1
‘Better housing conditions are of vital importance to the ordinary
man’: Slum Clearance in Post-War Khartoum
Abstract: As population of Khartoum increased during the 1940s, the Sudan Government sought to
demolish the Deims, or slums, that surrounded the southern edge of the city and relocate the residents
to a new planned site. Here it was envisaged that improved housing would help to create ‘modern’,
model families. However, like many of the post-war housing projects in British Africa, the resettlement
of the Deims was undermined by poor planning, inadequate financial support, and resistance from
residents, who rejected the colonial planners’ vision of how domestic life should be organised.
Introduction
From the late 1930s onwards, urban growth rates accelerated throughout Africa. In Mombasa
the African population increased from 40,000 in 1939 to 63,000 in 1945, while in Dar es
Salaam the African population increased from 34,750 in 1940 to 93,363 in 1957.1 This rapid
urban growth coincided with and, in part, contributed to the labour unrest that swept through
the continent during the late 1930s and continued in the period after 1945. Strikes and urban
riots revealed the depth of discontent among the urban labour force, as protests engulfed the
towns of the Rhodesian Copperbelt (1935 and 1937), Kenya (1939), and Tanganyika (1939).2
In each case the colonial authorities found that the urban environment and its associated
problems of overcrowding, poor housing, rotational employment, and low wages were key
contributing factors in the outbreak of the protests. Consequently, in the wake of the unrest,
and with the labour shortages of the Depression giving way to growing and increasingly settled
urban populations, colonial governments were forced to concede that the poor living conditions
in many African towns was a matter that required urgent attention. 3 Such a view found a
receptive audience among officials in the Colonial Office, which, as a result of the 1940
1
Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven,
1987), 57; James R. Brennan and Andrew Burton, ‘The emerging metropolis: a history of Dar es Salaam, circa 1862-2000’, in
James R. Brennan and Andrew Burton and Yusuf Lawi (eds), Dar es Salaam: Histories from an Emerging African Metropolis (Dar
es Salaam, 2007), 51.
2
Ian Henderson, ‘Early African leadership: the Copperbelt disturbances of 1935 and 1940’, Journal of Southern African Studies,
2 (1975), 83-97; Cooper, On the African Waterfront, pp. 45-50; John Iliffe, ‘The creation of group consciousness: a history of the
dockworkers of Dar es Salaam’, in Robin Cohen and Richard Sandbrook (eds) The Development of an African Working Class
(London, 1975).
3
Richard Harris and Susan Parnell, ‘The turning point in urban policy for British colonial Africa, 1939-1945’, in Fassil Demissie
(ed.) Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories (Farnham, 2012), 127-51.
2
Colonial Development and Welfare Act (CDWA), was eager to promote policies that would
lead to improved social welfare provision in the colonies.4
Having identified the urban problem as an issue that needed resolving, a consensus
gradually emerged in London and the colonies that the system of migrant casual labour on
which the colonial economies depended should be eradicated. It was argued that casual
labour contributed to a range of social problems, such as vagrancy, unemployment, and crime.
It therefore followed for colonial officials that the increasing number of migrants settling in the
towns and cities was not only placing additional strain on already overstretched infrastructure
but was also contributing to the state of social disorder.5 The solution, as advocated by a
number of investigative commissions, including the Howman and Phillips Committees, was to
‘stabilise’ the African workforce.6 Stabilisation typically involved: setting a higher minimum
wage, addressing malnutrition and poor health among workers, hiring only registered casual
labourers, and providing adequate housing and social services for urban workers and their
families.7
Housing was critical to the policy of stabilisation, for if workers were to settle
permanently in the towns and cities then they would require ‘family housing’, along with the
necessary infrastructure and social amenities. 8 Moreover, although it was assumed that
employers would continue to provide accommodation, it was also acknowledged that at a time
when colonial governments were intervening more directly in the social and economic spheres
of colonial rule, the state would have to play a greater role in the provision of housing. In Kenya,
for example, in 1944 the government submitted a request for CDWA assistance to build 756
houses for its African employees, of which three quarters would be for families.9 The rationale
in Kenya, as in other colonies in British Africa, was simple: the provision of suitable and
affordable family housing would encourage workers to settle in the urban environment and
form stable nuclear families. Model families, with access to improved social amenities, such
as education, health, and employment opportunities, would, in turn, help to raise the standard
4
Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge, 1996),
171-270.
5
Cooper, On the African Waterfront, 50-7.
6
Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Labour Unrest in Mombasa (Nairobi, 1945); Report of the Committee to Investigate the
Economic, Social, and Health Conditions of Africans Employed in Urban Areas (Salisbury, 1944).
7
Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 324-60.
8
Ibid., 335.
9
Richard Harris and Alison Hay, ‘New plans for housing in urban Kenya, 1939–63’, Planning Perspectives, Vol. 22 (2007), 195-
223.
3
of living of low-income neighbourhoods, which had long been regarded as a source of social
instability.10
The Sudan, which was jointly administered by Britain and Egypt from 1898 until
independence in 1956, has largely been neglected in studies of late imperial urban policy. This
is primarily because of the Sudan’s ‘Condominium’ status, which meant that the Sudan
Government reported to the Foreign Office and not the Colonial Office and was therefore
excluded from policy debates regarding the development and welfare agenda.11 However, as
Justin Willis has argued in relation to Indirect Rule or Native Administration, the Sudan was
far from an exceptional case. In fact, as Willis notes, the officers of the Sudan Political Service
(SPS) ‘perceived [of] the same problems [and] pursued similar policies’ to colonial officials
elsewhere in British Africa.12 Using the example of the Sudan Government’s post-war slum
clearance programme, this article makes a similar argument. It demonstrates how the colonial
authorities regarded the inhabitants of the Deims, or ‘native lodging areas’, that surrounded
the southern edge of the city as a source of disease, crime, and social disorder. The article
explores the authorities’ response to the rapid expansion of the Deims during the late 1940s,
demonstrating how the Sudan Government, like other colonial administrations in British Africa,
sought to control casual labour through urban planning and housing and thereby create a more
productive and ‘modern’ urban class.
In this respect the article echoes the work of those historians who have focused on late
colonial development policy in Africa. As Joseph Hodge has demonstrated, development,
whether conceived of in terms of agricultural production, ecological conservation, or the
provision of social welfare and medical services, had been undertaken by the colonial state
since the establishment of colonial rule. 13 The ‘colonial science’ that informed these
development policies, as Christophe Bonneuil has argued, was a specific colonial form of
knowledge: a discourse that was shaped by a belief in the superiority of European science
10
Cooper, Labour and Decolonization, p. 335.
