THE ENGLISH IN THE SUDAN

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 56, 28 November 1924, Page 8

THE ENGLISH IN THE SUDAN

PIONEER WORK PROBLEMS ‘OF PRIMITIVE PEOPLE “He has a job in Egypt—or the Sudan, I forget which.” Behind the frequent phrase lurks a conviction that the distinction is hardly worth drawing. Yet (says a correspondent of the London “Observer”) beyond the fact that on certain evenings in tho week they both board the same south-bound train from Cairo, the daily lives of the English official in Egypt and his younger brother from tho. Sudan might be lived in separate continents. “On paper,” indeed, they might read as much the same story. The diary of each is a record of “murur,” which is the popular Arabic for “going on circuit.” Journeys of inspection to overlook this or that departmental operation—tlie collection of taxes, inspections of police, of the progress of irrigation works, or of experiments m cot-ton-crowing—represent the daily activities of both. The “Reports,” which record tho tale of their work, are full of tho same titles of Mudirs and Mamurs, Sheikhs, and Omdas, and so on through all the gamut of the. nomenclature of Arabic administration. But with this the resemblance ends. The redl lives lived in the service of the neighbouring administrations are as different as can well be imagined. Much more divides Egypt and the Sudan than tho widespread expanse of desert that centres round Wady Haifa, where the younger traveller enters on his own inheritance. . The difference between hie in Egypt and a career in the Sudan is the difference between diplomacy and pioneering. In Egypt a host of European complications has compelled England rigidly to adhere to the cautious plan, adopted on her first entrance into the country, of tendering advice to native officials. But when the ora of British control opened in tho Sudan tho Englishman found tho country virgin soil. Ho could begin at tho beginning. There were no mistakes of system to bo undone or tolerated, for no system existed. Tho state of the country was a pure and virile barbarism. Tho Englishman took it over as he found it,. and from the beginning ho has run it in his own wav. The million square miles of tho Sudan still represent a sphere where the Englishman is supreme. He has equipped tho country with his. own law and his own methods of administration, and has had to ask no one’s permission for what he has done. Iho title of “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan’ is a diplomatic misnomer. Life in the Wilds. “Allah laughed when ho created the Sudan,” says an Arabic proverb. Wo should associate tho country with Uganda and the Great Lakes, the tropical forests, tho rapids and cataracts, and tho savage tribes of Stanley s explorations, rather than with the uniform and narrow perspective of a country like Egypt, where multiform European influence has for. generations overlaid the face of life with a veneer of Western civilisation- Official life nt tho Sudan is not a matter of offico hours and official routine. It is a land for young men. Candidates for its service must bo neither married nor engaged to marry. For except for senior officials,, whose work ot centra] administration keeps them in Khartoum, the Sudan is no place for English women. Its official lives in the” wilds. His tours of inspection are no matter of comfortable train journeys and nights at a Government rest-house. Ho may have to travel miles through forest or desert on horseback or by camel. His home for months on end may ho a mud cottago or a hut built of .grass. Scores carry on in the position of two isolated Englishmen, a doctor and an engineer, of whom I know, who, periodically relieved, live some hundreds of miles from their kind, engaged in special work- at the head waters of the Nile on tlie Abyssinian frontier. In the remoter spots of the Sudan young Englishmen, far beyond means . of prompt communication with their kind, may still have need of the masterful qualities of a Clive or a John Nicholson. Tho work is lonely, but it can hardly bo dull. It is surrounded by all manner of dangers. The mosquito of the Sudan has not been tamed as has his fellow in Egypt. He can still carry malaria, fever, or death to his victims. All the wild life of tho primeval forest surrounds tho worker in these remoter regions. The official is in general a specialist.. But he is a specialist who, be he engineer, doctor, or agricultural expert, must have a goodlv store of knowledge beside his special attainments. Races and Religions.

An Assistant-Inspector may find himself at any time the unquestioned ruler of a tract of territory as large as the British Isles. His “subjects,” unlike the population of Egypt, which is. one people divided between two religions, will be of varying colours and of multiform races —as diverse, indeed, as their country with its miles of barren desert, green oases, and untamed forests and huge tracts of “sudd,” where the choked rivers struggle through tangles of floating weed and earth. The land is not even the home of a homogeneous language, for though Arabic is the official tongue it is not understood by thou, sands of the inhabitants, and out of the two hundred and more tribes who form the mixed population of negroids and black some may speak as many as twenty different dialects. Even religion has failed to unify them, for despite the widespread extension of Islam there are large tracts where the population are primitive pagans. And all alike are practically pure savages. There is a parable in the true story of the Budanesa school children who, being provided with clothes to attend school, wore their garments with pride while sitting on the forms of the “kuttab,” but took them off on the threshold and used them as sacks for their books, while they walked home in comfortable nakedness. An English official’s life is busy enough among a population so primitive. It is diversified by an occasional spell of a few days on official business in Khartoum, with its accompanying forgatherings at the club or on the polo ground, and by periodical “leaves.” For the rest, there is the consolation of sport, which is to be had in abundance in the remoter reaches of a country alive with all manner of game. But the service is peculiarity Englishman’s work. No other nation could rule a country so diverse and primitive. And “the Englishman on his own” lias had no interference in his work. The country, is too primitive for the mischievous activities of “politics.” The only native source of potential agitation, the powerful Moslem sects, which might inflame fighting races against their white rulers, has. raised n > opposition to a regime which has consistently supported Islam as a groat power for good among primitive peoples. If ihe Oriental is proverbially ungrateful. tho same cannot be so truly said of the African