Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-7tdvq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-15T04:56:04.503Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Tale of Two Sudanese Courts: Colonial Governmentality Revisited*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Investigating the sour grapes of the post-colonial order has led some scholars to revisit colonialism in ways antithetical to the nationalist “consecrated rhetoric” (Heesterman 1978, 31). In the perspective of this revision, colonialism is seen as its own grave digger. Constrained by conflicting local contexts, colonial administrations, it is argued, had to make ad hoc adjustments (Phillips 1989, 11-12). Decolonization is viewed by these revisionists as a “recognition of the failure of colonialism rather than a response to the powers of nationalism” (1989, 13). It is true, perhaps, that decolonization has been studied with an overemphasis on resistance. Resistance, of course, cannot be discounted in accounting for the shoddy performance of the colonial state. However, much of the self-serving discourse of the nationalists can be easily scrapped without hurting the cause of resistance. For a better understanding of resistance itself, scholars argue, it is useful to start discussing it in “a sceptical frame of mind” (Gledhill 1994, 82).

Basic to this revision of the reasons that led to the end of the empire is an investigation of the inherent disabilities of the colonial state (Robinson 1972; Phillips 1989; Darwin 1991). It has been graphically called a “facsimile of a state” (Phillips 1989, 11) for being taken out and set apart from society (Heesterman 1987, 54). This dramatic severing of the colonizer and the colonized is reminiscent of Fanon's characterization of the colonial condition, for being unswervingly divided into European and native quarters, as “manichaean.”

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 13 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1997

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article was written during a fellowship-in-residence at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University (1991-1992). Financial support was generously provided by the Middle East Research Committee (MERC) of the Ford Foundation, Cairo, and the Program of African Studies at Northwestern. I am grateful to Professor David W. Cohen, the Director of the Program and the Institute, and his vigorous staff for making my stay among them both productive and enjoyable. I extend my sincere thanks to Professor Ivan Karp and my other fellows at the Institute for many perceptive questions, comments and suggestions. I am very grateful for Professor Abu Salim and Dr. M.S. Karar, the former and present directors of the National Record Office, respectively, and their keen and wonderful staff for services provided on a platter blending professionalism and civility. I owe Professor Ken Perkins, Dr. John Godfrey, Akbar Virmani and Mark Auslander a mountain of 'irfan (acknowledgment) for their timely and proper editorial assistance.

References

Abd Al-Rahim, Muddathir. 1969. Imperialism and 'Nationalism in the Sudan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Abu Rannat, Muhamad. 1960. “The Relationship between Islamic and Customary Law in the Sudan,” Journal of African Law (Spring) 4/1: 9–16.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. “Is Homo Hierarchicus?” American Anthropologist (11) 13/4: 745–76.Google Scholar
Bedri, Babiker, 1980. The Memoirs of Babiker Bedri. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chanock, Martin. 1985. Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Christelow, Allan. 1985. Muslim Law Courts and the French Colonial State in Algeria. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean. 1992. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Daly, Martin W. 1986. Empire on the Nile. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Darwin, John. 1991. The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate. London: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1983. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Pelican.Google Scholar
Fluer-Lobban, Carolyn. 1987. Islamic Law and Society in the Sudan. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1991 “Governmentality,” in Burcell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Gilmartin, Davis. 1988. “Customary Law and Shari'at in British Punjab,” in Ewing, Kathrine P. (ed.) Sharia'at and Ambiguity in South Asia Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Gledhill, John. 1994. Powerand its Disguises. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Heesterman, J.C. 1978. “Was There an Indian Reaction? Western Expansion in Indian Perspective,” in Wesseling, H.L. (ed.) Expansion and Reaction. Leiden: Leiden University Press.Google Scholar
Ibrahim, Abdullahi A. “Courtroom Drama and Islamic Revival: The Usurpation of a Genre,” PAS (newsletter of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University) 2,3 (Winter 1992).Google Scholar
Khalid, Mansour. 1972. Hiwar ma' al-Safwah. Khartoum: Khartoum University Press.Google Scholar
Khalid, Mansour. 1986. Al-Fajr al-Kadhib. Cairo: Dar al-Hilal.Google Scholar
Kramer, Robert. 1991. “Holy City on the Nile: Omdurman, 1885-1898,” Ph.D. diss. Northwestern University.Google Scholar
McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Moore, Sally Falk. 1986. Social Facts and Fabrications: “Customary” Law on Kilimanjaro, 1903-1980. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nader, Laura. 1989. “The Crown, the Colonialists, and the Course of Zapotec Village Law,” in Starr, June and Collier, Jane F. (eds.) History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Nasr, Ahmad A. 1980. Al-Tabshir al-lslami wa al-Masihi ft jibal al-Nuba (Islamic and Missionary Activities in Nuba Mountains). Khartoum: Ministry of Religious Affairs.Google Scholar
Phillips, Anne. 1989. The Enigma of Colonialism. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Robinson, Ronald. 1972. “Non-European Foundation of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration,” in Owens, Roger and Sutcliffe, Bob (eds.) Studies in the Theory of Imperialism. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Salih, Kamal Osman. 1989. “The British Colonial Policy and the Accentuation of Inter-ethnic Divisions,” in Hurreiz, Sayyid H. and Salam, Elfatih A. Abdel (eds.) Ethnicity, Conflict and National Integration. Khartoum: University of Khartoum.Google Scholar
Salman, Salman M. 1977. “Judicial Administration and Organization in the Sudan,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Warburg, Gabriel. 1970. The Sudan under Wingate. London: Frank and Cass.Google Scholar
Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London: Routledge.Google Scholar