11
As a ‘Condominium’ of Britain and Egypt, the Sudan was not eligible for funds under the terms of the CDW Act of 1940.
However, in 1946 the Sudan was granted two million pounds sterling from the British Treasury as recognition for its contribution
to the war effort. This grant served as a catalyst for the The Five Year Plan for Postwar Development in Sudan: 1946-1951. Alden
Young, Accounting for Decolonization: The Origins of the Sudanese Economy, 1945-1964, Princeton University Ph. D. thesis,
2013, 44. For further information concerning Sudan’s administrative status see: Martin W. Daly, Empire on the Nile: the AngloEgyptian Sudan, 1898-1934 (Cambridge, 1986).
12
Justin Willis, ‘Violence, Authority, and the State in the Nuba Mountains of Condominium Sudan’, The Historical Journal, Vol.
46, No. 1 (2003), 91.
13
Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism
(Athens, 2007). See also: Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific
Knowledge, 1870-1950 (Chicago, 2011).
4
and presented indigenous or local practices as irrational, thereby serving to justify the civilising
mission.14 During the inter-war period this faith in the possibilities of science and development
sat uneasily alongside the principles of trusteeship and indirect rule but, following the
influential work of Frederick Cooper, historians are increasingly recognising that the 1930s
was also a period of change with regard to colonial development policy.15 The Depression and
the subsequent labour protests highlighted the terrible living conditions in the African colonies.
As Cooper, Hodge and Joanna Lewis have argued, these protests, in combination with the
outbreak of the Second World War and the growth of anti-colonial nationalism after 1945, were
used by colonial governments across British Africa to justify greater state intervention with
regard to economic development and the provision of social services.16
The towns and cities, as Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly have suggested,
became a key focus for late colonial development initiatives, owing to the frequency of urban
protests, the rise of organised trade unionism, and the influx of the rural poor from the
countryside. 17 Through initiatives, such as the promotion of apolitical trade unionism, the
provision of maternal and child welfare services, or the development of public housing
schemes and community centres, the colonial state sought to intervene more directly in the
daily lives of the subject population, aiming to transform colonial subjects into productive and
orderly citizens.18 These policies, as Branch and Mampilly point out, were often accompanied
by a high degree of coercion and state violence: street hawkers and the urban unemployed
faced greater harassment from the police, while the inhabitants of ‘illegal’ squatter settlements
were liable to be evicted and their homes destroyed with little or no warning.19 Unsurprisingly,
given the highly authoritarian nature of many of these policies and the flawed racial and
cultural prejudices that shaped them, the late colonial development initiatives did not yield the
14
Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930-
1970’, Osiris, Vol. 15 (2000), p. 260. As Hodge argues, it should also be pointed out that colonial officials’ commitment to
development was also influenced by fears concerning social and economic instability, as much as it was shaped by their belief
in Western ideas of scientific progress. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert, 263.
15
Cooper, Decolonization and African Society.
16
Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War and
Welfare in Kenya, 1925-1952 (Oxford, 2000). See also: Sabine Clarke, “A Technocratic Imperial State? The Colonial Office and
Scientific Research, 1940-1960,” Twentieth Century British History 18, No. 4 (2007): 453-480.
17
Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change (London, 2015), 16.
18
The literature on these subjects is extensive, examples include: Cooper, Decolonization and African Society; Lewis, Empire
State Building; Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial
Lagos (Athens, Ohio, 2014); Teresa A. Barnes “We Women Worked so Hard”: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Harare,
Zimbabwe, 1930-1956 (Portsmouth, 1999), Lynn Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya
(Berkeley, 2003) and Andreas Eckert, ‘Regulating The Social: Social Security, Social Welfare And The State In Late Colonial
Tanzania’, Journal Of African History, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2004), 467-489.
19
Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, 18-19.
5
desired results. However, in spite of this, the belief in the transformative power of the state did
not disappear with the formal end of imperial rule, with many independent African governments
pursuing similar policies to their colonial predecessors.20 Though not the focus of this article,
such continuities have been evident in Sudan. During the 1980s and 1990s, following the influx
of war-displaced Southern Sudanese migrants to Khartoum, the authorities, regarding these
internally displaced persons as a potential source of insecurity and crime, used similar policies
to the British administration, including the violent destruction of informal settlements and the
forcible relocation of residents.21 This supports a recent argument made by David Anderson
and Oystein Rolandsen, who have pointed to the relationship between the coercive and
authoritarian nature of the colonial state for the violent political culture that has dominated East
African politics since independence.22
In terms of methodology, the article draws on archival sources, which includes official
reports, correspondence, and social surveys.23 As Willis has noted a reliance on the official
record can reduce the urban population to a ‘disorganised rabble, just as the administrators of
the time were wont to perceive them’.24 Indeed, official sources often have little to say about
everyday urban life, the informal economic sector, or the rich associational life in many African
towns and cities.25 Yet, as this article demonstrates, such sources are invaluable because
they reveal how colonial officials perceived of colonial subjects, how colonial administrations
responded to the challenges posed by rapid urban growth, and, above all, how the colonial
state sought - often without success - to monitor, control, and regulate the urban African
population.26
I
20
Bonneuil, ‘Development as Experiment’, pp. 258-281 and James Midgley and David Piachaud (eds) Colonialism and Welfare:
Social Policy and the British Imperial Legacy (Cheltenham, 2011).
21
On the destruction of squatter camps in Khartoum see: Human Rights Watch, Behind the Red Line: Political Repression in
Sudan (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996).
22
David M. Andersonand Øystein H. Rolandsen, ‘Violence As Politics In Eastern Africa, 1940–1990: Legacy, Agency,
Contingency’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2014), 539-557.
23
This article is part of a larger study on labour policy in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Research was carried out in the National
Archives of Khartoum but I was denied access to the records of Khartoum Province, which contain more detailed administrative
records relating to the management of the city and the Deims.
24
Justin Willis, Mombasa, the Swahili, and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993), 2 cited in Andrew Burton, African
Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (London, 2005), 13.
25
Phyllis M. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge, 1995); Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture,
Community and Identity in Post-abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945 (Oxford, 2002); Paul Tyambe Zeleza and Cassandra Rachel
Veney (eds) Leisure in Urban Africa (Trenton, 2003).
