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Cultural and language policies in Sudan have been subject to dramatic changes and transformations in line with the ideological and political whims and moods of the so called Sudanese elite, itself the illegitimate child of a targeted colonial British educational policy. Within the changes in Sudan’s politics, a bitter conflict developed between the two (civilised) languages, classical holy Arabic and colonial progressive English, on one level and the colloquial Arabic and the hundreds of Sudanese languages and dialects on another, whereby English became the stolen identity of non-arabicized intellectuals and Arabic the mission carrier of islamo-arabic dominance. Secondary to the political battle of language and ideologies that doesn’t lack a brutal side, the educational system suffered most.

Broadly said a young Sudanese comes out of school and university mastering neither his/her real native language nor English or even Modern Standard Arabic. The occupation with decoding language thus creates an opaque shield between recipient and text, crippling the educational process.

The question remains: Is such a language policy a tool intended to distort communication or an unhappy side effect of political wrestling? And how does such dilemma affect L₃- language learning?

To grasp the wide range of causes, motives and developments that led to the current state of "language(s)" and "language policies", and the repercussions and consequences, present and future, of the latter on the overall "Sudanese condition", it is mandatory to take a few steps back and consider with the help of the de-ideologising effect of time the landmarks of the evolution of language and educational policies in Sudan.

Observing the history of war and peace in Sudan, it is evident that "language" was never and can never be a neutral issue; rather it has always been and most likely will remain a political and politicised issue par excellence, a cause and a weapon in a chronic conflict of identities, orientations and interests that has found expression in a brutal war in the South, social divide and disparities among the populations of the country and lately a second war in Darfur and a third may be in the Beja regions of East Sudan. In essence, language as a tool and component of nation building and social integration is a most controversial issue in the Sudanese setting, and must be considered within a wider socio-economic, socio-political and cultural context, far beyond its innocent communicative and educational functions.

Sudan is home to a mosaic of ethnicities, cultures and languages. Due to a long historical process that started around 651 A.D., the start of significant Arab migration into the Sudan, Arabic became the lingua franca binding the Sudanese, most of all as the sacral language of their new religion Islam, language of commerce and trade between Sudan and its influential neighbours in the Middle East, particularly Egypt, Sudan's "Big Brother", and carrier of a world culture and civilization, within which Sudan was to redefine its identity. This process is commonly described as peaceful; nevertheless it is evident that force and power did their share in establishing Moslem- Arabic Sudan, since neither common religion nor language prevented the Turkish-Egyptian invasion of the country in 1821; an imperial undertaking of Egypt under Mohamed Ali Pasha, whereby Sudan became at least formally a peripheral colony of the Ottoman Empire. The period 1881-1885 witnessed a popular uprising that unified most parts of the country and won the sympathy even of the non-Moslem population in southern Sudan, led by a religious leader who sought to liberate the country from the "Turks" and cleanse Sudanese traditional Islam from superstition and heresy, an uprising that successfully culminated in the establishment of the nucleus of the Sudanese nation state with it's capital in Omdurman. Sudan's Mahdi (saviour) Mohamed Ahmed ibn Abdalla and his Khalifa (successor) Abdalla ibn Mohamed al T'aishi considered their version of Islam and its language a holy message that they had to spread and enforce, not only throughout Sudan but also to Sudan's neighbours and the world.

When compared to Egypt for example, the dominance of Arabic in the Sudan remained partial, major population groups accepted the Islamic faith, however preserved their local languages, this is true for the Nubians of North Sudan, the Beja of East Sudan and most of the tribes of Darfur. On the other hand, Southern Sudan and major population groups in the Nuba Mountains and the Southern Blue Nile remained throughout adamantly resistant to both Islam and Arabic penetration, although Arabic enforced itself as the language of commerce and inter-tribal communication. For the sake of generalisation Arabic can be described as the mother tongue of many Sudanese, and a first foreign language for many others, its foreignness incorporating the austerity and coercion of an imperial power and a superior civilisation, one that the Moslems among them are potentially ready to embrace and the non-Moslems openly defy.

