British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour: The Foreign Office Records as Sources for Social History

British Society for Middle Eastern Studies

British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour: The Foreign Office Records as Sources for SocialHistoryAuthor(s): Peter CrossSource: British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Nov., 1997), pp. 217-260Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/195773 .

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British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (1997), 24(2), 217-260

British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour:

the Foreign Office Records as Sources

for Social History PETER CROSS*

ABSTRACT In the absence of any satisfactory full-length history of the small but historically important Sudanese working class, the present paper attempts to evaluate the records of the British Foreign Office as one source among many for such a study. In particular, it attempts to reveal the attitudes held by British officials in the Sudan towards labour and related issues. These attitudes evolved during the Condominium, falling roughly into four periods. From the reconquest to around 1904, Sudanese were generally held to be incapable of working productively for wages. From around 1904, when infrastructural development began in earnest, to the end of World War II, it became clear that wage labour could be found locally, and there was an overriding concern with preventing too many hands being drawn away from agriculture. The sudden eruption of the Sudanese labour movement in 1946 shocked the country's British rulers, who sought external political forces manipulating the supposedly disorganized Sudanese workers. From around 1948 onwards, however, the labour movement's existence came to be accepted and, under pressure from London as well as from local events, there were even attempts, albeit unsuccessful, to co-opt it.

Introduction: the Historiography of Sudanese Labour

The original inspiration for this paper was found in a footnote. Discussing the current state of Third World labour history in the introduction to their excellent Workers on the Nile, Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman point to the lack of any 'first-rate study of the Sudanese labour movement, despite its prominence and close links with the Egyptian situation'.' Such neglect would appear to be unwarranted. The earliest achievements of the labour movement-unionization of perhaps a majority of workers in the industrial and service sectors in just nine years, winning over a similar period of body a trade union and factory legislation that had taken several decades of struggle to achieve in, say, Britain-

* Peter Cross is an independent scholar based in Paris, France. Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile. Nationalism, Communism, Islam and the Egyptian

Working Class, 1882-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 16, n. 18.

1353-0194/97/020217-44 ? 1997 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies



PETER CROSS

these achievements alone would seem worthy of greater academic comment and analysis than has so far been the case, not to mention the role of the working class in the independence struggle and its decisive role in the events of 1964 and 1985. Any study of the Sudanese Communist Party, furthermore, must surely take account of the base it had been able to create for itself in the trade union movement-a social reserve that in the past was a major factor in the Party's tenacity in the face of state repression.

The Sudanese workers are, of course, not entirely alone in being cold- shouldered by Western academia. As Beinin and Lockman point out, until comparatively recently, scholarly opinion tended on the whole to reject the idea that analyses based on class might have anything useful to say about the history and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. An object of particular scorn was the idea that independent working-class movements could have played a serious role in national liberation struggles, which, to the extent that discussions of class as a relevant factor did occur, were seen largely as the achievement of indigenous middle classes, perhaps with the peasantry as auxiliaries. Such attitudes ran through a wide spectrum of thought, from the modernization theory of American social science to Frantz Fanon's 'radical' petit-bourgeois haughtiness towards the 'labour aristocracy'. It is only really in the last twenty years that the greater part of the literature challenging these views has been published.2

As regards the Sudan, in any case, it is of note that the stratification of society into classes does not seem to have been considered irrelevant or unthinkable by the country's British rulers themselves. The Political Service may, it is true, have tended to idealize tribal society, and indeed to have sought to impose methods of rule based on tribalism even where the tribal organization of society had already begun to break down and new classes to emerge. But the Sudan government's role in class formation was, to a very large extent, a perfectly conscious one that on occasion smacked of social engineering. Accordingly, references to class in the Foreign Office (FO) records are usually quite explicit. There was a conscious desire on the part of many administrators to avoid, as Viscount Milner put it in 1919, the 'necessity of creating an effendi class'3 of educated Sudanese who would be susceptible to nationalist ideas and liable to begin agitation against the British as they had done in Egypt. On the other

2 To be fair, this is truer of Anglophone academia than of the French-speaking world, where a scholarly interest in Arab workers arose far earlier. For less schematic discussions of these questions and bibliographical references, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile ..., pp. 1-8 and 14-18; Ellis Jay Goldberg (ed.), The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), pp. 1-18; and my review of the latter in M.A.R.S-The Arab World in Scientific Research VII, Winter 1996. Two recently published collective works-Goldberg's collection and Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) edited by Zachary Lockman-are a sign of rising interest in Middle East labour history in Anglophone academia, at a time when it seems to be very much on the decline in the Francophone countries. Sudan remains unjustly neglected by all, however. 3 Quoted in M. W. Daly and P. M. Holt, A History of the Sudan from the Coming of Islam to the Present Day

(London: Longman, 1988), p. 131.

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hand, this ran counter to the efforts of the government's education system 'to produce a small administrative class for entry to the government service' (as well as 'a small class of competent artisans'), in the words of the Sudan government's first Director of Education Sir James Currie.4 And of course there was much discussion as to whether a class of indigenous wage labourers could or should be encouraged to develop, and if so how-a discussion which will provide much of the subject matter for this paper.

There has been at least one serious scholarly attempt to develop a class analysis of social and political developments in Sudan, namely Tim Niblock's Class and Power in Sudan.5 Although this paper does share Niblock's central thesis-that the way in which the class structure of the Sudan evolved under the Condominium is of central importance to understanding the development of political life after independence-its main centres of interest are not quite the same. On the one hand, while the exposition of the book's main thesis inevitably means that approximately half the text is given over to a discussion of the changes wrought to the class structure prior to independence, Niblock in fact seems more interested in the effects such changes had in the post-independence period.6 Here, the bias will be quite the opposite, towards cause rather than effect. On the other hand, Niblock's work is concerned with the mechanism of Sudanese society as a whole, and hence with all the classes that go to make up that society. Here, we shall be focusing more specifically on the urban proletariat which emerged during the period of British rule.

I have chosen to specify the urban proletariat-skilled and unskilled wage- workers in industry, construction, commerce, communications, public services- despite the fact that a considerable layer of agricultural wage-labourers has existed for many decades, since space prohibits a full discussion of the rural proletariat.7 Yet in reality there has been a considerable degree of overlap between these two groups-and between both of them and other groups such as nomadic pastoralists and poor peasants-as people move between town and country for seasonal or medium-term employment, perhaps making the distinction somewhat

4 Ibid., p. 123. 5 Tim Niblock, Class and Power in Sudan. The Dynamics of Sudanese Politics, 1898-1985 (London: Macmil-

lan, 1987). 6 Indeed, much of the concrete socio-economic data relating to the Condominium period contained in the

first half of Class and Power in Sudan is derived from the 1955-56 census. As a result, the 'dynamics' of the book's subtitle really only become apparent in the second half, concerned with post-independence politics. The work as a whole nevertheless remains an extremely welcome defence of the relevance of the concept of class to the analysis of African and Arab societies, which furthermore refuses to ignore the complexity of the class structure in an economy which incorporates a variety of modes of production. 7 Furthermore, English-speaking academics seem to have paid more attention to agricultural labour than to

urban labour. Indeed, there has been some extremely interesting work on the subject of agricultural wage- labour, notably that of Peter McLoughlin. See, for example, McLoughlin's 'Labour market conditions and wages in the Gash and Tokar deltas, 1900-1955', Sudan Notes and Records, 47 (1966), pp. 111-126, and 'Labour market conditions and wages in the Three Towns, 1900-1950', Sudan Notes and Records, 51 (1970), pp. 105-118.

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PETER CROSS

artificial.8 In fact, the task of defining our terms is complicated because for the greater part of the period under discussion we are dealing not with a class as such but with a class-in-formation; not with a category but with a process. In the earliest years of our period, virtually the only use of wage-labour (except in agriculture) was for public works such as the construction of the railways or Port Sudan, where employment was, by its very nature, temporary. Wage-earners therefore not only came from but may be assumed often to have gone back to tending herds or tilling fields, where economic life and social relations would be organized on quite a different basis.9 These 'semi proletarians' must necessarily make up part of our subject, alongside the hereditary class of proletarians in the real sense-'free' labour, denuded of ownership of the means of production- which rapidly began to crystallize.

The only published book of which I am aware concerned with this stratum of Sudanese society is that written by Saad Ed Din Fawzi in the 1950s.1? Fawzi does give a very detailed account of the events of 1946-55 and includes some useful data on, for example, origins of the landless labour force in the Gezira in 1950s. However, The Labour Movement in the Sudan is seriously flawed from the point of view of methodology, as a direct result of the political and historical context in which it appeared. Writing at a time when the British were preparing to withdraw from the Sudan and when the educated elite to which he belonged was preparing to assume full political power in the newly independent state, Fawzi adopted an idealized and essentially non-conflictual view of inter-class relations. Where class conflict had arisen under British rule, the 'root of the problem' was that 'management and labour belonged to two different racial groups'-a situation that was, presumably, soon to be remedied. His work is, in effect, a liberal plea for trade union freedom as a means of fostering 'responsible' unionism-his condemnation of 'excessive use of the strike weapon' (p. 150) is telling in this respect, as are his comments to the effect that 'the wisdom of such restrictions [on the trade union rights of civil servants and employees of public utilities] in the interest of the civil service and the community as a whole cannot be doubted' (p. 87). At the end of the day, Fawzi's main preoccupation is not with describing and understanding the dynamics of workers' activities, but with how best to channel them and put them to use as an instrument for raising productivity in the period of nation-building. The upshot is that he concentrates heavily on the details of labour legislation, to the detriment of many other issues

8 Niblock, quoting the 1955-56 census, records that, out of an active population of almost 3,800,000 at the time of independence, there were some 300,000 seasonal rural labourers (approximately 7.9%), the great majority of them employed on the Gezira scheme cotton harvest. According to Niblock, an estimated 75% of these seasonal labourers were Sudanese peasants and nomads, the remainder being made up of migrants from Chad and Nigeria. In addition, there were some 49,282 permanent rural labourers (c. 1.3%). By comparison, the census recorded some 346,253 'urban labourers' (c. 9%), a figure which includes all manual workers in towns, whether in manufacturing or services, together with self-employed artisans; significantly, 'urban' refers to the place of work, rather than the place of residence, and even then appears to have been used rather loosely. Niblock, Class and Power, pp. 81-92 passim. 9 Indeed, on any one of several different bases. See Niblock, Class and Power, pp. xvii-xviii. ?0 Saad Ed Din Fawzi, The Labour Movement in the Sudan, 1946-1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955).

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of interest to the labour historian: he pays no serious attention to the process of class formation, for example, and makes no reference whatsoever to the stirrings of the embryonic working class movement prior to 1946.

There is one other full-length (but unpublished) study which should be mentioned before continuing, namely Abdel-Rahman El Tayib Ali Taha's The Sudanese Labor Movement. 1 Although Taha covers a larger timescale than Fawzi (1946-69), for the 1946-55 period he relies heavily on The Labour Movement in the Sudan, acknowledging his debt to its late author. However, he takes Fawzi to task for underestimating political-ideological factors in the rise of the labour movement, for his approach stresses 'the primacy of ideology in developing societies' (pp. 14-17). Although he invokes Clifford Geertz as one of his main theoretical guides, the resulting insistence in Taha's text on the role of the Communists in 'stirring up' the Sudanese working class echoes eerily the desperate quest of the British authorities for a deus ex machina when confronted with the extraordinary upsurge of labour militancy immediately after World War II. And, crucially, Taha is rather too inclined to take British public pronouncements on labour matters at their word12-quite the opposite of the approach adopted in the present study, which seeks to read between the lines, as it were, of British documents. Once again, the context in which Taha was writing clearly influenced the content: his thesis, which is intended to 'be of help to all students of the Sudanese society, to employers of industrial labour, to policy-makers in the government and finally [!] to the labor movement itself', was written for a doctorate in business administration.

This paper could obviously not presume to be a full-length history of the Sudanese labour movement-space prohibits even a detailed account of the labour agitation of 1946-55. Its underlying theme will be an evaluation of the changing attitudes of British administrators to Sudanese labour. It takes as its source material the records of the British Foreign Office,13 to which the Sudan government under the Condominium was in effect answerable. In one sense, they are the least satisfactory of all sources, as the documents they contain were written at the greatest distance-both socially, and, very often, physically-from

l Abdel-Rahman El Tayib Ali Taha, The Sudanese Labor Movement. a Study of Labor Unionism in a Developing Society, unpublished PhD thesis (UCLA, 1970). 12 'It is reasonable to assume, however, that it [the Sudan government in 1945-6] intended the works committees to be the first step in a slow and gradual advance towards full-fledged unionism' (p. 60). However, the sections of Taha's thesis dealing with later decades-where he relies less on secondary sources and more on union documents and interviews with trade unionists-are of greater interest. 13 In particular, the F078 and F0371 General Correspondence classes, which contain despatches from British officials in Khartoum and Cairo (often with enclosures, reports, translations, private letters and so on, sent on for information) accumulated by the FO in London, together with drafts and copies of out-going telegrams and letters, and sometimes communications with other ministries, MPs and members of the public. Also included in the FO records are the Governor-General's Annual Reports, which were published up until 1951-52 as Blue Books. They appeared variously as reports on the Sudan in its own right or as appendices to Annual Reports on Egypt, with varying titles and signed by any number of different Governors-General in Khartoum or Residents/Ambassadors in Cairo: they will hereafter be referred to in the footnotes simply as Sudan, followed by the year.

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PETER CROSS

the subject matter. Any history of the Sudanese working class which sought to do justice to its subject-a work which, I would suggest, has yet to be written- would obviously have to draw on a wide range of other materials, first and foremost those emanating from the labour movement itself.14 Nevertheless the FO records do have a certain validity as sources. Firstly, the class struggle, as with any contradiction, has necessarily both thesis and antithesis: since the government itself employed the majority of Sudanese workers, a record of state officials' actions and reactions is an essential part of the picture. Secondly, the records contain at least some facts and figures (on wages, strikes, etc.) not available elsewhere. Finally, they sometimes give a fascinating insight into tensions over labour questions between British officials in Khartoum, Cairo and London, which arose in the context of the Sudan's unique legal status.15 The first need, however, is to put our sources to the question, as it were, and dissociate as far as possible objective fact from subjective opinion. In parallel, I shall attempt to draw out some of the most salient points of fact contained within the documents.

