Bonds of Silk

Description

The title of this book was inspired by a Sudanese chief speaking of the British: "When they tie your hands, they tie you with silk, not with iron chains" (p. 120). Similar quotations fill Bonds of Silk, mainly the words of Sudanese elite men and the Britons who ruled them. Both rulers and ruled felt the ambivalence of the silken bonds. For the Sudanese, they were the bonds of a regime which brought welcome peace but repugnant foreign rule. The British, too, found their power to shape events restricted by the very people whom they had come to administer. Francis M. Deng and M. W. Daly largely let their Sudanese and British contributors speak for themselves. After a short foreword by Prosser Gifford and a ten-page introduction, the book is divided into three parts. Each part examines Sudanese-British relations, between about 1930 and the postcolonial era, from the perspective of a particular group: British officials; northern Sudanese leaders; and southern Sudanese leaders. The reminiscences of these men—thirty-one Britons and seventeen Sudanese—were collected in written questionnaires and taped interviews by Deng from 1973 to 1981. The structure of the interviews and questionnaires, reproduced in an appendix, insured that the informants addressed similar themes, from the first preconceptions of each other, through working relations and the rise of nationalism, to postcolonial contacts. Responding to these issues the Reviews 745 contributors seem to speak with extraordinary frankness and fullness, perhaps because Deng and Daly promised not to impose a thesis or analysis on the responses. The lack of analysis by the authors and the centrality of the contributors' own experiences determine the potential readership for Bonds of Silk. In this book, readers will not find a coherent survey of Sudan under British rule. Other works, some of them by Deng and Daly themselves, tell us more both about Sudan and about individual Sudanese lives during colonialism. (See, e.g., M. W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898-1934 [Cambridge, 1986]; Francis Mading Deng, Recollections of Babo Nimr [London, 1982]; idem, The Man Called Deng Majok: A Biography of Power, Polygamy and Change [New Haven, 1986].) Nor does Bonds of Silk provide an oral history of British administration. The authors themselves claim their book only as a source for such an oral history. (Equally, Bonds of Silk could serve as a source for a great novel about colonialism and its end, a sort of Sudanese version of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet.) But because the Sudanese and British contributors speak so clearly about the ambivalence and complexity of their relationships, Bonds of Silk vividly conveys to readers what Deng and Daly call "the human factor" of British administration. And it is this human factor that helps readers explore some fundamental questions about European colonialism anywhere in the world and, more specifically, about British rule of Sudan. Bonds of Silk reveals how the tensions and contradictions so apparent in relations between rulers and ruled did not undermine colonialism, but instead both sustained it and allowed it to end without violence—at least between colonial government and its subjects. Underlying the contradictions in Sudan was how few British officials there were, especially in rural areas. One British district commissioner and his assistant, for example, administered 250,000 people, spread over an area the size of England and Wales. In order to govern, the British needed the cooperation of local leaders. This resulted in a particularly close relationship, almost a dependency, between British officials and the men in the countryside who the British identified as "traditional" leaders. For these men, the British often were "protectors or supporters, props or creators" (p. 9). At least one of these leaders also remembers his relations with the British as one of "give and take," in which British administrators listened to his advice (p. 121). Because British and Sudanese held multiple and often contradictory ideas, both sides proved able to respond to each other with flexibility. Relations between rulers and ruled could change fairly rapidly, preparing the way for independence. One British official went from having all his Sudanese colleagues as subordinants in the 1930s to having Sudanese superiors by the early 1950s. On the part of Sudanese, it was possible for men, like Daud Abd al-Latif in the north and Andrew Wieu in the south, both to criticize foreign rule and to advance in the hierarchy of British administration until they assumed positions in the independent government.

Subjects

Series Statement

• African series number 1