26
Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (London, 2005), 13.
6
Land use in Khartoum during the Condominium period was regulated through a series of
ordinances. The Town Lands Ordinance of 1899 authorised the Sudan Government to obtain
any land it required, either by purchase or by exchange, and ordered landowners to construct
buildings conforming to specific regulations within two years. In 1909 this legislation was
strengthened with the promulgation of Town Building Regulations which established three
classes of residential land. The tenure of these holdings was regulated under the 1912
Government Town Lands Ordinance, which also created a fourth class of land, the ‘Native
Lodging Area.’ In each class of land residents were required to construct houses according to
a certain specification, with houses in Class 1 requiring a superior specification to those
houses in Class 3. If an owner failed to comply with the regulations the government could
retake possession of the land.27
The building regulations amounted to a de facto policy of racial and social segregation.
The large plot sizes and long leases in Class 1 encouraged wealthy residents, such as
expatriate officials, to invest in land for private housing but the majority of the city’s poorest
residents could not afford to construct a house according to the specification for Class 3.28
Therefore, while British officials lived in palatial villas, the urban poor were forced to find
accommodation in the Native Lodging Areas, where the land could be reclaimed by the
authorities with just one month’s notice.29 The insecurity of tenure, coupled with the high cost
of building materials, contributed to the proliferation of low-quality, temporary poor housing.
The 1912 Annual Report for Khartoum Province recorded the impact of the Government Town
Lands Ordinance:
Now that houses of a better type are taking the place of mud buildings in the
third-class part of the town, the natives are forced either to leave the town or
associate themselves with others and share a hosh with perhaps thirty or forty
other families. The consequence is that all yards and unoccupied ground have
been taken up for native huts. It is quite a thing to see a yard containing from
twenty to fifty mud huts and straw tukls ... To-day we may have a place
27
S.R. Simpson, ‘Land law and registration in the Sudan’, Journal of African Administration, 7 (1955), 11-16; Ahmad Alawad
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers: Emancipation and Labor in Colonial Sudan (Austin, 1996), 77-9.
28
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, p. 79.
29
S. R. Simpson, ‘Town planning and development during the Condominium: two extracts from a memoir’, in Martin W. Daly (ed.)
Modernization in the Sudan (New York, 1985), 73-84.
7
occupied by one family and in less than a week’s time we may find over
hundred occupants in the same place.30
Even when wealthy Sudanese applied to purchase a plot in a Class 1 area the authorities
objected to the introduction of ‘Sudanese standards of living’ into residential areas inhabited
by British officials.31 It was in this way that city planning and urban architecture served as
important symbols of racial distinction and separation.
32
Downtown Khartoum, the
administrative centre of the colonial state in the Sudan, was divided into a zoned grid system,
while the sprawling layout of the Native Lodging Areas reflected the ‘irregular’ nature of the
neighbourhoods, where the infrastructure was limited and the building regulations rarely
enforced.33
The majority of the urban poor - the casual labourers, emancipated slaves, and rural
migrants - lived in the Deims (meaning residential quarter), which surrounded the southern
edge of Khartoum. The Deims were first established in 1902 and the area was formally
classified as a ‘Native Lodging Area’ in 1912 following the introduction of Government Town
Lands Ordinance.34 Since the land on which the Deims were built was classified as a ‘Native
Lodging Area’, the municipal authorities were under no obligation to provide the necessary
infrastructure – pit latrines, for example, were not installed in the Deims until the 1930s.35
Houses in the Deims, referred to locally as a jaloo, were built from cob, which was then
protected with zibla, a plaster made from a fermented mixture of animal waste, soil, and water.
Houses had no foundations and erosion at ground level was common, particularly during
periods of heavy rain (see Figure 1).36
Figure 1 near here.
30
‘Annual Report for Khartoum Province’ in Reports on the Finance, Administration and Condition of the Sudan, 1912 (London,
1913), 138.
31
Sudan Archive Durham (SAD) 627/14/20, E.W. Thomas to S.R. Simpson, 21 November 1946.
32
Frederick Cooper, ‘Urban space, industrial time, and wage labor in Africa’, in Frederick Cooper (ed.) Struggle for the City:
Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa (Beverly Hills, 1983), 27.
33
This comment on the difference between the administrative centre of Khartoum and the informal settlements that surrounded
it is based on a point made by Cooper, see ‘Urban Space’, 31.
34
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 76-81. On the ethnic composition of the Deims, see pages 79-81.
35
A. V. J. Arthur, ‘Slum clearance in Khartoum’, Journal of African Administration, 6 (1954), 74.
36
Paul J. Sandison, ‘Problems of low-cost housing in the Sudan’, Sudan Notes and Records, 35 (1954), 75.
8
S.R. Simpson, the Commissioner of Lands and Registrar General (1945-53), justified
these housing conditions on the basis that the residents of the Deims were temporary migrants
who only worked in the capital for a short-period of time:
The ‘native lodging area,’ ... was originally intended for those casual labourers
whom towns attract; they came and they went; they had no families and merely
wanted somewhere to ‘lodge’ whilst working in the town. There was, therefore,
nothing very strange or reprehensible in allotting only enough space for a single
room; it fully served the purpose. It was in no sense a ‘home;’ it was merely a
temporary ‘lodging.’37
In other words, by imagining the casual labourer as a single male migrant who circulated
between the city and the countryside, SPS officials argued that if the migrant’s true home was
in the countryside then improving conditions in the urban areas was not only unnecessary but
also risked encouraging more migrants to abandon their rural homes in favour of the towns
and cities.
This unwillingness to invest in the necessary infrastructure meant that as the urban
population increased overcrowding became a serious problem. With people living in such
close proximity to each other, and without adequate sanitation facilities, outbreaks of disease
were common. Typical outbreaks included cholera, dysentery, relapsing fever, and malaria.38
The regular outbreak of disease was symptomatic of the colonial authorities’ inability, or
unwillingness, to address the issues that contributed to the overcrowding and insanitary
conditions in the Deims. The problem was, in part, one of perception. In 1902 all the inhabitants
of Khartoum who were without permanent accommodation were resettled south of the city –
in the area which later became the Deims. This policy was justified on the basis that this
‘floating population’ defied all ‘sanitary regulations.’39 This was common practice throughout
cities in colonial Africa where ‘metaphors of disease and contamination … served as rationales
for racial segregation’, and the expulsion of the urban poor. 40 Of course the insanitary
conditions which subsequently developed in neighbourhoods such as the Deims only served
to fuel fears of contagion that the authorities used in a circular fashion to legitimise continued
segregation and neglect.
