: Military Slavery inNortheast Africa,” Ethnohistory 36, no. 1, (1989): 72–88; Douglas H.Johnson, “Sudanese Military Slavery From the Eighteenth to the TwentiethCentury,” in Slavery and Other Forms of Unfree Labour, ed. L. Archer(London: Routledge, 1988); Ahmad Alawad Sikainga, Slaves Into Workers:Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1996).

11. “ . . . the leaders of the White Flag League had little support outside thesmall and politically immature intelligentsia and the handful of SudaneseArmy Officers who founded it.” Gabriel Warburg, Islam, Nationalism andCommunism in a Traditional Society: The Case of the Sudan (London: FrankCass, 1978), 94.



12. Bābikr Badrī was the pioneer of women’s education in Sudan. He foundedthe first school for girls in Rufa‘a in 1907. He left two volumes of memoirs:Babikr Bedri, The Memoirs of Babikr Bedri, 2 vols. (London; New York:Oxford University Press, 1969 and 1980). See also Renate Lunde,“Between Tradition and Modernity. Girls’ Education in the Northern Sudan1899–1956” (MA diss., University of Bergen, 2001).

13. Maḥjūb ‘Umar Bāshirī, Rūwād Al-fikr Al-Sūdānī (Beirut: Dār al-Jīl, 1991).14. ‘Alī was never freed from prison and died in Cairo in 1948. ‘Ubayd died in

prison at Malakal, in Southern Sudan, in 1932. For an interestingcomparison of the tabaqāt, see Heather J. Sharkey “Ṭabaqāt of theTwentieth-Century Sudan: Arabic Biographical Dictionaries as a Source forColonial History, 1898–1956,” Sudanic Africa 6 (1995): 17–34.

15. Elwathig Kamei “New Sudan: Towards Building the SudaneseNation-State.” 30 June 2006, http://www.sudantribune.com/New-Sudan-Towards-building-the,18400; “Enduring the Hazards of ‘Attractive Unity’:The John Garang Calling.” http://www.sudantribune.com/Enduring-the-Hazards-of-Attractive,23060, 30 July 2007; “SPLM and the Imperative ofInternal Dialogue,” 23 December 2009, http://www.sudantribune.com/SPLM-and-the-imperative-of,33565; “Towards Sustainable Peace andStructured and Institutional Relations between Southern and NorthernSudan.” 31 January 2011, http://www.sudantribune.com/Towards-sustainable-peace-and,37837. All accessed 1 June 2013.

16. Shahid Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1996).

17. It is perhaps useful to point out that there is, indeed, a qualitativedifference between local and colonial sources. Contrary to local accounts,colonial sources on the Revolution were written over a very short timespan of no more than 12 months and produced to become judicial records.Additionally, the public to which these documents were addressed wasrather uniform, as these accounts were secret and circulated only amongBritish authorities. On the other hand, local accounts on the 1924revolution were already being published in the 1930s and their productioncontinues even today. Thus, different historical and political contextsinfluenced the nature of this production as well as the public for whichthey were written. Finally, local accounts were authored by sociallyheterogeneous actors. Thus, the differences between colonial and local



http://www.sudantribune.com/new-sudan-towards-building-the,18400

http://www.sudantribune.com/new-sudan-towards-building-the,18400

http://www.sudantribune.com/enduring-the-hazards-of-attractive,23060

http://www.sudantribune.com/enduring-the-hazards-of-attractive,23060

http://www.sudantribune.com/splm-and-the-imperative-of,33565

http://www.sudantribune.com/splm-and-the-imperative-of,33565

http://www.sudantribune.com/towards-sustainable-peace-and,37837

http://www.sudantribune.com/towards-sustainable-peace-and,37837

sources lie in their time of production, public, purpose, and function, aswell as in the interpretative grill through which the events are recast.However, as said, it is not the quality of information, but the quality ofmemory that is at stake here.

18. In particular, Kurita’s ‘Alī ‘abd al-Laṭīf, since its publication in 1997 hasbecome of the most influential local accounts about the 1924 Revolution.For a history of the 1924 Revolution, see Muhammed Omar Beshir,Revolution and Nationalism in the Sudan (New York: Barnes & Noble Books,1974); Hassan Abdin, Early Sudanese Nationalism, 1919–1925 (Khartoum:Institute of African & Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1985);Aḥmad Ibrāhīm Diyab, Thawra 1924, Dirāsāt Wa Waqā’iḥ (Khartoum:1977) Jafar Muhammad Bakheit, “British Administration and SudaneseNationalism 1919–1939” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1965);Elena Vezzadini, “The 1924 Revolution: Hegemony, Resistance, andNationalism in Colonial Sudan” (PhD diss., University of Bergen, 2008).

