Starvation and the State

Famine, Slavery, and Power in Sudan, 1883–1956

Steven Serels

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137383877
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sudan has historically suffered devastating famines that have powerfully reshaped its society. This study shows that food crises were the result of exploitative processes that transferred resources to a small group of beneficiaries, including British imperial agents and indigenous elites who went on to control the Sudanese state at independence.

1

Introduction

The years leading up to the 1898 British-led conquest of Umm Durman, the capital of the Sudanese Mahdist state, were marked by food insecurity and famine. Starting in 1896, fear of a looming British-led advance drove Mahdist officials and urban elites to stockpile grain, which, in turn, caused grain prices in Umm Durman to rise sharply. As the British-led joint Anglo-Egyptian force slowly made its way from Upper Egypt to Umm Durman, the crisis deepened. Between the end of 1896 and the beginning of 1898, the price of dhura (sorghum), the staple grain, rose nearly 3,500 percent as demand vastly outstripped supply. Many townspeople could not afford to purchase the limited stocks left in the market and, therefore, either subsisted on charity or starved.¹ However, the Anglo-Egyptian force slowly advancing south from the Egyptian frontier was well supplied. Colonel Herbert Kitchener, who commanded the conquest, had ordered a railroad to be built from the Egyptian frontier so as to ensure that the advancing Anglo-Egyptian force could draw supplies from Egypt and, if necessary, overseas.

On September 2, 1898, the Anglo-Egyptian force and the Mahdist forces met in battle at Karari, just north of Umm Durman. Mahdist officials sought to defeat the Anglo-Egyptian force by overwhelming it with sheer numbers. Tens of thousands of undernourished and malnourished Sudanese men were forced to join the regular Mahdist forces on the battlefield and participate in the defense of Umm Durman. Though many of the starving townsmen fought against the British and died, some abandoned the battlefield, returned to Umm Durman and waited. By the time fighting at Karari had ended in the early afternoon, over ten thousand Sudanese men had been killed and even more had been injured. Despite the carnage on the battlefield, ‘Abd Allahi Muhammad Turshain, who had ruled Mahdist Sudan as the Khalīfat al-Mahdī since 1885 and who continues to be remembered in Sudan as al-Khalifa, had managed to escape to Umm Durman during the fighting. British military officers, sure that the battle had not really ended, ordered an advance on the city. Officials feared that they would be met in Umm Durman by untold numbers of armed and hostile townspeople and that they would be forced to continue the fight in the city’s maze of narrow streets and blind alleys.² However, the starving townspeople had other plans. Before the Anglo-Egyptian force made its way from the battlefield to the outskirts of the city, the townspeople sent word that they wanted to surrender.³ As the British officers and their men entered the city, they were met by large crowds clambering over each other to publicly submit.⁴ The attention of the townspeople soon shifted. Word spread that shelling from gunboats had cut holes through the walls of the state’s granary. At first, only a few starving slaves were willing to collect the grain that had spilled into the street. However, other starving townspeople soon joined in. As Barnett Burliegh, the war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, described:

Within half an hour all the women and children in the town apparently, to the number of several thousands, were running pell-mell to loot the granary. Men also joined in plundering the Khalifa’s storehouse. They ran against our horses, tripped over each other and fell in their crazy haste to fill sacks, skins and nondescript vessels of all sorts—metal, wood and clay—with grain. It became a saturnalia and jubilee for the long, half-starved slaves, men and women.⁵

As they made their way through the city, two things became apparent to Kitchener and the other senior officers. First, al-Khalifa had already fled the city with his diehard supporters. Second, the townspeople were suffering from the ongoing famine and were desperately in need of food. Shortly after securing the city, Kitchener officially sanctioned the looting of the granary by proclaiming it open to all the inhabitants of Umm Durman.⁶

The fighting on the battlefield of Karari was not repeated later that day in the winding streets of Umm Durman because the townspeople decided to stop fighting. The townsmen who had fled from Karari into Umm Durman took their weapons with them. They could have reengaged the Anglo-Egyptian force. Instead, armed townsmen listened to the Anglo-Egyptian officers when they ordered to turn over their weapons and, as the Anglo-Egyptian force passed through the city, large piles of spears, daggers, and rifles quickly formed in the streets.⁷ At that moment, the townspeople were more concerned with making peace, tending to the injured and dead, and finding food. G. W. Steevens, the war correspondent for the Daily Mail who was with the Anglo-Egyptian force as it entered Umm Durman, observed that if the fighting had continued in Umm Durman “that would have spelt days of fighting and thousands dead.”⁸ Steevens, like some later observers, believed that the Anglo-Egyptian force was better armed and led than the Mahdist force and was, therefore, destined to ultimately triumph.⁹ However, had fighting continued, the nature of the victory at Karari, and as a result the Anglo-Egyptian force’s command of Umm Durman in the days, months, and years that followed, would have been fundamentally different.