37
Simpson, ‘Town Planning’, 74.
38
Report on the Administration of the Sudan for the Years 1942-44 (Khartoum, 1950), 141.
39
Reports on the Finances, Administration and Condition of the Sudan. 1902, Khartoum Province Annual Report, 1902 (Cairo:
1905), 312.
40
Cooper, ‘Urban Space’, p. 27.
9
II
Khartoum experienced similar urban growth rates to other African towns and cities during this
period. By 1945 the population of the Deims was estimated to be 30,000, while overall it was
estimated that the population of Khartoum had increased from 186,093 in 1944 to 245,736 in
1956.41 The city’s rising population contributed to the overcrowding problem and the shortages
of suitable housing, particularly in the lower income neighbourhoods. J.W. Kenrick, the District
Commissioner in Omdurman, conducted a survey in the early 1950s into living conditions in
Murada – one the town’s low-income neighbourhoods that was comparable with the Deims.
The survey, underlining the extent of the overcrowding, found that 2,273 people were living as
356 households on 259 plots.42 Of the 356 households, 135 contained more than six persons
and only 80 consisted of less than five persons. The problem was not so much the number of
people in a household but the population density, with Kenrick estimating that 45 per cent of
Murada’s population were living at a density of 12.5 persons per plot or 3.25 persons per 100
m2.43
The demand for housing was not just limited to the Deims and the lower-income
neighbourhoods but also in the first and second class areas of Khartoum, where the European
expatriates and the senior Sudanese civil servants lived. The Annual Report 1948 stated that:
‘Land auctions in the first, second and third class residential areas showed that money was
available and people anxious to buy.’44 Traders and merchants, who had amassed a great
deal of wealth during the war, sought to invest their income in land and property, as ongoing
import shortages meant there were few other avenues for investment. 45 This city-wide
competition drove up the price of land. Simpson complained that site values had ‘reached an
excessive price.’46 In June 1947, five first class plots which had been sold for £E208 in 1946
were auctioned for a total of £E533 and 38 second class plots which had been sold for £E578
in 1946 were auctioned for a total of £E1,399 (£E= Egyptian pound).47 There were comparable
levels of competition in the third class areas: in 1946 220 plots in third class areas were made
available and in response the municipal authorities received 1,500 applicants.48
41
The relevant population statistics for Khartoum can be found in Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 155, 157, and 178.
42
J.W. Kenrick, ‘The need for slum clearance in Omdurman’, Sudan Notes and Records, 34 (1953), 283-4.
43
Ibid.
44
Report by the Governor-General on the Administration, Finances and Conditions of the Sudan in 1948 (Khartoum, 1950), 179.
45
Ibid. For a similar situation in Port Sudan see: Kenneth J. Perkins, Port Sudan: The Evolution of a Colonial City (Boulder,
Colorado, 1993), 212.
46
SAD 627/14/11, S. R. Simpson to Governor Khartoum Province, 13 March 1946.
47
£E = Egyptian pounds. SAD 725/12/8, Khartoum District Annual Report, 1949.
48
Report by the Governor-General on the Administration, Finances and Conditions of the Sudan in 1946 (London, 1948), p. 155.
10
The housing shortage contributed to the post-war industrial unrest in the Sudan, with
the provision of suitable housing one of the key objectives for many trade unions and
professional associations. The Sudan Government Railways, for example, provided some
housing for employees, particularly in towns Atbara and Port Sudan, but the majority of
workers were forced to find accommodation in the private sector. A 1948 Commission of
Inquiry, which was appointed to investigate the causes of the 1947 railway strike, reported that
with as many as ‘two or three families crowding into one house’ high rents and overcrowding
were universal complaints among railway workers.49 Similarly, the Watson Commission, which
was appointed to investigate the 1951 police strike, cited rising private rental prices and
substandard police accommodation as key causes of the unrest.50 The Commission even went
as far as to accuse the government of neglect, reporting that police officers were still living in
accommodation that had been condemned in 1937.51
Although the Sudan Government acknowledged that the state needed to play a greater
role in the provision of housing, it was unwilling bear the financial burden of a large scale
housing development project.52 Not only was the cost of public housing schemes considered
prohibitive but the government initially regarded the housing shortage as a temporary crisis.
In response to the railway workers’ complaints about high rents, the 1948 Commission of
Inquiry pointed to the situation in the 1930s when workers vacated houses provided by the
Sudan Railways because they could obtain private houses at lower rents. The Commission
thus argued that if demand for houses declined the railway authorities would be ‘left with
blocks of empty houses.’53 Unwilling to invest in public housing SPS officials, such as Simpson,
argued that the best solution was to simply make more land available for construction in
Khartoum, where land shortages had ‘prevented natural economic factors from taking their
normal course.’ According to Simpson, if more land was made available for construction then
the price of plots in the first and second class areas would be reduced. In turn this would lead
to lower rents and reduced prices for plots in the third class areas.54
Since Khartoum was surrounded by the river to the north and east, the only direction
for further expansion was to the south, where the Deims were located. The Deims had been
49
The National Archives, London (TNA) FO 371/69236, Sudan Railways’ Employees: Report of the Independent Committee of
Inquiry, Khartoum, 14 April 1948.
50
SAD 418/1/9, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Police Mutiny in Khartoum (1951).
51
SAD 418/1/11, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Police Mutiny in Khartoum (1951).
52
SAD 524/9/16, J.W. Robertson Circular to All Governors, Civil Secretary’s Office, Khartoum, 7 August 1945.
53
TNA, FO 371/69236, Sudan Railways’ Employees: Report of the Independent Committee Inquiry, Khartoum, 14 April 1948.
54
SAD 627/14/12, S.R. Simpson to Governor Khartoum Province, 13 March 1946.
11
allowed to develop around the outskirts of the city so as to keep the inhabitants segregated
from the residents of the first and second class quarters. The authorities were therefore
unwilling to leave the Deims where they were and develop the land around them.55 One report,
for example, complained that the ‘natural development of Khartoum’ had been ‘halted by the
persistent and embarrassing presence of the old deims.’56 A plan to resettle the residents of
the Deims had been in place since the 1930s but the scheme had not been implemented
owing to a lack of funds.57 However, with the housing shortage becoming acute, officials drew
up plans to demolish the Deims and resettle all of the inhabitants to a new residential area
further south.
