The colonial project in Africa might be seen as centred on the creation of boundaries, both spatial and social – imposing a project of state ‘legibility’ on illegible and complex social realities. In Darfur, the most obvious manifestation of this was in attempts to enforce a correspondence between ethnicity and territory – the idea that each tribe had its own territory, or dar, within which it had primary rights to land – and, significantly, that people should, broadly speaking, remain in their dar under the control of their chief. This had implications for all the peoples of the region – and as noted in previous chapters, experiments in creating clear territorial boundaries between ethnic dars were sometimes implicated in rebellion and conflict. Mamdani has located the roots of recent conflict in this colonial policy of the ethnicisation of land rights, arguing that the British destroyed the Sultans’ hakura system (which had emphasized the rights of favoured individuals to land granted them by the ruler) and ‘retribalised’ Darfur by emphasizing collective, ethnically defined land rights. This is something of a simplification – for one thing, hakura grants sometimes recognized ethnically or collectively based rights to land, rather than individual holdings. Moreover, the British were forced to live with the continued claims of hakura estate holders to control access to their estates, even as they regarded such claims as a disruption to their tidy model of tribal territories. To this extent, colonial policy again failed to make uniform a landscape of plural, overlapping rights to land. Conversely, the hakura system under the Sultans had always been limited in its reach, and the idea of collective dars was certainly no novelty among the pastoralist populations of northern and southern Darfur, regions which the hakura system had only very partially penetrated.

Nonetheless the distinctively colonial idea that tribes should remain within their dars, so that chiefs could control their people, was of particular significance for pastoralist populations. Their livelihoods depended on mobility which often involved movement out of their own dars and into the dars of other ethnic groups.