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Sudan
THE TURKIYAH, 1821-85
As a pashalik of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had been
divided into several provinces, each of which was placed under
a Mamluk bey (governor) reponsible to the pasha, who in turn answered
to the Porte, the term used for the Ottoman government referring
to the Sublime Porte, or high gate, of the grand vizier's building.
In approximately 280 years of Ottoman rule, no fewer than 100
pashas succeeded each other. In the eighteenth century, their
authority became tenuous as rival Mamluk beys became the real
power in the land. The struggles among the beys continued until
1798 when the French invasion of Egypt altered the situation.
Combined British and Turkish military operations forced the withdrawal
of French forces in 1801, introducing a period of chaos in Egypt.
In 1805 the Ottomans sought to restore order by appointing Muhammad
Ali as Egypt's pasha.
With the help of 10,000 Albanian troops provided by the Ottomans,
Muhammad Ali purged Egypt of the Mamluks. In 1811 he launched
a seven-year campaign in Arabia, supporting his suzerain, the
Ottoman sultan, in the suppression of a revolt by the Wahhabi,
an ultraconservative Muslim sect. To replace the Albanian soldiers,
Muhammad Ali planned to build an Egyptian army with Sudanese slave
recruits.
Although a part of present-day northern Sudan was nominally an
Egyptian dependency, the previous pashas had demanded little more
from the kashif who ruled there than the regular remittance
of tribute; that changed under Muhammad Ali. After he had defeated
the Mamluks in Egypt, a party of them had escaped and had fled
south. In 1811 these Mamluks established a state at Dunqulah as
a base for their slave trading. In 1820 the sultan of Sannar informed
Muhammad Ali that he was unable to comply with the demand to expel
the Mamluks. In response the pasha sent 4,000 troops to invade
Sudan, clear it of Mamluks, and reclaim it for Egypt. The pasha's
forces received the submission of the kashif, dispersed
the Dunqulah Mamluks, conquered Kurdufan, and accepted Sannar's
surrender from the last Funj sultan, Badi IV. The Jaali Arab tribes
offered stiff resistance, however.
Initially, the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was disastrous. Under
the new government established in 1821, which was known as the
Turkiyah or Turkish regime, soldiers lived off the land and exacted
exorbitant taxes from the population. They also destroyed many
ancient Meroitic pyramids searching for hidden gold. Furthermore,
slave trading increased, causing many of the inhabitants of the
fertile Al Jazirah, heartland of Funj, to flee to escape the slave
traders. Within a year of the pasha's victory, 30,000 Sudanese
slaves went to Egypt for training and induction into the army.
However, so many perished from disease and the unfamiliar climate
that the remaining slaves could be used only in garrisons in Sudan.
As the military occupation became more secure, the government
became less harsh. Egypt saddled Sudan with a parasitic bureaucracy,
however, and expected the country to be self- supporting. Nevertheless,
farmers and herders gradually returned to Al Jazirah. The Turkiyah
also won the allegiance of some tribal and religious leaders by
granting them a tax exemption. Egyptian soldiers and Sudanese
jahidiyah (slave soldiers; literally, fighters), supplemented
by mercenaries recruited in various Ottoman domains, manned garrisons
in Khartoum, Kassala, and Al Ubayyid and at several smaller outposts.
The Shaiqiyah, Arabic speakers who had resisted Egyptian occupation,
were defeated and allowed to serve the Egyptian rulers as tax
collectors and irregular cavalry under their own shaykhs. The
Egyptians divided Sudan into provinces, which they then subdivided
into smaller administrative units that usually corresponded to
tribal territories. In 1835 Khartoum became the seat of the hakimadar
(governor general); many garrison towns also developed into administrative
centers in their respective regions. At the local level, shaykhs
and traditional tribal chieftains assumed administrative responsibilities.
In the 1850s, the pashalik revised the legal systems
in Egypt and Sudan, introducing a commercial code and a criminal
code administered in secular courts. The change reduced the prestige
of the qadis (Islamic judges) whose sharia courts were confined
to dealing with matters of personal status. Even in this area,
the courts lacked credibility in the eyes of Sudanese Muslims
because they conducted hearings according to the Ottoman Empire's
Hanafi school of law rather than the stricter Maliki school traditional
in the area.
The Turkiyah also encouraged a religious orthodoxy favored in
the Ottoman Empire. The government undertook a mosque-building
program and staffed religious schools and courts with teachers
and judges trained at Cairo's Al Azhar University. The government
favored the Khatmiyyah, a traditional religious order, because
its leaders preached cooperation with the regime. But Sudanese
Muslims condemned the official orthodoxy as decadent because it
had rejected many popular beliefs and practices.