The documents fall into two basic periods. The first runs from the reoccupation of the Sudan by British forces to the end of World War II. This was essentially a period of class formation, in which British officialdom was concerned with labour almost exclusively as a factor of production. The second period, however, running from 1946 to independence, corresponds with the massive explosion of the labour movement. At this stage, the British were forced to consider labour from quite another angle. If the latter period is considered labour history 'proper', we might describe the former as the 'pre-history' of the Sudanese working class. However, both periods can be further subdivided, as we shall see.16

14 Even as far as British attitudes are concerned, other sources could have been consulted, notably the published memoirs of former British officials in Egypt and the Sudan. The decision not to use memoirs as source materials for this particular paper was a conscious one, however. To begin with, books by old Sudan hands are so many and varied-from Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt (London: Macmillan, 1908) to Sir James Robertson's Transition in Africa. From Direct Rule to Independence (London: C. Hurst, 1974)-that to do them justice would have meant further prolonging an already over-long essay. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, they tend to be written with the benefit of hindsight, whereas what we are interested in here is attitudes in real time, as it were, as they appear in the Foreign Office records. 15 Sudan's status as a Condominium, rather than a colony, left the Sudan government theoretically answerable to both the Foreign Office and the Egyptian government (in effect this usually meant the British authorities in Egypt) and in practice with a great deal more autonomy than most purely colonial administrations under the Colonial Office. Disagreements, often acrimonious, were by no means limited to labour affairs and could indeed even be three-sided, with Cairo, London and Khartoum all adopting different positions. Numerous former members of the Sudan government and the Sudan political service have left memoirs, often published, in which such tensions are often apparent. For one insider's view of the forms these tensions took in the final years of British rule, see Glen Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain's Relinquishment of her last three Arab Dependencies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 16 At the risk.of laying myself open to charges of reductionism, each of the following subsections begins with a very brief outline of the main economic developments during the period under consideration, in order to help the reader to situate the 'action'. These economic outlines are largely based on M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) and Imperial Sudan. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934-1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Any faults are, of course, entirely my own.

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'Pre-history'

(i) 1898-1904

Local labour. Intimately connected with the question of the numerical strength of the population is the further question of whether the inhabitants of the Sudan are able and willing to work. The local officials are well-nigh unanimous in their opinion that, as a general rule, the Sudanese are not industrious. In this respect they are the very reverse of the Egyptians, who are a singularly industrious race. It can be no matter for surprise that the Sudanese are unwilling to work, their wants are few and simple ... The slave holders of former days are not accustomed to labour. The slaves, for the most part, consider that the best use they can make of their newly-acquired liberty is to labour as little as possible. The lesson which, I conceive, lies at the bottom of all labour problems, that a man must work or starve, has not yet been brought home to the mass of the inhabitants of the Sudan.

Lord Cromer, Sudan 1903

By the time the Mahdist state finally succumbed to the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest in 1898, the Sudan's economy, and indeed society as a whole, had been severely dislocated by almost two decades of revolution and war. Armed conflict, forced migration, taxation, famine and disease had disrupted trade, debased the currency and driven many from the land, ownership of which was often unclear or disputed. Agricultural land, the basis of Sudan's economy, was therefore massively underused, while communications were virtually non-existent. Natur- ally enough, the first task the country's new rulers set themselves was, as with all new rulers, pacification. But the second most urgent task was plainly to get agriculture back on its feet-a need made all the more pressing by the fact that the Sudan government could expect no financial backing from the British Treasury.7

Beyond this, it would not seem that the British arrived in Sudan with a blueprint for its economic exploitation, the reconquest being motivated more by European power politics in the context of the scramble for Africa than any clearly formulated economic desiderata. None the less, British and European interests began to apply for land and mining concessions in the Sudan almost immediately.18 The Condominium Agreement (in theory) opened the country up to free trade, and a Mining (Prospecting Licence) Ordinance was issued as early as 1899, under which twelve companies had been granted licences by 1905. The possibility of developing cotton production dawned very quickly on private interests outside the Sudan, with high world prices for cotton prompting a surge of applications for agricultural land as of 1903. In 1904, American businessman Leigh Hunt set up the Sudan Experimental Plantations Syndicate (later to

17 Considerable subsidies were, however, obtained from the Egyptian government. See Daly, Empire on the Nile, p. 194 ff. 18 Indeed, as Daly points out, this was among the arguments for the Condominium Agreement adduced by Cromer, who argued that he could not be expected to put off the petitioners much longer. See Daly, Empire on the Nile, p. 119.

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become the Sudan Plantations Syndicate Ltd, from which the Gezira Scheme was to grow), which was granted a concession at Zeidab.

The expansion of the Sudan Military Railway (the Sudan Government Railways as of 1902) was from the outset a priority for the Sudan's new rulers, occupying a key role in their strategy for internal security. As the war of reconquest was being fought, the line had advanced with Kitchener's army, and by the end of 1899, the railway had been extended from the north bank of the Atbara river to Halfaya. But expanding the railways was also of prime economic importance, if exportation of the country's agricultural produce (and its supposed mineral wealth, although little came of this in the end) was to be envisaged. In the following years, therefore, routes were surveyed for the branch lines that were soon to be built from Berber to Suakin on the Red Sea and from Abu Hamad to Karima in Sudanese Nubia, on which work began in 1904.19 At the end of 1903, the Secretary of the British Cotton Growing Association felt moved to write to Lord Landsdowne at the Foreign Office that 'as you know, we are very anxious indeed that the Railway between Suakim (sic) and Berber should rapidly be pushed forward by Lord Cromer'20-a sign of the importance attached to such projects by British industrial interests. Plans were also drawn up during this period for the construction of Port Sudan, on which work also began in 1904. Hundreds of miles of roads (albeit of a somewhat rudimentary nature) and thousands of miles of telegraph lines were also laid out in the first five years of the Condominium.

Major infrastructural projects such as these obviously required considerable amounts of manual labour, as did the reconstruction of Khartoum. Con- sequently, British economic policy in the Sudan reposed from the outset on a contradiction, at least as far as labour was concerned: on the one hand, it required that the largest possible numbers remain attached to the land, in order to restore and, if possible, raise agricultural production; on the other, it required a reservoir of free labour,21 available for work on the infrastructural projects without which it would be extremely difficult to integrate Sudanese agriculture into the imperial market. This contradiction, although not necessarily clearly perceived, had important consequences in terms of both policy and attitudes vis-a-vis Sudanese labour.

As far as policy was concerned, two aspects are worth noting. Firstly, a somewhat inconsistent line on slavery was adopted. Repression of slavery had provided one of the moral justifications for the reconquest, and in January 1899 the slave trade was declared illegal and a 'department for the repression of the slave trade' established. But with slave-labour accounting for as much as 20-30%

19 In 1901 and 1902, plans were also hatched to build railways from the Nile to El Obeid and from Suakin to Gedaref via Kassala, but nothing came of these. 20 Letter of 23/23/1903, F078/5309. The British Cotton Growing Association was an organization set up by the British textile industry and devoted to developing sources of cotton within the Empire. 21 'Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors; Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 875.

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of the entire population and a very significant proportion of the agricultural workforce,22 British administrators found themselves faced with the danger of a slump in agricultural production if slaves left their masters in large numbers. Hence a distinction was drawn between trade in and ownership of slaves, the latter being tolerated under the terms of the policy drawn up by Cromer as of 1899. Officially, the Sudan government aimed 'whilst making every effort to suppress slave raiding and slave trafficking ... to deal as gently as possible with questions of domestic slavery ... [and] gradually transform the status of slavery and substitute for it a system of paid labour'.23 In reality, the efforts of the anti- slavery department were constantly frustrated until it was finally wound up in 1922; a blind eye was frequently turned to slave trading and on a number of occasions runaway slaves were actually returned to their masters by the authorities, in open contradiction of the official policy.24 Bonded labour persisted as a significant part of the economy well into the Condominium period.

The other important conclusion to be drawn in terms of policy was that it would be necessary to import labour on a fairly large scale, in particular (but not exclusively) for the infrastructural projects. In the earliest years, most railway construction (and much other building work) was carried out by the Compulsory Labour Battalions of the Egyptian Army, a unit of 2882 NCOs and enlisted men and 33 officers, together with a civilian contingent of about 400. Soon, however, plans were drawn up for the importation of 5000 Indian Muslim 'coolies' for the construction of the Suakin-Berber railway, and in 1902 an agreement was signed with the government of India. However, negotiations with the government of India (via London) were complicated and problematic, and the idea was eventually abandoned, apparently at Cromer's bidding.25 Leigh Hunt, for his part, sought to recruit African-American labour for his plantations, but the idea was not well received by Cromer and even the few African- Americans who were brought to the Sudan by the Sudan Experimental Planta- tions Syndicate soon asked to return to the United States.26 Even less fruitful schemes were hatched from time to time of recruiting Chinese, Bosnian and Nigerian labourers for the Sudan.

On the other hand, from the earliest years of the Condominium, there was seasonal immigration on the part of peasants from Upper Egypt, who mainly

22 P. F. M. McLoughlin, 'Economic development and the heritage of slavery in the Sudan Republic', Africa, 32 (1962), pp. 355-391. McLoughlin suggests that slaves performed 'the bulk of all agricultural labour'. In fact, the labour process must have been organized in a number of different forms-certainly the communal labour of nomadic pastoralists (in animal husbandry) must have existed alongside slave labour-and McLough- lin himself does not make a clear distinction between slaves and serfs. It should also be noted that although McLoughlin's work on the legacy of slavery as regards menial labour is valuable, his argument centres to a considerable degree on examples such as the Gezira tenants and, crucially, is concerned exclusively with the effects of that legacy on the former slave-owners rather than the ex-slaves. 23 Sudan 1904. 24 See Gabriel Warburg, The Sudan Under Wingate, Administration in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1899-1916 (London: Cass, 1971), pp. 170-182, and Warburg, G. 'Slavery and labour in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan', Asian and African Studies: Journal of the Israel Oriental Society, 12 (1978), pp. 221-245. 25 Much of the extensive correspondence on the question is preserved in F078/5229, F078/5239 and F078/5240. 26 Mohamed Omer Beshir, Revolution and Nationalism in the Sudan (London: Rex Collins, 1974), p. 33.

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worked in agriculture and, later, canal and dam building.27 Spontaneous immigration from as far afield as Northern Nigeria had long been a tradition, as pilgrims on their way to Mecca passed through the Sudan, often staying on to work in order to cover the costs of the trip, frequently for prolonged periods and in many cases permanently. The restoration of order after the years of war and revolution led to a resumption of this practice, and a large but unquantifiable number of West Africans (or Fellata) settled as labourers both in the countryside and in the towns during the Condominium period. To a somewhat lesser extent, there was also immigration from Ethiopia and Eritrea, and as work on Port Sudan got under way and demand for scarce local labour pushed wages up, workers were attracted to Red Sea province from Yemen and the Hijaz. In addition, Greek and Italian skilled workers also came in significant numbers during the earliest period.

As regards attitudes towards labour, the consequences of the material dilemma the British found themselves in were, again, twofold. On the one hand, attitudes towards slavery as an institution were, to say the least, ambivalent. At the official level, slavery was condemned in principle and condoned in practice, with the result that the whole issue grew to be shrouded in the coy veils of euphemism, slaves being referred to as 'domestic servants' (whatever the nature of their work) in legislation as in the official discourse as a whole.28 At the operational level, while some British officials such as Captain McMurdo (director of the slavery repression department until forced to accept a golden handshake in 1910) were undoubtedly sincere and devoted opponents of slavery, others were unequivocal in their support for the institution. Inspector-General Slatin Pasha was a particularly outspoken advocate, being of the view that black Sudanese were:

... god-forsaken swine who do not deserve to be treated like free and independent men

... The blacks should be made to remain under the protection of their former masters who were forced to treat them well.29

Slatin expressed his opinions on the subject with typical bluntness, but he was far from alone in holding them. Indeed, a number of provincial governors and others were entirely at one with him, and Wingate tended to side with him on this as in other matters.

The other consequence the dilemma regarding labour had on British attitudes at this stage was a tendency to elaborate rationalizations in racial terms. In the earliest days of the Condominium, the general view of British administrators seems to have been that for one reason or another the Sudanese, as a race, were in fact unsuited to any serious labour. Opinions were divided as to the relative merits (or dismerits) of the Arab and non-Arab peoples of the Sudan, Slatin

27 By 1921, more than half the workers at the massive Makwar dam project were Egyptian. See Daly, Empire

on the Nile, p. 440. In earlier years, under Wingate and Kitchener, there had also been various more or less unsuccessful projects to encourage permanent settlement by Egyptian agricultural labourers and their families or to use Egyptian convict labour for earthworks in the Gezira. 28 Sometimes the expression 'Sudanese servants' was substituted, leading with time to the even more refined euphemism of 'Sudanese' for slave. 29 Quoted in Warburg, 'Slavery and labour in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan'.

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Pasha for one holding that 'by nature all blacks are lazy'30 while Wingate took the view that:

the inherent laziness of the present generation of sedentary Arabs had blinded their eyes to the golden harvest lying at their doors, would they only bestir themselves to take advantage of it. Skilled labour, however, being more congenial to the Arab mind than heavy manual work, with the spread of education-especially technical education-a great improvement may be looked for.31

Whether justified by Victorian racial theory or, on occasion, sociological explana- tions based on the perceived low level of physical needs of the mass of the Sudanese population, such views were prevalent until around 1903-4, when reserves of labour began to be discovered.32 In either case, they represent a pseudo-rationalization for the failure of labour to come forward in the required quantities in a situation where no reservoir of free labour (i.e. neither bound by traditional obligations to the master nor possessing independently the means of production) had been created. Implicit within such views is the failure to recognize nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism as forms of economic activity or, consequently, the activities of a very significant section of the Sudanese population as labour. Such is precisely the basis for Cromer's lament, quoted at the beginning of this section, that the Sudanese had not yet 'understood', that a man must 'work or starve'.

(ii) 1904-1945

The contractor for the bridges on the Red Sea Railway employed a large number of Hadendowa labourers and they proved so satisfactory that they will be used for work on the Shendi-Khartoum section of the line. 'It is more than interesting', writes Sir Reginald Wingate, 'to learn that the renowned 'Fuzzy Wuzzy' is inclined to take his part in the more prosaic work of bridge building'.

Sir Eldon Gorst, Sudan 1908

In the period running from 1904 to the end of World War II, to which we shall now turn our attention, labour questions were seen by the Sudan's British administrators as a matter of the greatest importance. Indeed, 'the scarcity of labour' was held to be one of the 'two principal difficulties which the government of the Sudan now has to encounter'.33 From this point on, the Annual Reports often contained subsections on 'Labour and Population' (although Kitchener, in his rather terse Reports, showed only token interest in the subject, and Maffey, in most of his positively voluminous Reports, none whatsoever),34 and from 1905 to at least 1911, all provincial governors were asked to report on labour

30 Enclosure in Cromer to Salisbury, 7/2/1900, F078/5086. 31 Sudan 1905. 32 Even after this point, variations on the theme are expressed by isolated individuals from time to time right through to the end of the period under study in this paper. 33 Sudan 1905. The other was the provision of capital for Public Works. 34 Horatio Herbert (Lord) Kitchener, Governor-General 1899; Sir John Maffey, Governor-General 1926-33.

