Panel #1:

"Military Conflicts and Border Issues"

Conflict and Military Coup in Equatoria: A Study of the Social and Ethnic Background of A Frontier Army in Turco-Egyptian Sudan  

Abannik O. Hino
Wingate University

That Equatoria was the last province of Turco-Egyptian Sudan to fall to the Mahdist Revolution is a well-known fact, but why it took it so long to fall needs re-examination.  Existing literature on the subject explains the problem in terms of the geographical isolation of the region and, therefore, of its strategic insignificance to the Mahdist military calculations.  This paper seeks to go beyond this geographical explanation.  It instead posits the racial and local ethnic background of Emin Pasha’s army as a much more decisive factor in the resistance against the Mahdist takeover of the province.

‘A Thoroughly Satisfactory Boundary’? – The Creation, Subversion and Manipulation of the Frontiers of Yei District of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, with Uganda and the Belgian Congo.

Cherry Leonardi
Department of History
University of Durham

The international frontiers of Yei District appear to offer a clear example of the problematic consequences of the imposition of colonial boundaries, which disregarded local social and political geographies. However, this paper will argue that such boundaries were not simply a negative imposition; rather the inhabitants of the border area were able to subvert and manipulate the frontier. Their ongoing cross-border interaction ensured the spread of cultural influences, and disease, labelled by the British as ‘foreign’ importations from Uganda or the Belgian Congo. The Government campaign against sleeping sickness justified stringent restrictions on cross-border movement. The ‘Water of Yakan’, or ‘Allah Water’, rituals may have been in part a response to these restrictions, and seem to not only have spread across, but even to have provided a means of resisting the colonial boundaries. Later in the Condominium period, the pull of the labour market in Uganda led to legitimised cross-border migration, though British administrators remained concerned about its effects, particularly in importing subversive religious or social changes. The colonial Government in the Sudan thus never fully succeeded in rigidly enforcing its international boundary in this area, and instead local social, cultural, political and economic spheres continued to operate across it.

Tribe or Nationality? The Sudanese Diaspora in East Africa

Douglas H. Johnson
St Antony's College, Oxford

The settlement of Sudanese soldier colonists throughout British East Africa was a legacy of colonial expansion and pacification. Not only were grants of land a reward for loyal service, but soldier colonies served a strategic purpose in securing colonial frontiers and lines of communication. Once pacification was complete, however, new policies representing new interests increasingly made the presence of these non-indigenous Africans redundant. Not only were terms of settlement altered after World War I in many locations, but the right of Sudanese to remain in their original settlements came under attack. The largest, and most problematic Sudanese colony in Kenya was in the former military encampment of Kibera, on the edge of Nairobi.
Sudanese claims to their land rights, first expressed in testimony to the Carter Land Commission, and frequently repeated throughout the following two decades, was that land had been granted to them 'in perpetuity' in lieu of a pension, but in recognition for services to the Crown. The resulting struggle to retain land ownership in Kibera was thus presented in terms of a reciprocal loyalty between the Sudanese and the British Crown and the Empire, rather than the specific legal jurisdiction of the Kenya Colony government. At the same time there were quite specific economic interests, not only for the Nairobi colonial authorities who wanted the Kibera land, but for the Sudanese settlers who had become landlords there.
This paper will look at the struggle waged between the Nairobi authorities and the Sudanese of Kibera from the 1930s to the early 1950s. It will look at the tactics employed by local officials to induce the Sudanese to give up Kibera, from the denial of basic services (such as water) to the heavy-handed policing of distillers of 'Nubian Gin'. It will also look at the delaying tactics employed by experienced barrack-room lawyers among the Sudanese, and their ability to enlist support at different levels of the colonial structure.
By the early 1950s the cost of the proposed relocation had risen beyond the Kenyan government's willingness to pay. In the early years of the Mau Mau emergency, when there was every need to seek allies against Mau Mau within the African urban population of Nairobi, it was no longer politically wise to continue to deprive such a large group as the Sudanese of basic services, nor disturb them through unnecessary relocation. In the end the Sudanese outlasted their early tormentors, and economics and politics converged to give them a victory of sorts. Their tenure in Kibera, so long denied, was at last recognised.

The Ilemi Triangle

Robert O. Collins
Department of History
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara,

This paper first describes the manner by which the boundary between the Sudan and Kenya was demarcated in 1914 followed by ethnic rivalries between the Toposa and Turkana resulting in violent raids into the Sudan and Kenya by Turkana armed by the Ethiopians anxious to extend their empire to Lake Rudolf. During the 1920s and 1930s the Ilemi Triangle was created as an administrative convenience whereby Kenya governed the Triangle patrolled by the Kings African Rifles to keep the northern Turkana from raiding into northern Kenya. In 1963 the Kenya Independence Order in Council and subsequent orders in council acknowledged that the 1914 line was the international boundary and that Ilemi was Sudan sovereign territory. In subsequent years maps of Kenya demarcated the international boundary to include the Ilemi Triangle which the independent government of the Sudan never recognized. The issue became further complicated when the SPLM/SPLA in a demonstration of its legitimacy ceded the Triangle to Kenya. In international law the recognized boundary remains that of the 1914 Line, but the arid, dessicated grazing land and brackish wells of the Triangle,a worthless land except to the Turkana and Toposa who inhabit it, can be another source of friction if not violence as have the equally useless Halayib Triangle between Egypt and the Sudan and the boundary wars of Eritrea and Ethiopia.

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