Port Sudan

The Evolution Of A Colonial City

Kenneth J Perkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000307757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 1904, only the unimposing tomb of a local holy man occupied the site chosen by British officials for the construction of a modern seaport to facilitate the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan's expanded commerce. Built where no urban center had previously existed, Port Sudan was the quintessential colonial city, created and designed by Europeans, who organized its municipal services and devised the regulations for its day-to-day management. The advantages of a created city were clear: The colonial government did not need to accommodate an indigenous urban population with its own existing social structures, institutions, and cultural values. This study examines the efforts of Port Sudan's builders and early administrators to tailor the urban environment to their own notions of the ideal colonial city–how it should look, how it should function, and how its human components should interact. It then focuses on the inter-war period, describing how the rapid growth of Port Sudan and its harbor posed insurmountable challenges to the maintenance of this ideal. Although the Sudanese population within the city steadily increased, their exclusion from any meaningful participation in municipal affairs during these troubled years left them physically and psychologically isolated. The situation began to change after World War II, but, as the study reveals, conditions in the post-war era only compounded long-standing political, economic, and social problems in Port Sudan, ensuring that the city the Sudanese inherited in 1956 still bore the marks of its colonial origins.

Part One

Introduction

1
Creating Colonial Cities

The Europeans who created, organized, and administered overseas dependencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries held views about the nature and function of cities that had been shaped by the urbanizing societies they had left behind. Because the traditional urban centers of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East usually failed, in one way or another, to conform to the standards of the new rulers or to meet their administrative requirements, the restructuring of a city’s basic framework often occurred early in the colonial era.

In the major metropolises of French North Africa, this process frequently took the form of constructing a “new” city outside the walls (or their remnants) of the older one, sometimes using as a base a quarter traditionally set aside for European merchants. Here, multi-storied edifices of contemporary design and building material soon stood along wide, tree-lined streets that neatly intersected at right angles. Their upper floors housed the offices of private businesses and government agencies, while shops catering to the European occupants of neighboring apartment buildings and villas occupied the street level. The “new” city offered westerners a more familiar, and therefore more comfortable, environment than the adjacent, but mysterious and occasionally frightening, madina-the “native” city whose congested markets, crowded residential quarters, and narrow, winding streets appeared to many Europeans an impenetrable maze. The “new” city and the madina exhibited dramatic contrasts in virtually every respect.

Thus, in the colonial era, Tunis, Fez, Algiers, and many smaller Maghribi urban agglomerations were really twin cities, with the functional and residential differences between the two components dearly delineated both physically and psychically. Even before the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, a similar duality characterized Cairo and, to a much greater extent, the bustling seaport of Alexandria. It was also evident in cities of the Ottoman Empire-Beirut, Aleppo, Smyrna (Izmir), and Istanbul, for example—that hosted substantial communities of European merchants and, by the mid-nineteenth century, found themselves firmly within Europe’s commercial, if not yet its political, orbit.

European authorities enjoyed an even freer hand in shaping the colonial urban environment on those occasions when they found it useful to transform a relatively insignificant town into a more important city. To illustrations from the French Maghrib—Philippeville (Skikda) in Algeria, Bizerte in Tunisia, and Casablanca in Morocco, to cite only a few of the most important examples-may be added a British parallel at Aden in southwestern Arabia. Significantly, all were seaports. Either because of the natural quality of their harbors, the abundance of raw materials or agricultural commodities produced in their hinterlands, or their location astride strategic maritime passages, these sites were singled out for development as major seaports (and in the cases of Bizerte and Aden as naval bases as well.)

In such transportation centers, the advances of contemporary European technology were applied to create ports capable of handling many times the volume of traffic of those they replaced. Each was equipped with the latest machinery and boasted an array of facilities intended to expedite the flow of imports and exports, to bunker or provide chandlery services for vessels plying the imperial sea lanes, or to support a substantial fleet of warships. The development of these ports was accompanied by the rapid growth of the towns which they served and which, in turn, served them. Western neighborhoods, growing in tandem with the port facilities, replaced long-standing indigenous commercial and residential quarters as the new heart of the community, resulting in more “twin cities” of the kind described above. The transformation of these small towns into centers of international commerce required the formulation of political, social, and economic policies capable of seeing them through this transition and insuring their smooth functioning thereafter. In overseeing this process, colonial administrators imprinted these communities with many of the characteristics of contemporary European cities and the newly prominent seaports became transitional zones, in appearance as well as in function, between the western and non-western worlds.

There were, of course, variations on this theme of important colonial seaports emerging from modest indigenous towns. Despite its coastal location, Rabat, which became Morocco’s capital under the French protectorate, was of limited economic significance. It owed its elevation not to commercial considerations but to conscious French efforts to “bury the past” associated with Fez, the former center of government, and to symbolize, with the creation of a new center of political gravity, the dawn of a new era in Morocco. (These attitudes were not limited to the colonial powers. Within a decade of the French decision to transform Rabat, and for many of the same reasons, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk shifted the Turkish capital from Istanbul to the desolate Anatolian village of Ankara.)