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market conditions in their areas for inclusion in the Annual Reports.3s However, before examining in detail the evolution in British attitudes and policy towards labour, it may be useful to look briefly at developments in the economy of the Sudan during those four decades.

Very soon after the reconquest, the Sudan government had addressed itself to the knotty problem of land settlement, a key element in getting agricultural production back on its feet. As progress was made in this domain, the area of land under cultivation rose (from an estimated 1.1 m feddans in 1904 to 2.1 m feddans in 1913)36 as, in general, did harvests, although the country remained vulnerable to crop failures and famine. The trade in gum arabic, which had been virtually wiped out during the Mahdiyya, resumed and gum rapidly became the country's main export, and a very important source of government revenue. It remained so until the second half of the 1920s, when it was replaced by cotton.

Cotton really emerged as the great white hope of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in around 1909, when plans for a dam at Sennar and a vast Gezira Canal were first hatched, against a background of crisis in the British textile industry due to the failure of the Egyptian and American cotton crops. Pressure from British textile interests,37 combined with a political need to put an end to the Sudan's financial dependence on Egypt, opened the way for work to begin on the main canal of the Gezira Scheme in January 1914. Work was suspended during World War I, resumed in 1919 and completed, after an ugly financial crisis caused by unexpectedly high costs for labour and materials, in mid-1925 (although there was some further work on large-scale irrigation projects after this, notably the construction of the Jabal Aulia dam in 1935-36). Initially, the production of cotton, which was also being grown on lesser irrigation schemes in the Gash and Tokar deltas and on a small scale in a number of other areas, rocketed and the cotton boom of 1926-29 fuelled a general upsurge in economic activity.

Meanwhile, the development of basic infrastructure continued apace, as plans for Sudanese agriculture matured-indeed from the reconquest until the end of World War I, transport development accounted for more than three-quarters of the government's capital expenditure.38 Port Sudan was officially opened in 1909, and Khartoum Central Station in the following year. Meanwhile, the Sudan Government Railways headquarters and workshops had been transferred from Wadi Halfa to the Atbara junction in 1906, and from this the new town of Atbara, depending entirely on the railways and of crucial importance to our subject, was to grow. In 1909, the railway was extended south from Khartoum to Wadi Madani, and then on to El Obeid by the end of 1911. Having been

35 Including, on occasion, some local information on wage levels, although sadly not enough to make it possible to draw up any really meaningful comparative table. 36 Daly, Empire on the Nile, p. 216. 37 The British Cotton Growing Association was particularly active in pushing for the Gezira Scheme, which it described in 1917 as 'the only scheme in the whole of the British Empire which offers any prospect of a considerable production of cotton of good quality, in the immediate future'. Quoted in Daly, Empire on the Nile, p. 223. 38 Expenditure on agricultural development during this period was, on the other hand, barely noticeable. Daly, Empire on the Nile, pp. 207-208.

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interrupted by the war, and further postponed due to the Gezira project financial crisis shortly afterwards, railway expansion resumed in the mid-1920s. Again, the impetus came from agricultural development, this time chiefly the Gash cotton-growing scheme. A line was built from the main Nile-Red Sea railway to Kassala by 1924, and on to Gedaref by 1928. The Red Sea loop was completed by another line, this time from the Khartoum-Gezira railway, to Kassala, operational by 1929. No significant expansion of the railways took place following this until after World War II. Expansion of the telegraph system and, to a certain extent, the network of rudimentary roads also continued up until the outbreak of World War I. As of the mid-1930s, however, road transport was forbidden by Ordinance from competing with the railways in the northern Sudan, although road construction was still undertaken in the south, where the railway did not extend, largely on the basis of forced labour in lieu of taxes. A telephone system, inaugurated as early as 1903, continued to expand after World War I, and received a considerable stimulus during World War II.

On the other hand, there was little development in industry, or even mining. Indeed, the Sudan government, as has been pointed out elsewhere,39 in practice actively discouraged industrialization, while playing lip-service to development via the free market. There seems to have been a general suspicion, expressed quite explicitly by Wingate for one, of European entrepreneurs who applied for mining concessions as 'adventurers', and the bar was deliberately set very high for prospecting licences. None the less, around twenty licences were granted in the first ten years of the Condominium, but very few ever got to the point of taking up a mining lease since yields were unattractively low: a commercial gold mine was established at Um Nabardi, but it closed by the end of 1919.40 A local textile industry was out of the question, Sudan's cotton being destined almost exclusively for the mills of Lancashire and, to a certain extent, British India. The Political Service remained generally hostile to any idea of industrial development, fearing the social changes it would inevitably have wrought.

From the mid-1920s on, the economy of the Sudan depended very heavily on a single crop, cotton, and to a large extent on the Gezira Scheme alone. Hence, when poor weather, parasites and disease led to a disastrously low cotton crop in 1931, coinciding with a dramatic slump in world cotton prices, the effect for the country as a whole was catastrophic. Although yields gradually recovered and the area under cotton expanded considerably in the 1930s, the Sudan remained dependent on the vagaries of the world market, and by 1935 four feddans had to be planted with cotton to provide as much revenue as one feddan at the beginning of the cotton boom. Cotton prices never again reached pre- depression levels throughout the 1930s (although World War II led to a massive upsurge in demand, creating a new boom). While British owners of the bonds that had been issued to finance construction of the Gezira Scheme continued to

39 G. N. Sanderson, 'The ghost of Adam Smith: ideology, bureaucracy and the frustration of economic development in the Sudan, 1934-1940', in M. W. Daly (ed.), Modernisation in the Sudan-Essays in Honour of Richard Hill (New York: Lilian Barber Press, 1985). See also Daly, Imperial Sudan, pp. 84-92. 40 See Beshir, Revolution and Nationalism, pp. 35-36, and Daly, Empire on the Nile, pp. 219-220.

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receive their dividends from the Sudan government, the government was faced with a massive drop in revenue. As Symes put it, 'world economic conditions transformed what promised to be an important financial asset into a liability'.41 The result was the policy of severe financial restraint known as Retrenchment. Spending on public works was slashed, as were the budgets of almost all government departments, across-the-board salary abatements for civil servants were implemented and a certain number of posts were 'retrenched'.

On the basis of this cursory outline of economic developments, it ought to be possible to draw an approximate picture of the ups and downs in demand for labour in the period under consideration. Initially, the expansion of the railways and the construction of Port Sudan required large quantities of mostly unskilled labour (while running them soon created a need for lesser amounts of skilled labour), up until World War I. Demand seems to have dipped considerably during the war, as all projects were put on hold. From the end of World War I until the mid-1920s, the 'Pharaonic' dam building and canal digging occasioned by the Gezira Scheme created massive demand for labour.42 To some extent, the slack must have been taken up by a renewed burst of railway expansion in the mid-to-late 1920s. As of 1931, as the world slump hit the Sudan and Retrench- ment bit, there was a brutal decline in demand for labour, although rare projects such as the Jabal Aulia dam seem to have provided occasional peaks.

From around 1904 onwards, British administrators began to realize, with a greater or lesser degree of surprise, that wage-labour was after all procurable in the Sudan. Labourers seem to have come from a variety of backgrounds (unfortunately the FO documents are not always explicit as regards this important point), but it would appear that they came most spontaneously and in the greatest number from agricultural slavery. In 1908, Wingate pointed to 'the desertion of slaves and the attraction of high pay on public works' as being largely to blame for the fact that government revenue from agricultural taxation had begun to fall.43 There also seems to have been something of a knock-on effect, many landowners adopting the wages system seemingly in order to keep their farm hands from leaving for other, more tempting, horizons. Paid employment became, in Peter McLoughlin's phrase, 'economic manumission'.

The first experiments with local labour, however, involved tribal nomads from the northern provinces. Neither was it a case of labour coming forward altogether spontaneously, since Cromer had personally scotched the plans to bring Indian Muslims to the Sudan for the construction of the Suakin-Berber railway and ordered the recruitment of local hands. Three hundred tribesmen from the Kokreb region were used, with the consent (negotiated by Slatin Pasha) of the

41 Sir George Stewart Symes, Governor-General 1934-40, quoted in Daly, Imperial Sudan, p. 87. 42 Canal construction at Makwar was described as 'one of the biggest excavation works of modern times' by engineer F. T. Hopkinson, who carried out an enquiry into the parlous state of the Scheme's finances in 1922. Numbers employed on dam-building and canalization for the Gezira Scheme had reached 18,000 by 1921 and 25,000 in the following year-far in excess of what Hopkinson considered sufficient. See the 'Gezira irrigation scheme, Soudan. Report by Mr F. T. Hopkinson', in F0407192. 43 Sudan 1908.

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tribal sheikhs, on rock-breaking before the main construction work began. The 'experiment' was not, however, a lasting success.44 In the Annual Report for 1903, Cromer talks with some optimism about possibilities for 'native recruitment' (having dismissed, almost in the same breath, the Sudanese as incapable of hard work) and goes on to list a number of other more or less successful experiences: 'a few Bedouins' had been employed in mining operations, and several hundred 'natives' in digging a canal at Fadlab.

Thus a conscious turn was made away from the policy of organized immigration in the period running up to World War I.45 As Wingate explained it in 1905:

Undoubtedly, under normal conditions, the ordinary wage rate should be determined primarily by competition for labour amongst contractors and private individuals; and if it is then found impossible to adjust the supply to the demand, the only remedy would appear to be for the Government either to reduce its programme or to encourage immigration.

But is the situation entirely normal? Those most competent to judge are of the opinion that it is not, and that the present state of affairs is not owing to the non- existence of the requisite amount of labour, but is due to the fact that the sources of supply have not yet been fully opened up. They are, therefore, strongly against the importation of labour on a large scale until every effort has been made locally to adjust supply and demand.46

Hence British attitudes towards labour in the Sudan took on a new dimension, with the economic and, to a certain extent, social management of the emerging labour force now uppermost in officials' minds. To begin with, it was feared that the relatively high wages offered by contractors on government infrastructure projects because of the initial shortage of labour would have the effect of drawing too much labour away from agriculture. There was almost permanent frustration at 'excessive' wage levels, attributed to competition between government departments, contractors and native cultivators in the labour market. And although the classic remedy to this was, as some British officials were aware, to create a reserve of free labourers not all of whom would be employed at any one time, thus pushing wages down, this very perspective in turn stirred fears of an unemployed, detribalized mass creating new political and security problems. Such a threat was perceived from a very early date, but it is especially as of 1928 that we begin to find regular references to unemployment in Khartoum. In 1931,

many artisans and labourers were thrown out of employment and a certain amount of relief work had to be provided for the poorer classes of labourer. Every possible effort

44 Cromer to FO, 22/12/1903, in F078/5302; Sudan Intelligence Report No. 105 in F078/5309; Sudan 1904. 45 Spontaneous immigration continued, however, notably from Egypt and Ethiopia: 'There has been a remarkable increase in the number both of European merchants and skilled artisans and of Egyptian artisans and labours. This is especially noticeable in Khartoum province. Lord Cromer, in his report for 1906, estimated that there were 3104 Europeans and 9815 Abyssinians, Egyptians and Indians then residing in the Sudan. According to the latest figures supplied to me, these have increased to 3194 and 17,030 respectively. Sudan 1908. 46 Sudan 1905.

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was made not only to prevent outsiders drifting into the Three Towns in search of work but send unemployed persons back to their villages of origin.47

From this point on, the new lumpenproletariat, the 'suk riff-raff', were increasingly seen by British administrators as an undesirable and dangerous element, and rural-urban drift as a serious problem, to be dealt with by deportations if necessary.

In terms of policy, these new preoccupations were reflected in a variety of ways. As early as 1905, fear of the social consequences of creating a reserve army of labour resulted in the Vagabonds Ordinance, which provided for especially stiff penalties for crimes committed by beggars and persons with no settled home or means of subsistence48 (suggesting that already more people were arriving in the towns than could readily be absorbed by the labour market). Also in 1905, a Labour Bureau was established, linked to the Intelligence Department and headed by none other than Slatin Pasha. Reorganized in 1908, the Labour Bureau at this stage concerned itself principally with limiting competition between government departments for scarce labour and registering all available labourers, in an attempt to keep wages low by administrative means while avoiding the social dangers of a truly free labour market (in which competition between unorganized workers might have had the same effect) by limiting workers' movements. Kitchener-having congratulated himself with a truly Panglossian capacity for self-delusion that 'increased prosperity, which is the result of careful administration, has been so equally divided throughout the entire population that it is not too much to say that there is hardly a poor man in the Sudan'-gives an idea of the role the Bureau actually played in relation to wages:

The work of the Labour Bureau has chiefly been directed towards securing the cooperation of all employers of labour in obtaining a fair rate of wage paid for unskilled labourers. The board has adopted this policy in the conviction that the laws of supply and demand cannot operate effectively until the minimum rate of wage bears a reasonable ratio to the cost of living. The rate at present has been reduced to three piastres per diem.49

The Labour Bureau was entirely refounded in 1920-21 and placed under the chairmanship of the Director of Agriculture. This reorganization coincided with the sudden upsurge in demand for labour caused by large-scale dam building and canalization work. Nor was this the end of the ups and downs in the existence of the Labour Bureau (or Board, or Committee, as it was variously known). It was to be reconstituted in 1936 and, having again more or less ceased to operate, revived once more in 1945. After this date it was chaired by the Civil

47 Sudan 1931. The section quoted, referring to Khartoum, continues: 'Labour was plentiful throughout the year, and the rate for casual labour actually fell as low as three piastres per diem. Many domestic servants were thrown out of work, and the opportunity was taken to revise the rates of pay for servants engaged through the servants' registry and put them on a more reasonable basis.' 48 Sudan 1905. 49 Sudan 1911. [Emphasis added.]

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Secretary and included the Governor of Blue Nile province, the Director of Agriculture, the Director of Medical Services, the General Manager of the Sudan Railways and the Labour Officer, who acted as secretary.50

Interestingly, the early 1920s also saw something of a swing back to a policy of immigration, as an immediate solution to the problems caused by soaring demand for labour. Already in 1921, more than half those employed at Makwar were Egyptian. The wage levels commanded by immigrants from the Sudan's northern neighbour and nominal co-dominus being held to be excessive, there was a renewal in interest to the Fellata, with schemes for direct recruitment in Nigeria apparently being dreamt up, albeit to little or no avail. At this time, Fellata were also considered suitable material for agricultural labour in the Gezira and in Gedaref.51

Before concluding this section and moving on to examine the sea-change which took place in the period immediately following World War II, a word must be said about the usefulness of the FO records as a source in the pre-war period. As of around 1920, although the Labour Bureau's files are not part of the FO records as such, a good deal more statistical information relating to labour does begin to filter through. One example of this is the Annual Intelligence Report for 1923,52 which gives a schedule of average wages for unskilled labour, province by province (see Table I), and a brief analysis of these figures may not be without relevance to our overall discussion. The daily rates quoted vary widely, ranging from 17 milliemes (Mongala Province) to 87 milliemes (Red Sea Province), which would seem to suggest a highly segmented labour market. This would be what one would expect in a country where communications even with the development of the railways that had taken place up to 1923, remained extremely poor, preventing supply and demand for labour (and hence wage rates) from evening out nationwide. This was compounded by political factors: the Passports and Permits Ordinance of 1922, part of the Sudan government's policy of Indirect Rule, created so-called 'closed districts' covering the whole of the south, which severely limited possibilities for southerners to travel north in search of work.

