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The politics of writing tribal identitiesin the Sudan: the case of the colonialNuba PolicyAshraf Kamal Abdelhay aa Department of Middle Eastern Studies , Cambridge University ,Cambridge, UKPublished online: 23 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Ashraf Kamal Abdelhay (2010) The politics of writing tribal identities in theSudan: the case of the colonial Nuba Policy, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development,31:2, 201-213, DOI: 10.1080/01434630903515698

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The politics of writing tribal identities in the Sudan: the case of thecolonial Nuba Policy

Ashraf Kamal Abdelhay*

Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK

(Received 1 July 2009; final version received 23 November 2009)

Linguistics is implicated in the colonial project of the invention of ‘self-contained’‘racial’ and ‘tribal units’ in the Sudan. This paper has two objectives. First, tohistoricise the notions of ‘language’ in the postcolonial discourse of languageplanning in the Sudan by reviewing one of the significant colonial policies: thecolonial Nuba Policy. The analysis shows that the colonial Nuba Policy intendedto build up artificial racial tribal Nuba identities in the Nuba Mountains.Language and literacy were instrumental in the accomplishment of this inven-tionist project. The second objective is to argue that both colonial andpostcolonial state-oriented language policy discourses in the Sudan havestrategically mobilised the traditional sociolinguistic essentialising framing oflanguage and literacy as a proxy for resisting or imposing nationalist ideologies.Within a social context as riddled with tensions and contradictions as the Sudan,the selection of a graphic representation of language is a mode of political action.Hence, literacy is inherently an ideological practice. The analysis points to theconclusion that there is intertextuality between colonial and postcolonial languagepolicies where discursive resources are manipulated as sites of social struggle overthe distribution of material resources in the Sudan. This renders ‘socially situated’views of language problematic as an epistemic foundation for non-essentialisinglinguistics.

Keywords: language planning; language politics; colonialism; language ideologies;identity construction

Introduction

There is a trend in critical sociolinguistics that hints at the possibility of having a

localised and situated understanding of language that might be radically different

from the institutional one. Yet, when we look at the colonial language policies in

Africa, we find that they provide rare and much-needed insights into rethinking the

relationship between the ‘local’ and the ‘institutional’ (Makoni and Meinhof 2004;

Mamdani 1996). Some critics argue that we need to focus on the ‘local’ to understand

the ways in which it frames its sociolinguistic resources. Yet, what is missing, or

rather underemphasised, in the debate is that in conflict-ridden areas such as the

Sudan, the ‘local’ can strategically reproduce the state-ideological understanding of

language as a bounded codified community code, as a result of internalising ‘the rules

of the game’. The emergence of various language committees in the Sudan to

*Email: aschraff200@gmail.com

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

Vol. 31, No. 2, March 2010, 201�213

ISSN 0143-4632 print/ISSN 1747-7557 online

# 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/01434630903515698

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standardise their linguistic resources through an active intervention into their

structural system is a significant case in point.

In this paper I intend to provide a semiotically informed understanding of the

ways colonial language policies in the Sudan invented social differentiation between

interacting groups. I restrict my attention to the colonial Nuba Policy in the Nuba

Mountains (1920�1940) although a passing comparative reference will be made to the

colonial Southern Policy. I focus on the ways literacy was mobilised in the

construction of ‘self-contained racial or tribal units’ in the Nuba Mountains.

Thus, the choice of a graphic mode of action in specific social contexts does have

serious social implications (Hymes 1996). The paper has the following organisational

structure: the first section provides a theoretical background about some key

conceptual constructs in the interdisciplinary field of language planning and policy.

The second section performs a historical�textual inspection of the colonial Nuba

Policy; the third section focuses on the intertextuality between colonial and

postcolonial discourses of language and literacy planning; and the final section

summarises and draws conclusions.

Theoretical background

To begin with, two key social constructs have mutually defined the Western discipline

of language planning and policy: language and identity. The various, and at times

conflicting, conceptualisations of these items have shaped and been shaped by the

discourses within which they were created (Makoni and Trudell 2009). It is generally

argued that to understand the social implications of language (and literacy), we need

to examine them in relation to the discourses of nationalism (Street 1995, 125). In

what follows, I review the key definitions of nationalism to understand how they

mutually define the ways in which we view language and literacy.