The townspeople’s response to the Anglo-Egyptian force cannot be disentwined from their response to the ongoing famine. Along with a new political, legal, and economic system, the new rulers of Sudan brought with them access to new sources of grain. In the hours following the Battle of Karari, the townspeople took grain from the previously off-limits government granary but this source was quickly exhausted. The townspeople soon became dependent on grain imported from Egypt on the Anglo-Egyptian force’s rail and steamer network. Continued resistance would have meant continued starvation.

The Anglo-Egyptian military engagement with the Mahdist state redefined the nature of state power in Sudan in terms of both access to food stocks and command of agricultural resources. Previously, state power had been defined in terms of the ability to extract surpluses through taxation and raiding, as it had been under the pre-Mahdist, Turko-Egyptian state, or in terms of military might and restricted access to foreign goods, as it had been under the even earlier Funj and Fur sultanates.¹⁰ State power was redefined at the end of the nineteenth century because the military engagement between the Anglo-Egyptian and Mahdist forces pushed many Sudanese communities into an intergenerational cycle of famine and food insecurity.¹¹ The Anglo-Egyptian state emerged alongside and, in no small part, as a result of persistent and prolonged food crises. The establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian state is conventionally dated to the Battle of Karari and the occupation of Umm Durman on September 2, 1898.¹² However, Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan really began nearly 15 years earlier on the Nile and Red Sea frontiers of the Mahdist state. During their protracted military engagement with the Mahdist state, the Anglo-Egyptian officials who governed the frontiers enacted a set of policies and procedures that eroded the food security of communities in Northern and Eastern Sudan. The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan did not bring about a respite from food crises. As the cycle of famine and food insecurity persisted over the next six decades, Anglo-Egyptian officials extended their reach by repeatedly seizing key productive resources, often in the name of famine relief. The loss of these resources further impoverished many indigenous communities and, as a result, the expansion of the state’s role in agricultural production perpetuated, rather than stopped, the cycle of famine and food insecurity.

The fact that Anglo-Egyptian officials benefited from food crises cannot be taken as evidence that they intentionally induced every food crisis that occurred under their watch. Though at the end of the nineteenth century officials saw the strategic value of food shortages, following the collapse of the Mahdist state officials came to believe that food crises had the potential to weaken their hold on the country. As a result, during the first half of the twentieth century, Anglo-Egyptian officials worked to increase the food security of Sudan. Despite these efforts, famine relief and agricultural development programs often facilitated the transfer of resources away from local management and, as a result, further propelled the cycle of famine and food insecurity. Economic, political, and social gains accrued by the Anglo-Egyptian state during food crises were by no means secure. One of the greatest challenges to Anglo-Egyptian rule came from a small group of Sudanese elites, including ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi and ‘Ali al-Mirghani, who also positioned themselves to reap the “spoils” of famine and food insecurity. These elites were able to use their position as intermediaries between the state and the Sudanese population in ways that increased their economic wealth, even as many of their followers sank into poverty. As the Anglo-Egyptian state consolidated its rule, these elites increased their demands on the state. When the future political status of Sudan was debated after the Second World War, these elites demanded the right to profit from the resources seized by the Anglo-Egyptian state. On January 1, 1956, these elites were handed the reins of power and, in the years that followed, they continued many of the policies that drove the cycle of famine and food insecurity.

Famine and Power

Since at least the end of the nineteenth century, there has been no necessary correlation between natural disasters, reduced crop yields, and famine in Sudan. Sudanese communities have passed through numerous environmental catastrophes without suffering widespread starvation, and famines have occurred when there was no reduction in the overall supply of food. As a result, these famines need to be considered as social, political, and economic phenomena and not simply as tragic ecological or natural events. These empirical findings further undermine what Amartya Sen has termed the “food availability decline” theory of famine causation. This by now mainly discredited theory assumes that famines are, except in highly unusual cases, the result of adverse ecological conditions that disrupt the normal cultivation cycle and produce less-than-normal crop yields.¹³ Sen, in his groundbreaking Poverty and Famines, directed the scholars’ attention away from the natural and, occasionally, man-made hazards that reduce crop yields to the structures that determine the distribution of food resources. Sen proposed “the entitlement approach to starvation and famines,” which he states “concentrates on the ability of people to command food through the legal means available in the society.”¹⁴ According to Sen:

