Sudan

Early Foundations of Sudanese Education: The educational system of modern Sudan is rooted in the Islamic culture of the northern riverain Arabs, and influenced by previous British imperial policy and the Mahdist nationalist sentiment prior to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium era. In this exclusivist and missionary-minded system of education, the Arab language is the medium of instruction and socialization into the Islamic umma, or community of Muslims, distinct from those outside the community who are collectively referred to as the kafir, or nonbelievers in the message of the Prophet Mohammed. The Islamization of the Sudan has been a sometimes gradual, sometimes violent and sudden process of conversion, coalescing, integration, and intermarriage, until the various communities and social institutions of northern Sudan became woven into the very fabric of the greater Islamic umma. Islamic rituals, such as the observance of juma'a (Friday) prayers, the observance of holy days such as Eid Al Adha and Eid Al Fitr, and the establishment of Shari'a (Islamic law), identify the Muslim faithful as members of what is believed to be the universal true religion, whose adherents follow the final revelation of Allah (the one god), such revelation having been given through the Prophet Mohammed. In reciting the shahada, or the confession of the oneness of Allah and the prophethood of Mohammed, "There is one God, and Mohammed is the prophet of God," the believers submit themselves to Allah and the societal structure ordained in the Quran and the hadith, or traditions of the Prophet. Islamic societal governance is so closely intertwined with religious doctrine that the distinction between secular and sacred does not exist in fundamentalist Islamic ideology.

Unfortunately, the rule of Islamists in modern day Sudan, notably since the NIF (National Islamic Front) backed military coup of 1989, has gone against Islamic tradition. Rather than reaffirming the positive social aspects of the Islamic faith, Islam in the Sudan has been the path to political power, and a potent ideological weapon for maintaining that power. Hourani (1991) observed the dangers of such misguided use of religion for political ends:

The inherited wisdom of the 'ulema was that they should not link themselves too closely with the government of the world; they should keep a moral distance from it, while preserving their access to rulers and influence upon them: it was dangerous to tie the eternal interests of Islam to the fate of a transient ruler of the world.

It would seem that exactly the opposite has happened in the Sudan over the past several centuries, and the effects of rule by the religious elite, and their attempts to impose on a fractured society their particular version and interpretation of an Islamic state, has been disastrous for the societal structures of the Sudanese. Education has become less a means of enlightenment, than a means of coercive indoctrination, conversion, and enslavement. Instead of uniting, rule by the religionists has fractured, destroyed, and eliminated the very lives of the people who should have been—according to Islamic principle—protected and enabled to live moral lives of purity through peaceful measures. Instead, the use of Islamist ideology as a path to power has been fraught with abuse of religious principles toward political ends, a path strewn with the casualties of warfare, Muslim and nonMuslim alike.

The modern Sudanese educational infrastructure has its proto-origins in the times when the need for learning followed close on the heels of the call to Islam. Learning the Quran, for example, necessitated the establishment of khalawas (religious schools) affiliated with mosques for teaching the Quran and Arabic literacy skills. Further religious education developed for the study of such topics as fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), literature comprising praises to the Prophet, and exposition of Shari'a principles. This growth of Islamic education in the Sudan, concurrent with the spread of the Islamic religion itself, continued through the seventeenth century until the Turco-Egyptian administration that began in 1820 and continued until 1881. With the centralized government of the Turco-Egyptian regime, the foundations of the modern Sudanese educational system were established concurrently with the further development of the traditional religious educational systems that began with the coming of Islam.

Missionary Education: It was during the Turco-Egyptian administration (1820-1881) that the foundations of a modern, centralized educational infrastructure were put into place. Under this administration, missionary education was encouraged, and Christian missionary societies were allowed to open schools such as the Khartoum Catholic School, begun in 1846. There were missionary efforts in the southern regions of Sudan, but not as much educational investment as in the North. The catholic missionary Daniel Comboni, with his Kordofancentered missionary drive in the Sudan, was successful in developing vocational and technical education. The El Obeid school in 1876 was training 100 young men in various trades, and to the South of El Obeid in Malbes, families were receiving agricultural training in 1881. About 200 girls and 300 boys were enrolled in the Khartoum school by 1877, and the successes of Comboni were instrumental in Governor General Charles Gordon's later decision to promote missionary work in the South, paving the way for the important achievements made in education through missionary efforts after the brief interruption of the Mahdist regime.