According to Breuilly (1993, 2), the term ‘nationalism’ is used to describe

‘political movements seeking or exercising state power and justifying such action withnationalist arguments’. That is, a nationalist argument or an ideology of nationalism

is the political doctrine which holds that: (1) there exists a nation with an explicit and

peculiar identity; (2) the interests and values of a nation take precedence over all

other values and interests; and (3) a nation should be independent, and this demands

at least the achievement of political sovereignty (for a comparable definition see

Smith 1994, 379). A ‘nation-state’ is identified by the confluence of the nation and

the state in Gellner’s (1983, 1) understanding of political/ideological nationalism:

‘Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the

national unit should be congruent’. The building of a nation-state is conducted

principally through the formation and imposition of a common language and civil

culture, and through state agencies including education (Edwards 1985; May 2001,

55�6). This position is termed modernist in the literature (alternative terms include

instrumentalist/social constructionist).

The constructionist paradigm treats identity as a ‘‘‘process’’ in which individuals

construct categorical belonging, both for themselves and for others with whom they

come in contact’ (Joseph 2004, 84). The contributions of Anderson (1991) and

Hobsbawm (1983) are examples of a constructivist interpretation. This modernistperspective views the nation-state (and national identity) as a product of political

nationalism (i.e. nation-state congruence) and modernity (Breuilly 1993; Gellner

1983; Nairn 1981). Modern sovereign nation-states, according to modernist

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commentators, are a direct product of the eighteenth-century ideology of nationalism

and post-Enlightenment political rationalism (May 2001, 62). Hobsbawm (1983)

asserts the role of ‘invented traditions’ in the production of feelings of belonging and

solidarity. Anderson (1991, 6) defines a nation as ‘an imagined political community’.

Anderson focuses on the role of print literacy and its products in the forging of

national consciousness by promoting standardisation of vernacular languages (for a

critique see Joseph 2004). The modernist model is contrasted with the primordialist

one which recognises the existence of ethnic/cultural nations (e.g. indigenous

populations) that are not represented by corresponding boundaries of a particular

state of their own. Geertz (1973) and Shils (1957) are generally identified with

primordialism.

Irvine and Gal (2000) describe three semiotic processes involved in the

construction of the linguistic differences: iconisation, fractal recursivity and erasure.

Iconisation describes ‘a transformation of the sign relationship between linguistic

features (or varieties) and the social images with which they are linked’ (Irvine and

Gal 2000, 37). Fractal recursivity refers to ‘the projection of an opposition, salient atsome level of relationship, onto some other level’ (Irvine and Gal 2000, 38). Erasure

describes ‘the process in which ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field,

renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible’ (Irvine

and Gal 2000, 38). Critical linguists inspired by the work of Foucault and Bourdieu

treat identity as a product of discourse and intersubjective product of the social.

Now let us turn to the question of how the above paradigms to nationalism have

mutually shaped and been shaped by language. Let us start with the essentialist

paradigm which adopts a positivist tone of scientific investigation. This model to

nationalism tends to objectify and naturalise language, i.e. treats it as a natural entity.

This epistemic orientation defines language as an organism. The 19th philological

scholarship was largely implicated in the propagation of this ‘organicist view’ of the

language (Cameron 2007, 273). This type of philology which aided the colonial

control contributed to the reduction of languages to writing, and consequently to

their treatment as ‘objects’. Physical anthropology in the tradition of Seligman (1930),

which was fundamentally concerned with the construction of ‘African races’ into

Hamitic, Semitic, Negro, etc., relied centrally on the linguistic inquiry of the time (fora detailed discussion see Hutton 1999; on the Hamitic hypothesis see Sanders 1969).

On the other hand, the modernist paradigm rejects the view of language as a

fixed-given object. Joseph (2004, 125) has suggested that languages, whether standard

or non-standard, should be viewed as political inventions. Furthermore, the

discipline of language planning has contributed to the linguistic creation of social

spaces, which in turn sustained linguistic differences (see Silverstein 2003). Thus,

‘literacy’ in the traditional sense of the ability to encode and decode information has

contributed to the building of nation-states by enforcing a particular denotational

understanding of language. This view led to the emergence of the ‘great-divide/

autonomous’ ideology of literacy as a psychological ability; hence the divide between

‘literate’ and ‘non-literate’ (Brandt and Clinton 2002, 337). Literacy has thus become

‘a thing’ with intrinsic power to transform people’s lives in a predictable manner (cf.