19. It was actually formed earlier, around January–February 1924, but it wason 15 May 1924 that the five founders, ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf, Ṣāliḥ ‘Abdal-Qādir, ‘Ubayd al-Ḥājj al-Amīn, Ḥassan Ṣāliḥ, and Ḥassan Sharīf, decidedto begin taking “open” action.

20. Saeed Mohd and Ahmed El Mahdi, eds., The White Flag Trials (Khartoum:Institute of African and Asian Studies, Department of Private Law,University of Khartoum, 1974).

21. Baily’s diary, 5 December 1924, 422/13/23, Sudan Archive, DurhamUniversity. Robin E. H. Baily was a member of the Sudan Political servicefrom 1909 to 1933. In 1924 he was Deputy Governor of the KhartoumProvince.

22. The historian who has best explored this aspect is Sharkey. See Heather J.Sharkey, Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in theAnglo-Egyptian Sudan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 2003); “Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics ofLanguage, Ethnicity, and Race,” African Affairs 107, no. 426 (2008):21–43; “Arabic Literature and the Nationalist Imagination in Kordofan,” inKordofan Invaded: Peripheral Incorporation and Social Transformation inIslamic Africa, ed. Endre Stiansen and Michel Kevane (Leiden, Boston: BrillAcademic Pub., 1998), 165–79.

23. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, Al-S� ira� ʻ al-musallah� ʻalā al-wah�da fi� l-Su�dan, aw,al-H� aqı�qa ʻan h�awa�dith 1924 (Khartoum: Mat�baʻat Klu� t Bak, 1948).



24. He hardly ever states his sources, however. About this pioneer historian,see: ʿAlī Ṣāliḥ Karrār, Yaḥyā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm, and Rex S. O’Fahey,“The Life and Writings of a Sudanese Historian: Muḥammad ʿAbdAl-Raḥīm (1878–1966),” Sudanic Africa, no. 6 (1995): 125–36.

25. Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, Al-S� ira� ʻ al-musallah� ʻalā al-wah�da fi� l-Su�dan,39–46. I wish to thank Rola Shabayek for her precious assistance intranslating this text.

26. H� assan Najīla, Malāmiḥ Min Al-mujtama‘ Al-sūdānī (Beirut: Dar Maktabatal-Hayah, 1964). Malāmih is one of the books most beloved by educatednorthern Sudanese. His elegant and sensitive style, his kind andempathetic descriptions of the plight and struggles of Sudanesenationalists, and his attention to cultural issues such as literature, women’seducation, and the making of politics from a cultural viewpoint make thisbook outstanding historical reading.

27. Najīla, Malāmiḥ, 31.28. For a short biographical account, see Bāshirī, Rūwād Al-fikr Al-Sūdānī,

172–74.29. It is believed that the White Flag League was an offshoot of the Sudan

Union and was made up of former Sudan Union members who wished totake more radical action against the colonial government, an opinion towhich Kisha did not subscribe.

30. See the Index for Primary and Secondary Sources on the 1924 Revolution inthe Sudan (Documentation Center, Institute of African and Asian Studies,University of Khartoum, 1973). According to this index, he wasinterviewed by the newspaper Marrāt al-Sūdān in 1932, in “al-liwā’al-abyaḍ āmāmi al-qaḍā biqalam Sulaymān Kisha.” (The White FlagLeague in court, in the words of Sulaymān Khisha). Unfortunately, I havenot been able to view this article.

31. They are Al-Liwa’ al-Abyaḍ, (Khartoum: 1969); Sūq Al-dhikyāt, (Khartoum:Sharika al-ṭab‘a wal-nashar, 1963); Wathba al-sūdān al-awal: Thawra 1924(undated). Al-Liwā’ al-Abiaḍ is almost exclusively dedicated to the trials ofthe White Flag League members.

32. Kisha, Al-Liwā’ al-Abiaḍ, 6, 14. Ḥassan Ṣalīḥ al-Matbaji was one of the fivefounders of the White Flag League.

33. Maḥjub ‘Umar Bāshirī, Ma’ālim al-ḥaraka al-Waṭaniyya Fī al-Sūdān(Khartoum: al-Maktaba al-Thaqāfiya, 1996).



34. Al-Riwa�ya� t Al-shafawı�ya Li-thuwwa�r 1924 (Khartoum: Maʻhad al-Dira�sa�tal-Ifrı�qı�yah wa al-A� sı�wiyah, 1974), 1.

