I went to work today and picked up my subscription of Sudan Studies (number 60, July 2019), which included a review by its editor Gill Lusk of my book Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan. I am grateful for the many compliments in the review, although I note the author disagrees to an extent on the presentation of my arguments regarding the role of the Islamists during the October Revolution in 1964.

I see in one passage that the reviewer takes issue with is where I write that al-Turabi, who participated in the 1964 October Revolution and was a vocal spokesman for a shift to a democratic system at the time, shared the same ambiguous attitude towards democracy many others with the ‘modern forces’ of Sudan who participated in the 1964 and 1985 transitions. The reviewer finds this point ‘hard to swallow.’ Specifically, I wrote that to understand the motives behind his 1989 coup we need to appreciate that he shared the attitude of ‘more secular branches of the modern forces’, in that he maintained ‘that ‘democracy’ would be implemented after suspending ‘democracy’ for a period to prevent ‘anti-democratic forces (the ‘sectarians’ being the culprit in both cases) from exploiting ‘democracy’ to prevent ‘democracy’’.

As any political theorist will tell you, democracy is a nebulous concept and Sudanese politicians have advocated different forms of it throughout Sudan’s post-colonial past – liberal representative democracy, illiberal representative democracy, direct democracy, multiparty democracy, no-party democracy, sectoral representation and so on. Al-Turabi justified using force to remove the 1989 parliamentary democracy by maintaining that the multiparty one-man one vote system was exploited by neopatrimonial religious orders (the Khatmiyya and Ansar) who used networks of patronage and familial influence to manipulate the public vote. He also maintained that with these networks removed, a genuine direct democracy based on the prototype of the 7^th century Islamic state would emerge. Al-Turabi was the classic opportunist maverick, but even opportunistic mavericks need some intellectual framework and effective political discourse to justify themselves. I fully accept the author’s point that the Islamists’ rise to power was facilitated by their exceptional organizing skills, financial strength, adoption of Marxist-Leninist front tactics and infiltration of security networks – this is discussed in some detail in my subsequent book on al-Turabi. However, they did also need to create an effective political discourse for their ideology to gain the traction that it did. Al-Turabi’s musings on the merits of no-party democracy in his al-Shura wa’l-Dimuqratiyya (Consultation and Democracy), published in the 1980s, draw on debates about the pitfalls of multiparty parliamentary  that emerged during the era of the first transitional government in October 1964.

 It is often maintained, somewhat simplistically, that the first October government was dominated by the Sudan Communist Party. In fact, a select group of communists, alongside members of the Popular Democratic Party influenced by Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union, gained control of the first transitional cabinet and fought for the institution of a mixed electoral system whereby the number of ‘geographic’ or ‘one man, one vote’ seats would be reduced and direct sectoral representation of various economic groups – workers, farmers, etc – would partially replace them. After other political groupings –  particularly the Umma Party, which benefited the most from one man one vote democracy – thwarted their efforts, a number of the communists who were particularly active during the October period like Farouk Abu Eissa and Ahmad Sulayman were also backers of the next military coup in 1969, which eventually introduced a system of sectoral representation within a one party system based on Nasser’s Arab Socialist Union – the Sudanese Socialist Union. Their perspective was based on a vanguardist approach rejected by the mainstream of the Sudan Communist Party under Abd al-Khaliq Mahjub, which lamented that October  was a revolution of the ‘petit bourgeois’ and also distanced itself from the 1969 coup on the grounds that it was impossible to pre-empt via military putsch the structural changes needed to facilitate economic and social revolution. After his rift with Abd al-Khaliq, who was later executed by Nimeiri’s regime, Ahmad Sulayman – one of the most powerful communist figures in the transitional October cabinet – went on to join forces with al-Turabi and play a major role in planning the Islamist seizure of power in 1989. This is why I wrote that al-Turabi shares the ambiguous perspective regarding what democracy constituted of many within the ‘modern forces’ who shaped October.

