Port Sudan: The Evolution Of A Colonial City (state, Culture, And Society In Arab North Africa)

This is the story of Port Sudan’s creation and its development as a colonial city from 1904 until the early 1950s when, in the twilight of the condominium, responsibility for its management began increasingly to devolve upon the Sudanese themselves. It examines the procedures colonial administrators evolved during that half century, first to lay out an orderly urban community, then to supply its basic needs, govern it effectively, and provide for its growth and prosperity amid social, economic, and political controversies that arose in the 1920s and 1930s and reached a crescendo in the post-World War II era.Although the evolution of Port Sudan (and the handful of similar “created” cities that sprang up in the absence of previous settlements) generally replicated that of other cities in colonial Africa, it differed in one extremely important respect: The Europeans who laid out the city, organized its municipal services, and devised the regulations for its day to day management, did not have to weigh the impact of their decisions on an indigenous urban population with its own social structures and institutions, nor did they have to modify their own views about city life in order to accommodate the prevailing mores and values of an already established urban class. Because its builders and early administrators enjoyed so free a hand in shaping Port Sudan, an examination of the plans they designed and implemented reveals with considerable clarity what they thought the ideal colonial city should look like, how they thought it should function, and how they believed its component communities should interact. In 1904, only the unimposing tomb of a local holy man occupied the site chosen by British officials for the construction of a modern seaport to facilitate the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan's expanded commerce. Built where no urban center had previously existed, Port Sudan was the quintessential colonial city, created and designed by Europeans, who organized its municipal services and devised the regulations for its day-to-day management. The advantages of a created city were clear: The colonial government did not need to accommodate an indigenous urban population with its own existing social structures, institutions, and cultural values. This study examines the efforts of Port Sudan's builders and early administrators to tailor the urban environment to their own notions of the ideal colonial city–how it should look, how it should function, and how its human components should interact. It then focuses on the inter-war period, describing how the rapid growth of Port Sudan and its harbor posed insurmountable challenges to the maintenance of this ideal. Although the Sudanese population within the city steadily increased, their exclusion from any meaningful participation in municipal affairs during these troubled years left them physically and psychologically isolated. The situation began to change after World War II, but, as the study reveals, conditions in the post-war era only compounded long-standing political, economic, and social problems in Port Sudan, ensuring that the city the Sudanese inherited in 1956 still bore the marks of its colonial origins. In 1904, only the unimposing tomb of a local holy man occupied the site chosen by British officials for the construction of a modern seaport to facilitate the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan's expanded commerce. Built where no urban center had previously existed, Port Sudan was the quintessential colonial city, created and designed by Europeans, who organized its municipal services and devised the regulations for its day-to-day management. The advantages of a created city were clear: The colonial government did not need to accommodate an indigenous urban population with its own existing social structures, institutions, and cultural values. This study examines the efforts of Port Sudan's builders and early administrators to tailor the urban environment to their own notions of the ideal colonial city - how it should look, how it should function, and how its human components should interact. It then focuses on the interwar period, describing how the rapid growth of Port Sudan and its harbor posed insurmountable challenges to the maintenance of this ideal. Although the Sudanese population within the city steadily increased, their exclusion from any meaningful participation in municipal affairs during these troubled years left them physically and psychologically isolated. The situation began to change after World War II, but, as the study reveals, conditions in the postwar era only compounded long-standing political, economic, and social problems in Port Sudan, ensuring that the city the Sudanese inherited in 1956 still bore the marks of its colonial origins.