Graff ’s 1978 ‘literacy myth’; Gee’s 1996 ‘commodity myth’). Critical and cross-

cultural approaches to literacy which emerged in 1970s and 1980s have challenged

this essentialist view of literacy. These approaches came to be known in the literatureas the New Literacy Studies (henceforth NLS; cf. Gee’s 1996, 122 ‘socioliteracy

studies’; Street 1995). The NLS endorses the paradigm of social practice that defines

Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 203

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writing and reading as situated social practices (Brandt and Clinton 2002, 337).

Within the NLS model the oral/written distinction is contextual and there is no

universal consensus of ‘the written’ or ‘the oral’ (Street 1995, 1). What is at stake in

literacy debates is the question of nationalism and national identity. The discourse of

autonomous literacy (including the discourse of linguistic purism) is a proxy for

promoting specific nationalist ideology (see Suleiman 2004).

The semiotic invention of tribal units in the Sudan: the case of the Nuba Policy in the

Nuba Mountains

The British colonial rule 1898�1956 (nominally known as the Anglo-Egyptian rule or

the Condominium Government) assigned Christian missionaries ‘spheres of influ-

ence’ in the southern Sudan in order to avoid conflict between them (Sanderson 1963,

237). In line with this administrative policy, the area of the Nuba Mountains was

regarded as a separate province in 1914 and was assigned to the Sudan United

Mission (SUM) which was an evangelical protestant mission from New Zealand and

Australia (for a review of a prehistory of Nuba Mountains see Spaulding 1987;

Rahhal 2001; for a review of the current political status of the Nuba Mountains see

Thomas 2009; Figure 1). The government advised SUM to provide missionary

education on the pattern of the Southern Sudan (Baumann 1987, 17). The main

Figure 1. The Nuba Mountains (Source: Salih 1990, 419, by permission of Oxford UniversityPress).

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objective of both officials and the Christian mission was expressed by an Educational

Department official as ‘building up an indigenous Nuba culture under Christian

influence’ (cited in Willis 2003a, 42). This project involved the ‘determined attempts

by the missionaries to enforce their vision of tradition on pupils’ (Willis 2003a, 49).

The missionaries described this task as one of producing ‘a ‘‘complete’’ Nuba � a boy,

anchored in Him, mentally and physically equipped to meet all that Westernism is

bringing to him, and ready to combine the best of it with the best of the traditions of

his people’ (Willis 2003a, 42).

In 1920, SUM entered the region of Nuba Mountains and selected Heiban in

eastern Hills to be the main station. The policy of the colonial government laid down

in 1923 was to construct predominantly Muslim areas in the Nuba Mountains as

‘northern Arab’ and the pagan areas as ‘negroid black’ (Salih 1990, 418; Sanderson

1963, 236). The social identities of each part were to be imagined discursively

(religiously, linguistically and educationally). In the Arab/Arabised areas this was

enforced through the establishment of ‘khalwas’ (Koranic schools), and the means of

instruction was Arabic. The social orientation of the pagan part was to be invented

again discursively through the introduction of Christian education (Sanderson 1963,

236). In the village schools the medium of instruction was the ‘vernacular’. The first

elementary school in the Nuba Mountains was established in 1923 in Heiban and the

means of instruction was English (Sanderson 1963, 237). In areas viewed as

cohabited by both Arab/Arabised and pagan Nuba, the colonial rule decided to

provide ‘Kuttabs’ (secular elementary schools). The Kuttabs were established in

1921�1922 in Dilling, Talodi, El Liri, Kadugli and Rashad (Gillan 1931, 33). The

colonial rule hoped that the majority of students would be Nuba. However, they

turned out to be ‘town boys’ (non-tribal Nuba).

To develop a Nuba identity in contrast to the Arab/Arabised one, the Governor

of Kordofan from 1928 to 1932 (later Civil Secretary) J.A. Gillan formulated a ‘Nuba

Policy’. This policy was enshrined in Gillan’s memorandum of 1931 entitled ‘Some

Aspects of Nuba Administration’ which he left to his successor Douglas Newbold.