Despite the recurrence of the phrase “ville nouvelle” in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Maghrib, the cities so described were, in one sense at least, hardly new. Rather, they were outgrowths of existing urban centers whose sites had been selected and settled centuries, or in some cases millennia, earlier. As Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, a scholar of urbanization in Africa, has pointed out in a study of colonial cities in the sub-Saharan region (much of which holds true for the rest of the continent as well),¹ the colonizers’ preference for grafting their agglomerations on to existing urban settlements made the creation of the colonial city ex nihilo the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, political, economic, military, or health considerations did occasionally result in the creation of colonial cities on sites previously occupied by villages of little or no importance—the seaports of Dakar and Cotonou in French West Africa; Lusaka in landlocked Northern Rhodesia-or, more rarely, on genuinely new sites-Nairobi in the interior of Kenya; Durban on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa; Kenitra (later Port Lyautey) in Morocco.

The Sudanese city of Atbara was a hybrid of these two categories. Initially no more than a small settlement surrounding a British military encampment established in 1897, Atbara lay at what became the intersection of the Nile Valley and Red Sea rail lines. Its selection, in 1908, as the technical and administrative headquarters of the powerful Sudan Government Railways spurred the conversion of the previously insignificant town into one of the largest urban centers of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, ranking by 1940 behind only the Khartoum-Khartoum North-Omdurman complex at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles and the city that is the subject of this study, Port Sudan on the Red Sea.

At the start of the twentieth century, Suakin was, as it had been for hundreds of years, the most important port on the western coast of the Red Sea. Soon after the establishment of the condominium over Sudan, however, British officials—the senior partners in the new political arrangement-opted to replace Suakin with a new port. Their decision rested on evidence that natural deficiencies would prevent Suakin from accommodating the increase in shipping expected to be generated by the economic development of Sudan, as well as on a desire to assume a significant measure of control over that shipping, and over Sudan’s maritime commerce in general, by paring down the role of the Suakin merchants. For the site of the city that would supplant Suakin the British selected Marsa Shaikh Barghuth, a natural anchorage some thirty-five miles to its north, which they renamed Port Sudan.

This is the story of Port Sudan’s creation and its development as a colonial city from 1904 until the early 1950s when, in the twilight of the condominium, responsibility for its management began increasingly to devolve upon the Sudanese themselves. It examines the procedures colonial administrators evolved during that half century, first to lay out an orderly urban community, then to supply its basic needs, govern it effectively, and provide for its growth and prosperity amid social, economic, and political controversies that arose in the 1920s and 1930s and reached a crescendo in the post-World War II era. Although Port Sudan’s raison d’etre was its harbor, this study generally relegates the harbor to a secondary status. It is impossible—and undesirable—to completely detach the harbor from the city, but such matters as shipping trends, the volume and nature of imports and exports, and improvements to the harbor and its facilities are treated, particularly in those sections dealing with the period after Port Sudan’s founding, only as they bear upon the administration of the town proper.

This period of Port Sudan’s history constitutes what might be termed an “unalloyed” version of the creation of a new city in a colonial context. Red Sea mariners sometimes put in at Marsa Shaikh Barghuth, but until 1904 the only structure located there was the tomb of the local holy man from whom the harbor’s name derived. Neither adjacent to nor an outgrowth of an existing community, Port Sudan was an unusual, albeit not unique, example of urban development in colonial Africa.

Although the evolution of Port Sudan (and the handful of similar “created” cities that sprang up in the absence of previous settlements) generally replicated that of other cities in colonial Africa, it differed in one extremely important respect: The Europeans who laid out the city, organized its municipal services, and devised the regulations for its day to day management, did not have to weigh the impact of their decisions on an indigenous urban population with its own social structures and institutions, nor did they have to modify their own views about city life in order to accommodate the prevailing mores and values of an already established urban class. Because its builders and early administrators enjoyed so free a hand in shaping Port Sudan, an examination of the plans they designed and implemented reveals with considerable clarity what they thought the ideal colonial city should look like, how they thought it should function, and how they believed its component communities should interact.

Before turning spedfically to Port Sudan, a brief examination of a few other “created” colonial cities especially comparable to it will help to amplify this concept and to sketch out the broader context into which this case study fits. The establishment of Kenitra, like Port Sudan, resulted from the decision of a European colonial administration governing an Arabo-Islamic society to reorient prevailing commercial patterns by building a modern port on an uninhabited site close to, but clearly distinct from, an older urban center. Chronology further reinforces this congruence, in that work at Kenitra began less than a decade after the founding of Port Sudan. France’s status as protecting power in Morocco, as opposed to Great Britain’s partnership in the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium in Sudan, constitutes the greatest variable in the similarity, but also makes possible a comparison of how Europe’s two greatest imperial powers managed such an undertaking.

