10 - A Central Marginality: The Invisibilization of Urban Pastoralists in Khartoum State

Summary

In Sudan, as well as in various African and Middle Eastern countries where nomadic groups are historically important, state officials and other actors tend to underestimate figures of nomads or populations with pastoral origin. For decades pastoralism has been shown as in decline. However, there is still a need to reassert the persistence of nomadic pastoralism both at the socio-demographic and economic level (Casciarri & Ahmed 2009). The ecological features of the Sudan and its late and limited process of urbanization point to the viability and sustainability of pastoralism, despite strong pressures working against this complex socio-economic formation.

This chapter focuses on the process of ‘invisibilization’, which often is correlated by marginalization, affecting pastoral people in Sudan. Several factors account for such an invisibilization. First, the dominant vision enforced by the central state. In Sudan, unlike the Maghreb, nomadic peoples have never replaced sedentary peoples in the power hegemony. In the ‘dynamic opposition’ between nomad/sedentary, periphery/centre (or tribe/state), sedentary has been the victor since at least the Mahdist era (Grandin 1982: 33–34). This caused a shift from a threatening image of nomads, to denying the identity of the vanquished. While no longer seen as a danger, nomads have gradually become invisible in the dominant discourse. Second, post-colonial governments in Sudan have pursued the same deleterious tendency of the colonizer in addressing the ‘nomadic problem’ like most African and Middle East countries’ (Bocco 1990). Conceiving of nomads as a hindrance to the process of nation building and modernization, the state has coupled material neglect of pastoralists with its social and economic policies (Mohamed Salih 1990), aiming at their ideological effacement as a fundamental component of the country. Third, since the 1950s, international agencies for development also focused their interventions in Southern countries on the objective of sedentarizing nomads (Asad et al. 1965, Khogali 1983). It was only in recent years that a non-mainstream approach emerged, targeting pastoral elements in some projects. Yet, such a seemingly renewed interest does not blur the practical and ideological effects of the ‘struggle’ against nomadism and tribalism, which was supported by international agencies in the Third World after decolonization.