All quotes and statements cited from Gillan are from this archival document. Gillan

argued that the colonial creation of the Nuba as a single ‘tribe/race’ through social

and linguistic reductionism would be an administrative necessity. He stated:

How many reasonably well informed outsiders are there who realise that there is no‘Nuba’ tribe or race, but an as yet unknown number of entirely different stocks, ofdifferent cultures, religions and stages of civilisation, speaking perhaps as many as tenentirely different languages and some fifty dialects more or less mutually unintelligible?It is these factors that in broad outline constitute half the ‘Nuba Problem’ in as far as itconcerns native administration and indigenous culture, the other half being theircontiguity with the Arab. If we were dealing with one solid and separate pagan race theremight still be a problem, but its solution would be comparatively simple and would notbe urgent. We should only have to isolate it within a metaphorical wall and deal with it atour convenience. (Gillan 1931, 6)

It is remarkable that the colonial rule in the Nuba Mountains was operating with the

ideology of linguistic enumeration (e.g. ‘ten different languages’, ‘fifty dialects’),

which is in turn based in specific Western understanding of what constitutes ‘a

language’ and ‘a dialect’ (see Duchene and Heller 2007). The invention of a racial or

tribal banner for the Nuba (there was ‘no Nuba tribe or race’) would be carried out

primarily on linguistic and racial terrain. To the colonial rule, linguistic diversity was

determinative of the Nuba’s thought. Gillan believed that ‘to the average white man

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Nuba processes of thought are more difficult to follow than those of the Arab’

(Gillan 1931, 12).

Gillan (1931, 12) defined the Nuba as the ‘childlike creature of impulse’ since, in

his view, the cultural behaviour of the Nuba is unpredictable compared to the Arab.

The objective of the Nuba Policy was to ‘preserve or evolve an authentic Nuba

civilisation and culture as against a bastard type of arabicisation’ (Gillan 1931, 20).

But Gillan (1931, 31) intended to develop the Nubian cultural ‘authenticity’ on racial

and traditional basis: ‘When all is said and done it is native opinion and pride of race

and custom that are going to be our best allies throughout in the fight for an

authentic Nuba civilisation’. Gillan (1931, 20) believed that the Nuba area should be

guided to a position where it can ‘stand on its own feet as a self contained unit’.

To achieve this policy of linguistic and social protectionism against Arabicisation,

Gillan’s (1931, 20) solution was ‘the creation of federations strong enough to stand

on their own feet, and (provided certain lines of policy are consistently followed)

sufficiently imbued with Nuba tradition to present a firm barrier to arabicisation’.Yet it is ‘mutual federation in view of difference of race and language’ that will be the

basis of the building up of self-contained Nuba tribes (Gillan 1931, 23). In other

words, it is a process of amalgamation and segregation on a racial and linguistic

basis. The social groups viewed as ‘racially’ Nuba were separated from ‘Arabicised’

groups and federated together as ‘self-contained units’ (Gillan 1931, 23). For

example, Gillan (1931, 23) suggested the federation of ‘Tima’ with ‘Katala’ against

their ‘Arabised’ neighbour ‘Messeria’.

Gillan (1931, 21�2) draws a correlation between Arabicisation and its favourable

structural conditions including economics and education: ‘I am convinced that

economics and education are far more potent sources of arabicisation than is the

agency of administration’. Gillan’s (1931, 27) ultimate aim was the development of

‘Nuba Renaissance of pride in birth and culture’. To achieve this goal, he drew on the

Western notions of ‘nationalism’. For example, he used the notion of ‘moribund

nationalism’ in reference to groups that were ‘too small to form a self contained

community of a different type of culture from their [Arabised] neighbours’ (Gillan

1931, 22). The strategy of ‘language groupings’ was instrumental in the federation ofisolated communities. Drawing on the linguistic study of D.N. MacDiarmid, an SUM

missionary worker, Gillan produced ‘Nuba Language Groups’ and a ‘sketch map of

Nuba language groups’. Gillan (1931, i) made the note that ‘it must be emphasised

that there are many dialects in most of the language groups which are mutually

unintelligible’. The point here is that the creation of a racial demarcation between

‘Nuba’ and the ‘Arab/Arabised’ communities was significantly conducted in and

through the discourse of linguistic authenticity/indigeneity. The output of the

essentialising strategy of linguistic grouping in Gillan’s fashion is ‘birth certificates

of a language’ (Blommaert 2008, 291) indexical of specific form of identity. Hence the

instrumental centrality of alphabetic literacy in this colonial inventionist project

became more visible. The adopted educational policy for the Nuba Mountains was

embedded in the 1930 ‘Memorandum On Educational Policy in the Nuba Pagan

Area’ by the Secretary for Education and Health, J.G. Matthew (cited in Gillan 1931,

vi, emphasis in original):

The wish of the Government is that Nubas should develop on their own lines and beassisted to build up self contained racial or tribal units; but at the same time it isrecognised that for their material advancement there must be easy communicationbetween them and their neighbours and also between the various groups of Nubas

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themselves who speak different dialects. It is considered that Arabic is the only possiblelanguage of inter-communication and it is recommended that for this purpose Arabic inRoman script should be taught as a subject in the elementary schools. Obviously othersubjects must be taught in the pupils’ own language.