However, there are a number of other elements to be factored in which may temper our initial assumption. Firstly, it should be pointed out that labour was not entirely immobile. Indeed, the Three Towns acted as a 'labour reservoir', providing labour (voluntary or drafted) for the Makwar Dam, the Gezira

50 The Labour Board's functions, as defined in 1936, were: '(1) To act in an advisory capacity to the government in all questions of labour, whether local labour or imported labour. (2) Though not directly executive, to initiate through the proper channels such measures as are considered necessary, subject to the Governor- General's approval, and to secure that the same are carried out. (3) To be represented in any negotiations on labour questions between the Sudan Government and other parties, and to be consulted by all governors of provinces and heads of departments of the Sudan Government and the Sudan Defence Force before any action is taken such as may affect the general level of wages or the supply of labour. (4) To call for any information on the subject of labour and to invite the attendance of members of the public and of other administrations at their meetings. (5) To co-opt other officials of the Sudan Government as temporary members.' See the Civil Secretary's Circular No. CS/37 Al of 8 November 1936, quoted by Fawzi, Labour Movement, p. 25. 5' Daly, Empire on the Nile, pp. 440-441. 52 In FO0371/10039.

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Table I. Average daily wage for unskilled labour, 1923, by province

Province Wage (in milliemes)

Red Sea 87 Blue Nile 65 Kassala 62 Khartoum 60 White Nile 57 Berber 47 Halfa 47 Kordafan 45 Upper Nile 40 Fung 36 Dongola 33 Darfur 30 Nuba Mountains 28 Bahr Al-Ghazal 22 Mongala 17

Source: Sudan Annual Intelligence Report, 1923.

scheme, the Nile-Red Sea railway, Port Sudan docks and so on.53 Secondly, the figures in the 1923 Intelligence Report appear to include labourers not only in industry, construction and commerce but also in agriculture, where wages fluctuated widely with the agricultural cycle (rising rapidly, for example, towards the end of the cotton harvest), possibly pushing up annual averages for some areas. In this connection, it is worth noting that in most areas when labour was short in the countryside a certain number of workers from the local towns would undertake seasonal work in the fields, having a knock-on effect on urban labour supply and wages.54 Finally, it was common practice, especially in rural areas and with temporarily employed nomads, to pay part of the wage in kind,55 making real wages harder to calculate and cash wages harder to compare.

What do these observations imply, from a sociological point of view? It would seem that the movements of labour that did take place must, to some extent, have thrown ex-slaves and free men, members of different tribes, Sufi tarTqas and even language groups and religions, together in similar conditions of existence. This might be expected to have hastened the breakdown of traditional consciousness and, perhaps, to have contributed to the emergence of a new form of consciousness based on class. The Three Towns, in order to fulfil their role as a labour reservoir, had drawn in people from the Northern Sudan, Darfur

53 McLoughlin, 'Labour market conditions and wages in the Three Towns'. 54 For example, in 1945, when the supply of agricultural labour in Kassala Province grew short, putting pressure on the urban labour market, wages in the towns rose and urban workers were emboldened: 'There were no serious stoppages or strikes, but there have been certain manifestations of restlessness and demands for higher wages, especially in the building trade'. See Sudan 1945. 55 Bedouin working on the Suakin-Berber railway in 1903, for example, received a five-piastre daily wage plus free rations costing about two piastres.

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and West Africa, their population growing from 81,880 in 1904 to 202,381 in 1930; Port Sudan attracted Beja tribesmen as well as people from Kassala, Khartoum and even the opposite shore of the Red Sea.56 Seasonal work in the countryside by urban-based workers might be assumed to have run counter to this process, as far as the shaping of workers' consciousness is concerned, keeping alive the link with the land, traditional society and the old attitudes.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the continuing link between town and country apparently did not always have the effect of holding back urban workers' consciousness of themselves as workers.57 The first recorded strike in the Sudan dates back to as early as 1903, when workers from the Forestry Department downed tools in protest at working conditions. The Forestry workers struck again in 1907, as did Egyptian employees of the Nile steamers (over pay) and child labourers on the Fadlab estate in Berber. Isolated, spontaneous strikes and protests such as these occurred regularly up until World War I: government clerical workers petitioned their employers over pay and conditions in 1908; workers on a government-owned farm at Kamlin struck over pay in 1909 and, despite their dismissal, another strike took place at the same farm the following year; in 1912 and 1913, workers at Port Sudan and on the Erkowit earthworks downed tools.

After World War I, the same pattern was resumed, but from this point on the stakes appear gradually to have been raised. In October 1919, employees of the Egyptian government in Atbara and Wadi Halfa went on strike, and with Egypt in the throws of revolution, the Sudan government responded by mobilizing British and Egyptian troops. In 1920, there was a threat of strike action by the railway workers at Atbara over a new grading system, and the following year 108 workers in the Khartoum railway workshops actually did strike. Unrest continued at Atbara until the revolution of 1924, when a two-day strike occurred there. By then, the White Flag League appears to have established a clandestine workers' section, and during the tumultous events of 1924 there was an attempt to call a strike of Posts and Telegraphs officials and a brief strike by Postal and Customs clerks in Port Sudan in protest at the arrest of a colleague who was a leader of the White Flag.

The upheavals of 1924 were followed by a decade of almost complete calm

56 Unfortunately, there is little or no data in the sources consulted on the crucial case of Atbara. 57 The following outline of pre-1946 labour unrest draws mainly on Beshir, Revolution and Nationalism (pp. 190-193), whose information is largely drawn from Security Intelligence Reports in the Sudan Government Archive, Khartoum. Beshir attributes the earliest strikes-at least those prior to World War I-to primary resistance. True enough, they seem to have been more or less spontaneous manifestations of protest, with no organization or clearly conceived political programme behind them. But it would seem to me that the term 'primary resistance' does not fully describe the phenomenon, in that the strike is (for want of a better word) a thoroughly 'modern' form of protest, enacted by a social group called into being by colonialism, rather than the instinctive revolt of the 'traditional' society against the process of colonialization. Space prohibits a full discussion of the issues raised here, but such a discussion would certainly be interesting and may present some interesting parallels with the debate over the first recorded mass strike in Egypt (the Port Said coalheavers strike of 1882) which has involved, over almost two decades, such scholars as Gabriel Baer, Beinin and Lockman, Juan Cole and Zayn Al-Abidin Najm. For a summary, see Ellis Goldberg's contribution on 'The Social History of Egyptian Labor' in Goldberg (ed.), The Social History of Labour, pp. 163-192.

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on the labour front, with the possible exception of a strike by Gordon College students in 1931 against a proposed cut of 30% in graduates' starting salaries as part of Retrenchment. In 1934, however, 200 workers at the Jabal Aulia dam site came out on strike over wages, and Egyptian workers at the same site also struck in 1936.58 In the same year, a five-day strike of Sudanese tram drivers and conductors took place in Khartoum. In 1938, there were strikes by ginnery workers and labourers at the Port Sudan dockyard. This trend (it would perhaps be anachronistic to speak of a movement) continued unabated well into World War II: in 1940, labour unrest was reported in the Gezira, Kassala and Northern Province; in 1941, there were strikes in Khartoum, at Trinkitat near Port Sudan, at the Irrigation Department in the Gezira and at a button factory in Atbara; in 1942, 600 contract workers struck in Kassala, as did labourers in Bahr El Ghazal and Juba, workers of the Public Works Department in Khartoum, workers at Gordon's Tree and railway workers near Khartoum. There was even a sit-down strike by a company of the Frontier Battalion of the Sudan Defence Force in Libya, in protest at the cancellation of leave.

It is most remarkable, however, that these events have left very little trace in the FO Records. The early Forestry Department strikes did find their way into the Annual Reports for 1903 and 1907, while the 1912 Report mentions strikes at Port Sudan. A dispatch of 192459 records that at Atbara on the early morning of 10 August, 'the men [of the Egyptian Railways Battalion] proceeded to the workshops [and] intimidated the workmen then coming in the shops' and that 'practically all the civilian staff, artisans and clerks, returned to work on the morning of the twelfth'-but carefully avoids using the word 'strike' in relation to the incident. The only explicit reference to a strike in the dispatch concerns the action taken by 'two (!) Post Office employees' in Port Sudan. In 1926, an Intelligence Report (again, not present in the FO Records) warned that there were signs

of an agitation amongst artisans and others employed in European industrial and business firms, which may be interpreted as an incipient labour movement ... A statement of grievances, intended for publication in the Vernacular Press, contained ... specific demands ... for a share in profits in addition to good wages, annual holidays, sickness benefit, and gratuities upon dismissal.60

It would appear, therefore, that there was concern about, and active interest in, labour unrest on the part of the authorities in the Sudan from at least the mid- 1920s, but that at this stage their concern was not sufficiently great for it to be systematically communicated to London, as would be the case as of 1946. True

58 It is of note that the first strike at Jabal Aulia-if not others-was an offensive strike, in support of a pay claim, despite the effects of the Depression, which might normally have been assumed to be unfavourable to this type of action. 59 Khartoum to FO, 21/8/1924, in F0371/10053. The dispatch in question is concerned chiefly with the military revolt and contains the comments of the acting Sirdar, the acting General Manager of the Sudan Railways and the acting Director of Intelligence. 60 Security Intelligence Report No. 6 28/8/1926, quoted in Muhammad Nuri El-Amin, 'The impact of the Sudanese Unionists on Sudanese Communism', Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (1986), pp. 418-434.

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enough, some documents from 1924 remain unavailable to this day, but this alone cannot explain the relative absence of reports of labour unrest from the FO Records until after World War II. The fact that the sporadic, isolated nature of workers' protests and strikes before the war meant that the Sudan government was not confronted with a labour movement as such seems to have made it possible for Khartoum if not to ignore such manifestations of discontent at least to feel that they were not something His Majesty's Government need be troubled with.

The Birth of the Sudanese Labour Movement

(i) 1946-1948

I have no real evidence or even partial evidence to connect these labour troubles with any special foreign agency, but I don't believe they occur by themselves and are not guided or encouraged by someone. Personally, I suspect the Communists ... I don't agree that the Workers' Affairs Association would have stayed so happily together without quarrelling for more than a year-Sudanese can usually never co-operate for more than a few days-nor organise their associations so well as to carry out a 100% strike over such a widespread system as our Railways unless there was something more than this committee behind the strikers.

It has been suggested that one or two of the British railwaymen at Atbara may be communist and that they are organising the whole business ... I have sent a special British Police Officer to Atbara to make enquiries.

Civil Secretary J. W. Robertson, 14/2/194861

One might be forgiven on the basis of the two existing full-length works on the Sudanese working class (and even on the basis of the FO records) for believing that the country's extremely militant labour movement was created more or less ex nihilo in 1946. In reality, as we have seen, the storm of labour protest which broke in 1946 did not come out of a clear blue sky; on the contrary, there had been numerous precedents over the preceding decades. However, 1946 does represent a historic turning point: then it was that the Sudanese workers truly entered the stage of history, giving their aspirations an organized form for the first time,62 and for this reason the present paper also takes 1946 as its central 61 Letter to the Sudan Agent, London, in F0371/69235. 62 None the less, even before World War II, the first steps towards organizing workers were quietly being taken. Workers' clubs, initially concerned with cultural and social issues, were set up in Atbara in 1934 and Khartoum in 1935. It was from the Technical School Old Boys' Club at Atbara that the Workers' Affairs Association, the Sudan's first real trade union, was born on 29 June 1946. Some mention should also be made of the Graduates General Congress, founded in 1938, which Daly and Holt describe as 'implicitly a trade union' (A History of the Sudan, p. 145). While it is certainly true that professional associations of clerical staff in some countries have indeed evolved into bona fide trade unions (Britain's CPSA, which started out as a rather tame professional association, is a case in point, to categorize the Congress as such seems to me anachronistic. Much separated Sudanese civil service clerks from manual workers at that time: clerks' salaries, which were higher than in other Middle Eastern countries, were 'frequently up to three, four or even five times the wage of the artisan or fifteen or twenty times the basic wage of the labourer' (Sudan Government, Report of the Independent Committee of Inquiry (Khartoum, 1948), quoted by Fawzi, Labour Movement, pp. 134-135); their social status and almost certainly their subjective class outlook also set them apart from even the highest paid skilled worker.

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demarcation line. In order to understand something of the reasons for this sea- change, a brief glance at the economic developments occasioned by the war may prove useful

Although the Sudan was only briefly and very partially a theatre of conflict itself, the war waged by the British Empire affected the country's economy very profoundly. Under the aegis of the Middle East Supply Centre in Cairo, one of the first and most important tasks required of the Sudan government was to achieve as great a measure of self-sufficiency as possible in order to save vital shipping space. Strict controls were therefore introduced on both imports and exports. There were some-very limited-experiments in import substitution in the fields of tanning, canning, glass and perfume, while the British Portland Cement Company set up a cement works in Atbara as early as 1939. Expansion of services and infrastructure, and indeed much routine maintenance, was suspended until after the war, although the railway network did undergo some war-related expansion (less than 150 km in all).

Concurrently, a complex system of price controls, rationing and subsidies developed. A Price Stabilization Reserve (in effect a tax on producers) was built up, but 'reserve' rather than 'price stabilization' seemed to be the operative word, since far more was accumulated than was actually spent on subsidies. Although administrative measures undoubtedly did curb price rises to some extent, at least in the legal market, inflationary pressures inevitably built up and soon began to make themselves felt. Government employees, whose wages had been frozen since the general wage settlement of 1935, were probably hit hardest, despite the war bonus of 1942 and the Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) accorded to state employees in 1943. Food prices, notably that of durra, the staple for most low-income Sudanese, rose massively over the years. The last two years of war, during which severe shortages occurred and prices shot up, were particularly harsh: food prices, having risen 35% over their 1938 level by 1943, stood fully 71% higher in 1945.