The spread of Arabic among the Sudanese prior to the introduction of "modern" colonial schools went hand in hand with the spread of the Islamic faith, Arabic being the language of a religion that found acceptance peacefully or otherwise among many indigenous populations of Sudan. Pre-colonial arabicization thus took place within a religious context, institutionally via the still viable and existent maseed or khalwa; an entity with educational, social and economic functions, where boys and young men as well as girls however not young women learn the Koran, reading and writing Arabic, fiqh (classical Islamic jurisdiction), tafseer (interpretation of the Koran) and hadeeth (written traditions of Prophet Mohamed), under the guidance of a sheikh or fageer (religious scholar/ holy man), who teaches and guides youth, heals the sick, addresses disputes and problems in the local community and is capable of acts of baraka (blessing), i.e. has magical or meta-physical talents with which he can e.g. heal the insane, grant an infertile couple children or even physically attend prayers in Mecca, despite the fact that he dwells in a village on the Nile. The role that the maseed played and still plays in creation of the Northern Sudanese perception of the self cannot be stressed enough, since it is the institutional form, through which values and social codes are transferred from generation to another, in the centre of this institution stands the fageer, a prestigious figure, whose influence in the local socio-political realm is unprecedented, no wonder that the national pride of the modern Northern Sudanese, the Mahdi Revolution, was led by essentially such a fageer, and the two elephants of modern Sudanese politics the Umma Party and the Democratic Unionist Party (both founded in the mid 40's) are based on religious orders, the Ansar and the Khatmiyya respectively, and thus function largely as a polished form of the maseed community structure, and are both headed by descendants of educated and rich fageer families, the Mahdis and the Mirghanis.

Although the Turkish-Egyptian rule of Sudan (1821-1885) established a limited number of schools, they had no mentionable effect on the educational traditions of the Sudanese, the maseed remained uncontested. Only after British invasion of the Sudan and establishment of the colonial British administration, named neatly the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899-1956) did the inevitable schism between the colonial world and the indigenous world make itself evidently felt, a divide that not only engendered and prompted later developments in language policies but also in regards to jurisdiction, and the wider cultural and political being of the Sudanese.

Khartoum became under the British the capital city and the seat of Government; a clean and organized town with gardens and lawns, in Khartoum lived the British staff and select Sudanese, who were ready to dissolve in the colonial plan, it prided its whitewashed brick walls and its "modern" architecture in contrast to the neglected capital of the defeated Mahdi state, Omdurman; filthy, chaotic and indigenous, even the visitor today may well notice the differences in planning, buildings and spirit between these hardly reconcilable neighbours and symbols of identity. A similar claim of schizophrenic divide can be made about the polarities created by the white man's burden in the educational system; most clearly exemplified by the historical evolution of the English-speaking Gordon's Memorial College established 1902 and later to become University of Khartoum (1956), and on the other side of the rift the Arabic-speaking religion school al-Ma'had al-I'lmi established 1902, later to become Omdurman Islamic University (est.1965). In this regard quoting a few lines from Rudyard Kipling's (1865-1936) poem "Kitchener's School" (1898) may be enlightening:

It is their treasure – it is their pleasure – thus are their hearts inclined:

The appointment of Sir Ogar as Sudan's first Director of Education in 1900 signalled the advent of "modern" "secular" schooling in Sudan. The targets set by the British remained well served for the next 60 years and beyond, mainly to create an efficient craftsmen class, to provide civil servants and professionals i.e. cogwheels for the colonial administration, and to disseminate enough education among the people for them to understand the governmental system. Colonial capital investments was attracted by virtue of profitability to Central Sudan, where the White and Blue Niles provide necessary irrigation water and the area of Gezira provides the most suitable lands to grow a cash-crop namely cotton. The year 1911 witnessed the start of Gezira Agricultural Scheme, and in 1925 the Sinnar Dam was inaugurated, allowing gravity irrigation of the vast area between the two Niles. In line with the targets of British educational policy (and colonial economical investment), school education was clustered in the vicinity of Khartoum and the few economically significant urban centres. The educational ladder followed a 4-4-4 years plan, language of instruction was English, with the exception of the two subjects Arabic and Islamic Faith, the teachers of which were mostly the inferior graduates of the "traditional" al Ma'had al-I'lmi, ridiculed for their indigenous dress jallabiyya, gufttan and i'mma, their classical Arabic and local manners by the prestigious and "modern", educated, polished Gordonians- graduates of Gordon Memorial College- packed in western suits and neckties, who taught the "sciences" in English. In the year 1934 a Teacher Training School was established in Bakht al-Ruda, a small village on the White Nile close to the town El-Duem. Bakht al-Ruda offered primary school graduates a four years course at its beginning, increased to five years in 1940 and six years in 1944, this school was preceded by the Teachers and Judges Training School (1900) and a Female Teachers Training Institute (1921), both in Omdurman. Only in 1937 did the British Administration decide to link the curriculum of Gordon's Memorial College to the Cambridge Secondary School Certificate Examinations, thereby enabling graduates of the College to join British institutions of higher education.