A cluster of “created” cities comprises a second useful, if perhaps less immediately apparent, illustration. In conjunction with the digging of a canal through the sparsely populated Isthmus of Suez, the Suez Canal Company built the cities of Port Said (1859), Ismailia (1862), and Terreplein (1867; renamed Port Tewfik in 1882). At the southern end of the canal, Port Tewfik was overshadowed by the long established entrepôt of Suez, which it never seriously rivalled. Ismailia, near the mid-point in the canal, was the headquarters of the Company and the main point of contact between the isthmus and the rest of Egypt. The northern terminus of the canal, Port Said, evolved into a thriving seaport complemented, after 1926, by a twin city on the opposite (eastern) bank of the canal, Port Fuad.

While these were not colonial cities in quite the same sense as Port Sudan or Kenitra, the influence of the Suez Canal Company in administering them and the role of Europeans and their capital and technological skills in the cities’ construction and growth make them quite comparable in virtually all important respects. The emergence and consolidation of these cities coincided with—indeed, was a not insignificant cause of—Great Britain’s increasing interest in Egypt that culminated in its occupation of the country in 1882. Port Said, the largest of the Suez Canal municipalities, was a created city familiar to many British officials of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and one which shared with Port Sudan its role both as a link in the maritime chain joining Great Britain with its Asian and Pacific possessions and as an important commercial center of northeastern Africa. As such, an account of some of its most salient features complements the study of Port Sudan itself.

Kenitra

Difficult logistical problems hampered the advance of French forces dispatched from Casablanca in the spring of 1912 to support Morocco’s sultan, besieged in Fez by dissident tribesmen and contingents of his own army outraged by his accession to the Treaty of Fez, which had made his country a French protectorate. Poor roads and overextended lines of communication and supply compelled the French command to use ports closer to Fez as staging points for men and materiel bound for the royal capital. One such place was Mahdia. Situated at the mouth of the Sebou River some eighty miles north of Casablanca and less than a hundred miles west of Fez, Mahdia had a record of maritime activity that dated to Phoenician times. But the port had seen little activity since the eighteenth century and, at the beginning of the twentieth, appeared suitable for neither the renovations nor expansion required for it to serve France’s anticipated needs in the protectorate effectively.

In August, on the basis of reports from reconnaissance parties that had scoured the area in search of a site for a new port, Resident General Lyautey personally selected a location above the Sebou estuary, ten miles upstream from Mahdia, but at a place where the 300 yard wide river remained navigable for ocean going vessels. The only structures in the vicinity were a government fort guarding the coastal road and the small bridge (Arabic, qanaitra) over a tributary of the Sebou that gave the locale its name, Kenitra.

When Kenitra’s port opened on January 1, 1913, the town’s population consisted of 600 Europeans and 500 Moroccans.² A French civil administration headed by a contrôleur civil began to function in June, 1913. In December of the following year, its head assumed the title “Chief of Municipal Services” when the commander of the fort was appointed Kenitra’s qa’id, or chief Moroccan official. Less than three years later, on November 27, 1917, the town was accorded the status of a municipality with its own budget and a municipal council of eighteen members, fifteen of them Frenchmen. In 1920, the town became the administrative headquarters of the Gharb Civil Region that encompassed the fertile plain stretching into the interior toward Meknes and Fez. In 1932, Kenitra was renamed Port Lyautey. The former Resident General himself expressed a preference for this designation over another proposal, Lyautey-Ville, because “it is possible to have cities anywhere, but there, the raison d’etre was the port.”³

Until the early 1930s, the growth of Kenitra and its port did seem to confirm Lyautey’s wisdom in superseding Mahdia. Although less than 6,000 tons of cargo, virtually all of it imports, had cleared the port in 1913, in 1930 the figure rose to over 290,000 tons. Even when the tonnage handled on the docks subsequently declined, as Casablanca’s larger, better equipped harbor gradually overshadowed all other Moroccan ports, Kenitra’s population still rose steadily. It reached 9,931 in 1926 (about 60% of them Moroccans) and more than doubled to 26,663 (with the proportion of Moroccans rising to 75%) by 1941.

The transformation of the Gharb Region, for which Kenitra was the economic as well as administrative capital, into a center of colonial agriculture, the emergence of a modest industrial base in the city, and the construction nearby of military and naval installations stimulated this growth. So did the division of Morocco into French and Spanish zones and the internationalization of Tangier. This arrangement complicated, if it did not entirely sever, the traditional connections of Fez, Meknes, and the villages of the Gharb with the ports of Larache and Tangier, which now came under different political regimes. As the French controlled port closest to these areas, Kenitra naturally benefitted from the resultant deviation in trade patterns.

Quick to grasp the new city’s possibilities, merchants from elsewhere in the country, and especially from Fez, moved there soon after its founding. Kenitra’s tnadina, separated from the European quarter by a military encampment, originated with the modest homes of these entrepreneurs. But the unskilled Moroccan laborers drawn to Ke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Photographs, and Maps
• A Note on Sources
• A Note on Transliteration
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Introduction
• PART TWO 1904–1918
• PART THREE 1919–1942
• PART FOUR 1943–1953
• Appendix: Port Sudan Commissioners; Red Sea and Kassala Province Governors
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index