The Mahdist regime (1881-1898), with its emphasis on Islamic reform, brought a temporary halt to missionary education and to the centralized educational system established during the Turco-Egyptian administration. The Mahdia, or Mahdist regime, dismantled the work of the missionaries and Turco-Egyptian administration, so that by the time the Sudan was reconquered in 1898, the only education to be had was in the small number of traditional religious schools allowed by the Mahdi and his successor, the Khalifa 'Abdallahi (Reyero 1995).

Mahdist Reforms & Prohibitions: In order to understand the Islamic nature and character of educational policy in modern Sudan, it is very important to consider the influence of the Mahdia, a revolutionary regime which was "born by the sword, lived by the sword and perished by the sword" (Zulfo 1980). The Mahdi was the leader of this revolution who inspired and inflamed the Sudanese of his day to sacrifice their lives for the cause of Islam, an inspiration which endures today in the form of resistance to Westernization and the jihad (holy war) against the South. The Islamic martyrs of this jihad are held up as heroes of the faith, and institutions such as Khartoum University boast the number of martyr-students they have offered in the holy war to conquer the southern rebels.

The legacy of the Mahdia was a jihad-inspired military takeover of the governmental administration of Sudan, and the implementation of reformist, puritanical, Mahdist Islamism, which oversaw the reactionary dismantling of the previous advancements made in education. The attitude seemed to be that anything tainted by foreign influence had to be done away with. Religious schools in the vein of "true" Islam, or Islam according to the visions of the Mahdi, were the only educational institutions allowed to continue during the Mahdist regime.

Condominium Educational Policy: In 1898 the Sudan was reconquered by combined British and Egyptian forces, and up until independence in 1956, the country was governed by the Condominium administration, which resulted from the signing of the Condominium Agreement in Cairo on January 19, 1899, thus inaugurating the co-domini Anglo-Egyptian rule. From the beginning of the Condominium, Sudanese involvement in education and employment quickly led to a level of political awareness that would later find expression in the nationalist movements toward eventual independence.

The first governors general of the Condominium administration, Sir Herbert Kitchener and Sir Reginald Wingate, set in motion the educational policies that were to guide the content and aims of Sudanese education. The first Director of Education, James Currie, appointed in 1900, set in place the patterns that continued in one form or another for most of the twentieth century. Currie's system of education was envisaged as one that would allow the Sudanese "to understand the elements of the system of government." Also envisaged was the preparation of "a small class of competent artisans" as well as "a small administrative class for entry to the government service." This limited system of education stemmed from budgetary constraints and fears that an educated elite would be dangerous for the status quo. When Gordon College opened in 1902 as the next step for the first intermediate and secondary schools, it reflected a system of education that was politically influenced and designed to meet the needs of governmental departments rather than the needs of the broader Sudanese populace of the North (Holt and Daly 2000).

Under the Anglo-Egyptian rule, khalawas (traditional religious schools) were modified to incorporate secular additions to the traditional Islamic curricula, and this combination of the secular and religious became the basis of elementary education in Sudan. Government supported kuttabs (Quranic schools) were encouraged in a policy of cultivating orthodox Islam in favor of "fanatical" Islam. After the elementary levels, vocational training was introduced but limited to those being trained for government service. The educational reforms were intended to prevent a revival of Mahdism and the resurgence of Islamic ideology hostile to the government.

Also under the Condominium administration, missionary education was begun anew by the Verona Fathers (Comboni missionaries) and the American Presbyterian Mission. But the activities of the missionaries were curtailed and proselytism became a heated issue of debate, because the government did not want to instill mistrust among Muslims and provoke a reaction to perceived sanctioning of Christian missionary proselytism. Concerns and questions notwithstanding, missionaries were permitted to begin their work in the South. Missionary work began in the North too, but with many prohibitions. At first, the missionaries were permitted to open schools in Khartoum for Christian children, but not Muslims, until 1901, when schools outside Khartoum were opened and were allowed to enroll Sudanese Muslim children.

But there was still much distrust and suspicion of the "foreign" schools and educational reforms. Rural Sudanese especially, but the general populace as well, preferred the traditional to the modern, the religious to the secular. The strongest influence was wielded by the traditional religious schools, even when it became apparent that there were many benefits to receiving vocational training and a combined education with elements of both the secular and the sacred. The traditional religious schools represented for some Sudanese the backward state of educational policy, but for others, in particular the Islamic elite, the traditional elements of Islamic education were a protection of societal status, a buffer against the evils of modernization and the imposition of a foreign system of education.

