Africa, in the wake of Asia, is taking its first steps towards liberation from the centuries-old domination of white imperialism. On 19 December last year, the Parliament in Khartoum unanimously passed a resolution declaring that Sudan is an independent state and intends to become a sovereign republic.

The solemn decision follows by one month the withdrawal of the British and Egyptian forces that had occupied Sudan for fifty-seven years, namely since 2 September 1898, the date of the historic Battle of Omdurman, which marked the end of the Mahdist revolt. The ephemeral barbarian empire that the Mahdi and his successors founded, fighting valiantly against the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, the Italians who had descended on Eritrea, and above all against the English, succumbed on this bloody day – one of the bloodiest in the history of colonial wars – to the overwhelming forces of ‘Sirdar’ Kitchener, commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Egyptian troops. The phalanxes of the followers of Abdullah al-Taashi, lieutenant of the late Mahdi, the famous Dervishes (which means poor in Arabic) fought with fanatical courage, leaving on the battlefield 11,000 dead and 16,000 wounded. It was the golden age of white imperialism, personified by Great Britain, which was then unsheathing its young claws (the repression of the Mahdi revolt preceded by a year the shameful British attack on the Boer republics of South Africa). No wonder then that the Sudan’s first attempt to free itself from imperialist domination and give itself an independent state form – albeit inspired by motives characteristic of the opposition to capitalism from a reactionary point of view – would be drowned in blood.

Today’s decision by the Khartoum parliament echoes the clamour raised by the unfortunate Dervish struggle of the last century, but it does not have an equally uncertain future ahead of it, because it falls within the age of ‘waning’ imperialism. This does not mean that the fledgling African Republic will have an easy life. We are warned of this by the circumstances in which this important event took place. It is no coincidence that the unexpected decision of the Sudanese parliament and government came on the same day on which, in a region on another continent, in Jordan, the violent agitation against the government of Hazza al-Majali, a determined supporter of the Baghdad Pact, and for it of British policy in the Middle East, reached its acme, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries.

In the cold language of geography, Sudan and the Middle East seem to belong to two different worlds. In reality, there are well-founded reasons to believe that the recent events in Sudan will exert profound repercussions on the vast theatre of the crisis raging in the Middle East, which is characterised by the conflict between Egypt and Great Britain, an undeclared conflict, but one that is self-evident if one takes into account that the Baghdad Pact, which allies Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and against which Egypt calls the Arab countries to battle, is a construct conceived and realised by Great Britain, which is directly involved in the alliance. Now it does not seem to be a coincidence of chance that the mighty effort that British diplomacy is making to force Jordan to adhere to the Baghdad Pact, and thus to take sides against Egypt and its allies, enters its decisive phase at the very moment when the Parliament and the Government of Sudan, overriding the Anglo-Egyptian agreement that set the popular referendum for the beginning of January, decide to choose the constitutional form of the future Sudanese State without any doubt.

The decision of the Khartoum Parliament confronted Egypt with a fait accompli that effectively upset the plans that the Cairo government had built on the assumption of Sudan’s political union with Egypt. Since July 1952, the revolutionary regime personified in General Naguib laid the foundations for the project of the political unification of the Nile Valley. On succeeding Naguib, Nasser inherited the ambitious programme, which was based on the existence of a Sudanese party in favour of union with Egypt. The unionist principle went through a fortunate period, especially in the northern regions of Sudan bordering Egypt – the elections of November 1953 were won by the unionists – but it had fallen into disfavour for some years precisely because of the political action of the government headed by Ismail al-Azhari, who, ironically enough, is also the head of the unionist party.

Of course, the British condominium – let it not be forgotten that Sudan was precisely an Anglo-Egyptian condominium – could only profit from the decline of Egyptian influence. It is obvious that Britain, being committed by the Anglo-Egyptian agreements of 12 February 1953 to grant the Sudanese people the right to choose the constitutional form of the future Sudanese state, and thus to put an end to the colonial occupation regime, manoeuvred in order to favour the independence principle. It is well understood that an eventual incorporation of Sudan into Egypt – in any constitutional form – would have abruptly nullified any possibility for the London government to retain its influence in an independent Sudanese republic. Faced with the prospect of seeing the former Egyptian condominium become the exclusive master of the object of the dispute, the London government had to logically bet on the Sudanese independence card. It is circumstances of this kind that provoke the apparent paradoxes whereby traditionally colonialist powers set themselves up as champions of the independence of their former servants.

The conflict over Suez was bound to exacerbate Anglo-Egyptian rivalry in Sudan, for it is clear that Britain, forced to abandon its military bases in the Canal Zone, is trying to retain footholds, albeit very much in the rear, or in areas adjacent to the positions it has had to evacuate in any case. On the other hand, the tendency towards independence, even if coaxed along and favoured by the representatives of British imperialism out of selfish calculation, is by no means foreign to the political history of Sudan, as the Mahdi revolt proves. It should also be added that Cairo’s plans for the utilisation of the Nile’s waters, if they have raised Nasser’s prestige in the West as a builder of colossal dams, have found firm opposition in the Sudanese, who can always argue that if ‘Egypt is the gift of the Nile’, it is also true that the sources of this providential river are certainly not located within Egyptian borders. Apart from anything else, historical experience shows that it is extremely unlikely that even an embryonic government apparatus with a rudimentary bureaucratic structure, as in the case of Sudan, would spontaneously agree to dissolve itself into a larger state edifice.

The 1953 agreements had remained inoperative in practice, due to the controversy that arose between London and Cairo over the manner in which they were implemented. But on 29 August 1955, a proposal made by the leader of the Unionist party and Prime Minister al-Azhari had the effect of unblocking the situation, as they say. Ismail al-Azhari then proposed to delegate to a popular consultation, to be carried out in the form of a referendum, the right to choose the constitutional form. Independence or union with Egypt. This thesis constituted an amendment to the agreements of 13 February 1953, which delegated to an elective Constituent Assembly, and not to a direct popular consultation, the right to pronounce on the future constitutional structure of the country.