Matthew accounted for the writing of Arabic in Roman rather than Arabic script as

follows (cited in Gillan 1931, vi):

The use of Roman instead Arabic script is desirable on two grounds [sic]. In the firstplace the children will have learned Roman script when being taught to read and writetheir own language and the difficulty of teaching two scripts will therefore not arise. Inthe second place the use of Arabic script would enable pupils to read Arabic literature ofall kinds which would thereby introduce influences tending to disintegrate their triballife.

The production of a ‘Romanised version’ of colloquial Arabic by the missionaries is,

in the words of Blommaert (2004, 20), ‘a linguistics that is not linguistic’. The

‘Romanised Arabic’ is contrasted with standard Arabic in Arabic script (for a review

of a debate on the standard vs. Arabic dialects see Suleiman 2004). The ‘Romanised

colloquial Arabic’ propagated by missionaries in education is their decontextualised

European versions of the local linguistic resources of the people. Despite the

protestations against the mutual unintelligibility of the Romanised colloquial Arabic,

missionaries remained convinced of its relevance (Sharkey 2002, 70). Commenting on

the activities of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in the Northern Sudan

including the Nuba Mountains, Sharkey notes:

Although CMS missionaries used Arabic rather than English in their schools, theyinsisted on teaching an idiosyncratic ‘romanised’ colloquial Arabic of their own devising� a system of reading and writing in Latin print that had no practical local applications.Graduates of CMS schools were therefore restricted not only by social expectationsbased upon their gender, ethnicity or social status, but also by their possession of adysfunctional literacy. (Sharkey 2002, 52)

The production of ‘Romanised colloquial Arabic’ by missionaries was guided by the

principle that communities should learn the Bible in their vernacular; hence

‘vernacular schools’ were established. And in some situations ‘vernaculars’ were

invented. It was reported that the colonial government funded research carried out

by SUM to develop two languages that would become the Nuba vernaculars (Willis

2003a, 40, 2003b). The point here is that ‘vernaculars’ were constructed in and

through European discourses by non-locals. Hurreiz and Bell state:

Too few analyses of Sudanese vernacular languages are known to have been done bynative speakers. This may reflect in part a certain linguistic ethno-centrism within theworld of Arabic learning, in part the alien medium of European languages in which mostof the linguistic works on vernacular languages have been published. (Hurreiz and Bell1975a, 2)

The point here is that the taken-for-grantedness of ‘socially situated’ views of

language as an epistemic foundation for a non-essentialising linguistics should be

problematised. The semiotic process of ‘vernacularisation’ intended to ‘enregister’

(Agha 2006) specific linguistic features in the public imagination as ‘local’ and tied to

specific ‘locality’. Hence ‘vernaculars’ have invariably been used to ‘index’ (Silverstein

2003) the ‘local’ (see Johnstone 2006). Missionaries were aware of the variation

between the standard and colloquial Arabic. The vernacularising Romanisation of

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Arabic had the ideological aim of cutting off the people from the standard Arabic

(fusha). Sharkey (2002, 70) has reported that CMS missionaries ‘hailed the Latin

alphabet as a cultural barrier to Muslim influence’. Suleiman (2008) is correct to state

that our relationship with the standard is ideological due to its link to the Koran and/

or Arab identity. Matthew, who later became a CMS secretary in Jerusalem, admitted

retrospectively that he and others defended the use of ‘Arabic in Roman script and not

in Arabic script in order to cut them [locals in the Sudan] off from the Koran’ (cited in

Sharkey 2002, 70). Thus, script literacy became an arena of ideological conflict

between the missionaries and northern government schools. Matthew also suggested

that a select few boys be given special education in standard Arabic. Colloquial

knowledge of Arabic was an entry requirement as Arabic would be both a subject and

medium of instruction. These boys were intended to make up the ‘progressive Nuba’

class (cited in Gillan 1931, vii).