Educational policy as implemented under Anglo-Egyptian rule was tied to the needs of the administration and political service in that administration by the educated elite of the Sudanese. Gordon Memorial College, the forerunner of today's Khartoum University, was established to commemorate Governor General Charles Gordon. It became the center of the Condominium's educational system, and the all-male Sudanese student body was educated and socialized after the European model. Although westernized by having learned to speak English and to dress like Europeans the students retained traditional religious and cultural beliefs. The bonds of Islamic unity forged during the Mahdia in the stand against the enemy were not to be so easily undone through policy which could change the external, but which could not invade the inner being of a people's awakened national self-consciousness.

To cater to those students seeking a more traditional religious education, the government-sponsored Islamic Religious Institute of Omdurman was inaugurated in 1912. But unlike graduates of Gordon Memorial College, graduates of the institute were not on a track toward eventual service in a government administrative capacity. With the failure of state schools to provide enough places for students, and to subsequently train them for jobs in the administration, ma'hads (nongovernment institutes) proliferated and offered students a traditional Islamic education—an alternative to the administrative-track studentships offered in government sponsored institutions—but without the same potential for employment upon completion.

With little opportunity for profitable employment, the nationalist movement of the 1920s, and everincreasing perception that the Condominium administration's educational policy was more for the benefit of its own needs instead of the Sudanese populace, there were calls for reform. As a result of such pressure for reform, there were changes in the 1930s including the establishment of private schools, the coordination of educational policy with Egypt, and attempts to standardize the curricula of mission schools in the South. After World War II, there was expansion at all levels of education to deal with the growing numbers of students, such as the opening of postsecondary schools like the Khartoum Technical Institute, the Omdurman Higher Teachers' Training Institute, and a Khartoum branch of Cairo University, later to become the nationalized El Nileen University (University of the Two Niles) in 1992.

Prior to independence in 1956, the failures, disparities, and discontinuities of the educational system under the co-domini powers became glaringly evident. Illiteracy was rampant, as high as 86 percent, and only 10-12 percent of eligible children were in primary school. With independence the nationalized government faced serious challenges in expanding and modernizing the educational system so that schooling would be available for all Sudanese, meeting the needs of a linguistically, culturally, and religiously diverse population. It would be easy to blame educational policy under the Condominium administration for the subsequent failures and problems encountered in the postindependence era. And indeed, it has been argued that Condominium policy reinforced disparities between northern and southern Sudan, between Arab and non-Arab, and Muslim and non-Muslim, the disparities that were to lead to the southern "problem" and the interminable civil warfare of the postindependence era.

Education in the South: Both before and after the Mahdia, the southern educational policy was influenced by Christian missionary activities, and after the reconquest of the Sudan, the Condominium administration was concerned with preventing a revival of Mahdisim and the spread of Islamic radicalism to the southern regions. The South was cut off from the North in terms of language planning policy, educational policy, and employment policy of the government administration that prevented northerners from taking up government posts in the South and vice versa.

Southern educational policy differed from northern policy in that Christian missionary organizations were responsible for educational development and planning in regional spheres of influence relegated to the various missionary societies. The South was economically backward and sparsely populated with a remarkable linguistic diversity among tribal populations, some of them nomadic. Amidst a suspicious xenophobia sown among southerners during the slave-trading eras, the Christian missionary groups met the social, educational, and developmental challenges of southern Sudan. The Verona Fathers (Comboni missionaries), the Church Missionary Society, and the American Presbyterian Mission divided the South into spheres of influence and proselytism under regulations established in 1905. The Catholic educators offered vocational, technical, and industrial training, whereas the Church Missionary Society and the American Presbyterian Mission focused in their educational planning on the development of literacy skills.

Unlike the educational system of the North, dominated by the modified Islamic religious institutions and government-sponsored kuttabs using Arabic as the medium of instruction, the southern schools employed English as the language of instruction, with the exception of Bahr al-Ghazal, where Arabic was used. The southern schools after Sudan's reconquest were nearly all for boys except for several elementary schools established for girls. At the time of the reconquest, when missionary activities were renewed after the Mahdist era, the missionary educators could not have foreseen the influence that their policies would have on the future sociopolitical dynamics of the Sudan, the cleavages between north and south, Muslim and Christian, Arabs and non-Arabs, and "true" Muslims versus "other" Muslims. The challenges of working among varied and linguistically diverse tribal ethnic groups on a meager budget left little option but to adopt a common language for education. The pidgen Arabic that was common at the time could just as easily have been chosen, but Mahdist revivalism fears negated such an option. Perhaps one of the many tribal languages could have been used in education, but there could have been no unity of educational policy and planning, and who is to say whether such a choice would have been less divisive than adopting English? What is clear is that the adoption of a Western tongue, and the perception by northern Arab Muslims that this represented a foreign intrusion, later justified in the minds of Arab northerners the future programs of Arabization and Islamization in the name of Allah. It also legitimized the jihad against the southerners to expel the foreign influence from the Sudan, the imposition of Shari'a law, and the establishment of a state founded upon the platform of political Islam.