On the other hand, the war drastically changed conditions in the world market for the Sudan's main export, cotton. Production and prices recovered rapidly, and in 1943 a contract with Britain's Ministry of Supply Cotton Control guaranteed the sale of the Sudan's entire output until one year after the war had ended. Although the export price for cotton was at the same time fixed at a favourable rate for the British government (again, a hidden tax on producers, who were forced to sell well below world prices), tenants' profits rose very significantly, not to mention the dividends of British shareholders in the Gezira Scheme. Thus, despite the abolition of the Egyptian grant to the Sudan in 1941 and a cash gift to Britain and India of E?300,000 early in the war, Sudan government revenues increased steadily throughout the war, enabling Khartoum to build up a very substantial General Reserve Fund, as well as similar funds for cotton production and the railways.

As regards the labour market, migration from the west combined with administrative restrictions kept wages generally low during the first two or three years of the war. But as the war dragged on, expansion of the railways, road

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Table II. Cost of living indices, 1944-49, for Sudanese with monthly incomes of under ?E12

(1938= 100)

31 December 1994 160.4 31 December 1945 170.2 31 December 1946 183.4 31 December 1947 229.3 31 December 1948 288.7 31 December 1949 307.0

Note: The rising price of durra is estimated to account for 75% of the total increase.

Source. Sudan 1949.

building, increased food production and military recruitment led to increased demand for labour, with some competition developing between Khartoum contractors and farmers in the Gezira, where a severe labour shortage occurred in 1942.63 In the south, recourse was again made to forced labour in payment of taxes, sometimes to the detriment of cultivation, while the phenomenon of labour migration from the south to the north began to develop.

Such conditions-together with the perspective of demobilizing thousands of members of the Sudan Defence Force and, perhaps, the general vogue for economic planning born in Britain during the war years-must have helped to stimulate renewed administrative interest in organizing the labour market as a whole towards the end of the war. The Labour Board was once more revived in May 1945 and retired governor of Khartoum province E. H. Macintosh was appointed to the new post of Labour Officer, who acted as ex officio secretary of the Board.

In the years immediately following World War II, demand for cotton remained high and the prices it commanded continued to rise. With price controls and rationing being dismantled rather more swiftly than in post-war Britain,64 the genie of inflation, which had to some extent been kept bottled up during the war, was unleashed with full force (see Table II). The other side of the coin was that rising cotton prices meant huge increases in government revenues from customs duties. With the extraordinarily high reserves it had built up during the war to cushion it, the Sudan government felt confident enough to launch the first five-year development programme in 1946, with plans for expansion in agriculture and irrigation, roads, railways posts and telegraphs as well as health and education. Demand for labour continued to boom.

Overall, then, World War II and the immediate post-war years saw rising

63 In other provinces, however, the social effects of Fellata immigration were so feared that often brutal measures were taken to discourage it, including on occasion the burning of villages. See Daly, Imperial Sudan, pp. 190-192. In the same pages, Daly also illustrates the extreme brutality sometimes used in impressing southern labour. 64 Ibid., p. 312. Price controls were lifted on durra in 1946 under the pressure of merchants' protests. Controls on the retail price of sugar were abolished in 1948, with the result that it soon reached twice the pre-war level.

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demand for labour and, it would seem, an absolute rise in the numbers of wage labourers. But with most wage-earners employed by the government and its various branches, and with the absence of workers' organizations preventing any semblance of collective bargaining, there was at the same time a decline- which in many cases must have proved catastrophic for the individuals concerned-in real wages, as inflation more than cancelled out any exceptional bonuses granted by the state. It was into-or perhaps rather out of-this situation that the Sudanese labour movement was born.

The initial reaction of the Sudan government to the emergence of the country's first trade union-the Workers' Affairs Association of the Sudan Railways workers at Atbara-was one of shock. Thoroughly accustomed by now to the Sudanese as labourers, the idea of Sudanese labourers organizing and taking concerted action as a class had apparently hardly occurred to British officialdom. From the outset, labour militancy was regarded as something exogenous, the consequence of 'half-truths, rumours and the tongues of agitators and less responsible self-government advocates, fanned by unveiled propaganda and attractive promises by the Egyptians';65 or perhaps the Ashigga,66 or then again maybe the Communists.67 Increasingly, it was the latter who came under suspicion, and there is a wealth of material on Communist activities in the FO records, including some very detailed police reports.68 Despite a number of irritating gaps (some of which, one hopes, may soon be filled) due to documents being closed for fifty years or withheld in the department of origin, there is plenty of scope for research here.69

But Civil Secretary Sir James Robertson's quest for British Communists pulling the WAA's strings70 proved fruitless. Although one of the earliest

65 M. T. Audsley (Labour Attache, British Embassy, Cairo), 'Notes of my visit to the Sudan, 25th February to 15th March 1946', 30/4/1946, in F0371/53252. 66 'It was apparent that this ... resistance ... was due to the activities of a small number of workers at Atbara, led by a chargehand named Suleiman Mousa ... It was agreed between us ... that his political sympathies (Ashigga Party) would doubtless have some influence on his persistency, that he was a 'live wire' and that undoubtedly he had the support of a large percentage of the workers'. M. T. Audsley, 'Notes on my visit to Sudan from 10th to 20th March 1947 inclusive', 2/4/1947, in F0371/63088. 67 Already in 1926, it had been concluded that 'the phraseology used [in the workers' statements of demands] easily betrays a foreign source of inspiration. It is probable that these ideas, hitherto foreign to the native mind, have been spread through contact with Greek and Italian artisans, who may be assumed to have learned the language of socialism in their own countries. The discontent created by the unintelligent absorption of such ideas is likely to produce suitable material for the Bolshevik agitation with which the country is threatened'. Security Intelligence Report No. 6, 1926, quoted in Muhammad Nuri El-Amin, 'The impact of the Sudanese Unionists on Sudanese Communism'. However, as El-Amin points out, the Intelligence Department themselves were well aware that the Greek and Italian communities were firmly anti-Communist. 68 Among the most interesting are: Huddleston's report on 'Communism in the Sudan' (1947) in F0371/63082; police memo on the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation (3/2/1949) and a police report again entitled 'Communism in the Sudan' (10/10/1949) in F0371/73471; a further police report of 1950 providing amendments and additions to the latter in F0371/80352. 69 Ervand Abrahamian's Iran Between the Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), and Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) stand as examples of the way in which this type of data may be used by the political historian. It may, for example, be possible to tabulate the ages, social origins, previous political activities, etc. of the earliest Sudanese Communists on the basis of the FO material. 70 See epigraph to this section.

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Communist groups in the Sudan was indeed organized by a young British serviceman named Herbert Storey during the 1940s, his influence was basically restricted to Gordon College students. In 1946, the Storey group merged with the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation (SMNL), which had grown out of the 'Umm Durman group of Sudanese students in Egypt (after the journal of the same name), set up by Henri Curiel's Egyptian Movement for National Liberation (Haditu) in 1944.7' But it should be noted that the first SMNL leaflets to come to the attention of the police in Atbara, the heart of the railwaymen's agitation, were distributed in September 1947, more than a year after the movement began.72 For all the Sudanese Communist Party's later attempts to take all the credit for establishing the labour movement in the Sudan, the absence of Communist influence at the very beginning of the movement is in fact borne out by the testimony of the Party's General Secretary Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub, who had joined the SMNL as a student in Cairo. While on trial in 1959, Mahjub recalled:

I took advantage of the first vacation to come back to the Sudan and offer my humble knowledge and experience to the people. I remember, in pride, that the most important among the things I participated in was helping the Sudanese working class build its organizations in 1947. I was in Atbara for some time during that year when the Railway Workers' Affairs Association ... was being formed.73

In fact, the founding document of the WAA and its first letter requesting recognition from management-dated 16 July 1946-bear no sign of Communist influence and indeed seem 'moderate' in tone almost to the point of servility. They make no mention whatsoever of the strike weapon, let alone threatening to use it, explicitly exclude any political aims, and lay great stress on 'securing permission from the appropriate authorities' and 'meticulous care to avoid any action likely to cause the management any inconvenience or trouble'.74

But the sudden upsurge of the labour movement had causes far more real than 'agitators' sought at every turn by the Sudan government. First and foremost among these, I would argue, are the intense economic pressures to which Sudanese workers found themselves subjected during and immediately after the war. But this was undoubtedly not the only cause. Tens of thousands of Sudanese had seen active service abroad in the Sudan Defence Force during the war,75 and had been able to observe great changes in labour relations in

71 In 1956, the SMNL became the Sudanese Communist Party. On the role of Curiel's group in establishing the SMNL, see Muhammad Nuri El-Amin, 'The role of the Egyptian Communists in introducing the Sudanese to Communism in the 1940s', International Journal of Middle East Studies, 19 (1987), pp. 433-454, and also Gilles Perrault, A Man Apart. The Life of Henri Curiel (London: Zed Books, 1987), pp. 131-133. 72 'Note on Communism in the Sudan', Secretariat (Khartoum) to all Provincial Governors, District Commis- sioners and Heads of Departments, 16/2/1949, in F0371/73471. 73 Quoted by Taha, The Sudanese Labor Movement, p. 73. [Emphasis added.] 74 Quoted by Fawzi, Labour Movement, pp. 38-42. 75 Two or three thousand had learned a trade in the SDF-drivers, fitters, telegraphists and so on. Interestingly, Niblock suggests that 'some of those most active in the trade union movement in the late 1940s were demobilized soldiers (and specifically those who had obtained a technical training while in the army)'. See his Class and Power, p. 112.

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other colonial and semi-colonial countries. Egypt in particular had witnessed a huge strike wave, reaching almost insurrectionary proportions, from late 1945 to mid-1946.76 Closer to home, a 'strike' by the 25,000 Gezira tenants in June 1946 in support of their demand that the Gezira reserve fund be paid out to them may also have provided an object lesson in militant action. To these factors should be added the intransigence of the Sudan government and the Sudan Railways management, who refused to recognize the WAA until July 1947. By then a demonstration of railworkers in Atbara had been broken up and their leaders arrested, provoking a strike over the whole network that lasted ten days-the country's first ever national strike and a major turning point in Sudanese labour history.

If Communists soon came to play a leading role in the Sudan Railway Workers' Union (the WAA's successor) and the Sudan Workers' Trade Union Federation, I would suggest that it was in large measure due to the fact that they were seen as the most militant group, and the need for militancy was a lesson learnt by a great many Sudanese worker-activists above all through their own experience. The nascent Sudanese Communist Party may not have played the instrumental role in establishing the Sudan's first trade union that it later claimed, but its student activists found a receptive audience among the railwaymen. Mustafa Al-Sayid, another student who had joined the SMNL in Cairo, made a number of visits to Atbara during his vacations, and recruited a group of cadres among the railway workers, among them Qasim Amin and Al- Shafi Ahmad Al-Shaykh,77 who became key members of both the Party and the trade union. It is particularly noteworthy that Communist influence in the trade union movement was exercised by recruitment from within, rather than by imposing non-worker leadership from without. Unlike many other Arab trade unions, the Sudanese labour movement was led from the outset by workers, not notables.

The Sudan government rapidly found itself in a quandry-whether to use the velvet glove or the mailed fist in order to check this new movement. As the WAA, having finally won recognition, prepared to strike over a wage claim in January 1948, with the possibility of sympathy strikes of Sudan Light and Power and Egyptian Irrigation Department workers, a telegram from the Civil Secretary's Office to the Sudan Agent in London expressed the dilemma:

76 On the upheavals in Egypt during this period, see Beinin and Lockman, Workers on the Nile, pp. 335-344. Perrault gives a vivid account of Curiel's role in particular in A Man Apart. 77 Qasim Amin became an Executive Officer of the Sudan Railway Workers' Union (SRWU) and one of the few full-time professional trade union organizers in the country, and also stood unsuccessfully for the SCP in Atbara in the elections which preceded independence. Al-Shafi Ahmad al-Shaykh, a skilled worker in the Atbara workshops and a founder-member of the WAA, was elected to the Executive Committee of the SRWU in 1948, and became its General Secretary in 1950. Later that year, he was elected General Secretary of the newly created Sudan Workers' Trade Union Federation, a post he held for many years. He went on to become Vice President of the World Federation of Trade Unions and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions. In 1964, he briefly held office as Minister of State in the government which emerged from Sudan's 'October Revolution'. A prime example of the Gramscian 'organic intellectual of the Party', he was executed in 1971 following a failed coup supported by the SCP.

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Strike is of course illegal and all strikers liable to conviction under Section 143 of Sudan Penal Code, but it is difficult to estimate whether prosecution of leaders would increase their popularity or discredit them and lessen chances of another strike ... Can you give me advice on this as public opinion here would probably support strong line.78

A few days later the Governor-General took a similar view:

Legally all strikers could be prosecuted under Sec. 143 ... Such a proposition might precipitate a further strike and we are considering whether it would be advisable to risk this now or to prepare for a show down later on.79

While it was the velvet glove which was chosen in the end, the underlying attitude of the Sudan government towards unions in general, even once they had become an accomplished fact, remained one of thinly veiled hostility for a number of years. Saad Ed Din Fawzi attributes the government's reluctance to recognize the WAA essentially to its desire to implement its own scheme for consultative works committees,80 supposedly leading at a later stage to the formation of trade unions once workers had gained sufficient experience. How- ever, the general tenor of government statements and memos of those early years reveals a rather different attitude. 'Experience has proved that where the majority of the workers are illiterate, the Union as an institution benefits its leaders and not the rank and file', stated a government communique of 1947.81 It is also interesting to note that even the relatively liberal Labour Attache at the British Embassy in Cairo, M. T. Audsley (of whom more later), had felt no need to make any recommendations to the Sudan government regarding the formation of trade unions when he visited the Sudan for the first time in 1946, not long after his appointment and before the creation of the WAA-despite the fact that the question had been raised with him by Sudanese newspaper editors and others.82 This visit was essentially concerned with ways of carrying through the policy of Sudanization, which was recognized by all concerned to be a political tool in Britain's struggle with the other co-dominus, Egypt. Three years later, by which time Audsley was generally playing a far more active role, he was still sometimes inclined to give ground to the Sudan government's entrenched hostility to independent labour organizations, writing for example that:

78 Telegram, Dakhlia to Sudanology, 25/1/1948, in F0371/69235. 79 Telegram, Hakiman to Sudanology, 31/1/1948, in F0371/69235. 80 In May 1946, the Labour Board had begun to discuss the possibility of setting up works committees of elected representatives of the workforce, modelled on the Whitley-Hartney councils set up in Britain during the war and directly inspired by the British Ministry of Labour's 1944 Industrial Relations Handbook. The committees were not, however, to be allowed to discuss wages or conditions of service. Furthermore, the Whitley-Hartney councils worked in conjunction with existing trade unions, whereas the planned Sudanese version seems largely to have been intended to forestall the creation of trade unions, considered a dangerous forum for nationalist agitation. See Daly, Imperial Sudan, p. 318, and Fawzi, Labour Movement, pp. 25-33. 81 Contained in Audsley's report of 2/4/1949, in F0371/63088. 82 Audsley's report of 30/3/1946, in F0371/53252. To be fair, in the same report Audsley also observed that 'it is now accepted internationally that the workers are entitled to a voice in the deliberations concerning their conditions of work etc, and the inclusion of Sudanese on the Labour Board would conform to that policy'. He also recommended the creation of a Joint Sudanization Committee in each government department, and recognized that the absence of representative workers' associations posed a problem in this respect-but only in so far as it made transmitting the administration's plans to the workforce slightly more complicated.