Until its gradual suppression in the 1860s, the slave trade was
the most profitable undertaking in Sudan and was the focus of
Egyptian interests in the country. The government encouraged economic
development through state monopolies that had exported slaves,
ivory, and gum arabic. In some areas, tribal land, which had been
held in common, became the private property of the shaykhs and
was sometimes sold to buyers outside the tribe.
Muhammad Ali's immediate successors, Abbas I (1849-54) and Said
(1854-63), lacked leadership qualities and paid little attention
to Sudan, but the reign of Ismail (1863-79) revitalized Egyptian
interest in the country. In 1865 the Ottoman Empire ceded the
Red Sea coast and its ports to Egypt. Two years later, the Ottoman
sultan granted Ismail the title of khedive (sovereign prince).
Egypt organized and garrisoned the new provinces of Upper Nile,
Bahr al Ghazal, and Equatoria and, in 1874, conquered and annexed
Darfur. Ismail named Europeans to provincial governorships and
appointed Sudanese to more responsible government positions. Under
prodding from Britain, Ismail took steps to complete the elimination
of the slave trade in the north of present-day Sudan. The khedive
also tried to build a new army on the European model that no longer
would depend on slaves to provide manpower. However, this modernization
process caused unrest. Army units mutinied, and many Sudanese
resented the quartering of troops among the civilian population
and the use of Sudanese forced labor on public projects. Efforts
to suppress the slave trade angered the urban merchant class and
the Baqqara Arabs, who had grown prosperous by selling slaves.
There is little documentation for the history of the southern
Sudanese provinces until the introduction of the Turkiyah in the
north in the early 1820s and the subsequent extension of slave
raiding into the south. Information about their peoples before
that time is based largely on oral history. According to these
traditions, the Nilotic peoples--the Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and
others--first entered southern Sudan sometime before the tenth
century. During the period from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth
century, tribal migrations, largely from the area of Bahr al Ghazal,
brought these peoples to their modern locations. Some, like the
Shilluk, developed a centralized monarchical tradition that enabled
them to preserve their tribal integrity in the face of external
pressures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The non-Nilotic
Azande people, who entered southern Sudan in the sixteenth century,
established the region's largest state. In the eighteenth century,
the militaristic Avungara people entered and quickly imposed their
authority over the poorly organized and weaker Azande. Avungara
power remained largely unchallenged until the arrival of the British
at the end of the nineteenth century. Geographic barriers protected
the southerners from Islam's advance, enabling them to retain
their social and cultural heritage and their political and religious
institutions. During the nineteenth century, the slave trade brought
southerners into closer contact with Sudanese Arabs and resulted
in a deep hatred for the northerners.
Slavery had been an institution of Sudanese life throughout history,
but southern Sudan, where slavery flourished particularly, was
originally considered an area beyond Cairo's control. Because
Sudan had access to Middle East slave markets, the slave trade
in the south intensified in the nineteenth century and continued
after the British had suppressed slavery in much of sub-Saharan
Africa. Annual raids resulted in the capture of countless thousands
of southern Sudanese, and the destruction of the region's stability
and economy. The horrors associated with the slave trade generated
European interest in Sudan.
Until 1843 Muhammad Ali maintained a state monopoly on slave
trading in Egypt and the pashalik. Thereafter, authorities
sold licenses to private traders who competed with government-
conducted slave raids. In 1854 Cairo ended state participation
in the slave trade, and in 1860, in response to European pressure,
Egypt prohibited the slave trade. However, the Egyptian army failed
to enforce the prohibition against the private armies of the slave
traders. The introduction of steamboats and firearms enabled slave
traders to overwhelm local resistance and prompted the creation
of southern "bush empires" by Baqqara Arabs.
Ismail implemented a military modernization program and proposed
to extend Egyptian rule to the southern region. In 1869 British
explorer Sir Samuel Baker received a commission as governor of
Equatoria Province, with orders to annex all territory in the
White Nile's basin and to suppress the slave trade. In 1874 Charles
George Gordon, a British officer, succeeded Baker. Gordon disarmed
many slave traders and hanged those who defied him. By the time
he became Sudan's governor general in 1877, Gordon had weakened
the slave trade in much of the south.
Unfortunately, Ismail's southern policy lacked consistency. In
1871 he had named a notorious Arab slave trader, Rahman Mansur
az Zubayr, as governor of the newly created province of Bahr al
Ghazal. Zubayr used his army to pacify the province and to eliminate
his competition in the slave trade. In 1874 he invaded Darfur
after the sultan had refused to guard caravan routes through his
territory. Zubayr then offered the region as a province to the
khedive. Later that year, Zubayr defied Cairo when it attempted
to relieve him of his post, and defeated an Egyptian force that
sought to oust him. After he became Sudan's governor general,
Gordon ended Zubayr's slave trading, disbanded his army, and sent
him back to Cairo.
Data as of June 1991
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