The Rejaf Language Conference of 1928 further legitimized the linguistic and educational policy that divided the North from the South and deepened the gap between the Arab Muslim north and the African Christian and Animist south. The educational system in the South expanded throughout the 1920s, but due to the differing spheres of influence and the different approaches of the missionary societies, there was a lack of uniformity in the South that highlighted not only the North-South divide, but also the interregional divides in the South.

Thus, the educational administration of the South being an indirect one under the Condominium administration seems to have prevented the interregional unity in the South that might have been achieved through a centrally coordinated policy of education. But although this indirect rule facilitated cleavages along religious, regional, and ethnic divides, progress was made in training Sudanese nationals for government service in the South, in facilitating development of literacy and technicalvocational skills, and in raising the level of awareness of the southern Sudanese of themselves as a distinct entity from the North as indeed they had been even before the coming of the missionaries.

Whatever the failures or successes of the educational policy in the South in forestalling capitulation to northern aggression and the sword of political Islam, the resulting divisions and cleavages underlined the fact that the southern Sudan was different from northern Sudan, and the people had visions of their destiny which differed sharply from the Islamic future that the northerners envisaged for the South. The northern Islamic elite viewed the south in a sense as their "lost brother" who needed to be brought back into the fold of Islam (Abdel Wahab El-Affendi 1990).

With the movements toward nationalism and independence in the 1930s and 1940s, the fears of the Condominium administration began to be realized—the way was being prepared for a postindependence sociopolitical movement that advocated Islamization and Arabization of the entire Sudan. The sociopolitical impasses between North and South had been deepened through lack of unifying the country on principles other than exclusivist Islamism. It seemed that the advantages gained through the particular educational policies in the South were eclipsed altogether by the sociopolitical divisions. There was virtually no freedom of movement between North and South in terms of employment opportunities for the educational elite, and after independence it was the placement of southern troops under officers of northern origin that prompted mass mutiny and rebellion.

With the determination of the nationalists and Islamists to extend Islam into the South in the 1930s, the maturation of the discourse of independence, nationalism, Arabization, and Islamization was well underway. After independence in 1956, the educational backwardness and state of underdevelopment of the South in relation to the North prompted reforms oriented toward a strict policy of Islamization and Arabization to bring the southern regions into line with the Islamist vision for the newly independent Republic of the Sudan.

Postindependence Arabization & Islamization: Since independence in 1956 the educational policy of the Sudan has been influenced by the ongoing program of Arabization and Islamization. But the Islamist vision has been shown to be incompatible with the ethnically and linguistically diverse populace of the Sudan, particularly the South. Ideally an Islamic state recognizes the rights of linguistic and ethnic minorities, and such a policy of minority recognition remains the stated official line of the Bashir regime as set forth in the constitution.

There are benefits to homogenization, but politicized educational policy has been disastrous for those who have resisted the eclipsing of their autonomous identity. In the displaced persons' camps, it seems that the Islamic relief agencies such as the Islamic African Relief Agency of the 1980s and the Da'wa Islamia, working under the aegis of the NIF and government sponsorship, have been more concerned with religious "needs" than physical needs. The services provided by Islamic relief agencies have been woefully inadequate, not meeting the basic food and health needs of refugees, and the services have been manipulated to "encourage" conversion to Islam. The main focus of Da'wa Islamia, as Peterson (1999) notes, was the providing of schools at the relief camps so that displaced children could be taught according to the Islamic curriculum of the Khartoum regime.

Through education, the Arab Umma hopes to regain the ascendancy now being usurped by the West. In Sudan the Islamists are using education to further religious doctrine, and they are manipulating the government social services apparatus toward that end. As Peterson (1999) has observed, "Islamists in charge have a firm grip on power," they are "unlikely to be displaced in the foreseeable future" and they intend to "Islamize all of Sudan. . .spread their brand of political Islam far and wide. . .[and] they will pursue a strategy of dividing and overcoming those Sudanese who oppose them, and they will work to gain support from groups and individuals in the United States and Western Europe in order to soften or end policies unfavorable to Sudan." Caught right in the middle of the conflict surrounding Khartoum's policies and programs are the children of Sudan. In 1995 a Nuba refugee named Yusuf said "The intent of the Government is complete and utter elimination of Nuba culture. Its intent is not new. I myself believed I was an Arab until high secondary school; that is what we were taught. . . .Our great concern is for our children. For the last eight years, since 1987, there has been no education for children" (Winter 2000).