It may come across as surprising to those more familiar with him on account of the crimes perpetrated by his regime since 1989 that al-Turabi in 1964 acted as a champion of democratic transformation in the country, delivering a speech to students at the University of Khartoum that galvanized them against the regime. He later maintained that this speech was inspired by the principles of the ‘egalité, liberté, fraternité’ which he had embraced during his time studying the French Revolution at the Sorbonne. Of course this does not mean that we should endorse the statements of the likes of the Turabist al-Wan editor Hussein Khogali, who has used this legacy to maintain that the Islamists represent the true democratic heritage of the October Revolution, and encouraged Islamists to demonstrate on the 21 October anniversary on that basis. The leading Islamists are pushing for a quick return to elections today precisely because they do not want the transitional government to undo 30 years of Islamist rule. However, as a historian I cannot escape the fact that al-Turabi and the Islamists  were leading protagonists during October, along with the other main Khartoum based political forces of the day – the communists, Arab nationalists, Umma and so forth. The Islamists adapted to civil politics just as much as their rivals. If anything, the fact that the leadership of the October Revolution was dominated by al-Turabi and other graduates of the University of Khartoum, which was at the heart of Sudan’s ‘developmental state’, should remind is that revolution was shaped by a much more narrow elite in comparison to today. Al-Turabi’s journey from democrat to coup-planner, more than anything else, is indicative of the limited distance between civil society and state in Sudan’s history.[i]

It is one of the ironies of Sudanese politics that al-Turabi at that time was closer to being a supporter of liberal democracy than some of his secular opponents in the Sudan Communist Party and Popular Democratic Party, on the grounds that he believed that ‘sectarian’ parties who benefited from it – especially the Umma Party – would act as a bulwark against the communists. He increasingly became a champion of illiberal representative democracy in the late 1960s, when he used the principle of absolute parliamentary sovereignty to justify the banning of the Sudan Communist Party, and then when the Sudan Communist Party was less of a threat following its fatal showdown with Nimeiri in 1971 moved towards appropriating the communists’ arguments against liberal multiparty democracy and using them against the ‘sectarians’. He also drew heavily on anarchic models of direct democracy, in which decentralized committees would bypass party politics, that were advocated by old colleagues in the Marxist-influenced Islamic Liberation Movement such as Abdullah Zakariyya.

This political discourse was genuinely effective in elite circles at the time – al-Turabi’s Islamists frequently dominated student union elections in the 1970s and 1980s, and won 23 out of the 28 ‘graduate seats’ reserved for the educated classes in the 1986 elections. It is tempting to present al-Turabi as a cartoon villain – ‘eccentric and chilling, with his high-pitched giggle’, as the author notes in her review. However, the risk is that if you associate all the failings of Sudanese politics with one man and his movement, you risk overlooking broader structural failings at the heart of the Khartoum-centered state and may assume that removing the Islamists will solve all the problems that have beset it since well before 1989. The social and economic gap between the riverain centre and marginalized regions predates 1989, as does the damaging legacy of British colonial exploitation, as does the political and economic hegemony of the military, as do the wranglings over the merits of multiparty politics.

Al-Turabi may have been an opportunist whose regime committed appalling abuses against its population, but he was able to get into the position that he did because he formed a political discourse that offered a hope of an escape from ‘sectarian’ and patrimonial politics, state centralization, and the cultural legacy of colonialism. That his regime subsequently failed to rid Sudan of any of these malaises, and that al-Turabi like many populists elsewhere was a part of the system he purported to rail against, should not distract us from understanding his appeal at the time.  He was able to co-opt elite Darfuris, such as those who launched the 1981 regionalist Intifada and his successor as leader of the Popular Congress Party Ali al-Haj, by promising a political model that would prevent domination by the Khartoum. Of course it was the nature of al-Turabi’s hubris – or ideological opportunism, depending how you read him – that he insisted that the establishment of direct and decentralized democracy must be tied to the politics of religious revival, since his official position was that he was striving to create a political system that had already obtained in the 7^th century past. But when the reviewer writes that ‘disciplined cadres outdid the Sudan Communist Party in Leninist techniques’ she is herself acknowledging that the line between secular and Islamist politics in Sudan’s pre-1989 history is at lot more blurry than at first seems.