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... although I am an advocate of properly constituted associations of employees and workers, there may be good reasons, in the present political situation of the Sudan, why formal Associations (Trade Unions as regards workers) should not be operated in respect of officials.83

Very soon, however, the Sudan government found itself forced to make concessions. But neither concessions nor repression seemed to be able to stem the tide once the movement had gathered momentum.

(ii) 1948-1956

You will, of course, appreciate that the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions have a special interest in these matters, not only through their desire to assist us in a peaceful settlement of our difficulties with the Trade Union Federation and its leaders, but also in view of their own desire to get a footing in the Sudanese trade union movement. I think we should all agree that increased ICFTU influence in the Sudan would be a welcome development to counter the growth of WFTU influence. It would also help us in our efforts to get the trade union movement into our camp before independence day. Although our hopes in that direction are rather dim at present, the recent interest of the ICFTU in African affairs does perhaps open up a possible new approach.

Draft letter, F. C. Mason (Foreign Office) to P. J. Sandison, Sudan Government Labour Commissioner, 23/1/1952.84

By 1948, British officialdom's chief interest in labour, as expressed in the FO archives, was with the political, rather than the economic, aspects of the question. Accordingly, the main emphasis of this section will be upon politics. Before addressing ourselves to this, however, the habitual summary of economic developments may still prove useful.

The exponential growth in world demand and prices for cotton that began during the war continued in the late 1940s and early 1950s. At the same time, the gum trade, which unlike cotton had been seriously disrupted by the war, recovered. With the country's main exports flourishing, an unprecedented boom took place in the Sudanese economy, with government revenue and expenditure soaring to equally unprecedented levels. Revenue in the 1951-52 fiscal year was fully ten times higher than the immediate pre-war level, and three times that of 1948. On this basis, a second five-year development plan, even more ambitious than the first, was drawn up for the 1951-56 period. The plan included projects in a wide range of fields, including communications (chiefly the railways and roads, but also posts, telegraphs, the telephone system and the creation of Sudan Airways), primary production (chiefly expansion of rural water supplies and cotton-related projects in the Gezira and elsewhere), industrial development,

83 Audsley's report of 2/4/1949, in F0371/63088. 84 Contained in F0371/90230. In the version actually sent to Sandison, the words 'into our camp' were replaced with the more anodyne (and less ambitious) 'organized on a sound footing'.

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education, health and social services (under which title the Sudan's first census was included), electricity and administration.

Obviously, the expansion of the railways is of particular interest for our purposes. As of 1952, the Gezira railway was extended from Sennar up the Blue Nile to Al-Damazin, in order to serve a new irrigation scheme at Kanana. In 1955, work began on extending the line from El Obeid to Nyala in Darfur. Neither line was completed until after independence, but the second five-year plan (which included the construction of Khartoum airport and some extension of the road network) nevertheless marks the first major expansion of communications since the 1920s. Industrial development, on the other hand, remained feeble, accounting for just 3% of planned investment under the second plan. The only significant industrial project to be carried out under the plan was a cotton mill. In agriculture, it is of note that the wartime trend towards crop diversification was reversed, and King Cotton resumed its throne.

With the economy now awash with cash (albeit extremely unevenly distributed), inflation continued to spiral out of control. At the same time, the cotton boom sucked in imports (in particular cotton piece goods and refined sugar) in ever increasing quantities-between 1946 and 1955, the nominal value of the Sudan's import bill more than quadrupled. Consequently, foreign exchange reserves began to be depleted as of 1951. Meanwhile, development projects devised in the years immediately preceding independence (concentrating once more on cotton growing) began to rely very heavily on foreign loans, to the extent that 'by 1955, the Sudanese public were in fact living on credit'.85

For our purposes, in any case, the basic picture for the period between 1948 and independence is very much a continuation of that for the preceding period, characterized by high inflation and continually expanding demand for labour. By 1955, according to the census of that year, there were just under 350,000 'urban labourers' in the Sudan, or approximately 9% of the active population. The crucial difference with the situation in 1946, however, was that by the early 1950s large swathes of the workforce had been unionized-around 100,000 by 1953, in over 100 unions-and were thus better able to defend living standards by means of collective action.

Faced with this burgeoning movement, the Sudan's British rulers had little choice but to develop a new manner of dealing with labour activism-the new unions were there now and could not be wished away, and repression on the scale necessary to crush the movement seemed out of the question. What Audsley called the 'new conceptions of industrial relations' involved granting unions recognition while making efforts to channel their not inconsiderable energies and even coopt them. Above all, no effort was to be spared in countering Communist influence in the movement.

This change of strategy was thus in large part forced on the Sudan government by the inescapable realities of the situation. These objective pressures also happened to dovetail with the new line at the Foreign Office, where Ernest Bevin

85 Daly, Imperial Sudan, p. 317.

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had taken over as Foreign Secretary following the election of the Labour government in April 1946. Indeed, the 'new conceptions' of labour relations seem to flow from the new thinking on the Empire as a whole that was in the ascendancy during this period. For all the anti-imperialist sentiments of a significant part of the British labour movement, Bevin had no intention of disbanding Britain's Empire (and his successor Herbert Morrison had, if anything, even less). On the contrary, with the British economy staggering under the weights of its war debts, payable in dollars, the Labour government perceived a need to 'develop' the resources of British overseas possessions as rapidly as possible. Bevin himself was 'a strong advocate of colonial development, which I regard as more vital than ever now', given the need 'to produce the raw materials in short supply in the United States'.86 The Labour government was, however, adamant that a new formula for Britain's 'mission' needed to be found, involving measures for the economic and social betterment of the colonial masses, if Britain's interests in the regions under its sway were to be preserved and Communist expansion blocked-a policy very much shaped by Colonial Secre- tary Arthur Creech Jones, who, like Bevin, began his political life in the British trade union movement and had been the Fabian Colonial Bureau's principal spokesman in parliament. In opposition at least, Creech Jones had argued that the emergence of trade unions and indeed the occurrence of strikes should be seen as normal manifestations of labour relations in the colonies, rather than as anomalies and 'disturbances'. Fabian colonial labour policy had its limitations, however. As a Fabian pamphlet (quoting Sidney Webb as Colonial Secretary in the 1929-31 Labour government) put it:

There is a danger that, without sympathetic supervision and guidance, organizations of labourers without experience of combination for any social or economic purpose may fall under the domination of disaffected persons, by whom their activities may be diverted to improper and mischievous ends.87

In the specific case of the Sudan, Bevin on taking office was particularly frustrated with the Sudan government's 'outmoded view of the role of empire'.88 Meanwhile, the Empire-wide fear of Communism was coupled with a need to counter Egyptian aspirations to hegemony in the Nile valley. Bevin was thus particularly disturbed by reports of strikes in the Sudan that were filtering through to him by 1948, leading him to demand in person that proper concili- ation machinery be set up to prevent the Communists or Egyptians exploiting continuing labour unrest.89 Furthermore, his frustration with Khartoum's initial reaction to the upsurge of the labour movement soon rubbed off on some if not all of the FO civil servants in London: in 1948, G. L. McDermott at the FO's Sudan desk observed, on the basis of reports from Audsley, that the Sudan government was not only far too slow off the mark as far as labour relations

86 Minute to Atlee, 7/7/1947, in F0371/62557. 87 W. Bowen, Colonial Trade Unions (Fabian Research Series No. 167) (London: Fabian Publications, 1954), p. 4. 88 Telegram to Atlee, 10/11/1946, in F0371/53259. 89 Minute by McDermott, 23/3/1948, in F0371/69235.

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were concerned but 'too inclined to use the mailed fist in the old-fashioned manner'.90

As the Sudan moved towards independence, the new conceptions were further refined and gradually became the more or less generally accepted British 'line'. In 1955, T. E. Bradley of the FO gave perhaps the most advanced expression of the new policy when he wrote that:

Our view in general is that the real answer to Communism is not legislation but a healthy social, political and economic system which will: (a) provide outlets for the energies and ambitions of the effendi class, who will otherwise form the Communist cadres; and (b) remove the grievances of the masses, who may otherwise turn to the Communists for leadership.91

As independence dawned in 1956, the British Embassy in Khartoum fully recognized that 'the trade union movement in the Sudan is of great, perhaps in the long run decisive, political importance',92 although the FO's hopes of getting the Sudanese unions 'into our camp before independence day' had, of course, come to nought.

Whereas 1948 does represent a turning point in British attitudes-it was then that the Sudan government stopped simply reacting to events and began to legislate in accordance with a more or less clearly conceived strategy-British officials on the ground did not, of course, change their approach towards labour as one man in that year. Such a turnaround would have been unlikely even if the line of command had run directly from London to Khartoum, but given the fact that the Sudan government enjoyed a unique status whereby it was technic- ally answerable to the Foreign Office via the British Embassy in Cairo and maintained its own Agents in the British and Egyptian capitals to speak in its name, it is hardly surprising that it clung to its relative independence and required a good deal of chivvying to be brought round to the new way of seeing things. In 1950, the Sudan government was still provoking horror in London by threatening (at a time when the Foreign Secretary was about to embark on sensitive discussions with Egypt) to prosecute SWTUF leaders for conspiracy and sedition if they did not make written and public apologies for calling a general strike.93 It would appear, furthermore, that the Sudan Government Railways management, and in particular its General Manager Hillard (formerly of the Political Service), developed a reputation as hardliners, clinging to the old methods of rule even after Khartoum had begun to come round to London's way of thinking. In December 1950, Hillard insisted on prosecuting the WAA's successor, the Sudan Railways Workers' Union, for 'defaming' him in a circular.

On the other hand, Sir Robert Howe, a former FO civil servant who replaced

90 McDermott's notes on a typically gung-ho communication from the Civil Secretary (promising summary dismissal of ringleaders in the case of a further strike on the railways, even at the risk of provoking a prolonged conflict), in F0371/69235. 9t Letter to P. G. D. Adams, 3/2/1955, in F0371/113589. 92 Letter, Chancery of British Embassy, Khartoum, to Middle East Department Division of British Embassy, Beirut, 8/5/1956, in F0371/119703. 93 See the material on the Khor Tuggat incident in F0371/80584.

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Sir Hubert Huddleston as Governor-General on Bevin's orders in 1947, might have been expected to be more attentive to the Foreign Secretary's thinking. But Howe was brought in not to supervise labour policy but to toe London's line on negotiations with Egypt over Sudan's future, and often seems to have taken a 'tough' line on labour questions under the influence of longer-standing members of the Sudan government, notably Robertson.94 Indeed, by 1952, the Labour Adviser at the Foreign Office in London noted that:

The Sudan Agency seem rather contemptuous of the trade union movement in the Sudan ... I wonder therefore whether, if the Governor-General does not succeed in settling his labour problems, he should not be offered some technical assistance from the UK? Otherwise these strikes will recur at fortnightly intervals and may be a source of continual unrest.95

In fact, the FO seems to have got greater mileage out of less direct methods. Shrewdly, Bevin had insisted on the appointment of a labour counsellor at the British Embassy in Cairo, leading to Audsley's secondment form the British Ministry of Labour for that purpose before the end of 1946, and it was Audsley who was to become the FO's main 'trouble-shooter', as far as Sudanese labour affairs were concerned. As we have seen, his first visit to the Sudan in 1946 preceded even the creation of the WAA, but it was during this visit that he arranged to keep in touch with the Labour Officer, E. H. Macintosh. Once the movement broke out, he was able to use the contact thus established to chivvy the Sudan government along towards a concept of labour relations more in line with the current thinking at the Foreign Office. Neither was he alone in his task. After the first wave of strikes, R. Brown, an official from the British Ministry of Labour and National Service with experience of labour affairs in Britain's West African colonies, was seconded to the Sudan government as Labour Adviser, holding the post from November 1947 to April 1948. Brown was replaced as Labour Adviser in October 1948 by T. M. Cowan, another Ministry of Labour official, again with experience in West Africa but also as Labour Adviser to the Government of Jamaica from 1945 to 1948. Cowan's West Indian posting is particularly significant, labour troubles in the Carribean in the mid to late 1930s (St Kitts, Trinidad and British Guyana in 1935, Trinidad and Barbados in 1937, Jamaica in 1938) having constituted a key element in changing official British views on how best to handle labour in subject countries.96 Finally, in September

94 Even on the issue of negotiations with Egypt he seems to have failed to live up to Bevin's expectations. See Balfour-Paul, End of Empire, p. 30, in particular n. 29. 95 Notes by Labour Adviser R. D. D. Ledward, March 1952, in FO0371/97073. 96 Although Sidney Webb, as Colonial Secretary, had enjoined colonial governors to consider the establishment of trade unions a natural and legitimate consequence of industrial development as early as 1930, the 1929-31 Labour government actually seems to have had little or no effect on colonial labour policy. The post of Labour Adviser at the Colonial Office in London was first created only in 1938, and it is from the early 1940s that we see the Foreign Office appointing Labour Advisers at selected missions abroad. On the Jamaican events, see Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings. the Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and its Aftermath (the Hague: Nijhoff, 1978) and also Post's chapter on 'The politics of protest in Jamaica, 1938: some problems of analysis and conceptualization' in Robin Cohen, Peter C. W. Gutkind and Phyllis Brazier (eds), Peasants and Proletarians- the Struggles of Third World Workers (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), pp. 198-218.

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1949, a Trade Union Adviser with the brief of giving direct guidance to the Sudanese unions was appointed, in the person of D. Newman, a member of the Secretariat of Britain's National Association of Local Government Officers.

It was Brown who was largely responsible for drafting the main body of trade union and factory legislation that came into force at this time. Copies of the Workmen's Compensation Ordinance, the Employers and Employed Per- sons Ordinance, the Trade Disputes (Arbitration and Enquiry) Ordinance, the Regulation of Trade Disputes Ordinance, the Trades Union (Registration) Regulations and the Trade Unions Ordinance, all of 1948, are to be found in F0371/69236. Space prohibits a detailed summary of this corpus of legislation,97 but a few points might usefully be made at this juncture in relation to its significance.