III
The plan to resettle the residents of the Deims was not just about making more land available
for the development of the first and second class zones. In the post-war decade the provision
of suitable housing became a central tenet of the Sudan Government’s attempts to ‘stabilise’
the labour force. Simpson, writing in 1946, emphasised the importance of housing:
Better housing conditions are of vital importance to the ordinary man; next to
the food he eats, perhaps the most important thing to the average citizen is the
house he and his family live in. Better education and better medical service will
avail him but little if has to go home to the slum conditions which to this day
exist in the fair city of Khartoum.58
The conditions in the Deims had been justified on the basis that the accommodation was
suitable for the single male migrant worker. However, as increasing numbers of migrants
settled in the Deims officials were forced to concede that the image of the casual labourer as
a lone bachelor was no longer appropriate – if it ever had been.59 The 1948 Commission of
Inquiry, for example, acknowledged this in its report, stating that: ‘we are unable to accept the
contention that men on the lowest wage level are, or ought to be, unmarried.’60
The realisation that not all of the Deims’ residents were temporary male migrants did
not fundamentally alter officials’ perception of the urban environment as a source of vice.
55
Simpson, ‘Town planning’.
56
Report by the Governor-General on the Administration, Finances and Conditions of the Sudan in 1948, 187.
57
Arthur, ‘Slum clearance’, 74.
58
SAD 627/14/14, S.R. Simpson to Governor Khartoum Province, 13 March 1946.
59
Simpson, ‘Town planning and development’.
60
TNA, FO 371/69236, Sudan Railways’ Employees: Report of the Independent Committee Inquiry, Khartoum, 14 April 1948.
12
Officials echoed sentiments that had been expressed by earlier reports which had described
overcrowding in the Deims as a ‘menace to health’ and a ‘social evil.’61 A range of problems,
such as unemployment, crime, and prostitution, were attributed to living conditions in the
Deims where, it was argued, traditional communal obligations were in decay. Writing in 1953,
P. J. Sandison, referring to the ‘dangerous anonymity’ of the urban environment and ‘the
collapse of the traditional social system,’ warned that in the absence of ‘normal social
groupings’ the loss of ‘moral control’ and ‘demoralisation’ was inevitable.62 Of course such
views obscured the variety of associational life in Khartoum, where residents were often active
in a number of organisations ranging from informal rotational credit and mutual help societies
to sport clubs, cultural associations, trade unions, and political organisations.63
SPS officials’ concerns about the social consequences of the urban environment
mirrored contemporary anxieties in post-war Britain. The war had highlighted the terrible
conditions in Britain’s inner-city slums where Aneurin Bevan, the Minister of Health and Local
Government, argued that poverty, poor housing, and social segregation had resulted in
‘castrated communities.’64 To remedy this situation Bevan drew up plans for public housing
and the development of ‘New Towns’. It was hoped that these initiatives, when combined with
the expansion of state education, health and social welfare, would help to achieve the Labour
Government’s vision of creating a more inclusive and responsible society. 65 Planning was
central to the post-war housing policy and town planners, such as Patrick Abercrombie, the
architect of the 1944 Greater London Plan, argued that with proper planning towns and cities
could be reorganised to avoid social disintegration and promote community cohesion.66
In recent years historians have drawn increasing attention to how ideas about housing
and town planning circulated between the metropole and the colonies.67 In Kenya, for example,
Richard Harris and Alison Hay have documented how officials were not only influenced by
ideas from Britain but also drew inspiration from other territories in Africa, including Northern
and Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.68 In the case of the Sudan, owing to a lack of access
61
Report on the Administration of the Sudan for the Years 1939-41, 135.
62
P.J. Sandison, ‘Problem with low-cost housing’, 77.
63
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 149-83.
64
See chapter five in Steven Fielding, Peter Thompson and Nick Tiratsoo, ‘England arise!’: The Labour Party and Popular Politics
in 1940s Britain (Manchester: The University of Manchester Press, 1995).
65
Ian Cole and Barry Goodchild, ‘Social mix and the ‘balanced community’ in British housing policy – a tale of two epochs’,
GeoJournal, 51 (2001), 352-3.
66
Frank Mort, ‘Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s’, Journal of British Studies, 43 (2004), 120-51 and
Peter Malpass, Housing and the Welfare State: The Development of Housing Policy in Britain (Basingstoke, 2005).
67
See Loh Kah Seng,
68
Harris and Hay, ‘New plans for housing’, pp. 196-197.
13
to the necessary archival records, it is less clear how SPS officials came to be exposed to the
latest ideas in housing and town planning. From the available sources it appears that the
influence was diffuse but it is nonetheless evident that SPS officials and their Sudanese
subordinates shared the metropolitan planners’ view that proper planning and the provision of
suitable housing could serve as a remedy for social problems. In 1954 Sa’ad ed din Fawzi, a
lecturer in economics at the University of Khartoum, was commissioned by the Sudan
Government to conduct a survey of low-income neighbourhoods in Khartoum. In the
introduction to his report Fawzi, emphasising that ‘we must study man before can plan’, cited
Le Congrés International d’Architecture Moderne, stating that: ‘The modern aim ... of town
planning is nothing less than the “creation of a physical environment that will satisfy man’s
emotional and material needs and stimulate his spiritual growth”.’
69
Similarly, and
demonstrating that SPS officials were aware of developments in other colonial territories,
Sandison, in his 1953 essay on low-cost housing in Sudan, cited reports on housing in the
Belgian Congo and West Africa.70
It is also clear from the plan to resettle the residents of the Deims that the Sudan
Government shared the metropolitan planners’ view of housing as both an ‘illness and a
cure’.71 As part of the plans to resettle the residents of the Deims, a newly appointed Town
Planner devised plans for blocks of approximately 50 plots with open spaces at regular
intervals, as well as space for a school, market, health centre, cinema, police station, and
shops. 72 Here the aim was to replace the unregulated houses of the Deims with new
accommodation on a planned site that was designed to resemble a suburb of an imagined
English town in the hope that the creation a self-contained neighbourhood would help to create
a sense of social cohesion or community spirit.
