Luxury, Status, and the Importance of Slavery in the Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Northern Sudan (original) (raw)

1994, Northeast African Studies

Almost immediately after the official abolition of slavery in 1899, the Condominium administration began to worry about the exodus of slaves from the farmlands of their owners and the corresponding slump in the northern Sudan's overall agricultural output.1 In an influential article entitled "Economic Development and the Heritage of Slavery in the Sudan Republic," McLoughlin comments on this period's labor shortage and the hardship that it created. He explains that the pains of social and economic adjustment were not surprising, since "the Sudan has been a slave-based economy for at least three millennia."2 McLoughlin's portrayal of slavery in the Sudan is open to question on two grounds: he suggests that slaves had indeed been the cornerstone of the Sudanese economy for millennia, and implies that the demand for slaves over that time span had primarily reflected a demand for their productive labor. Both conclusions, though containing some truth, are essentially flawed. It is true that the territories of the Sudan had exported slaves for millennia. One of the earliest extant written sources, dating from the fourth millennium B.c., indicates that Egyptians under the Pharaoh Seneferu penetrated Nubia up to the fourth cataract and collected slaves from the area between Abu Hamad and Khartoum. Later Ptolemaic records mention the Sudanese ivory and slave eunuchs which were subject to duty at the port of Alexandria.3 And so it continued, with the Sudan providing slaves and other exotic goods to the successive Pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Mamluke, Ot-® Northeast African Studies (

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