Elena Vezzadini

After the First World War, a nationalist movement quickly gained momentum in Sudan, eventually leading to the outburst of the 1924 Revolution. While the peculiar status of Sudan as an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium and the political struggle between Egypt and Great Britain have often been seen as the main reasons behind the uprising, this article seeks to reinterpret the international factors leading to the Revolution, first by connecting it to the transnational diffusion of both ideas and techniques of protest that went well beyond Egypt and Great Britain, and second by analysing it in light of that peculiar global moment which occurred in many sites of the colonial world during and after the Great War. Moreover, contrary to the tendency of global history to focus mostly on transnational elites, the case of Sudan has the merit of showing the impact of international diffusion on local political cultures “from below.” Various aspects of this “transnationalism from below” will be explored: the role of international news and the press in feeding the 1924 Revolution and the way in which the activists “wrote back” to reach an international audience; the creation of secret societies in Sudan, another highly transnational structure of protest; but also how this era of mass protests caused the transformation of the structure of secret societies so that they would become tools to mobilise the masses.

The 1924 Revolution marked the first time in Sudanese history a nationalist ideology became the language of politics and was successfully employed to mobilize the masses. It was a part of a broader movement of anticolonial nationalist agitation that merits studying this Sudanese event as an illuminating example in world history of the period. Thousands of people from all over Sudan protested in the name of principles such as self-determination and the will of the Nation, and the right of citizens to choose their own destiny. Moreover, the movement that led it, the White Flag League, explicitly sought to include people from different backgrounds, statuses, professions, and religions, to counteract the colonial policy of reliance on ethnic affiliations and social hierarchies. Even though it was bloodily put down after only six months, the events of 1924 represent a revolutionary departure in the in the history of modern Sudan.

Starting from a short description of the 1924 Revolution, an episode of anticolo-nial nationalist protest that shook Sudan aft er the First World War, this chapter explores the connection between nationalism and the educational background of a part of the protestors. It follows, however, a specifi c thread, that is the colonial racial policies applied to the recruitment mechanisms in colonial schools, seeking to understand the impact of these policies on the formation of this group. Th e source in fact reveals that one important component of the 1924 Revolution was constituted by " Black " Sudanese, that is people whose background was from the old slave enclaves, many of whom were educated in colonial schools, something that appears to be in striking opposition with the guidelines of the government in matter of who should be admitted to school. Aft er reviewing the educational policies the government and their contradictory injunctions of making an educational system " safe " from nationalist " infections " and open to the " right " people, this chapter explores a number of facets connected to the question of the racial selection of the pupils: fi rst, which racial considerations were at work in the admission of students; second, to which extent these were applied and whether there were diff erences according to the level of education; third, which were the consequences of the gap between stated colonial racial preferences, and education practices in matter of recruitment in government job, to which the overwhelming majority of educated Sudanese were destined. Th is will allow unraveling the gap between stated colonial racial preferences and education practices, and especially understand the fragile

This chapter focuses on conflicts of development from the point of view of the entanglement between development, labour legislation, and labour conflicts during the time of decolonisation. It describes the origins of the trade union movement in Sudan, created after the Second World War, and covers the history of that movement up until 1952, the year in which its curve of radicalisation was stopped and it turned towards more conciliatory labour relations. Dwelling on internal sources emanating from the colonial government and the various labour attachés sent to Khartoum, the chapter aims to shed light on the reciprocal influences and feedback effect between the three main actors of these conflicts: the British government, whose agenda set colonial labour welfare as a top priority; a reluctant Sudanese government accustomed to decades of laissez-faire in matters of labour; and the workers, who quite suddenly discovered that they had the power to compel the government to listen to their demands.

Le CEDEJ-K, un laboratoire de la recherche sur le Soudan contemporain
Quelques repères sur l’histoire du Soudan, du début de la guerre civile à 2011
Un Soudan plus « homogène » après l’Indépendance du Sud ?
Quelles catégories pour quelles reconfigurations ?

This article explores the way in which romantic love and companionate marriage were debated in Sudan at the time of independence by analysing a small corpus of love stories published in a special column of the left-wing newspaper al-Saraha. I start by contextualizing the left-wing press at a time of tremendous political, economic, and social change in Sudan as a key to understanding the pedagogical mission of al-Saraha. I then describe the various opinions on companionate marriage discussed in these texts and analyse them structurally, highlighting both common patterns and systematic omissions. Finally, I seek to interpret the spread of the ideal of romantic love in Sudan in relation to the theory of the rise of individualism as a sign of a modern State, and to show that the solution these texts proposed was not to disconnect individuals from society, but to reform society as a whole so as to harmonize collective and individual wills.

This article attempts to trace a geography of the memory of the 1924 Revolution in colonial Sudan. It springs from a glaring paradox: though the 1924 Revolution is one of the best documented episodes of colonial history, it has not affected collective memory in the same way other episodes from the country’s modern history have. Eyewitness accounts were first produced in the 1930s and have continued to be published up to the present day; for some of the central episodes of 1924, there are as many versions as there are narrators. The purpose of this article is to investigate the facets of these memories and those who have produced them. 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 the revolution, this event is not fully known, shrouded as it is in mystery, filled with unspoken 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 why the 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 of 1924, along with the unspoken social divisions that followed it.

This article investigates a part of the “story of the story” of the 1924 revolution, the first popular anticolonial uprising in Sudan to be framed by a nationalist ideology. Considering that the process that turns a past event into history is neither linear nor predictable, I draw on Trouillot's “catalogue of silences” to compare two sets of sources that correspond to two moments in the making of 1924 as history: first, the judicial records produced by the Sudan government during 1924, and second the Ewart Report, written in 1925, to “seal” the revolution. A comparison of these two sources reveals radical discrepancies in the narrative, as well as the silences imposed on and well-concealed fine-tunings of the various voices of the revolution. Of these two sets of sources, it is the Ewart Report that provides the most influential interpretation of the 1924 revolution.

Vezzadini, E. (2005),‘Naḥwa huwayya waṭaniyya: Jamaʿiyyat al-liwā’ al-‘abyaḍ wa nahḍat al-qawmiyya fī-l-sūdān, ADAB, Journal of the Faculty of Arts, Khartoum University Press, Khartoum, v. 23, December 2005,  pp. 72-109 [Shaping a National Identity. The White Flag League and the rise of Nationalism in the Sudan, 1919-1924.]

Localising Salafism est une étude approfondie sur l'origine et le développement du salafisme dans le Bale, une province au sud-est de l'Éthiopie, habitée majoritairement par les Oromo qui y constituent environ 90% de la population. il s' agit aussi d'une région à ...

The 1924 Revolution marked the first time in Sudanese history a nationalist ideology became the language of politics and was successfully employed to mobilize the masses. It was a part of a broader movement of anticolonial nationalist agitation that merits studying this Sudanese event as an illuminating example in world history of the period. Thousands of people from all over Sudan protested in the name of principles such as self-determination and the will of the Nation, and the right of citizens to choose their own destiny. Moreover, the movement that led it, the White Flag League, explicitly sought to include people from different backgrounds, statuses, professions, and religions, to counteract the colonial policy of reliance on ethnic affiliations and social hierarchies. Even though it was bloodily put down after only six months, the events of 1924 represent a revolutionary departure in the in the history of modern Sudan.