In addition to the planned layout for the new neighbourhood, a Municipal Engineer
prepared six standard house plans, all of which included a family room, guest room, veranda,
kitchen, bathroom, and pit latrine. 73 The house plans also reflected colonial ideas about
appropriate gender roles within the home: if a man was expected to earn a steady income in
order to provide suitable accommodation for his family, the inclusion of a kitchen and other
domestic amenities reflected the expectation that workers’ wives would socially reproduce the
69
Sa’ad ed din Fawzi, Social Aspects of Low-Cost Housing in the Northern Sudan (Khartoum, 1954), 5.
70
Sandison, ‘The problem of low cost housing’, 77.
71
Luise White, ‘Separating the men from the boys: constructions of gender, sexuality, and terrorism in central Kenya, 1939-1959’,
The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 23 (1990), 8.
72
Arthur, ‘Slum Clearance’, 76-7.
73
Ibid., 76.
14
male labour force and raise the next generation of workers.74 The assumption among officials
was that ‘function and behaviour’ would follow form.75 By encouraging Sudanese workers to
construct family-sized homes the residents would form stable, nuclear families which, in turn,
would produce efficient and disciplined workers because if a worker was responsible for a
monthly rent or providing for his family he would be less likely to work irregularly or become
involved in industrial unrest.
IV
In 1946-47, as the first step in the resettlement programme, a plan was developed to move
550 residents to plots located to the south of the Deims in an area that would become known
as the ‘New Deims’.76 In theory these residents were supposed to demolish their properties in
the Deims once the construction of their new houses had been completed. However, many
residents chose to maintain their old property and rent it out.77 To overcome this problem the
authorities decided to demolish the remaining houses in the Deims. In March 1949, as part of
this process, a survey of 5,777 houses was completed by Ali Nadim, the Deims Re-settlement
Officer. 78 Based on the findings of Ali Nadim’s survey, the residents of the Deims were
classified into three categories:
Group A: ‘absentee landlords’ who had been allocated plots but rented their old
properties to tenants.
Group B: ‘owner occupiers’. This group included people who were living in the
Deims as a result of original allotment, purchase, or inheritance.
Group C: ‘tenants’, who were leasing a property from absentee landlords in Group
A.79
It was decided to allot a plot of 200 square metres in the New Deims, subject to the payment
of ground rent (15 piastres P.T. per month), free to all owner-occupiers in Group B and to
tenants in Group C. Plots were only allocated to tenants in Group C who had been residents
of the old Deims for at least 10 years, lived with their families, and had permanent
employment.80 The basis on which plots were allocated was clearly designed to distinguish
74
This is a point that Luise has made in relation to housing in Kenya, see ‘Separating the men from the boys’, 9.
75
Ibid., 8.
76
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 179.
77
SAD 725/12/11, Khartoum District Annual Report, 1949.
78
Ibid.
79
Ibid.
80
Sikaigna, Slaves into Workers, 179.
15
the ‘responsible’ worker, who was permanently settled in Khartoum with his family, from the
single or short-term migrant, who was regarded as a potential source of social and labour
unrest. In only allocating plots to long-term residents it was hoped that the city would be purged
of those elements – the short-term or temporary migrants – who did not fit with the planners’
vision of an orderly colonial city.
This provoked opposition from the landlords who opposed the plans on the basis that
they would lose their rental income.81 Officials, however, had little sympathy. The authorities
portrayed the landlords as irresponsible and corrupt profiteers. One government circular
stated that while it was inevitable that the landlords would resist ‘the death of the goose that
has laid them so many golden eggs’ they deserved ‘scant sympathy.’ 82 Simpson, who
described tenement letting as a ‘disgrace,’ complained that landlords had ‘with a minimum of
capital expenditure’ acquired ‘a swollen rent-roll which would be the envy of slum landlords...
elsewhere.’83 Such criticism obscured the fact that the development of tenement letting in the
Deims was a consequence of colonial policies. In Khartoum the state depended upon a large
casual labour force but exclusionary building regulations and low wages meant that workers
were denied access to permanent housing. Landlords, who had benefitted from the authorities’
reluctance to enforce municipal regulations in the Deims, had emerged to fill the void,
providing affordable accommodation which, although in poor condition, was well suited to the
cyclical and insecure nature of urban employment.
Here was a key dilemma for the colonial authorities. Entrepreneurs, such as the
landlords in the Deims, provided affordable housing and other essential services to the urban
workforce at little or no cost to the state and private capital. However, although tenement
letting eased the housing shortage in the Sudan’s rapidly growing cities, the Deims had
become synonymous with other activities that were associated with non-wage employment or
the ‘informal sector,’ such as street hawking, prostitution, alcohol production, and theft.84 Such
activities had always been criminalised by the colonial state but during the post-war period,
when the authorities were increasingly anxious about the relationship between casual labour
and social disorder, the belief among officials was that the living conditions and subsistence
activities in the Deims undermined efforts to create a ‘a disciplined work culture’. 85 The
81
Ibid.
82
SAD 627/16/46, Circular to Provincial Governors, Town Replanning Principles of Compensation.
83
SAD 627/14/12, S.R. Simpson to Governor Khartoum Province, 13 March 1946.
84
This contradiction and the colonial state’s inability to reconcile it is one of the central issues discussed by Cooper in his ‘Urban
Space’, 7-50.
85
Ibid.. 32.
16
assumption was that poor housing, ‘irregular’ social relations, alcohol consumption, and crime
all contributed to labour unrest and low productivity. By minimising tenement letting and by
determining who had access to housing, the state aimed to limit the influence of the petty
entrepreneurs – the landlords and street hawkers – who facilitated the cyclical pattern of
casual labour.86
In mid-1949 the government warned those persons in Groups B and C, who had been
allotted plots in 1946-47, that they must construct their houses in the New Deims by the end
of the year. Those residents who had not yet been allocated plots in the New Deims were also
informed that they would be allocated a site in due course and that they must construct their
new houses within one year. When the absentee landlords continued to protest, the authorities
responded by repossessing 103 plots from those residents who had been allocated sites in
the New Deims in 1946-47. After negotiations the authorities agreed to return the plots to their
original lessees on the condition that the demolition of the Deims began immediately.