Gillan (1931, 27) believed that the advent of cotton growing in the 1920s provided

the Nuba with the ‘detribalising’ ‘tendency to local urbanisation’. Arabic was the

lingua franca in the majority of cotton farms which brought Nuba and Arabised/

Arab communities in contact. Here Arabic was conceptualised as a detribalising and

urbanising force. In the view of the colonial Nuba Policy, linguistic interaction with

Arab/Arabised groups would constitute a potential threat to the ‘authentic’ identity

of the Nuba. To avoid detribalising interactions, Gillan suggested the policy of

‘villagisation’:

Instead of an enlarged town the present plan is to institute a Nuba village, or series ofvillages, within easy distance of the town, where the Nuba, whether permanently ortemporarily, can live as far as possible under tribal conditions . . . I am convinced thatvillagisation rather than urbanisation is the policy to adopt. (Gillan 1931, 28)

Gillan (1931, 28) advised that ‘non-tribal’ communities in the Nuba Mountains

should be represented as ‘foreign enclaves’. The point here is that the creation of

geographical spaces (villages, towns, etc.) was in itself an aspect of a configuration of

social networks, which incorporated unequal power relations (e.g. ‘foreign’ vs.

‘authentic’). The process of ‘villagisation’ is intended to ‘enregister’ the Nuba as

specific type of social identity. This ideological objective is intertextual with the

colonial Southern Policy (1920�1945) which intended to construct the ‘north’ and the

‘south’ of Sudan as separate social entities. Similarly, this had started to be done

through the invention of ‘a series of self-contained racial and tribal units’ in the

southern Sudan. In essence, the Southern Policy is a social project of inventing

ideological differences between the ‘south’ and the ‘north’ (Abdelhay 2007). The core

of the colonial Southern Policy was summed up by the Governor-General in 1945 in

the following extract (cited in Beshir 1968, 122):

The approved policy is to act upon the fact that the peoples of the Southern Sudan aredistinctively African and Negroid, and that our obvious duty to them is therefore topush ahead as fast as we can with their economic and educational development onAfrican and Negroid lines, and not upon the Middle Eastern and Arab lines of progresswhich are suitable for the Northern Sudan. It is only by economic and educationaldevelopment that these people can be equipped to stand up for themselves in the future,whether their future lot be eventually cast with the Northern Sudan or with East Africa(or partly with each).

The above quote can be said to illustrate the semiotic process of ‘fractal recursivity’

through which the colonial regime invented social differences between the south and

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the north of the Sudan. The Western representation of global differences between the

‘African Negroid’ vs. ‘Caucasian White’ was deployed as a model upon which the

sociolinguistic differentiation between the south and the north was imagined at a

national level. The fractal recursivity of the same ideological scheme was conducted

with the respect to the Nuba Policy, which aimed at isolating the pagan areas of the

Nuba Mountains of Southern Kordofan from the northern Arabic and Islamic

influences.

The colonial Nuba Policy faced a number of problems. One problem is that it was

difficult to draw a line between the ‘Nuba’ and the ‘Arab/Arabised’. Gillan admitted

that the most difficult aspect of the Nuba Policy was ‘the problem of the contiguity of

two cultures of somewhat similar racial origin’ (Gillan 1931, 26). For example, in

Talodi sub-district, there was a community called the ‘Talodi Arab’ defined by Gillan

as a group of ‘Nuba origin but of Arab speech and custom’ (Gillan 1931, 26).

Another related difficulty was that ‘there were no Nuba available to teach the

religious customs of the hills’ (Sanderson 1963, 238). Sanderson (1963, 238) notes

that the ‘project of building up an indigenous Nuba culture was certainly not proving

an easy task’. Because of these problems, Douglas Newbold (1932�1938), who later

became the Civil Secretary (1939�1945), decided to reverse the Nuba Policy in 1934

(cited in Henderson 1953, 495�6, emphasis in original):

The Nuba policy as set forth in Mr. Gillan’s printed Memorandum and approved by theCentral Government is a positive civilising policy, based on what is best in local traditionand culture. It does not aim at keeping the Nuba in a glass case, nor in making the Nubamountains into a human game reserve, but envisages the evolution of a Nuba civilisationthrough Nuba leaders and Nuba communal ties . . . It encourages economic expansionand friendly relations with Arabs and Mohammedans. Government schools for Nubaare now being instituted in both districts to supplement mission vernacular teaching, toteach Arabic, and to provide a reservoir for literate meks and meks’ staffs, and for minorgovernment employees in ginneries, dispensaries, farms, & c. These schools, with theiragricultural bias, should be a great economic asset.