35. See the introduction to Al-Riwa�ya� t Al-shafawı�ya Li-thuwwa�r 1924. Thescientific committee included renowned Sudanese historians such as YūsifFaḍl Ḥassan and Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Abū Salīm.

36. Al-Riwāyāt: Nafīsa Surūr, 467–77; al-‘Āzza, 373–422.37. Al-Riwāyāt: Musa Aḥmad ‘Antar, 452–65; Fūmu Jāmā, 23–39.38. Newspapers have historically been the privileged media for popular

accounts of the 1924 revolution. Al-Ṣaḥāfa, an influential left-wingnewspaper, has been very sensitive to this topic, and has published avariety of interviews with and biographies of a number of White FlagLeague activists. For instance, a wave of articles, most likely connected toal-Numayrī’s research project on 1924, was published in it during the1970s, including primary sources on the White Flag League trials. For a listup to 1974, see again the Index for Primary and Secondary Sources on the1924 Revolution in the Sudan. In 2006, I was shown another two-partarticle by Muawwiya al-Badrī entitled: “The Sudanese Free Officers (theTrue Beginnings of Action)” published in Al-Ayam on 2 and 6 February2006.

39. Personal communication with his daughter Fāṭima Sayyid Faraḥ, July2008. She showed me a series of articles cut out from from Al-Ṣaḥāfa(28 November 1978: “Officer Sayyid Faraḥ, one of the heroes of the1924 Revolution, tells his memoirs” by Muḥammad Sulaymān; andAl-Sūdān al-ḥadith, 24 February 1994: “The beginnings of the mutiny ofthe Sudanese Army. The retreat of the Egyptian forces was asurprise.”).

40. See for instance the struggles of Muzammil ‘Alī Dinār for getting a pension:Al-Riwāyāt, 60.

41. Of Musa Aḥmad ‘Antar, Al-Riwāyāt, 452–65. He was the owner of a coffeeshop in the Khartoum market, who contributed towards the organizationof a demonstration in Khartoum in August.

42. According to the intelligence services, he was a member of the SudanUnion, a secret association made up mostly of officers, and was importantenough for his name to be revealed to the intelligence services by aninformant. He had a role in the cadets’ mutiny and in the NovemberMutiny, although his direct participation has not been demonstrated.



Intelligence Office to General Staff, Khartoum, 10 December 1924, Palace4/11/55, National Records Office (hereafter “NRO”). See also “Statementof Ali Ahmed Saleh Mahassi,” p. 23, 23 August 1924, FO 141/805/2, TheNational Archives (hereafter “NA”).

43. Amīna Bilāl Riziq, interview by the author, tape recording, Khartoum, 11January 2005.

44. Halfa is a city close to the border between Egypt and Sudan.45. This was a rank in the civil and military administration of the Sudan

Government. The māmūr was usually an Egyptian, and answered directlyto the District Commissioner, who was usually British. The Sudanese wereusually sub-māmūr, but in these accounts the two ranks are often confusedwith each other. The māmūr al-markaz was the officer responsible for anadministrative center.

46. The mudīr was a rank in the Sudanese government equivalent to aProvincial Governor. The mudīr was always British.

47. Al-Riwāyāt, 329–30.48. An army rank equivalent to lieutenant.49. This is the celebration of the birthday of the Prophet Muḥammad.50. Al-Riwāyāt, 574–78.51. Al-Riwāyāt, 581.52. Such as Abdallāh Mabrūk, unknown interviewer, unknown date, tape

recording, IAAS 1568, or Muhḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Makk Al-Riwāyāt, 565. Forthe colonial sources, see below.

53. Al-Riwāyāt, 576.54. Al-Riwāyāt, 265. Compare this with the testimony of Ṣāliḥ ‘Abd al-Qādir,

given during the trials of 1924. According to this version: “Muḥammadal-Mahdī and Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tam did not form a delegation.Muḥammad al-Mahdī was going to try his luck with the Egyptians . . . andZayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tam was on vacation.” Sulaymān Kisha, Al-liwa’Al-abiaḍ, 47.

55. J. M. Ewart, Report on Political Agitation in the Sudan, p. 160, FO407/201, NA. As can be noted, the date is not correct. This is an exampleof the number of small mistakes and oversights in colonial records about1924, an element which hints at the British attitude to 1924.

