David Pryce-Jones: Peace in Sudan ... The legacy of enlightened colonialism

David Pryce-Jones is senior editor at National Review magazine.

A Sudanese novelist by the name of Tayyib Salih has retired to London. I practiced my Arabic by translating his novel Season of Migration to the North. Here is a tragic story of a Sudanese who tries to live up to the standards of the British, fails to do so, and kills his English girlfriend and then himself. And this is also pretty close to the story of Sudan.

True, at the battle of Omdurman at the close of the nineteenth century, the British sealed their occupation by killing ten thousand Sudanese, the bravest of the brave, in the face of machine-guns. The young Winston Churchill rode in the decisive cavalry charge and remained proud of it for the rest of his life. But it didn’t take long for Sudan to become the outstanding example of enlightened colonialism. About 200 British officials administered this vast country with its 500 or so tribes of different religion and ethnicity and language, and brought them peace and justice. Tayyib Salih acknowledges it in his book.

The news that Sudan has just split led me to look again at the writings of some of these former governors and district commissioners, men of immense experience and devotion to Sudan like Sir Reginald Wingate and Colonel Hugh Boustead. Wilfred Thesiger, the great explorer, joined the Sudan Service and left an unforgettable portrait of his time there in the 1930s and the humanity that he learnt. “Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me,” he writes in his autobiography.

How long ago that all was, and how much better that lost world seems than the ghastly murderous decades since then... ..