Newbold was a self-confessed internationalist in ideals (Henderson 1953, 55). One of

the significant decisions made by him was that standard Arabic in Arabic script was

to be used. Another decision was that after ‘vernacular education’, Arabic should

replace English as a means of instruction (Sanderson 1963, 240). This was justified

on the ground that the ‘Roman characters limited the Nuba’ and that Nuba should

be given access to Arabic as a lingua franca to achieve material advancement

(Sanderson 1963, 240). Newbold suggested that Islam (of a particular version)

should be implemented in the education and justice system (Henderson 1953, 69).

The point here is that the use of Islam and Arabic as a state policy is a production of

a colonial political culture (Miller 2003; O’Fahey 1996, 260). The polar representa-

tion of the Nuba as ‘pagan’ on one hand and the ‘non-Nuba’ as ‘Arab/

Mohammedan’ on the other illustrates the semiotic process of ‘erasure’ which aimed

at suppressing the internal variability within these groups. The end product of this

standardising discursive processes is a necessary connection between ‘Arabic�Islam’

on one hand, and ‘local vernaculars�Nuba-paganism’ on the other hand (cf. the

semiotic process of iconicity).Newbold hired the anthropologist Siegfried Nadel in 1937 to assess the

implementation of the Nuba Policy (Baumann 1987, 13; Salih 1990, 434). Nadel

(1947, 1) describes the Nuba people as ‘a human enclave of aboriginal Negro stock

encircled by groups of Arabs and hamitic (or semi-hamitic) Nilotes’. Here it is clear

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that Nadel draws on C. Seligman and B. Seligman’s (1932, 15) classification of the

Nuba as a ‘sub-racial unit’. Yet, Nadel (1947, 1) adds the caveat that the Nuba,

considered by themselves, are far from being a ‘pure’ racial unit or a homogenous

group. More importantly, Nadel (1947, 178) notes that some of the social groups in

the Nuba Mountains have no collective ‘tribal name’ for themselves. For example,

Nadel (1947, 178) found out that ‘the modern tribal name of the Moro people was

given them by their Arab neighbours, to whom the Moro became known by the name

of their ancient home, the hill of Elmoroh (or Lebu)’. Nadel (1947, 170) points out

that ‘modern tribal chieftainship differs fundamentally from the traditional system of

tribal organisation’. The government chieftainship in some tribes such as Heiban and

Laro required new kinds of qualifications including ‘knowledge of Arabic,

acquaintance with the ways of the Hakuma, an energetic temperament, and suitable

age for undertaking the new tasks of office, like tax-collection, recruiting labour for

road work’ (Nadel 1947, 164�5). Nadel also remarks that the new positions of

‘sheikhs’ and ‘Wakils’ (government chiefs and sub-chiefs) are at variance with the

traditional system of governing:

Though the official tasks of Sheikhs and Wakils are largely new and unrelated to thetraditional life of the group, the system of their appointment, spontaneously evolved bythe people, remains true to the essential identity of the community as a unit boundtogether by common life. No other features of the traditional culture have beenembodied in this modern chieftainship. (Nadel 1947, 170, emphasis in original)

The point here is that the colonial regime was involved in the ‘invention of traditions’

(Hobsbawm 1983) including the construction of artificial tribal boundaries between

already interacting social groups in the Nuba Mountains. The result was carto-

graphic texts with highly contestable tribal demarcating identities for the Nuba.

Postcolonial regimes exercised a similar interventionist practice in the Nuba

Mountains. This may account for the fact that the second ‘All Nuba Conference’

in 2005 held in Kauda (Nuba Mountains) demanded ‘renaming all tribes, districts,

natural and human phenomena with their original names, and expurgating all names

that are not related to the roots [of the Nuba people] from the new maps’ (http://

www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article9487/ accessed June 10, 2009).