The Cairo government immediately accepted the referendum proposal, perhaps trusting the unionists too much, who, as it turned out, would then vote in the Parliament in Khartoum in perfect agreement with the those who supported independence. By acting in this way, the unionists nonchalantly disowned themselves twice: first, by throwing away their unionist programmatic claims, and secondly, by going back on the referendum proposal that their own party leader had put forward. But one cannot, in truth, suspect that the leaders in Cairo were deluding themselves too much, if it is true, as the press reported, that as early as April Ismail al-Azhari had affirmed, in full agreement with the unionist parliamentary group, that Sudan should be ‘a completely sovereign republic, with its own president, its own parliament and its own government’. Even if news transmission by tam-tam drum was still in use in Sudan, such a peremptory statement could not have escaped the ears of Nasser’s ministers. Evidently, even knowing of the decline in its own influence and the Unionists’ turnabout, Nasser’s government could not, while it stood as the defender of democracy and anti-imperialism and under such labels led the furious struggle against the Baghdad Pact, reject the popular referendum, which is the taboo of parliamentary democracy. On the other hand, had he done so, he would have thereby admitted to feeling beaten before he’s even begun.

The British acceptance was to take concrete form in the agreement signed in Cairo on 3 December 1955 between Egypt and Sudan, in which the contracting parties declared that they entrusted the decision about the future of Sudan to a plebiscite, i.e. the al-Azhari proposal. As mentioned above, with a unanimous vote, the Parliament in Khartoum, ignoring this agreement, proceeded to proclaim Sudan’s independence. This decision marks the triumph of the British thesis and the definitive collapse of Egypt’s unifying dreams, which must now worry about regaining its lost influence in Sudan, and work doggedly to get the future Republic of Sudan to follow, if not a policy of understanding, which appears rather problematic, then at least a line of neutrality towards Cairo. In the current international conditions in the Middle East, which absorbs all the attention and efforts of the Cairo government, alarmed above all by the declared determination of King Hussein of Jordan and his followers to join the Baghdad Pact, the igniting of an outbreak of anti-Egyptian political hostilities in Sudan would greatly undermine the efforts of the Nasser government. Nor is it to be believed that Britain would not work hard to widen the undeniable rift between Cairo and Khartoum by exploiting its success.

Undoubtedly, the process of Sudan’s national settlement, which today appears to be on its way to completion, suffers from the interference of imperialism. But it could not happen otherwise in a world, such as the present one, in which the centres of imperialism have a power of political irradiation that covers the planet and events are linked multifacetedly across the Continents. Moreover, in almost all the great historical changes that gave rise to the new independent states of Asia and Africa in the aftermath of the Second World War, the motives of the national-democratic revolution, which was to begin the demolition of the old social structures of Asian-style despotism and feudalism, were dialectically intertwined with the motives of the imperialist struggle for world domination.

The future republic of Sudan is threatened internally by the dangers of separatism that are inherent in the rivalry between the northern and southern provinces of the country. Already the press speaks of two Sudans: the northern and the southern. Nor can the discrimination be said to be unfounded, because there are indeed tendencies towards regional autonomism, which if they become radicalised could jeopardise the unity of the future state. It is no coincidence that among the other motions passed by the parliament in Khartoum during the same session in which the country’s independence was proclaimed, there is one that assigns to the future Constituent Assembly the examination of ‘the wishes of the deputies of the three southern provinces concerning the establishment of a regional government for the said area’. What happened in August 1955, namely the revolt of the military garrisons in Equatoria province, proves how immature the ‘connective tissue’ of the future Sudanese nation-state still is. Very pronounced differences in social development and racial antagonisms divide the populations of the Northern provinces, composed of Arabs and Nubians of the Muslim religion, from the populations of the South of the Negro race, who live mainly in Equatoria and Upper Nile. There is, therefore, a widespread fear among ‘southerners’ of being degraded, within the new state, to the level of an exploited colony, no longer by the foreign occupier, but by the more evolved representatives of the Sudanese population itself, precisely by the ‘northerners’.

It is not the first time that populations subject to British domination prove to be politically divided as they prepare to emancipate themselves from their former masters and move towards independence. Let us not forget that the absurd state structure of Pakistan, to choose the most eloquent example, whose territory is divided into two large chunks separated from each other by the entire immense space of mainland India, is a masterpiece of the Foreign Office.

Imperialism is forced to withdraw, bit by bit, from the old colonies, and it does so by leaving in the abandoned places dangerous political landmines intended to weaken or make precarious the new state institutions. The age of colonialism is drawing to an end: Asia is almost entirely emancipated from the century-old yoke and is unleashing the endogenous forces of the industrial revolution; Africa, in which colonial domination is oldest, is proceeding more slowly but nevertheless surely, along the path that has now been opened up to the ‘coloured peoples’. The year 1955 saw two important events in the new African history: the start of independence for Sudan and the Gold Coast. The reactionaries of Europe and America have well-founded reasons to be scandalised and horrified, and in vain they rehash the trite themes of the congenital political inferiorities of colonial peoples in order to comfort and console themselves. They would have irrefutable arguments to oppose Marxist communism, if the world stood still: but the revolution, chained and gagged in the fortified citadels of western imperialism, unstoppably explodes elsewhere, sweeping away decrepit social and political structures and giving birth to new proletarian phalanxes. The power of the dominant Euro-American capitalist classes seems unassailable and destined to last forever. But never before has the imperialist-dominated world gone through such profound upheavals.