A person’s ability to command food—indeed to command any commodity he wishes to acquire or retain—depends on the entitlement relations that govern possession and use in that society. It depends on what he owns, what exchange possibilities are offered to him, what is given to him free, and what is taken away from him.¹⁵

According to Sen, entitlements are able to account for access to food during both normal conditions and periods of famine. Under normal conditions, members of a given population mobilize a number of entitlements in order to secure sufficient sustenance.¹⁶ When an individual’s entitlements are insufficient to secure necessary sustenance, the individual starves. As a result, Sen asserts that famines occur when changes in local conditions render the normal, legal entitlements available to at least one segment of the population insufficient to prevent starvation. Unable to secure their sustenance, members of this segment experience increased mortality. Sen argues that entitlements also determine why one segment of the population and not another experiences starvation and increased mortality during these food crises, as entitlements are economically defined and unequally distributed.

There are two fundamental problems in applying Sen’s theory to the study of the causes, trajectory, and outcome of famines in Sudan. First, the entitlement theory, in that it assumes a fixed legal framework in which entitlements are allocated, cannot adequately address the causes of famines in regions, such as in frontier zones or in many colonial states, where legal systems are weak, overlapping, or ill defined. Since the 1880s, most Sudanese famines have either occurred in contested border regions, such as those between the Anglo-Egyptian frontier administrations and the Mahdist state in the 1880s and 1890s, or in parts of Sudan in which local elites and state agents were competing for power. Second, Sen’s theory does not recognize that exchange relations and commodity transfers are frequently determined by force and not by legal right during severe food crises.¹⁷ Until 1956, Anglo-Egyptian officials seized on famines as opportunities to conquer territory, to appropriate locally managed resources, and to abrogate long-standing Sudanese rights. Since independence, state officials have used famines as opportunities to violently extend the reach of the state.¹⁸ Famines, therefore, are transformative events that are neither socially, politically, nor economically neutral and cannot be considered simply as temporary disruptions in the course of normal life.¹⁹

Amrita Rangasami offers a necessary corrective to Sen’s theory by stressing that famines produce both victims and beneficiaries. According to Rangasami, since famines unfold over extended periods, both victims and beneficiaries have opportunities to adjust their strategies in the face of changing conditions. Victims seek to minimize their own vulnerability and lessen the negative impacts of the deprivation. Rangasami demonstrates that famines have three distinct phases for victim communities—dearth, famishment, and morbidity. During the “dearth” phase, the victim community retains its cultural values despite increased need. The “famishment” phase is marked by a “rising desperation” as “the community perceives the growing decline of its ability to labour.” As a result, victim communities begin to adopt strategies of self-preservation, including “the acceptance of slavery, conversion to other religions, permanent migration as indentured labour.” However, these new strategies are also focused on continued communal cohesion, and, as a result, “a large number of families resort to one identical stratagem.” If these strategies of communal maintenance breakdown, the famine moves to the third phase, “morbidity,” in which “the community is spatially, socially and economically dismembered. They are cut adrift, wandering aimlessly, to forage in dustbins or beg by the wayside. Visually they are emaciated and diseases begin to overwhelm them.” It is during this phase that there is increased mortality from starvation.

Beneficiaries, like victim communities, modify their actions in response to changing conditions during famine. However, Rangasami asserts that “adaptations, maneuvers and strategies” employed by beneficiaries during the famine only serve to improve the beneficiaries’ position by further extracting resources from victim communities. Beneficiaries can include merchants who horde rather than sell grain stocks, government officials who manipulate food assistance for political gain, and landowners who capitalize on a decline in wages. As a result, Rangasami defines famines as “a process during which pressure or force (economic, military, political, social, psychological) is exerted upon the victim community, gradually increasing in intensity until the stricken are deprived of all assets including the ability to labour.”²⁰ Famines are rarely singular events and victims are frequently pushed into cycles of famine and food insecurity because beneficiaries continuously jockey to maintain position at the expense of victims. As a result, Rangasami asserts:

The study of famines should focus upon not only the famine, but th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Famine and the Making of Sudan’s Northern Frontier, 1883–1896
• 3 The Red Sea Grain Market and British Strategy in Eastern Sudan and the Red Sea Hills, 1883–1888
• 4 The Sanat Sitta Famine in Eastern Sudan and the Red Sea Hills and the Decline of Bija Autonomy, 1889–1904
• 5 Slavery, Anglo-Egyptian Rule, and the Development of the Unified Sudanese Grain Market, 1896–1913
• 6 Cotton and Grain as the Drivers of Economic Development, 1913–1940
• 7 Food Insecurity and the Transition to Independence, 1940–1956
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index