The postcolonial strategic essentialising of language in the Sudan

In the previous section I have shown that the NP mobilised literacy to construct ‘self-

contained racial or tribal units’ by demarcating social differences through the

semiotic standardisation process of creating ‘anti-languages’, ‘anti-societies’ (Halli-

day 1976), ‘anti-orthographies’, etc. An anti-language emerges ‘when the alternative

reality is counter-reality, set-up in opposition to some established norm’ (Halliday

1976, 576, emphasis in original). The postcolonial nationalist project is based on the

underlying principle of what Churchill (1996, 270) terms the ‘philosophical matrix of

the nation-state’. The nationalist educational system, unsurprisingly, has objectified

Arabic to induct the masses in the whole Sudan into the ‘national culture’.

Orthographic literacy was instrumental in this nationalist linguistic unification. Le

Clezio (1975, 42) notes that Arabic alphabet is ‘a factor of national integration’ in

Sudan. The postcolonial social order including linguistic scholarship tried to reverse

the colonial literacy policies of the Christian missionaries. For instance Khalil Asakir

and Yusuf al-Khalifa Abu Bakr devised orthographies in Arabic script and

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pedagogical materials for southern Sudanese languages (see Hurreiz and Bell 1975b,

31). In this postcolonial discourse Arabic orthography is represented as the ‘the

national script’ (Hurreiz and Bell 1975b, 31). Here we are not just dealing with a mere

‘script’ or ‘language’. Blommaert (1999, 429) rightly points out that ‘whenever

language is drawn into nationalist struggles, it becomes more than ‘‘just language’’’.

Sharkey (2002, 72) rightly points out that ‘whereas Christian missionaries had once

supported Romanised Arabic to blunt Islamic influence, northern politicians now

promoted Arabised vernaculars in primary schools as an acculturative step towards

the study of standard Arabic and, perhaps, towards Islam’. The point here is that

both colonial and postcolonial discourses in the Sudan strategically mobilised the

traditional sociolinguistic essentialising framing of ‘language’ as a proxy for resisting

or imposing nationalist ideologies.

One point which appears to have escaped the attention of the architects of the

colonial policies in their linguistic aspect is that language and literacy are linguistic

practices, and not ‘monolithic things’, constituting a part of the overall social

practice of the communities in Nuba Mountains. The colonial educational system

may have succeeded in impeding the spread of a specific version of language (e.g.

standard Arabic) in the Nuba Mountains, yet it has profoundly failed in its attempt

to control the everyday linguistic practice of communities. For example, Baumann

(1987, 26) conducted an ethnographic survey in the Miri community in the Nuba

Mountains. He found out that girls’ hopes for romantic love and urban marriage are

articulated and celebrated in a significant number of Arabic songs. For these girls,

Arabic is acquired and practised not in speech or writing but in songs and dancing:

Most girls know several dozen of these Arabic love songs, with great repertoires oftextual variations and embellishments. For many of them, Arabic is practised in song farmore often than in speech, and the Arabic love songs of Daluka, Murdum or Kirang andother genres are for many girls the mainstay of their acquisition of the lingua franca.(Baumann 1987, 26, emphasis in original)

The point here is that Sudanese Arabic (in its various varieties) conceptualised as a

form of social practice has spread in some parts of the Sudan through a wide range of

cultural meditational means.

Conclusion

In this article I have reviewed the colonial Nuba Policy. I have shown that this

protectionist policy was intended to construct a racial and linguistic ‘Nuba’ identity

in contrast to the ‘Arabic/Arabised’ one. I have investigated the political instrumen-

tality of alphabetic literacy in the colonial construction of social differentiation

between the ‘Nuba’ and the ‘Arab/Arabised’. I have shown that an essential

connection was forged between Arabic and Islam during the colonial period. This

deterministic understanding of language and literacy was manipulated as a proxy for

developing ‘self contained’ nationalisms in the Sudan. Postcolonial practice of

language (education) planning has inherited this essentialist view of the relationship

between language and identity. The product of these colonial linguistic experimenta-

tions is that a significant number of their victims have had to engage in a process of

‘rewriting’ their biographical narratives through dialogical or/and military struggle in

postcolonial Sudan.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from the ESRC (PTA-026.27-2079). I would like toacknowledge the kind help and support of John Joseph, Yasir Suleiman, Abdel RahimMugaddam, Eddie Thomas, Afaf Rahim, Allon Uhlmann and Jane Hogan. I am grateful tothe two anonymous referees for useful comments and helpful suggestions.

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