SUDAN: Democracy for Dinkas

In the equatorial South, on the left bank of the White Nile, the King of the Shilluks sat under a mango tree, wearing a white sash and stroking his tufted beard. His Majesty’s illiterate subjects kissed his black feet and asked: “For whom shall we vote?” The King said: “Ask the white man.”

A Briton in khaki shorts stood nearby in a thatched mud hut that served as a polling station. The Shilluk voters hesitated, fingering the red-painted beads of flesh that stand out on their foreheads, peering at a row of empty gasoline cans—the ballot boxes. Asked a Shilluk: “Into which can do we drop the magic paper?” Said the white man: “You must choose.”

So the Shilluks cast their ballots at random.

Dinkas & Bongos. That was at Juba, 750 miles south of Khartoum (pop. 82,700). The pattern was the same last week all over the 1,000,000 sq. mi. of desert, swamp and irrigated cotton land of the Sudan. In an area larger than the U.S. east of the Mississippi, 1,250,000 tribesmen, nine out of ten of them illiterate, were riding on bullocks or camels, trekking across dunes and marshes, to 2,000 polling booths, where the magic papers lay. Six of Sudan’s eight millions are Northerners, who worship Allah but still practice female circumcision; the rest are Southern primitives, who worship bulls, wear no clothes and hunt hippopotami in the swamps of the White Nile. There are Moslems and pagans, Dinkas, Bongos, Niam-Niams and Fuzzy-Wuzzies, but last week all confronted a new experience that most had never heard of and very few understood. The experience was democracy.

Hopeful Compromise. Sudan’s first national election was in no sense the culmination of a people’s long struggle to be free. At best it was the hopeful byproduct of a diplomats’ compromise, reached between Sudan’s master, Imperial Britain, and its expansion-minded neighbor, Egypt. The British annexed Sudan in 1899, after an Anglo-Egyptian army defeated Mahdi’s followers at the battle of Omdurman. At first both London and Cairo shared the administration, but in 1925 the British kicked their partner out. Egyptian independence left Sudan as the northern bulwark of Britain’s East African Empire. Sudan was Cairo’s fief in the days before the Mahdi; more important, it controls the headstreams of the Nile. Cairo’s policy is to unite the Nile valley from source to estuary, i.e., to annex Sudan. Britain’s counterproposal: Sudanese independence, if possible within the Commonwealth.

Both sides agreed last spring to let the Sudanese choose for themselves. It was easier said than done. For some months, a seven-man electoral commission, supervised by an Indian chairman and including one American, labored to parcel out 97 crude constituencies, establish direct voting procedures -for “sophisticated tribes” and indirect methods for the primitives. The commission arranged for the election, in three stages, of a 97-man House of Representatives and a 50-man Senate, 20 of whose members will be nominees of the British Governor General. Sudan’s first Parliament will decide the nation’s future.

Oxford Blues & Cairo Gold. The first stage of the election—for all but five of the 97 Representatives—began a month ago and ended last week. Two big factions dominated all the rest. One was a pro-Egyptian coalition, the National Unionists, led by Ismail El Azhari, 52, a political-science graduate of the American University of Beirut. The other was the Umma or “independence” party, an orthodox Moslem group which stood for a sovereign Sudan, free of both Britain and Egypt. Umma’s spiritual head is a millionaire knighted by King George V: Sir Sayid Abdel Rahman El Mahdi, 68, the only surviving son of the Mahdi.

The British genuinely doubted the wisdom of launching a backward and isolated country to sink or swim by itself, but it was no secret that London wanted Umma to win. British district officers, many of them Oxford and Cambridge blues, counted heavily on the loyalty of the southern primitives and on the strong religious appeal of El Mahdi, who confidently expected to become the first King of Sudan. The British overestimated the Mahdi and gravely underestimated that popular old cry: Britain, get out.

Not so the Egyptians. President Naguib, who was born in Khartoum, doled out lavish funds for mosques, schools and hospitals in the northern Sudan. Sudanese soldiers in the Egyptian army were sent home on “paid leaves” to propagandize their neighbors.

Farewell to the Empire. Last week, when the votes were counted, the pro-Egyptian National Unionists had swept the polls, not only in the Moslem North but in the black-pagan areas of the South and West. They led 5-1 in many areas. The party standings in Sudan’s new House of Representatives: National Unionists and allies, 49; Umma and Allies, 29; Independents, 14.

For better or for worse, one more British colony had turned its back on the Empire.