Sudan: A History of Wrong Paths and Lost Wars

By: Yasser Youssef

If only African leaders—including Sudanese—had listened with humility to the French thinker René Dumont, when he sounded the alarm in his 1966 book “Africa: The Misguided Start,” nearly a decade after many African countries gained independence.

If only they had read his book, which shed light on the flawed development model adopted by African elites post-colonialism. A model that mimicked the colonizer’s state with all its failings and added new burdens such as mismanagement, corruption, and failure to build systems and institutions that would limit the dominance of individuals in favor of the rule of law and scientific planning—rather than enforcing imported ideological projects on their peoples. Instead of fostering freedom, they brought about military coups that plunged the continent into misery, civil wars, division, and deadly underdevelopment.

Sudan, perhaps, stands as a prime example of this “misguided start”—a nation that has walked a path of endless wars since its independence seventy years ago.

Yet, Sudan had a relative advantage over many African countries whose borders were arbitrarily drawn by European colonizers. The Sudanese state existed before the British colonization in 1898, which came after the fall of the Mahdist State, which had ruled for sixteen years. Before that, the “Turkiyya” (Ottoman-Egyptian rule) lasted for sixty years, following the fall of the Funj Kingdom that ruled vast areas of present-day Sudan for three centuries.

The creative alliance formed in 1504 between the local Funj tribes and Arab tribes led by Abdullah Jamma, which gave birth to the Sennar Kingdom, had already answered the fundamental question of coexistence among Sudan’s diverse ethnic groups.

The elite who inherited power after colonialism could have drawn from this early and successful model to address the question of identity that emerged after sixty years of Anglo-Egyptian rule.

Instead of building a common foundation for coexistence and then focusing on comprehensive economic development—utilizing resources, diversifying production, investing in industry, and establishing stable markets for Sudanese exports through balanced foreign relations based on mutual interest—the Sudanese elite, across all ideological and political spectrums, sank into deadly ideological conflicts and fruitless debates. They abandoned pragmatic, productive thinking focused on development and pursued impractical ideological projects disconnected from the nation’s real needs at that time.

Ideology: The Gateway to Understanding Crises

One of the central problems in Sudanese politics, which has significantly contributed to today’s bleak reality, is the dominance of ideologies over the national landscape. This has produced a culture of extremism and a zero-sum mentality—”either us or no one”—a culture of mutual exclusion. No group is free of this trait, which has become a defining feature of Sudanese public affairs.

The ideology in question here, as defined by Abdallah Laroui, is “thought disconnected from reality.” When leaders adopt such thinking, their projects end in illusion. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur described ideology as functioning through three mechanisms:

1. Distortion of reality – offering an inverted image of it.

2. Justification of the status quo – providing hidden explanations for certain ideologies.

3. Integration of individuals into collective identity – creating a symbolic structure for collective memory.

Through this lens, unrealistic thinking infiltrated Sudanese politics, diverting its course from the realistic goals Sudanese people hoped to achieve after colonialism.

To support this claim, let us examine how issues that were far from being national priorities dominated the discourse, competition, disputes, and even became the cause of wars and conflicts.

This article will address two examples that illustrate how crisis thinking shaped the Sudanese elite’s imagination, wasting the country’s time on the wrong path. When foundations are flawed, outcomes will be flawed too—this is exactly what befell Sudan.

First: Identity as a False Question

The identity issue has remained a fundamental concern across all post-independence governments, to the point where it’s taken for granted that Sudan suffers from an inherent identity crisis.

Over the decades, tribalism has been fueled, narrow affiliations revived, and even hate speech spread at times—deepening the rift between northern and southern Sudan, culminating in the secession of South Sudan.

This painful experience, however, did not teach Sudanese the lessons of coexistence and tolerance. Instead, the false consciousness of an identity problem persisted across the remaining geography of the country, threatening further fragmentation.

I confidently argue that the identity question is a false one. Prioritizing it among national concerns was a trap the national elite fell into, distracting them from genuine national duties toward unproductive philosophical debates.

The Sennar Kingdom, founded five centuries ago, succeeded because it fully understood the objective conditions for state-building in a multi-ethnic land. It based governance on consensus and harmony among its components—a proto-federal system in modern terms.

Though founded on an alliance between Funj and Arab tribes, the kingdom did not suffer an identity crisis. Rather, it embraced the “Sudanese personality,” shaped by numerous historical factors, which fostered unity and voluntary integration without coercion or dominance.

Some might argue that modern Sudan included the South, with its distinct ethnic and religious diversity. But accommodating diversity is a natural demand in any modern state, and developing a unified national identity requires time, patience, and creative coexistence.

Identity, in our view, is a process—not something decreed by law. It must evolve, and the focus should have been on cultivating a sense of collective spirit. As Professor Barakat Al-Huwaiti defines it: “The moral forces within a community that reflect its solidarity and shared determination to progress and preserve its heritage.”

Poet Ibrahim Al-Abadi expressed this sentiment in his famous line: “The Nile is our father, and our race is Sudanese.”

Indeed, it was—and still is—possible to adopt a Sudanese identity and evolve it through education, culture, and thought to build an inclusive national identity. One that former Prime Minister Muhammad Ahmad Al-Mahjoub envisioned, saying: “The first step toward national sentiment is to transform tribalism into national unity.”

Al-Mahjoub and his fellow intellectuals, especially in the Al-Fajr magazine, called for a Sudanese national identity as the answer to the identity question. But their project was buried under the weight of exclusionary ideological movements.

On the identity issue, I say: Sudanese intellectuals fabricated the crisis, and then deceived themselves into thinking they were solving it—though it was one they themselves created.

If only Sudanese had heeded the valuable advice of Kenyan thinker Ali Mazrui during his 1960s visit to Khartoum. He emphasized the importance of understanding Sudan’s geopolitical position and using it as a strength, rather than letting marginalization define a country that lies, as Dr. Abdullah Ali Ibrahim put it, “at the bottom of the Arab world and the margin of Africa.”

Unfortunately, national awareness was insufficient to leverage Sudan’s geopolitical reality to enrich internal diversity and strengthen its internal front.

Instead, early Sudanese political thought was infiltrated by calls for Arabizing Sudan—often imposed by force. This provoked a counter-narrative that emphasized African identity. Even the “Forest and Desert” literary school, which sought a middle ground between the two identities, couldn’t revive the national state path begun by the Sennar Kingdom.

Second: Islamic Sharia

The second contentious issue was the question of Islamic Sharia. In our view, much of the conflict surrounding this issue could have been avoided had the parties abandoned partisan thinking and approached it with scientific and objective reasoning. We will explore this influential topic in Sudanese politics in our next article.

Published on Al Jazeera Net