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[i] For a useful analysis of the relationship between ‘civil society’ and the ‘developmental state’ in the context of post colonial uprisings in Sudan and the rest of Africa, see Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising

References

Berridge, W.J., Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)

Berridge, W.J., Hasan al-Turabi: Islamist Politics and Democracy in Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Branch, Adam & Mampilly, Zachariah, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (Chicago: Zed Books, 2015)

Ibrahim, Abdullahi Ali, “The 1971 Coup in Sudan and the Radical War of Liberal Democracy in Africa”, Comparative Studies of Africa, Asia and the Middle East 16 (1996), 98-114

Warburg, Gabriel, Islam, Sectarianism and Politics in Sudan (London: Hurst, 2003)

This is the text of my panel contribution at the Prospects for Democracy in Sudan event hosted by LSE’s Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit on 11 October 2019.

I am talking today with my historian hat on today, so drawing on my book Civil Uprisings in Modern Sudan I will be discussing the parallels between today’s popular uprising and Sudan’s two previous popular uprisings, the October Revolution of 1964 and the April Intifada of 1985. Now, as we all know, the leaders of those two uprisings were ultimately unable to establish a democratic political order in the long term, as the parliamentary systems they created were ultimately overthrown by military coups in 1969 and 1989 respectively. These military coups were launched in the name of ideologies that perceived parliamentary democracy as either too Western, too chaotic or too elitist, but ultimately lost their ideological character and brought about rampant corruption and authoritarianism, intensifying the exploitation of the periphery of Sudan and replacing public institutions with the ‘political marketplace’ that Alex is discussing.  So how do you avoid this trap? Well, what I wrote at the end of the Civil Uprisings book, which came out in 2015, is that the two most important divisions in Sudanese politics that had to be resolved for a transition to democracy to succeed were between centre and periphery, and between the secularists and the advocates of religious politics.

Let us take the famous centre-periphery divide in Sudanese politics. The key failing of the past two uprisings was that they began in the urban riverain areas and they failed to transcend the divide between the centre and the marginalized regions, the pattern of exploitation of the periphery by the centre continued, and the civil wars along with it. This is not to say that these uprisings did not offer moments of possibility. In 1964 the man who brought Sudan’s judges onto the street was Abd al-Majid Imam, a co-founder of today’s Sudan Congress Party who hailed from the periphery. The revolutionary government that followed October appointed Clement Mboro, a southerner, Minister of Interior, and he immediately set about trying to reform what was admittedly then a much less inflated security apparatus. However, the core of the revolution was in Sudan’s urban centre, but because the leftists and liberals of the cities were unable to revolutionize the periphery as well at the same those moments of new social possibility were lost, and the more conservative forces in Sudanese politics were able to mobilize the periphery against their opponents in the cities – whether that be Sadiq and Ahmad al-Mahdi marching the Ansar in Khartoum to strongarm the first transitional government into submission in 1965, or the Islamist governments bringing various militias trained in the periphery to crush urban dissidents since 1989. Now, what is different in 2019? Well, the most important point is that the revolutionary moment has gone on longer. In 1964 it took 5 days for the Abboud regime to fall, in 1985 it took the Nimeiri regime 11 days, and today it took the al-Bashir regime 4 months to fall. Now that shows how entrenched the al-Bashir regime was, but it has also mean that there has been much more time for today’s revolutionary activists to call for more representation for marginalized groups within the transitional arrangement. It has also created more time for those marginalized on the basis of gender and age to demand representation – the transitional government, although far from being fully gender balanced, has more representation of women than any other in Sudanese history, and just yesterday we saw the appointment of Sudan’s first female chief justice.

