This is Scarecrow Press' fourth historical dictionary covering the huge stretch of land between Egypt and Ethiopia. The first was edited by John Voll, and the second two by Richard and Carolyn Lobban. Robert Kramer has now taken over as lead editor, with a largely new or rewritten content. Since those early editions, the sensible decision has been made to separate the fascinating older history of the region into a Historical Dictionary of Ancient and Medieval Nubia (Lobban, 2004). This volume therefore only covers the history of the area since the Islamic conquest, the late nineteenth century British conquest, and in particular, occurrences since independence in 1956 up to around 2012. The editors have, of course, been overtaken by events. The previous edition of 2002 discussed one country; in 2011 an overwhelming majority in the South voted for independence in the aftermath of a long and bitter civil war so this edition has to cover two separate countries. Both are very fragile politically, and neither represents anything like a unified nation-state. Both contain a huge range of ethnic, linguistic and cultural groups. The name Sudan comes from an Arabic term meaning “Land of the Blacks”: southerners are more commonly black, with a higher proportion of Arabs in the north, all interspersed with assorted Nilotic peoples speaking very different languages. Vast numbers of refugees have moved in, fleeing conflicts in neighbouring countries such as Chad, Libya, the Congo and Ethiopia, while, on the other hand, refugees from the Sudan have fled into those same countries. Much of the population is Muslim, with substantial concentrations of Christians and Animists in the South, but the proportion who follow strict Arabic religious practices and would favour the adoption of Sharia law is considerably smaller.
Sudan is low in natural resources, and is therefore of less interest to the exploiting nations than some of the other countries covered in Scarecrow dictionaries. Much of it is arid, with the Sahara desert expanding year by year – one of the complications in Darfur is that the sedentary agricultural Fur people found themselves in genocidal conflict with nomadic pastoral Arabic-speaking peoples at a time when Darfur was gradually getting less suited to settled agriculture and the pastoral fringe was reverting to desert. The Nile is the main irrigation source, but its headwaters are owned by Ethiopia and the Equatorial lake countries – Uganda, Burundi, Congo, while its lower reaches are dominated by Egypt, even to the extent of the Aswan dam permanently flooding parts of Northern Sudan. In view of the increasing demand for decreasing supplies of water, further conflict seems extremely probable. Sudan has considerable oil reserves, originally exploited by Chevron Oil, located mostly in the South or in still-disputed areas, but served mainly by Chinese-backed pipelines and refineries in the North – a further source of potential conflict.
This book follows the standard Scarecrow pattern – a handful of black-and-white maps too small to be of any use, a handy chronology, starting in 5000BCE but concentrating mainly on events since 1956, a 36-page introductory essay, which is, in some ways, the most useful part of the book, followed by the dictionary proper – a ragbag of over 700 more or less relevant terms arranged in English or English-transliterated order, containing a vast amount of overlapping information. A series of appendices present some dubious statistics – given that nobody really knows the population figures; estimates of, say, GDP per capita are really just guesswork. Further appendices give various series of historical sultans etc., and lists of the cabinet ministers of the two countries as of 2011 and therefore already out of date. Finally there is an excellent, well-organized bibliography of English-language works. For some countries the Scarecrow bibliography has to be selective, but in this case I suspect that the authors have included virtually every English-language source they could find.
Because so little has been published on modern Sudan, this book is of importance. We recently reviewed the Sudan Handbook (Ryle et al., 2011) which our reviewer recommended as “a valuable addition to the stock of any library with an interest in the Middle East or Africa” (RR 2012/200). I would echo this – I found the Sudan Handbook much easier to comprehend – at a third of the price too, mainly because it avoids the unnecessary complications of the dictionary format. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to any library with an interest in the region, or in international relations in general, as one of the few balanced resources on an area of potential major conflict.
The situation in the Sudan is so fluid that this book will soon become dated. The ten years since the previous edition have been years of bitter bloody conflict and division. It would be good to think that the next edition will cover a period of peaceful resolution and reconciliation, but I very much doubt it.
