Many years ago, we used to sing a song in school that went “The waters of the Nile flow not through two lands but one / The Nile brings us together with its glistening waters.” We believed heart and soul that Egypt and Sudan were one country, and so they were until they were separated. After a period of British colonisation, Sudan won its independence, and some decades after that, in accordance with what had been British colonialist plans, the north and south of the country split apart. The British aim was to secure control of the Sudan in order to exploit its wealth and resources. It was an aim shared by other colonisers in Africa, such as the French, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Dutch and eventually the Americans who turned the continent into a chief source of slaves with which to build their new state. A British official once claimed in my hearing that Sudan owed its development to Britain. The anger this remark made me feel drove me to consult studies of what the British had done for Sudan during the colonial period compared to what Egypt had done for Sudan as part of the same nation neighbouring the Nile. What I found is summarised below. The Egyptians regarded Sudan as part of the same country and as having the same rights and duties. There were no distinctions between the south and the north of the Nile Valley. In 1886, the Sudanese sent freely elected representatives to parliament, and the Egyptians worked together with the Sudanese to abolish the slave trade and emancipate slaves in Sudan. Egypt also exempted the Sudanese from taxes. The British, on the other hand, levied a Sudanese force to defend British interests in the south and levied a tax to collect a war fund. They created their notorious Advisory Council, one of the façades they used to separate the north from the south of Sudan. Supreme military and civil command was vested in a British governor-general who could veto all the decisions taken by the council. True testimony to the “free” elections the British held in Sudan can be found in the lives of those who fought against them. Meanwhile, Egypt did all it could to keep the south and the north of Sudan together. It sent missions to explore the upper reaches of the Nile. Whereas Egypt divided the Nile Valley into provinces having equal rights, the British worked behind a veil of secrecy to divide the north from the south and to create two states, a nominally independent one in the north and a colony in the south. In the process, they sowed the seeds of the strife and civil warfare that would follow. In 1822, Egypt founded the city of Khartoum and built government buildings, mosques, a hospital, a shipyard and other facilities. By the end of the Mohamed Ali period, it had a population of 30,000. Egypt also founded Kassala, the capital of the Al-Taka district of Sudan, and Famka, the capital of what was formerly known as Fazogli in the Sennar province. British development efforts, in contrast, focused on the Gezira Scheme, a purely capitalist venture meant to fill British coffers and fund the grand villas of British settlers. The company running the Scheme rented the land from its original owners who had no say in how it was used and whose only option was to work as labourers in return for 40 per cent of the value of the crop. If a farmer refused such unfair conditions, he would be punished and pressed into corvée labour. It was Egyptians who drew the first modern map of the Nile Valley, proceeding southwards from Wadi Halfa. They produced the world's first study of the geography of Sudan, the first meteorological tables, and the first map of the Kordofan province. In the Mohamed Ali era, they discovered the sources of the White Nile. Egypt also established the first modern school in Sudan administered by the famous 19th-century Egyptian intellectual and educationalist Rifaa Al-Tahtawi. Egypt founded the first primary school in Berber. In 1875, Amin Pasha founded the first school, hospital and mosque in the capital of the Egyptian province of Equitoria on the Upper Nile. Ismail Pasha founded five schools in Khartoum, Berber, Dongola, Kordofan and Al-Taka and, in 1879 the khedive Tawfik established a medical school. After the turn of the century, the Egyptian University in Cairo, now Cairo University, and Khartoum University opened their doors to seekers of higher education. By contrast, British educational efforts in Sudan were limited to developing schools intended to teach the English language and the smattering of knowledge necessary to staff the lower echelons of government bureaucracy or the army. They founded one vocational college to produce individuals having the skills they needed. As a result, in 1944 only 0.0016 of the entire population of Sudan was enrolled in government schools. The British ignored the educational needs of south Sudan entirely, and according to a book published by the Sudanese government called A Glimpse of Sudan they showed little interest in the educational development of the country as a whole. With regard to agriculture, Egypt introduced cotton cultivation to Sudan. Ismail Pasha sent down irrigation equipment for this purpose, founded ginning mills in Khartoum and Kassala, and developed a network of irrigation canals in Gezira, Wadi Kassala and Kordofan. The British wanted to transform Sudan into a vast plantation for cash crops and livestock, and their government in Sudan, represented by the Gezira Land Company, retained 50 per cent of the proceeds. The Egyptians built 563km of railways as well as roads, river transport and caravan routes in Sudan. In 1873, they extended the Egyptian Railways to the administrative borders with Sudan, and by 1899 the railways had reached Khartoum, where the Egyptians built the Blue Nile Road and the Railway Bridge linking Khartoum with Khartoum North. They founded the Sudanese Postal Administration in 1873 and set up post offices in 12 towns while at the same time installing some 2,500km of telegraph cables. The British paved roads they were for their own use, while the Sudanese people (according to a British source) used other roads for transport by foot or beasts of burden. As for the accomplishments of the Egyptian army in Sudan, this is a subject that merits separate discussion. The point of such comparisons is not to boast of Egyptian achievements, but rather to present some facts in order to counter attempts to glamorise European colonialism in Africa, a process that exploited and plundered African land, that worked to divide it and keep it mired in internecine strife, and that sowed the seeds of religious extremism. Colonialism gave Africa arms and the tools of destruction instead of knowledge and technology for construction. Such comparisons are also meant to caution the African countries regarding the true intentions of the powers that are involved in the scramble to exploit them today. The facts here were once presented in the enlightening spirit of that true son of Egypt, former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who at one phase in his career counted four future African heads-of-state among his students. Today, I feel certain that with Egypt as chair of the African Union and a person with the vision and ability of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi as its elected chairman, Africa will be able to move resolutely towards the realisation of the goals and aspirations of its peoples.