Another factor to consider is that the rebellious periphery is a lot closer to home now that was the case in 1964 and 1985. Back then, armed opposition to the government was mainly restricted to the now seceded south, with the war in south Kordofan only just beginning in 1985. Today, the rebellion has extended further into the north including of course Darfur, and the departed regime’s perpetration of mass atrocities in that region has ensured that the issue of justice for the periphery is now one of the foremost slogans of the demonstrators even at the riverain centre. Yet at the same time, General Himeidti, the pseudo-champion and arch-nemesis of today’s revolution, has still been able to mobilize forces within the periphery – his notorious Rapid Support Force militia- to act against today’s urban revolutionaries, most notably of course during the awful massacre that occurred on 3 June this year. When in April the urban political forces began to negotiate with the Transitional Military Council independently of the rebel groups within the Forces of Freedom and Change and Sudan Call, it looked like the classic scenario where regimes fall but regional divisions continue might repeat itself. However, the transitional government and rebels have now begun to implement peace talks. We still need to be cautious for two reasons – first of all, because post-uprising peace talks have happened before, as at the round table conference on the south in 1965, and failed to stop the ongoing conflict, and secondly because the rebels in Darfur and the other peripheries is made up of an array of different movements and factions, some of which have a more genuine commitment to democracy and social progress than others. As Alex’s research shows us, there has been a long term pattern of marketized politics whereby rebel agendas begins to mirror regime agendas, and peace talks are simply used to divide wealth and resources between the government and its armed opponents. Rebel politics are also very male dominated, which sits awkwardly with an urban uprising that is trying to prioritize the representation of women. So in this context, it is important to note that groups such as the Darfur Women’s Protection Network and the General Coordination of Displaced People and Refugees are demanding that they participate in the talks. More broadly, there is a question of whether the disjuncture between civil opposition in the urban centre, and armed opposition in the periphery, will continue. Back during the 1964 October Revolution there were major urban protests in the leading cities of Darfur like Nyala and al-Ubayyid, and there was a famous train carrying protestors from Eastern Sudan to the capital. The issue back then was that events developed very rapidly in Khartoum, and without the forms of electronic media we have today it was harder to the citizens of the urban centre to be as rapidly aware of what was going on in the peripheries, and vice versa. The fact that both the uprising and the transition are happening in slow motion today, at least in contrast with the events of yester-year, is actually to the advantage of the periphery. And we are seeing peaceful protest having an impact on the periphery. Just a few weeks ago the resistance committees in Nyala begin to set up camps to educate the youth on peaceful demonstration, and following clashes in Nyala there were solidarity marches for Darfur all over Sudan. Similarly, parties like the Sudan Communist Party announced their solidarity with the recent protests against toxic gold mining in Talodi in South Kordofan, and ultimately these protests led the cabinet yesterday to outlaw the use of mercury in gold mining. So there are positive signs of protest on the periphery feeding back into political action at the centre.