Demolitions started in June 1949 and increased in intensity as the year progressed.87 By the
end of the year 1,036 houses had been demolished, with the result that only 53 houses
remained in Deim Gashasha and 50 in Deim Telegraph. These remaining houses were
demolished by mid-January 1950. 88 The demolition continued apace: 1,009 houses were
demolished in 1950, 1,884 in 1951, and 1,848 in 1952, so that within three years 5,855 houses
had been destroyed.89 The allocation of plots in the New Deims was carried out simultaneously
with the demolition of houses in the old Deims. By April 1951 3,804 plots in the New Deims
had been allocated to residents of the old Deims, of which 3,721 had been constructed by
November 1953. 90 Overall it was estimated that approximately 30,000 people had been
relocated from the old Deims in what Fawzi described as ‘a gigantic operation of slum
clearance and social resettlement’.91
V
The resettlement programme highlighted important differences between how the planners and
the Sudanese thought domestic life should be organised. The house plans for accommodation
in the New Deims had been designed for nuclear families but historically northern Sudanese
86
Ibid..
87
SAD 725/12/9-12, Khartoum District Annual Report, 1949.
88
Ibid.
89
The demolition of the Deims was initially carried out by prison gangs but later paid labour was employed to complete the task.
Sikainga, Slaves into Workers, 180.
90
Arthur, ‘Slum Clearance’, 77.
91
Ibid., p. 80.
17
families, particularly those from the central riverain region, had lived in large kinship-based
compounds in order to accommodate local social practices, such as the custom for newly
married couples to live with their in-laws for a period of time.92 It was also customary within
many northern Sudanese households for women not to socialise with male guests. Whenever
a male guest was present it was expected that a household would divide into two. In order to
facilitate this social custom, houses were built with separate male and female quarters, which
were respectively known as ‘hawsh rijali’ and ‘hawsh nisa’i.’93 Consequently, although officials
acknowledged that ‘everything possible should be done to prevent the collapse of the
traditional social system’, many of the residents surveyed by Fawzi in the New Deims
complained that either the plot sizes were too small or that the house plans devised by the
Municipal Engineer were ill suited to the needs of Sudanese families.94
These conflicting understandings of how domestic life should be structured were
evident throughout British Africa. Carolyn Brown, for example, has documented the colonial
authorities attempted to recreate an imagined English mining village for workers at the Engu
colliery in Nigeria. As in Khartoum, British officials believed that by providing two-roomed
houses with the necessary social amenities, the Nigerian mineworker could be reshaped into
the image of his idealised British counterpart. However, workers and the trade unions objected
to the housing scheme: home visits by health workers were regarded as an invasion of family
privacy and workers, many of whom were polygynous, argued that the houses were too small
for their families and servants. As a result, the trade unions organised a boycott of the housing
estate and fined any worker who chose to live in one of the houses.95 In other words, as the
cases of Khartoum and the Engu colliery demonstrate, Africans had their own ‘ideas about
respectability, order, and rank in the home’.96
Since the land on which old Deims were built was classified as a ‘Native Lodging Area,’
the residents were not entitled to any compensation if they had been in possession of a plot
for more than 10 years. Moreover, as there was no organised system of housing loans or
grants for the inhabitants of the New Deims, residents were responsible for the cost of
92
Fawzi, Social Aspects, 5. See also: Susan Kenyon, Five Women of Sennar: Culture and Change in Central Sudan (Oxford,
1991), 18-20; Hayder Ibrahim, The Shaiqiya: The Cultural and Social Change of a Northern Sudanese Riverain People
(Wiesbaden,1979), 55-70.
93
Ahmed al-Shahi, ‘Welcome, my house is yours’: values related to the Arab house’, in A.D.C Hyland and Ahmed al-Shahi (eds),
The Arab House (Newcastle, 1986), 25-32.
94
Sandison, ‘Problems of low-cost housing in the Sudan’, 78; Fawzi, ‘Social aspects of urban housing’, 97-103.
95
Carolyn A. Brown, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Engu Government Colliery
(Portsmouth, New Hampshire, 2003), 252-4.
96
White, ‘Separating the men from the boys’, 8.
18
constructing a new house.97 Prior to the demolition of the Deims, British officials had assumed
that residents would be able to build their own property. However, not only was constructing
a house from cob a skilled process but it was also expensive - Sandison reported that in 1953
it cost approximately £E180 to construct a three-room house from cob. In addition to the cost
of constructing a house, a plot owner had to purchase a lease and pay an annual ground rent
charge. Apart from low-interest government housing loans, which were only available to
government employees, there were very few credit options available to low-income
households.98
The scale of the resettlement programme, coupled with the demand for houses in the
first and second class areas, created a shortage of building materials and drove up wages for
skilled workers, such as carpenters and masons. 99 Unable to afford the cost of labour or
building materials, many of the relocated residents transferred their plots to landlords who then
developed the land and rented out the property. Others borrowed money from traders and
then developed the plot themselves. 100 Of the households in the New Deims surveyed by
Fawzi, 40.7 per cent were tenants and just under 10 per cent were sub-tenants – highlighting
the fact that the construction of a new house was beyond the means of many residents.101 It
was a similar situation in Nigeria, where the Lagos Executive Development Board (LEDB),
which oversaw slum clearance and housing projects, built 6,714 houses between 1957 and
1966 as part of a new housing estate called Surulere. However, according to Lisa Lindsay,
these new houses did not replace all of the accommodation that had been demolished in
central Lagos during the same period. Moreover, although the rents in the new houses were
subsidised, the prices were still higher than many former residents of central Lagos could
afford. As a result residents were forced find alternative accommodation in cheaper areas of
the city.102
In Khartoum, to reduce the financial burden of constructing a new house, the
authorities permitted residents to collect all the building material from their old homes which
could then be used to develop their plots in the New Deims. However, this meant that many
inhabitants simply replicated the houses of the old Deims, which bore little resemblance to the
97
SAD 627/16/46, Circular to Provincial Governors, Town Replanning Principles of Compensation; SAD 725/12/11, Khartoum
District Annual Report, 1949.
98
P.J. Sandison, ‘Problem with low-cost housing’, 78-9; Fawzi, Social Aspects, 102.
99
Report on the Administration of the Sudan in 1950/51 (Khartoum, 1955), 150.
100
Arthur, ‘Slum Clearance’, 79.
101
Fawzi, Social Aspects, 100.
102
Lisa Lindsay, Working With Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria (Portsmouth, New Hampshire,
2003), 149-50.