56. Capítulo A. Willis, The League of the White Flag, 20 July 1924, p. 2, FO141/810/3, NA; Sudan Agent to the First Secretary, Cairo, 19 June 1924,



FO 141/806/1, NA. Field Marshal Viscount Allenby to Zaghlul Pasha,Ramleh, 6 July 1924, FO 407/199, NA.

57. Chronicle of events during the period of political agitation in Khartoum,unsigned, undated, FO 141/805/2, NA.

58. The concept of “taxonomies of credibility” is drawn from Ann Laura Stoler,Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

59. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa,Illustrated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Luise White,“Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History,” History and Theory 39, no. 4(2000): 11–22; Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The SocialConstruction of Oral History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992).

60. This is a well-known quotation from Michel Taussig, “Culture ofTerror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and theExplanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3(1984): 467–97.

61. Elena Vezzadini, “The 1924 Revolution,” in particular Chapter 11; see alsoMohd. and El Mahdi, eds., The White Flag Trials.

62. There were no women in the White Flag League except as supporters: maleactivists believed that nationalism was too dangerous a business to includewomen.

63. “Statement of Ali Ahmed Saleh Mahassi,” p. 8, 28 July 1924, FO141/805/2, NA.

64. “Statement of Ali Ahmed Saleh Mahassi,” p. 10, 28 July 1924, FO141/805/2, NA.

65. Several accounts mention this. For instance, the name of the officer ‘Abdal-‘Azīz ‘Abd al-Ḥay was “not on List of League, as he is a serving officer.”Note in “Statement of Ali Ahmed Saleh Mahassi,” p. 9, 28 July 1924, FO141/805/2, NA.

66. List of members of the “Sudan Union” who are said to have recently takenthe oath, Intelligence Department, 21 September 1924, Palace 4/9/45,NRO. This seems to be confirmed by a list kept by the family of a 1924ex-officer. I am very grateful to Majdī Sumid for showing me a listcompiled by ‘Abdallāh Mabrūk Khalīl, one of the mutinous cadets.

67. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production ofHistory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) 27.



68. Director of intelligence to Governor El Obeid, Khartoum, 24 June 1924,Kordofan 1/12/54, NRO.

69. Assistant Governor Kordofan to Mamur, 1 August 1924, Kordofan1/12/56, NRO.

70. Wheatley, Bahr al-Ghazal to director of intelligence, Wau, 30 September1924, Palace 4/9/47, NRO.

71. Al-Riwāyāt, 329–31.72. One of many examples is that of Ḥassan Muḥammad Zayn, a Mulazim Awal

(First Lieutenant) sub-māmūr of El Fashir. The Intelligence Departmentfound out that he was one of the main supporters of the White Flag in ElFashir, together with several other officers (Telegram from director ofintelligence to Governor Fasher, 18 December 1924, Palace 4/9/47, NRO).However, his interview in Al-Riwāyāt is one of the shortest (588–89) andhe denies any connection with the League at all.

73. It was, after all, a project carried out under the aegis of Numayrī, and onewonders whether these ex-officers felt completely comfortable about beinginterviewed by elite northern Sudanese historians.

74. Taussig, “Culture of Terror,” 494. The italics are mine.75. Najīla, Malāmiḥ, 171.76. He talks also about a number of unnamed spies who were working for the

British (Muḥammad ‘Abd al-Raḥīm, Al-S�ira�ʻ al-musallah� ʻalā al-wah�da fi� l-Su�dan,13. About ‘Alī al-Hājj and the trauma of his betrayal see also an interview of‘Izz al-Dīn Ḥussayn Rāzik, unknown interviewer, unknown date (but between1970 and 1974), tape recording, kept in the archives of the Afro-AsianInstitute, University of Khartoum (hereafter IAAS), no. 1575.

77. Al-Riwāyāt, Hassan Ismā‘yl al-Muftī, 136. Miralai is a rank correspondingto colonel.

78. See, for example, the interview of the wife of Laṭīf, al-‘Āzza in Al-Riwāyāt,393. I am very grateful to the family of ‘Alī al-Bannā, and in particular to hisdaughter Munā, for all the information they have made available to me.

79. Al-Riwāyāt, Muzammil ‘Alī Dinār, 55. A very similar story is recounted by‘Abdallāh Mabrūk, Al-Riwāyāt, 494. (“To sum up, the White Flag Leaguepeople were with us and started spying and things like that, and theystarted to spy for the English, giving them news, but the students alltogether agreed that when the 2 o’clock bell for lunch would ring, thateach two would grab one and harshly beat them.”)



