In the days when the Sudan proclaimed its independence, escaping the British yoke and eluding the expectations of the Egyptian government, which had long hoped to annex the territory of the former Anglo-Egyptian condominium, we wrote an article which we entitled ‘Behind the Independence of the Sudan'. Well, what is ‘behind’ it? There is the subjugation and bloody slaughter of the wage-earning proletariat. But we knew this even before we had news of the Kosti massacre.

What distinguishes and divides us from the false Marxists who have promoted national independence as an outpouring of the class struggle of the proletariat, is that we know that the independent bourgeois republic is founded on the blood of the proletariat, the same proletarians who helped bring it into being by fighting against the feudal forces. It happened in France, during the last century; it is happening today as the movement for the founding of democratic republics unfolds, in Asia and Africa, in the various forms of anti-colonial revolt. Class history cannot be refuted: every bourgeois revolutionary government inevitably generates a Cavaignac – slaughterers of proletarians who delude themselves that they will get recognition from the bourgeois government for the sacrifices they have endured for the cause of the national democratic revolution.

The press has released the gruesome details of the barbaric massacre. In Kosti, a district in the Blue Nile province, about 310 kilometres from Khartoum, the police caused the death by suffocation of 194 farm labourers, who had been arrested for the crime of resisting the police and herded like beasts into cramped barracks. A government communiqué reported that the victims had died ‘from asphyxiation resulting from heat and excessive crowding’. Obviously, the Sudanese police is still in its infancy, but already it has nothing to envy, in terms of brutality and ruthlessness, to the most hardened police forces of the advanced capitalist countries.

Why were the Kosti workers imprisoned? To find out, we had to read the bourgeois press, since L’Unità, which usually grants great prominence and ample space to ‘reports’ from countries ‘freed from the colonial yoke’, appeared to us to be rather short on details in this regard.

The gruesome episode occurred on 23 February. It came as a tragic conclusion to the agitation that the peasants of Kosti, many of whom came originally from French West Africa, had started since 19 February against the agrarian societies on which they depended. ‘These peasants’, we read in Il Tempo, ‘cultivate fertilised and irrigated land, which is owned by the agrarian societies. The peasants refused to hand over the cotton crop to the representatives of the societies unless their demands, which had been formulated several months before, were accepted. The main demand, Il Tempo writes, ‘was the establishment of financial control over the administration of the societies by qualified persons (sic), and the distribution of the proceeds of the harvest in the proportion of 60 per cent to the peasants and 40 per cent to the owners.’

Having failed to get the companies to accept their demands, the workers decided to suspend cotton deliveries, waiting for the Khartoum government to intervene as an arbiter in the dispute. But on Sunday, 19 February, the local authorities decided, at the request of the companies’ representatives, to ‘tackle the revolt head-on’. In the ensuing conflict 22 workers were killed by police gunfire, 285 others were arrested and thrown into the cursed barracks, where, as mentioned, 194 of them, twelve hours later on Tuesday, met with a horrible death. The number of deaths resulting from the clashes in the streets is not certain. L’Unità, which is inclined in such cases to lean towards the optimistic version, was content with the figure of 22 published in the official communiqué.

Il Tempo and other newspapers reported instead the figures provided by the Union of the Peasants of the Blue Nile, according to which the number of people killed in the streets by the police amounted to 150 dead and about 500 wounded. Evidently, L’Unità was inclined to play it down. In fact, in addition to reducing the massacre to the scale desired by the government in Khartoum, it did not devote a single word to attacking the companies that manage the Sudanese cotton plantations, indeed it did not mention them at all, so that one could not understand from reading its report the causes of the conflict and its tragic consequences. It must be deduced that the editors of the P.C.I. organ only know how to go berserk when it is American monopolies, of the infamous ‘United Fruits Company’ type, who are the ones sacking the colonies or crypto-colonies.

