In 1924 the national movement spread extensively through the provinces, reaching larger administrative centres and small hamlets, and arriving as far as Darfur and Upper Nile. The degree of success enjoyed by the League's ‘agents’ in turning the Sudanese into protesters was however very uneven. I have selected El Obeid and Port Sudan as cases in point of such unequal success, in part because of the sources available, but also because of their contrasting outcomes. Both were centres that hosted a vibrant group of activists, and yet, while the League in Port Sudan, succeeded in organizing a series of important demonstrations, nothing happened in El Obeid, despite the fact that the national movement there was older, larger, and more widespread. These two cases disclose the relationship between politics and economic change in Sudan, particularly in relation to domestic and international trade. Finally, they allow me to take a close-up shot of the modalities of participation of another group of protesters – the traders – whose presence in 1924 has so far been noted but never analysed.

These two case studies will show how failures are as important as ‘success stories’, if not actually more so. In 1924 the local conjunction of events, which was partly determined by structural elements and partly by unpredictable ones, determined the outcome of the protests. The leaders of the League in various locations did not make the same choices on how to attract supporters and organize the movement; they sought to adapt their strategies so that they would make sense locally and fit local needs. Conversely, the choices on the configuration of the national movement reveal a number of social, economic, and political elements that speak to the uneven integration of the provinces in international markets, their differing relations with the colonial state, and the multiple repercussions that this had at a local level.

PORT SUDAN

With the Three Towns and Atbara, Port Sudan became one of the most important sites of political agitation of 1924. Yet compared with other centres, the city was fairly new to political activism: at least, the existence of political associations was not recorded prior to that year.