Coming to the second point here, can the rift between secularism and religious politics be overcome? At the moment, this looks unlikely- given the Islamist character of the regime, the mass popular hostility to Islamism displayed during the urban protests, and the ambivalent reaction of the various non-NCP Islamists to the uprising itself. Nevertheless, it is worth observing that in the great democratic wave that occurred slightly further north in 2011, the one country which escaped a return to authoritarianism was Tunisia, where both Islamists and secularists were willing to embrace parliamentary politics, and as research by the likes of Cavatorta and Merone has shown, Rashid Ghannushi’s al-Nahda party have moved away from the old rhetoric of hakimiyya and Islamic states towards an approach that is accommodating of pluralism and everyday politics. Elsewhere, in Syria, Libya and Egypt, military dictators and warlords exploited the divide between Islamists and secularists to justify returning to or keeping an authoritarian mode of politics. Now, I want to avoid straightforward comparisons here – the case in Sudan is different, not just because Sudan has a very different cultural makeup to those other countries but because unlike the various movements associated with the Arab spring, of course the Sudanese uprising was an uprising against an Islamist regime.  We have seen the scenario both in Sudan’s history and during the Arab Spring where there is a popular uprising against a secular or semi-secular regime, the Islamists give it lukewarm backing, and then win out in elections, but we have not seen whether this scenario can repeat itself when the regime that was overthrown was itself Islamist in character. It is worth observing that unlike Tunisia, Sudan has other religiously oriented, business orientated parties that might occupy the political space the Islamists vacate, such as the National Umma Party and Democratic Unionist Party which have acted as centre right in previous parliamentary systems in Sudan.  Yet the Islamists still have considerable financial and media power, as well as influence within the security services, important foreign allies and in the case of the Popular Congress Party an ambiguous relationship with the most powerful of the Darfur rebel movements, the Justice and Equality Movement. At the moment they are, in Johnsonesque fashion, pushing for early elections in the hope that they will be able to capitalize on their existing financial and media power before the revolutionary transitional processes reverse the effects of 30 years of Islamist rule. So can they moderate, or will they just try to bring back the old system? The leadership of Popular Congress Party who represented the Islamist opposition have often been fond of highlighting their relationship with Rashid al-Ghannushi, so as to associate themselves with the moderation of the al-Nahda party that he brought into democratic politics in Tunisia. Unfortunately, the Islamist opposition in Sudan have a somewhat more tainted history than al-Ghannushi in Tunisia. The leaders of the largest Islamist opposition groups, Ghazi Salahaddin and Ali al-Haj, were both major players in 1985 when the National Islamic Front refused to join the opposition National Alliance opposition umbrella during the last Intifada and they were leading figures in the National Islamic Front when it engineered the coup that brought Omar al-Bashir into power in 1989. The pattern in Sudanese history is that politicians who participated in military regimes have been barred from participation in the subsequent parliamentary regimes, and already Ghazi Salahaddin and Ali al-Haj, along with others, have been the subjects of a lawsuit on account of their role in the overthrowing the 1989 democracy. So, for the older generation of Islamists, the problematic issue is not so much the question of whether they have moderated on a philosophical level as much as their association with the old regime, its networks and its crimes. And that is why, when the PCP vacillated throughout early 2019 over whether to back the uprising or not, that very much reflected a divide between the leadership under Ali al-Haj and the youth of the party, who embraced the generational character of the revolution, ignored their party leadership, which was composed purely of Islamists over the age of 60, and went to the streets. In the case of the Popular Congress Party, we can only hope that this generational divide will lead to the emergence of a far less exclusivist mode of religious politics. That brings me back to the generational revolution. This same generational revolution has been happening within some of the other parties of the more conservative opposition over the last decade, with the youth of the National Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party protesting against the soft approach towards the regime of their aging patriarchs, both of whom have been in control of the party since the 1960s. One of the reasons that the popularity of the Sudan Congress Party has risen so much during the Intifada is because it has relatively young leaders – it is the party of the last Intifada, in effect. The 1964 October Revolution saw a generational transition within a small elite – hopefully this time it will be more comprehensive. The university students today are more diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and regional origin than was the case in the 1960s. They are not encumbered by the old way of doing politics that binds the older men, and they may well move away from the strict dichotomy of Islamism and secularism. But even if they do that, still need to extend their revolution beyond the urban centres. Coming back to the points about the Islamists and the regional politics of the revolution, it is also worth noting that Ali al-Haj has threatened to topple the transitional regime by setting up a ‘shadow government’ in the regions, and that returns me to the original point that the urban democrats need to bring the peripheries into the new order if they are to prevent those peripheries being manipulated to challenge their revolution.