On the one hand, the unions gained legal recognition and the standard legal immunities with regards to restraint of trade, while the right to strike, to picket peacefully and even, in theory, to organize a general strike were conceded. 'The aim of this legislation', explained Robertson, 'is to bring the Sudan into line with other countries of Africa in the matter of labour laws and to provide in particular for the establishment, development and control of trade unions on orthodox democratic lines and for the regulation of trade disputes.'98 In addition, initial attempts to prevent public service unions from affiliating to any Federation that might be set up were soon dropped. On the surface of things, at least, the ordinances therefore seem to represent a major achievement for a trade union movement that was barely two years old, and with hindsight it is perhaps hardly surprising that the boycott of the new labour relations apparatus proclaimed by the WAA soon collapsed.

On the other hand, the government's model rules and regulations for trade unions, vaunted as being 100% in accordance with union constitutions in Britain and elsewhere, of course scrupulously avoided the clauses relating to the transformation of society and the common ownership of the means of production that were to be found in the Aims and Objectives sections of many British union rule books. Another, more significant, difference with the British situation was the fact that the Sudanese labour ordinances required compulsory registration of unions in order for legal immunity to be granted, implicitly leaving open the possibility of registration being refused by the government.99 More importantly still, all public service unions (covering all Sudan government and Sudan Light and Power employees) were disbarred from affiliating to political organizations or taking any political action, and no immunity was given to public servants acting 'in breach of contract'. Thus, a fundamental ambiguity was built into the legislation-an ambiguity which seems, furthermore, to have been far from accidental. In Brown's own words:

97 The interested reader may refer to Fawzi, Labour Movement, Chapter VII. 98 Civil Secretary's explanatory note, 12/5/1948, attached to copies of various labour ordinances, in F0371/ 69199. 99 Interestingly, this was precisely the solution that had been adopted by the Wafd in relation to the Egyptian trade unions after it had been brought to power by British tanks in 1942.

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I have taken the line in drafting the Trades Union and Trades Disputes Ordinances that it is best to concede by law to the generality of workpeople the right to withhold their labour collectively in furtherance of a trade dispute, while including several safeguards ... in relation to persons coming within a wide definition of 'employed in the public services' ... I think these safeguards will be adequate, because the overwhelming majority of persons in wage-earning employment of all kinds in this country are directly employed by Government or in public utilities in which Government has a controlling interest. 00

In the final analysis, it would seem that when Robertson spoke of 'the establishment, development and control of trade unions', it was control that was uppermost in his mind.

A particular illustration of the use to which such inbuilt ambiguity could be put is the experience of the Sudan Workers' Trade Union Federation. Despite the absence of any provision in law for the registration of a federation, the SWTUF and its predecessor the Workers' Congress (1949-1950) had been accorded de facto recognition by the government, who negotiated with them on a number of occasions up to the spring of 1951. In 1950 the Congress leaders had consulted with the Trades Union Adviser, Newman, over the drafting of their constitution; Newman's proposal for a federation of government manual workers' unions only, with a loose, advisory all-union body in parallel, was rejected by the Congress leaders (who suspected an attempt to drive a wedge between public and private sector workers) in favour of their own plans for three federations of government, private sector and self-employed workers joined together under a united Executive Council."' Early in 1951, however, the government began to change tack, having lost patience with the SWTUF after a series of threatened and actual general strikes, and seen the leadership of the Federation fall easily to the Communists. It was at this point that even Audsley, who 'could not suppress the thought that they [the Federation leaders] followed far too closely the pattern of Communist infiltration laid down by the Comin- form' began to cast around for ways of clipping the SWTUF's wings:

[during discussions with representatives of the Sudan Government] I ... drew attention to certain articles in the Trades Union Ordinance with which no Federation, extremist or moderate, could comply ... The rejoinder was that the views I had expressed were against the advice given previously ... In order not to imperil the course of the threatened strike it was agreed to withhold action for the time being. It was realized however, that at the earliest convenient date the Federation should be challenged on the legal issue ... [After the only partially successful general strike of February 17, 1951] the consensus of opinion was that the prestige of the Federation had suffered heavily in the eyes of the public and among the moderate Unions and that the break-up of the Federation in its existing form was a reasonable possibility. If this happens the patience of the Government over several months will have been amply justified.02

'00 R. Brown, Confidential Report on 'The Threatened "Indefinite" Strike of the Railways', 4/3/1948, in F0371/69235. 01' Audsley, 'Report on a visit to the Sudan from 1st to 20th February 1951 inclusive', in F0371/90229.

102 Ibid. [Italics added.]

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In light of such a statement of aims, the unions' mistrust of Newman and the government in general does not seem altogether misplaced. The Federation did not, however, break up as the British had hoped. At its December 1951 congress, the SWTUF crossed its Rubicon by re-electing its imprisoned leaders and adopting a programme of non-cooperation with the colonial regime, thus further antagonizing the government which decided to take things a step further. In February 1952, the Legal Secretary declared that the right to call a general strike did not exist. Following a general strike in April of that year, the government launched a crackdown on the unions, arresting the Federation's leaders. Finally, in October, the government announced that it would no longer recognize the SWTUF. For all the 'new thinking', the Federation found itself back at square one.

Aside from legislation, the government's strategy also involved actively fostering 'moderate' elements within the movement itself-one happy consequence of which, for the labour historian at least, is a wealth of material on the ups and downs of the Communists and their opponents in trade union elections in various FO files, from around 1949 onwards. Contacts with Muhammad Zayn al-Din, an Egyptian trade unionist in the pay of the British Embassy in Cairo, were encouraged, while the government had high hopes for anti-Communist elements within the Sudanese unions and seems to have maintained discreet contact with them. However, a request made in 1954 by Yahya al-Fadil, Minister for Social Guidance, for the British to fund the anti-Communist activities of National Unionist Party agents working in the trade unions was flatly refused.103

In addition, from April 1948 onwards, it was repeatedly proposed that selected Sudanese trade unionists be sent to Britain for training with the TUC in the ways of 'responsible' trade unionism, although the visit never came off. In 1949, to allay suspicions of the trade union legislation, Cowan encouraged trade unionists to consult the TUC, who were then told how to reply by the Foreign Office in accordance with Cowan's requirements. The TUC General Secretary's soothing reply duly arrived at the Native Workers' Club, Khartoum, a month later.104 Great importance was also attached to encouraging contacts with the Western-oriented International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, although the SWTUF naturally gravitated toward the Communist-led World Federation of Trade Unions, despite a ban on contacts with this organization.1?5 In February 1951, the WFTU submitted a formal complaint to the United Nations Economic and Social Council regarding trade union rights in the Sudan, following the imprisonment of the railwaymen's leaders for 'criminal defamation' of the Sudan Railways management in agitational leaflets. The charges of attempting to suppress trade unionism were rejected in March 1952 by the International Labour Office's Committee on Freedom of Association. As a direct result of this ruling, majority opinion at the Foreign Office seems to have swung in favour

103 P. D. G. Adams (UK Trade Commissioner in the Sudan) to Foreign Office, 8/12/1954, in FO371/108348. 104 See correspondence and FO minutes in F0371/73475. 105 Under the anti-Communist law of 1949, subsequently confirmed by Provisional Order No. 22 for 'the suppression of subversive activities'.

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of advising the Colonial Office to direct all British colonies to follow the Sudan government's example in banning links with the WFTU.'06

With Sudanese labour policy gaining in sophistication, the Labour Bureau was once more forced to evolve. As the Sudan government adopted a policy of recognizing and registering trade unions, it soon became obvious that specialist staff would be needed to oversee application of the new legislation. In 1949, the Labour Bureau became the Labour Branch, still within the Civil Secretariat. To this structure, with its staff of two, Cowan was attached as Commissioner of Labour and an Assistant Commissioner was appointed from the Political Service. Two Inspectors-one for labour and the other for factories-were also appointed. The Branch's remit included administering the labour laws, drawing up any further legislation and advising the government on all aspects of labour policy. By the early 1950s, the Branch had eleven members of staff (four of them British) including a Registrar of Trade Unions, had begun workplace inspections and was beginning to take on the role of intervening and mediating in industrial disputes. In 1954, it was again renamed, this time as the Labour Department, and transferred from what had become the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry of Social Affairs.

As the administrative structures specializing in labour questions became larger and more complex and their duties were expanded, it was only natural that they should gather greater quantities of material useful to today's historians of labour. And, indeed, there is a considerable amount of data in the FO files on the extremely frequent strikes and general strikes that characterized the late 1940s and early 1950s. Some idea of the tempo of the strike movement might be gleaned from this information, although unfortunately it is not altogether systematic. One noticeable feature of the Sudanese situation is the high proportion of man-days lost as a result of general strikes in which, as the FO sources show, private sector workers also participated heavily as of 1949.107

The first independent strike of non-government workers recorded in the FO files seems to be a strike of taxi-drivers in January 1949, and it would appear that private sector workers, like non-railway government employees, followed the railwaymen's lead increasingly over the years. The records also suggest that from 1952 there was a far lower degree of participation by private sector workers in general strikes. It is also worth noting that the small size of many unions,108 and the consequent lack of strike funds and strike pay, seem to have made lengthy strikes extremely difficult to sustain, such that in most cases industrial action was short and sharp; the long railwaymen's strikes of 1947-48 were altogether exceptional. Finally, the effect the labour movement had of inspiring other sections of the population-the youth, women, to some extent the peas-

106 See in particular FO memos in F0371/97074. 107 Although he does not include precise, tabulated data on this, Fawzi does record that 'strikes by non- government workers accounted for nearly three-quarters of the total stoppages in 1951-2 and for more than half in 1949-50 and 1950-1 (though for just a third in 1952-3)'. Fawzi, Labour Movement, p. 124. 108 Some useful information on the size and type of the new unions (craft or workplace based, and so on) is contained in the 'Note on trade unions in the Sudan' sent by Robertson to the FO, 1/11/1950, in F0371/80607.

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antry-to take action is worthy of note.'09 In 1951, even the police went on strike over pay and conditions, provoking a serious crisis for the government.110

As has already been observed, the socio-politico aspect of the labour question somewhat overshadows its purely economic aspect in the files for this period. Interest in the economic side of things did not, however, disappear-and indeed economic analysis in some respects became more sophisticated as the Labour Branch expanded to cope with a much larger and more complex labour market. The Branch's Annual Report for the period 1 July 1952 to 30 June 1953, written by Labour Commissioner P. J. Sanderson"' makes particularly interesting reading, and it is worth quoting at some length his views on labour markets and wages:

At the root of much labour unrest in the Sudan is the fact that it is very hard for either side to determine what a wage-earner's work is worth. It must be realized that the employer-employee relationship ... is here confined to an extremely small though important sector. At least ninety per cent of the people are traditional peasant farmers ... The other ten per cent includes all organized labour, all government servants, all organized agricultural schemes (the Sudan Gezira Board and the Nile pump schemes) and the complete urban population, both employers and employed ... Membership of the ten per cent is both fluid and largely voluntary. If a member does not find work, he can rely for some time on the neighbourliness of others ... or he can return to the countryside and to agriculture. There is still enough cultivable land for all in most parts; and so the decision to become a wage-earner can still, by and large, be taken by the individual. Town dwelling and wage-earning are too atypical in the Sudan to have created a proletariat.

Within the wage-earning group, the vast majority are employed on providing services, public utilities, transport and public health, or in servicing equipment made abroad. Excluding workers on organized agricultural schemes, the number of those engaged in primary production is very small. Skilled and semi-skilled workers, who are generally on monthly rates of pay, expect to spend their lives with a single employer, usually the government. It follows from this that there is no true labour market. What is the value of a month spent nursing the sick, or repairing telephones or motor cars? In fully industrialized countries wage-rates for these occupations are linked to wages in productive enterprise; in the Sudan wages in productive enterprise, of which there is relatively little, follow and do not lead. The theories of supply and demand and marginal utility do not determine wages save as secondary factors. So the government has been forced to accept as the basis of its wage structure a reasonable subsistence level for a man, his wife, and two children.112

109 Communications on labour matters in FO0371/69236 report that in 1948 demonstrating Gordon College students were already raising the slogans of 'Down with the coloniser' and 'Long live the workers'. Two years later the pupils of Khor Tuggat secondary school struck in protest at poor food and their subsequent suspension came close to sparking a general strike; material on this incident is to be found in FO0371/80584. The first women to demonstrate in the Sudan were nurses from the Khartoum hospitals who took part in a silent protest of workers during a general strike on 26/8/1951, demanding the release of the arrested SWTUF leaders, according to an Egyptian radio broadcast reported in FO0371/90230. 10 Material on the police strike is to be found in FO0371/90229. " A copy is to be found in FO0371/10293. Unfortunately, there seem to be no Labour Branch reports for other years in the FO files. 112 Emphasis added throughout.

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Table III. Government and private factories and workshops registered and inspected by the Labour Branch to 30/6/1953

Size of establishment Number of establishments Total number of (number of workers) inspected persons employed

Group A 30+ 151 21,796 Group B 5-29 192 2,396 Group C 1-4 222 639

Source: Labour Branch Report, 1952-53.

While this paper's whole line of argument obviously runs contrary to Sanderson's assertion that no proletariat, and indeed no labour market, existed in 1950s Sudan, his report does bring out some of the specific characteristics of the way in which the Sudanese working class developed-and of continuing British attitudes to that development. It is particularly interesting to note that, fifty years after Cromer's complaint that the Sudanese 'did not understand' that they must 'work or starve', the official view of the competent British authorities had at least evolved to the point where the fundamental economic problem was more or less explicitly recognized to be the fact that most Sudanese labour had not yet been separated from the means of production (that is, the land) and that no sufficiently large reserve of free labour had been created. Furthermore, it is interesting to note that this economic problem is seen to be the ultimate cause of the more 'political' side of the government's troubles with labour.

Also contained in the Labour Branch report is a breakdown of government and private workplaces inspected up to 30 June 1953.113 As well as giving some indication of the type of activities labour was employed in, this data shows, on the one hand, a particularly high proportion of workplaces employing fewer than five people but, on the other, an overwhelming majority of workers-some 88%-concentrated in what the report refers to as 'Group A' establishments, in other words those employing 30 people or more (see Table III). So while the average workplace employed just 43.9 people, this on its own is a fairly meaningless figure; the average workforce of the Group A workplaces, where most Sudanese workers were employed, was in fact 144.3. While considerably higher than the formal average, this is still a fairly low figure compared with many other developed or developing countries, and would seem to suggest a degree of parcelization scarcely conducive to a high level of class consciousness. However, the figures are only partial and fail to record that 19-20,000 workers (perhaps as much as a fifth of the entire workforce at that time) worked for a single employer, the Sudan Railways. In fact, the specific weight of the railwaymen in the class as a whole-was so great that workers even in relatively tiny units were very rapidly pulled into industrial action by their lead, in particular 113 Since the figures are not exhaustive, I shall take the risk of assuming that the workplaces inspected by the Labour Branch constitute an approximately representative sample, and that the inspectors did not begin with, say, the largest employers and work downwards. There are, unfortunately, no clues as to the methodology in the report itself.