80. To Kisha, in fact, is attributed the authorship of the anonymous 1924al-Ḥadārat article mentioned before, in which the writer, referring to theslave lineage of ‘Alī, wrote: “low is the nation whose leader is ‘Alī ‘Abdal-Laṭīf.” Reported in Bakehit, British Administration and SudaneseNationalism, p. 88.

81. Al-Riwāyāt, 87. The reader will discover more background on al-Būshī in‘Abdallāh ‘Alī Ibrāhīm, Manichaean Delirium: Decolonizing the Judiciary andIslamic Renewal in Sudan, 1898–1985 (Brill, Leiden; Boston, 2008), 108.

82. ‘Abd al-‘Azīz ‘Abd al-Ḥay, unknown interviewer, unknown date, taperecording, IAAS 1453. This interview is also published in Al-Riwāyāt,224–56.

83. Anonymous, interview by the author, tape recording, Omdurman, 30December 2004. I prefer to keep this informant anonymous because he isperhaps the best example of the complex relation to the past of formerofficers of the Egyptian Army with a southern background. Despite the factthat he gave me permission to record him, he was rather reluctant tospeak. By choosing to maintain his anonymity, it is my intention to conveyhis sense of unease with what was going on.

84. Ibid.85. List of sentences, White Flag League Conspiracy Trial, 1924, Northern

Province, 1/21/207, NRO.86. See the story narrated by Muzammil ‘Alī Dinār Al-Riwāyāt, 58.87. The emphasis is mine.88. CSO & adjutant-general, Egyptian Army, to Ernest Corbyn, governor of

Khartoum Province, Khartoum, 2 October 1924, Palace 4/9/46, NRO. Theitalics are original in the text.

89. See for instance the comments made about Hassan al-Amīn al-Darīr, wherehe is described as a “sullen fanatic in no way repentant,” in “Notes of aninterview with Sheik Hassan El Amin” 12.7.1924, Palace 4/10/49, NRO.

90. G. Sanderson, “Indirect Rule in the Northern Sudan as an Anti-NationalistStrategy, 1920–1939” in The Nationalist Movement in the Sudan, ed.Mahasin Abd al-Gadir Hag al-Safi (Khartoum: The Institute of African andAsian Studies, University of Khartoum, 1989).

91. Among the most recent subtle analyses, see: Justin Willis, “TheCreolization of Authority in Condominium Sudan,” The Journal of AfricanHistory 46, no. 1 (2005): 29–50; Justin Willis, “Tribal Gatherings: Colonial



Spectacle, Native Administration and Local Government in CondominiumSudan,” Past & Present 211, no. 1 (2011): 243–68. As to the SouthernPolicy, for a general account see: classic account is M. W. Daly, Empire onthe Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1934 (Cambridge; New York:Cambridge University Press, 2000), 316–419; and D. N. N. Mayo, “TheBritish Southern Policy in Sudan: An Inquiry into the Closed DistrictOrdinances (1914–1946),” Northeast African Studies 1, no. 2/3 (1994):165–86.

92. On this point, see the following article, which describes the destiny of aNuba battalion after 1924: K. O. Salikh, “British Colonial MilitaryRecruitment Policy in the Southern Kordofan Region of Sudan,1900–1945,” Middle Eastern Studies 41, no. 2 (2005): 169–92.

93. Sharkey, Living with Colonialism, and “Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan:The Politics of Language, Ethnicity, and Race,” African Affairs 107, no. 426(2007): 21–43. On the marginalization of “black officers”: ElenaVezzadini, “Making the Sudanese: Slavery Policies and HegemonyConstruction in Early Colonial Sudan,” in Sudan’s Wars and PeaceAgreements, ed. Jay Spaulding et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: CambridgeScholar Publishing, 2010), 71–101. On “black officers” see also: Sikainga,Slaves into Workers, and G. P. Makris, Changing Masters: Spirit Possessionand Identity Construction Among Slave Descendants and Other Subordinates inthe Sudan (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2000).

94. See for instance the collected volume of Maḥāsin ‘Abd al-Qādir Ḥajjal-Ṣāfī, ed. Al-Ḥaraka Al-Waṭaniyya Fil-Sūdān: Thawra 1924 (Khartoum:Ma‘had al-Dirāsāt al-Ifriqiya wa al-Asiyawiya, Jāmi‘a al-Khurṭūm, 1992).

95. ‘Abdallāh ‘Alī Ibrāhīm, Manichaean Delirium, 108.96. The picture was taken by Dr. Noah Salomon in Khartoum on 7 July 2005. I

am grateful for sharing it with me and for having allowed its publication.



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