It is clear that the recent saga of the Russian-Egyptian friendship, consecrated by the commencement of exchanges of Czechoslovak and Russian arms for Egyptian cotton and rice, is inducing the highly sensitive diplomats at Via della Botteghe Oscure not to be too harsh on governments, like the Sudanese one, which Egypt is trying to draw into its orbit. It must not be forgotten that the current regime prevailing in Cairo launched in 1952 the ambitious project – formerly cherished by the Farouk governments – of a unitary Egyptian-Sudanese state, a project that was supported by the unionist party of Ismail al-Azhari, the current head of the government in Khartoum. Subsequently, this party was to retract and promote, with other parties, the independence of Sudan.

The Kosti uprising, and the ensuing massacre of workers, followed shortly after the uprising of the military garrisons in Equatoria province in August 1955. If the military revolt took place in the backward regions of the South, the recent uprising that had Kosti as its epicentre – one of the very few centres of nascent industrialisation and the capital of a cotton-producing area – can be explained, and should not seem a paradox, by the relative degree of social progress in the region.

Sudan’s main economic resource is cotton, the production of which reached 870,000 quintals of fibre in 1953. The development of this branch of production has been made possible by artificial irrigation, which has made great progress in the alluvial lands of the Gezira, which stretch between the Blue Nile and the Atbara. Other cotton centres are Kassala and Tokar, which are located in the north-eastern part of the country, near the Eritrean border. A third, less important class of plantations is found in Kordofan, and near Dongola. Cotton cultivation is the basis of progress in the northern regions of the country, while in the remaining parts agricultural technology still lies at a primitive level and makes use of rudimentary means. The South lacks the great works of modern industrialisation, which are, in the Centre-North, the Sennar Dam, the barrage on the White Nile and the hydraulic plants for channelling river water. Incidentally, the barrage on the White Nile was built with Egyptian capital and the use of the collected water is a controversial topic that disturbs relations between Cairo and Khartoum.

The South, inhabited mainly by Nilotic Negroes and Bantu people who still follow fetishistic religions, condemned so far to severe economic and social backwardness, looks with suspicion on the North, inhabited by Muslim Arabs, who are far more civilised and dedicated to superior forms of production. Indeed, some in the press even speak of two Sudans: Southern and Northern. That the southerners’ fears of the northerners, to whom they attribute the intention to turn the southern regions into a kind of exploitable colony, are not unfounded can be seen from the way in which the companies owning the cotton plantations in the Centre-North react to the wage claims of their employees. The assimilation of modern western production technology, introduced in agriculture and timidly infiltrating industry – what little there is of it – evidently could not fail to be accompanied by the importation of capitalist relations of production and the bourgeoisie’s own methods of social repression. The workers who suffocated to death in the fetid prisons of Kosti are the first victims of Sudan’s ‘republican and independent’ capitalism.

Marxists maintain that, in anti-feudal revolutions – and, in their social aspect, anti-colonial movements are anti-feudal and anti-bourgeois revolutions, just as they are independence revolutions in their national aspect – the revolutionary forces of the proletariat must, where they exist, collaborate with bourgeois nationalist revolutionary forces in the overthrow of foreign colonialism and feudalism, in any case of local pre-capitalism. But Marxists are by no means the theorists of the immolation of the proletariat on the altar of the bourgeois republic. Proletarian revolutionaries support the struggle against feudalism and pre-capitalism in colonial countries not in the interests of the bourgeois democratic republic, but, on the contrary, in the interests of their own class revolution. Bourgeois democracy is an obligatory passage on the pre-capitalist-socialist historical path, so Marxist communists agree to pass through it, but to pass through it, certainly not to stop there.

The fact is that the government in Khartoum, which has yet to prove itself to be entirely free of the influences of British imperialism, has the merit of directing, as well as it can, the modernisation movement in Sudan, does not prevent us from being completely on the side of the workers of Kosti, so barbarously suppressed, and against their capitalist executioners in Khartoum.