The Sudan of the Condominium period (1899-1956) - now Sudan and South Sudan - covered an area of nearly 1 million square miles and was populated in 1956, the date of the first census, by just over 10 million people. Geographically this would place the county today as the tenth largest in the world and the largest in Africa. Following the conquest of the Mahdist state in 1898 the successor Anglo-Egyptian state took many years to extend its authority. These years saw roads, rails and telegraph wires extended across the country. The distances were so large, the people so diverse, dispersed and sometimes nomadic, and the state itself so small that in many areas administration was largely left in the hands of local leaders who were willing to accommodate the state’s nominal control. Violent punitive military expeditions were deployed to control those, particularly in southern Sudan, who resisted.
Because of these constraints administrators frequently had to travel long distances in order to see the peoples they governed and be seen by them, to report on current conditions and to introduce new services and state impositions. In the Condominium period such treks might be undertaken by soldiers, Inspectors or District Commissioners, health workers, educationalists or missionaries, for example. In the earliest days the paths between Sudanese communities and settlements around the country were established through very sparse and functional 'route reports'. These then gave way to military patrol reports, administrative trek reports, and then, as the state grew, the reports of more technical officials and consultants who undertook tours in relation to health or other development initiatives issuing from the government in Khartoum.
Records of such journeys in the form of reports, diaries, letters, photographs, objects and film are valuable in tracing the development of the state and its authority, but can also provide colourful testimony of administators’ private views and of the history of many localities, peoples and personalities that these state officials encountered and their inter-relations with local peoples.
This summer a postgraduate intern, Celia Justin, took on the challenging task of geo-referencing some examples of such material and making it accessible in an online interactive map resource. The chosen examples below provide a range of such records and show how they link to other material in the Archive and their research potential.
Maps in the Sudan Archive have already been geo-referenced and can be browsed online. In time we hope to publish some of the c. 50,000 photographs that our Imaging Team has digitised in the same way. Such material is spread across more than 400 collections in the Sudan Archive and romanization of Arabic place names can be so variable that such an interactive map-based way of browsing our collections should make the material significantly more accessible than it is now.
In this example an aspect of health provision and regulation is addressed - that of maternal care and midwifery services. Inspectors would travel across Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and report and assess the local need for a trained midwife (daya), recruit potential midwives for training in the training school in Omdurman, and evaluate the work of existing midwives in the area and evaluate supplies. Our example comes from the well-documented travels of the Wolff sisters, Mabel and Gertrude, a midwife inspector and matron respectively. The Wolff sisters were particularly keen to establish formally trained midwives in areas where traditional local midwives operated and so had a clear focus on finding and recruiting suitable candidates for modern training. They campaigned for the work of the Sudanese midwives to receive recognition and also against local practices of female circumcision. Beginning in 1921 their goal was "one or more clean, well trained and enlightened midwives in every village throughout the Sudan". By 1933 there were 146 trained midwives providing their services across Sudan. The Wolff sisters were prolific photographers and letter writers, documenting the minutiae of their journeys and logistical travails, as well as their large collection of exotic pet birds. Their journeys are most frequently documented through letters between the sisters and their mother, recalling where they had been and their future travel plans, with detail given to midwife recruitment and deliveries. These personal accounts can be supplemented by the official reports of such tours of inspection and of midwives and the annual returns they made to the Medical Department, copies of which can also be found in their collection. The Wolff's personal papers and photographs are reproduced with the kind permission of the family.
Further georeferenced examples of trek diaries will be published here in future postings.
0 Comments.