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in general strikes which up to 1952 are generally reported to have been virtually 100% solid. This may be assumed to have had the opposite effect on their consciousness of themselves as workers, and indeed parcelization, rather than hindering unionization as such, in these circumstances was reflected in a tendency towards very small unions limited to a single employer.

Other factors weighing against the formation of a unified class consciousness might include the fragmented, composite wage-scales in government departments-372 in the Sudan Railways alone114-and the vastly exaggerated wage differentials not only between clerks and manual labourers but between skilled and unskilled workers, which could be as high as 500%. Audsley does indeed record some dissatisfaction amongst the artisan grades at the end of the 1948 railway strike, in which they had gained little by comparison with unskilled workers.115

Another very important factor is the degree to which the old social forms and ideologies persisted among the newly proletarianized layers, but unfortunately information for this period is scanty. There are, hardly surprisingly, some indications of continuing links with traditional society. In its section on dock labour at Port Sudan, the 1953 Labour Branch Report refers to 'a voluntary committee' on which 'the tribal authorities of the workers' were represented,116 and in 1956, as Communist influence in the unions began to suffer setbacks, we find D. A. Marston of the UK Diplomatic Mission to Khartoum reporting:

It would be comforting to be able to say that the rank and file of the trade union membership had woken up to the danger of Communist infiltration, but the indications are that it has not. The fact that the moderates are in the majority in the Railway trade union must be put down mainly to the fact that most of the railway workers are Ansars and Khatmi of Atbara who follow sectarian party dictates rather than those of their own conscience.' 17

On the other hand, it would appear that on an earlier occasion when both Sayyid 'Ali al-Mirghani, leader of the Khatimiyya, and Sayyid 'Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi, leader of the Ansar tried to use their influence against a railway strike, they had very little effect.118 Whatever the case, there does seem to have been a 14 Fawzi, Labour Movement, p. 131. 115 Audsley's 'Note concerning the Sudan Railways strike', 26/4/1948, in F0371/69236. 116 The committee also included the stevedoring companies, the Port Authority, the Commissioner of Port Sudan and the Commissioner of Labour.

17 Marston to Audsley, 2/3/1956, in F0371/119703. 18 'Note on the Sudan Railways strike, January 28th-29th 1948', in F0371/69236. As regards the specific case

of Atbara, Daly (Imperial Sudan, p. 318) refers to the town as 'uniquely detribalised', but frustratingly does not give a source for this assertion. On the other hand, Fawzi, writing at the time of independence, was adamant that 'trade union loyalty has so far failed to outweigh sectarian loyalty ... Sectarianism, and to a small extent tribalism, have not yet been replaced by a feeling of solidarity with one's fellow workers as workers', citing the example of the 1953 general election when workers at Atbara overwhelmingly backed the candidate supported by Sayyid Ali al-Mirghani and snubbed Communist candidate Qasim Amin, a leader of the SRWU (Labour Movement, p. 101). Taha seems unable to make up his mind, stating at one point that the 'urban workers ... were relatively free from sectarian influence' (The Sudanese Labor Movement, p. 42) and at a later point (p. 70) that 'the workers were and, to a lesser extent still are, loyal to the religious sects. This meant that the political allegiances of the workers were largely decided by their sectarian loyalties'. There is clearly a need for further research here.

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general tendency on the part of British officialdom to play up the supersti- tiousness and gullibility (whether in the face of the dreaded Communist agitators or the more traditional leaders) of the Sudanese workers, reaching far back and continuing right up to the end of our period.

Some Conclusions

Empirically, the FO records fall into two main periods as far as attitudes towards Sudanese labour are concerned: firstly, a period running from the reconquest to 1946, during which British administrative interest focused largely if not exclusively on economic aspects of labour, and secondly, a period running from 1946 to independence, during which the sudden and unexpected emergence of a militant labour movement led the country's British rulers to concentrate predominantly on what might broadly be described as the political role of labour. Analytically, these two periods may be said to correspond with, respectively, the period in which a small working class 'in itself' came into being and that in which it emerged as a class 'for itself'.19

Looking more closely at the changing attitudes of the Sudan's British masters to these developments, we have been able to advance a more complex periodization. From the reconquest to around 1903 or 1904, the British remained, as a whole, sceptical as to the possibility of recruiting indigenous wage labourers, tended to look towards organized immigration as a source of labour and developed an ambiguous attitude towards the institution of slavery, which they were unable or unwilling to abolish. From around 1904 to the end of World War II, as major infrastructural development got under way it became increasingly clear that wage labour could indeed be procured locally, and with time there was even concern that too much labour might be attracted away from agriculture. This period saw a turn away from a policy of immigration (with the notable exception of the early 1920s), a growing preoccupation with regulating the supply and cost of labour and the creation of the first formal administrative structures to this effect. In the years immediately following World War II, the initial wave of labour unrest provoked horrified disbelief on the part of the Sudan's rulers, who, apparently unable to imagine that Sudanese workers were capable of organizing themselves, sought external political forces pulling the new movement's strings and were generally tempted to use repressive measures against it. Finally, in the period running from around 1948 to independence, the British authorities in the Sudan came to accept the Sudanese labour movement's existence and to seek out new and more subtle ways of dealing with it, under the pressure of events as well as under the direct or indirect influence of new thinking on labour policy at the Foreign Office.

119 'Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people ... into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle ... this mass becomes united and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests'. K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), pp. 159-160.

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Even this schema is, of course, oversimplified. British officialdom did not change its mind as one man either in 1904 or in 1948, the two dividing lines for the sub-periods outlined above. On the contrary, as we have seen, early views of the Sudanese as inherently lazy certainly persisted to some degree after 1904; similarly, in the post-1948 period, British attitudes to labour questions in the Sudan were characterized not by unanimity behind the new official line of concessions to and cooption of the trade unions but by an underlying tension between the 'new conceptions' and a knee-jerk impulse to use repressive measures. In mid-1948, in discussions at the Foreign Office on his return to London, Brown expressed the opinion that the Governor-General and the Civil Secretary at least had been 'enlightened', even if the Sudan Railways management remained stuck in their ways;120 nevertheless, both Howe and Robertson were prone to froth with thoroughly old-fashioned indignation at the 'ill-mannered' and 'disrespectful' tone of workers' demands and adopted a provocative stance in the face of threatened industrial action on more than one occasion after 1948. To the very end, the views of at least certain British officials, as Audsley put it with masterful understatement, 'bordered on the reactionary'.12 It might even be argued that the 'lazy blacks' school of thought of the earliest years of the Condominium reappeared, mutatis mutandis, in a pseudo-rationalized form after World War II in the economic arguments of the Labour Branch and others of the 'backward-sloping supply curve for labour' and 'ceiling of effort' school.122 In short, then, the cut-off points I have used are, with the notable exception of 1946, no more than approximate.

The reader will also have noticed that the four sections corresponding to these four periods are of unequal length, and that this imbalance owes little to the actual number of years covered in each. I make no apologies for this, however, as it is a reflection of the fact that as sources for Sudanese labour history the FO records are frankly rather variable, and this is in large part what we set out to discover. From the reconquest to the end of World War II the Annual Reports are often the only material of any use to be found in the files. The only notable exception is the correspondence of 1902-3 on the question of labour for railway building, and much of this is concerned with ultimately fruitless plans to import

120 FO minutes in F0371/69236. 121 Audsley's memo of 3/5/1948 in F0371/69236. 122 The Labour Branch report for 1952-3 opined that: 'even the steady wage-earner tends to list his wants in an order of preference and decide whether their satisfaction is worth the effort involved. Once the basic requirements of food, shelter and clothing have been satisfied, the intensity of effort which he is willing to put forth decreases; and this decrease is progressive until what may be termed a "ceiling of effort" is reached.' Compare this with Cromer's view that 'as a general rule, the Sudanese are not industrious. In this respect, they are the very reverse of the Egyptians, who are a singularly industrious race. It can be no matter for surprise that the Sudanese should be unwilling to work. Their wants are few and simple ... The slave-holders of former days are not accustomed to labour. The slaves, for the most part, consider that the best use they can make of their newly-acquired liberty is to labour as little as possible' (Sudan 1904). Note also the way in which such views entered the received wisdom on the subject: 'Social Conditions: In contrast with the Egyptians, a most industrious race, the Sudanese tribes, both Arab and negro, are as a general rule indolent. Where wants are few and simple, where houses need not be built nor clothes worn to keep out the cold, there is little stimulus to exertion'-entry under 'Sudan', Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (London, 1910-11), Vol. XXVI, p. 11.

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labour from India. The Annual Reports themselves are of course often invaluable sources (although some Governors-General and Residents in Cairo seem to have paid little or no attention to the subject), but they were published and are available elsewhere. From 1946 onwards, however, there is a wealth of docu- mentation, indeed entire dossiers of correspondence for each year on labour, the trade unions and the Communist movement. The records of the Labour Bureau and its successors ought to provide a great deal of information on economic aspects of the labour question even before 1946, including registers of workers and wages statistics. But the Bureau, which as we have seen had its ups and downs in any case, generally had no reason to forward its records to the FO, so as things stand detailed statistical (or even precisely quantified) data does not predominate. Far more usual is information of a rather more subjective, impressionistic nature-part of the reason for concentrating on British attitudes.

Such observations aside, what other points relevant to the study of Sudanese labour history may be drawn out of the material examined here? Let us return for an instant to the question of periodization. As we have seen, the only really clear cut-off point is 1946, the year when Sudanese workers began to behave collectively as a class. It might be argued that the difference between the two major periods on either side of this point is so great in terms of the focus of my analysis (crudely, economics before and politics after 1946), that what we have here are really two different subjects and that the scope of this paper is actually far too large. Yet as I have attempted to demonstrate, there is a very real, and very important link between the specificities of early economic development in the Sudan and the structure, outlook and behaviour of the working class created by that development.

In the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, economic development in general and capital formation in particular were very much the work of the state. Yet ironically the state at times appears to have done all it could to check the process. Very little manufacturing, private or state-owned, existed, and as we have seen there were at times conscious efforts to restrict the growth of the working class. There is an interesting comparison to be made with other African countries under imperial rule, and in particular South Africa where the need for large amounts of labour for the extractive industries led to a state policy of hut taxes, poll taxes and other measures specifically designed to separate peasants from the land and turn them into wage labourers.'23 In the Sudan, none of the few mines that got to the stage of production ever employed more than a few hundred people, and in many cases most of them were foreigners.

123 According to Niblock, 'the abundant availability of urban labourers' under the Condominium was due at least in part to 'government action: the imposition of taxes on land and animals, which peasants and nomads had difficult in meeting' (Class and Power, p. 99, n. 73). This is not borne out by Daly (Empire on the Nile, pp. 197-200), who points out that 'it was a cardinal principle of the early Condominium that direct taxation should be kept low, both to encourage economic activity and to avoid political disturbance'. Although a house tax was concocted, it was applicable only in the major towns, rather than on peasants' huts-a major difference with South Africa. On the role of government policy in the process of proletarianization at the other end of the continent, see Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa. African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870-1930 (New York: Longman, 1982).

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To the extent that manufacturing and other private enterprises did exist, small to medium-sized units predominated, with the result that the labour movement was largely composed of small unions without the reserves necessary for prolonged industrial action. I would suggest that this factor, combined with the fact that the Sudanese labour movement at the same time had a formidable power-house in the shape of the (relatively speaking) immense railway workers' union, goes a long way toward explaining the movement's tradition of explosive outbursts of militant action: one large and very solid union has served as a sort of laboratory in which the most advanced forms of struggle have been experi- mented with, while the greater part of the movement is made up of a host of much smaller unions which, while they may seek to adopt such forms of struggle, are hampered by their small size in building up significant strike funds, organizing sympathy strikes and so on, and thus from maintaining industrial action over an extended period; a pattern of short, but very sharp, shocks flows from this. In addition, the role of the state as the main employer bound the problems of organized labour to the national liberation struggle from the very outset. In these conditions it was, I believe, quite natural for labour movement activists to gravitate very rapidly towards the Communists, who, whatever their shortcom- ings, represented the most radical current on the scene at that time and that most prone to combine national and class politics.

In this respect, what happened in the Sudan was quite different from what happened in Egypt, where client-unionism under the leadership of non-worker notables predominated for many years. Indeed, the situation in the Sudan is almost unique in the Arab world, in that from the very beginnings of the WAA in Atbara, the movement was led by workers and took part in social and political struggles very largely on its own terms, whereas in most other Arab countries notables and/or nationalist intellectuals have tended either to initiate or to take control of the trade unions.124 The singular case of the Sudanese workers' movement cries out for a comparative study to be made.

Finally, I have attempted to shed at least a little light on the degree to which the new class of wage labourers were separated from their peasant, slave, nomadic pastoralist or migrant backgrounds and the ideologies and world-views that went with them. Although data on this has proved to be fairly thin on the ground, it seems clear that the separation was by no means total, but equally the persistance of sufi-sectarian and tribal allegiances does not seem to have been sufficient to cut across the development of new forms of organization and thought.

Evolutions of world-view and ideology under the impact of social change

124 Egyptian unions were often led by lawyers sympathetic to the workers' cause, but the tendency towards client-unionism reached its clearest expression in the movement that formed around a scion of the royal family-'Abbas Halim, the 'Prince of the Workers'. In many ways, Beinin and Lockman's Workers on the Nile is an extended discussion of this phenomenon. On other countries, many of the essays in Goldberg's Social History are of interest, as is Rene Gallisot's 'Interrogation critique sur la centralit6 du mouvement ouvrier au Maghreb' in his collection of essays entitled Maghreb, Algerie, Classes et Nation, 2 vols (Paris: Arcantere, 1987), pp. 355-66.

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remain, however, an area for further research, and on that point, as on others, this paper has probably raised far more questions than it has answered.125 Indeed, in so far as I have tried to tackle some of those questions, I may be guilty of overstepping my own original brief. In doing so, however, I hope to have shown that future research might usefully explore the relationship between the two main periods initially identified, a relationship which in the final analysis is none other than that between an economic base and a social superstructure-however unfashionable such terms of reference may be.

125 It has not been possible to give consideration to Ahmad Alawad Sikainga's Slaves into Workers. emancipation and labour in colonial Sudan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) before completing this paper. Sikainga's work will undoubtedly illuminate many of the points raised here, although the fact that he concentrates to a great extent on Khartoum leaves considerable scope for further research.

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British Attitudes to Sudanese Labour: The Foreign Office Records as Sources for Social History

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