19
plans devised by the Municipal Engineer. For example, it was reported that many of the lowest
paid residents – those earning between £E1 and £E9 per month – could not afford to complete
the construction of their houses, with many only succeeding in building the outside wall. 103
Those persons who could not afford to build a house or were not allocated an alternative site
in the New Deims were provided with an ex gratia payment of £E10 and offered
accommodation in the alms houses.104
To high building costs was added the pressure of rising rents. During the war rents had
been restricted under the 1943 Rent Restriction and Recovery of Premises Ordinance but in
April 1950 this legislation was abolished. The 1950-51 Annual Report for Khartoum District
noted that following the abolition of rent control, prices increased by 100 to 300 per cent.105
The Report of Committee on Rent Control recorded that a house which was let for £E10 per
year in 1948 had increased to £E45 per year in 1953. 106 Casual labourers and low-paid
government employees were the worst affected by the rising cost of rent. ‘Abd al-Qadir Yousif,
the Commissioner of Labour, reported that rents were ‘accounting for an unduly high
proportion of household’s incomes’ and this was causing ‘genuine hardship... amongst the
working class.’107 Of the 7,776 low-income households surveyed in 1951-52, 53.8 per cent
earned less than £E15 per month, with the majority of these households earning less than
£E10 per month. Unsurprisingly Fawzi reported that as a household’s income decreased the
percentage of income accounted for by rent increased. For those households with an income
of £E7 to £E9, rent accounted for 20.11 per cent of their income but for households with an
income of less than £E3 rent accounted for as much as 49.02 per cent.108
In 1953 the Workers’ Housing Committee initiated a pilot housing scheme in Khartoum.
Fawzi’s survey reported that of the 561 households in the New Deims that had an income of
between £E10 and £E15 per month, 280 paid more than £E2 per month in rent for low-quality
housing.109 Therefore, in view of the difficulties that low-income households encountered when
trying to find affordable accommodation, the pilot scheme aimed ‘to tailor houses to the depth
of the householder’s pocket.’ 110 As part of the scheme 200 two-roomed houses were
constructed that government employees could then purchase at a cost of £E2 per month. To
103
Fawzi, Social Aspects, 55.
104
Arthur, ‘Slum Clearance’, 74.
105
SAD 725/12/20, Khartoum District Annual Report 1950-51.
106
SAD 418/1/25, Report of Committee on Rent Control, December 1953.
107
Fawzi, Social Aspects, v.
108
Ibid., 100.
109
Ibid.
110
Sandison, ‘Problem of low-cost housing’, 81.
20
be eligible for the scheme applicants had to be married, to have lived in Khartoum for at least
five years, and to have a monthly income of less than £E12 – conditions which again
conformed with officials’ idealised vision of the ‘modern’ Sudanese family. 111
The Labour Department’s report for 1953-55 recorded that the pilot scheme had
proved successful with the houses in ‘great demand’ and monthly instalments ‘up-to-date.’112
Based on the initial success of the scheme, a British firm submitted a proposal to construct
housing estates in Khartoum, Atbara, and Port Sudan but in 1953 the Housing Committee
postponed the plans indefinitely on the basis that a large-scale building programme would be
too expensive.113 As Richard Harris and Susan Parnell have noted, this was typical of many
of the post-war housing schemes in British Africa. In West Africa and Uganda houses were
built on the basis that they would be let at subsidised rents but financial challenges of providing
affordable housing were enormous. In Kenya, for example, CDWA funds were used to finance
the construction of housing estates in Nairobi in the mid-1940s but even with a 50 per cent
subsidy and a 40 year loan the colonial government was unable to recover its costs by
charging affordable rents. As a result, the government abandoned the idea of subsidised
housing in favour of providing housing for a relatively affluent minority of Kenyans, which, of
course, did little or nothing to resolve the issues that had contributed to the housing crisis.114
Conclusion
The labour unrest of the late 1930s marked a ‘turning point’ in urban policy in British Africa.115
The protests highlighted the terrible conditions in many African cities, where overcrowding,
poor housing, and inadequate infrastructure contributed to workers’ grievances. Concerned
that the unrest would spiral into broader social disorder, colonial governments and the Colonial
Office argued that the labour force needed to be stabilised. The provision of better housing
and urban infrastructure was central to the policy of stabilisation. Influenced by contemporary
thinking in British town planning, colonial officials believed that family housing on planned
estates would serve as a remedy for the industrial unrest, cure the social problems associated
with the urban environment, and promote a sense of community cohesion.
In Khartoum, as the population increased and as poor housing contributed to the postwar industrial unrest, the Sudan Government increasingly perceived of the Deims as an
111
Fawzi, Social Aspects, 105.
112
Ministry of Social Affairs, Labour Department Report Covering the Period 1 July 1953 – 30 June 1955 (Khartoum, 1955), 11.
113
SAD 525/14/4, J.W. Robertson Circular to All Governors, Civil Secretary’s Office, Khartoum, 30 July 1952.
114
Harris and Parnell, ‘The turning point’, 142-43.
115
Ibid.
21
obstacle to the development of an ordered colonial city. Acknowledging that ‘bachelor housing’
was no longer appropriate and that low paid workers actually required family housing, the
Sudan Government sought to relocate the residents of Deims to a new planned site. Here,
officials hoped, model housing would help to create model families. However, the resettlement
of the Deims proved ill-suited to the needs of the residents. Without financial support from the
state, many residents were unable to afford the construction of a new house, with the result
that conditions in the New Deims quickly replicated conditions in the old Deims, where
overcrowding, sub-letting, and high rents were common. Moreover, although officials regarded
housing as a tool that could reshape the Sudanese worker in the image of his British
counterpart, the houses in the New Deims proved ill-suited to the needs of Sudanese workers,
who regarded the accommodation as too small to uphold local notions of domestic
respectability and familial obligations.
The resettlement of the Khartoum Deims was typical of many of the post-war urban
planning initiatives in British Africa. On the one hand, colonial officials and technical experts,
confident that metropolitan knowledge and ideas could be successfully applied to the colonies,
believed that urban development projects could provide renewed legitimacy for imperial rule
and help transform colonial subjects into modern citizens. However, limited financial resources,
the coercive nature of the development policies and resistance from African residents, who
had their own ideas about how to live a modern urban life, meant that many of these projects
could not simply be imposed as colonial planners originally envisioned. In other words, as Tim
Livesy writes, ‘colonial development’, like so many other areas of imperial rule, ‘was continent’,
shaped not only by the plans of colonial officials but also the expectations of Africans.116
116
Tim Livsey, “‘Suitable lodgings for students’: modern space, colonial development and decolonization in Nigeria”, Urban
History / FirstView Article (2014), pp. 1 – 22 [online] DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0963926813000990, Published online 25
February 2014.