Consequently and under the umbrella of Gordon's Memorial College the School of Veterinary Medicine was opened in 1938, the School of Engineering in 1939 and the School of Arts in 1940. In addition to the School of Law and the School of Science the mentioned were joined in the year 1945 under the name of Khartoum University College, and awarded a "special" relationship with the University of London, whereby the Londoners set the examinations and granted outstanding students "London" Bachelor degrees, the less lucky ones got the usual College Diplomas.

Gordon's Memorial College can be regarded as the birth place and cradle of the Sudanese colonial elite; a full boarding school, entrance to which required fulfilling stringent and highly competitive academic criteria and of course a "correct" social background and back-up, its graduates, fluent English-speakers occupied governmental posts in the bureaucracy, education and the legal system. It was these beneficiaries of the Empire who organized themselves in a number of political and cultural societies, most influential of which was the Graduates' Congress (1938), eventually to lead a gentlemanly diplomatic battle for Independence.

Statistics from the year of Independence (1956) illustrate well the harvest of the colonial educational policy in Sudan, adult literacy rate was a shameful 22.9%, the education budget catered for 1 778 primary schools enrolling 208 688 pupils, 108 intermediate secondary schools enrolling 14 632 pupils and 49 government secondary schools enrolling 5 423 students. Higher education was limited to the University of Khartoum, except for around 1000 students sent abroad by wealthy families or with the help of government scholarships.

Post-colonial educational policies reflect the elitist attempt to address the illiteracy problem, increase the scope and reach of the educational system, reform the curricula to fit the needs of an underdeveloped impoverished nation, reinstitute national identity and pride after long years of foreign rule and realize national integration and unity. Tasks that are anything but easy in a multi-multi country, whose primary school pupils speak 400 different languages, and where a clash of identities had already shown its deadly side on the eve of Independence in a rebellion of the Torit garrison in Southern Sudan, ignited by refusal of Southern Sudanese soldiers to accept a Northern Sudanese officer instead of the British captain. The Torit events of 1955 escalated to become the longest war in Africa.

Critical assessment of post-colonial language policies necessitates analysis of the nature, orientations, ideological creeds and aspirations of its makers, i.e. the sons of the Empire, the Gordonians who took over rule of the country and determined its destination. As a result of the profit-drive guiding British policies, it was mainly Northern Sudanese from Central Sudan who managed to escape their indigenous world of chaos and enter "modern" schools, usually after two years in a maseed, only relatively wealthier families could make do without the free labour of their children and only the very best pupils could make it to a secondary school, among those a select number made it to the "beautiful yet unattainable" jameela wa mustaheela – the name students gave to Khartoum University, using the words of a popular song ! At home in Omdurman the elite spoke to their wives and kin in Sudanese Arabic, lavishly consumed Arabic literature -classic and modern- sitting in their embarrassingly modest homes, dressed in their jallabiyyas, they rejoiced at the nationalist Arab movement with eyes and passions glued to the North, to Egypt! Once on the other side of the river- Khartoum, their tongues spoke the language of the conqueror, they learned, taught and worked in English, stuffed themselves in suits and strangled themselves with neckties, drank sherry and smoked Craven A. The elite's perception of the British united awe, admiration, respect, envy and hate, since it was a British army that slaughtered 10 000 of their fathers and grandfathers on the battleground of Karrari, Omdurman, just a generation earlier. English incorporated the essence of their elitism, whilst Arabic represented their national pride, a sensation that still hovers over discussion of language "politics" in Sudan.

