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Between May 1816 and March 1820 the paramount chief of Asante Osei Tutu Kwame Asibey Bonsu (r.1800-24) received no less than nine representatives of the British and Dutch trading companies at his capital Kumase. Of these, seven wrote detailed accounts of their experiences but the first and the most historically important was Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee published by Thomas Edward Bowdich (1791?-1824) in 1819. Besides containing vivid descriptions of Bowdich’s experiences as the Conductor of the first British Mission it is also supplemented with maps, diagrams and ten colour illustrations, the majority of which depict everyday activities and important locations in Kumase. The largest illustration, entitled ‘The First Day of the Yam Custom,’ differs significantly from the others, however, in respect of its size and its subject matter, as it documents the appropriation of conventions, material culture and symbolism by Asante, Islamic and European representatives during an important diplomatic ceremony. This thesis focuses on Bowdich’s published account and this illustration in particular, in order to explore the hypothesis that such spectacles played an instrumental role in Anglo/Asante appropriations and diplomatic negotiations during this period. As part of this analysis Bowdich’s descriptions will be compared and contrasted with other envoys’ accounts that were written between 1816 and 1820 in order that systematic practices and procedures and consistent patterns of behaviour can be identified and interrogated. The adoption of this historical ethnographic approach demonstrates the value of analyzing and re-assessing individual accounts that complement, but also contrast with, the longue dureé perspective adopted by the majority of studies that examine culture contact and appropriation. Furthermore, it also facilitates the introduction and development of a new theoretical concept that has the potential for wide-spread applicability in the analysis of other cultural encounters.

The Lahawiyin: Identity and History in a Sudanese Arab Tribe Tamador Ahmed Khalid Abdalla Abstract This thesis is concerned with the Lahawiyin of northern Sudan, and it explores the relationship between identity and history in this Sudanese Arab tribe since the late nineteenth century. The history of the Lahawiyin reveals continuous crossings of borders and boundaries through a period of substantial political and economic change, much of it driven by external forces. The thesis demonstrates that the Lahawiyin Arab identity has been central to the way that Lahawiyin leaders have sought to develop and maintain their authority, and the ways in which ordinary Lahawiyin have tried to maintain a particular way of life and patterns of social relations. Arab identity has been used instrumentally to make claims or assert rights; but it has also shaped the way in which Lahawiyin have understood their interests. The emphasis on Arab identity has been closely linked to the prolonged campaign by some Lahawiyin for a homeland (dar), and in the way that Lahawiyin have negotiated their subordinate status within larger Arab confederations – first the Kababish, then the Shukriyya. It has also shaped Lahawiyin relationships with their own subordinates, particularly slaves. Though the Lahawiyin campaign for a dar has not been successful, and their lifestyle of most Lahawiyin has now changed irrevocably away from pastoralism, Arab identity has continued to be important in current contests over the political status of potential leaders, and the group as a whole. The thesis makes use of a range of archival sources in the UK National Archive, in Sudan Archive at Durham and at the National Records Office in Khartoum. During the fieldwork various academic sources were consulted in Khartoum and Gedarif which form an important aspect of the narratives together with the many stories which were generated from the oral histories told by the Lahawiyin. Using these materials, the thesis discusses how the Lahawiyin, have utilized their Arabness, and the way they present their history, to negotiate their status with a series of regimes, from the Turco-Egyptian state of the nineteenth century to the current regime of the National Congress Party.

The Gezira Scheme of northern Sudan has been consistently portrayed as a totalising institution which imposed a distinctly new form of social and economic organisation upon a tenant body. This study reassesses the impact of the Gezira Scheme, suggesting that the changes brought by the Scheme were of degree rather than type, and did not disrupt the cultural values at the heart of society. It credits the Sudanese actors within the Scheme with an agency previously denied to them, and looks holistically at the region’s experience of governance. The Scheme is thus seen not as a controlling and oppressive institution, but rather as a tool used by a flexible and forward-looking society to improve personal circumstances. To these ends both the economic and administrative structures of central government were embraced and adapted to meet pre-existing cultural values whilst retaining the existing flexible forms of community authority. Tenants used a system created as a result of a flawed government imagination of Gezira society to pursue existing aspirations that had formerly been attainable only by a small wealthy elite. In this way, a tenant elite was created that defined itself economically and ethnically in relation to a majority non-tenant population. With devolutionary policies responding primarily to the needs of the Scheme, this economic dominance of tenants was reinforced by their political dominance of institutions of local governance. Experienced in mediating with central state structures, the tenants who controlled courts and councils were able to control their own experience of governance. Tenant elitism was ultimately revealed through the establishment of a self-identified interest group that was organised institutionally from the 1940s. Embracing both government and Scheme, tenants campaigned in defence of stated financial 'rights' based on a notion of elevated citizenship. However, the inability of all tenants to attain these universal aims split the tenant body and established a future pattern of instability within the Gezira Scheme.

This thesis analyzes the institutional development of the Sudanese police between 1924 and 1989, focusing in particular on its role in governing Sudanese society and its relationship with the state at large. It seeks to challenge the static picture which represents the police as servile tools of ruling colonial and post-colonial regimes in Africa and a simple extension of the political executive. It contends that the police cannot be understood as the passive tools of the state, since both colonial and post-colonial states have been highly divided. The competing factions included legal and professional groups that wanted to develop a strong, united and institutionalized police force so as to exercise a systematic governance of Sudanese society, and political and administrative factions that sought to make the police serve the narrower political agendas of the regime. Central ruling factions, such as the Sudan Political Service in the colonial era and the military in the post-colonial era, have often seen a strong and institutionalized police force as a potential threat to their status, and have thus sought to weaken the police by conferring police authority to a number of parallel bodies. It will be seen that this conflict at the centre of the state helped to exacerbate the rift between the urban core and rural peripheries, as the various colonial and post-colonial governments sought to prevent the development of a united police force by dividing it along regional lines – and that the police came to serve, in some respects, as the state’s tools for enforcing this divide. Yet at the same time the thesis will seek to rehabilitate the police as actors within their own right, demonstrating the agency they exercised both as an institution and on behalf of various religious, ethnic and political groups to which they were affiliated.