Nasser's Egypt led the Pan-Arab Movement and exemplified its ideal; it also paved the way for Sudan's Independence. Influenced by the ideological atmosphere of their age, the ruling Sudanese elite did not ponder long over the immense problems implied by the facts on the ground, i.e. the multi-lingual and multi-ethnic nature of the population, without undue hesitation they decided to favour Arabic and Islam, the lifelines attaching the "nation" to the more developed "civilized" Arab World. The search for a post-colonial identity, for remedy of the colonial wound concluded with the endorsement of Arabic as "national" language. The Nasser-style coup of Colonel Numeiri on 25^th May 1969 provided the political power that made educational reform possible, in the same year a national conference on education issues decided to substitute the 4-4-4 ladder with a 8 – 4 system, however the Minister of Education Dr. Mohyeldin Sabir preferred to follow the advice of the Council of Arab Ministers of Education and enforced a Pan-Arab 6-3-3 package, the most important component of which was arabicization of curricula at all school levels and teaching English as a foreign language from the 7^th school year onwards.

By 1980 Sudan had 5 400 primary schools, approximately 1 500 junior secondary schools, 190 upper secondary schools and two new universities: Juba (est. 1977) and Gezira (est. 1975). Curricula had been extensively reformed and Arabic was the language of instruction. Higher education remained in English; the only exception was the less celebrated Khartoum Branch of Cairo University (est. 1955) and Omdurman Islamic University. The expansion in schools occurred at the cost of teachers' training, the Irish secondary school English teacher went back home, whereas methods and substance of Arabic lessons deteriorated by the day. Classified by the Gordonians as a non-"science", Arabic teaching was prime responsibility of the sheikhs i.e. graduates of the Ma'had, and as such fell victim to the unbridgeable cleft dividing the colonial "modern sciences" on one side and indigenous "Arabic" on the other. Pupils could not help fleeing from Arabic lessons; boring, tedious, as they were, and taught by harsh bearded angry men in jallabiyyas, with practically no modern pedagogic skills. Both teachers of Arabic and Religion were considered inferior to their colleagues- teachers of "other subjects". They received less salary, suffered unjust terms of service and promotion and were institutionally discriminated against. Whilst a teacher of "another subject"- Geography or English for example- spent only four years in the initial employment grade (Q), jumping thereafter to grade (DS), an Arabic teacher stagnated ten years on the bottom of the civil service ladder grade (Q) before making a step upwards. Such colonial-born inequalities were sustained throughout the post-colonial history of Sudan until Numeiri decided to invest politically in the nation-wide divide and launched his Islamic campaign, crowned by the September 1983 Sharia laws.

More violent winds struck the educational system under the regime of the National Islamic Front (the coup of 30^th June 1989). The chief ideologue of the regime Dr. Hassan al Turabi, born 1932, son of an Islamic legal judge from Wad al Turabi, a village in Central Sudan, a Gordonian armoured with a Masters degree from the University of London and a Doctorate from the University of Paris, had a mission to accomplish. Starting from 1991 a 2-8-3-school system was enforced, including two pre-school years. Sudanese education was to realize the following goals:

School curricula were radically reformed, rather written anew, and teachers' training was severed from the Ministry of Education and entrusted to the university faculties of education.

In 1990 the regime announced the so-called "Higher Education Revolution"; objectives of the new policy were stated in the National Comprehensive Strategy:

In accordance with the objectives determined the regime opened 17 new governmental universities in different regions of the Sudan, sudanised the Khartoum Branch of Cairo University and formed a novel "Knowledge Authentication Committee", with the aim of "working out plans, programmes, and curricula that reflect the characteristics of the Sudanese people, their belief and their Islamic, Arab and African heritage". In 1991 the Higher Authority of Arabicization was established, its mandate included:

With the "Revolution", the last few bastions of English, or Arabic for that matter capitulated before angry attacks from the Sudanese peripheries; the decade's long domination of the Gordonians came to an end. Thanks to their rigidity, snobbish behaviour, elitism, "colonialism", and envied for their governmental houses and cars, the public attitude towards them was similar to the one the Gordonians themselves had towards their British masters.

The expansion in Higher Education proved in a short while to be an outright farce, the percentage of the central government expenditure allocated to education in the period 1992 – 2004 was a meagre 8%, new and old universities alike were simply too poor to function, lacked basic infrastructure and suffered the weight of a by far too large student load. Introduction of Arabic as language of instruction at university level created generations of students, unable to communicate efficiently in any language; they lacked textbooks written in Arabic, and at the same time were unable to read textbooks written in English, the outdated pile and stock of university libraries. Lecturers and students alike developed the bad habit of depending on so called "hand-outs" or "sheets"- the names the university population gave to short summarized notes, containing the necessary minimum to pass examinations.

Ad hoc arabicization and expansion in Higher Education were political decisions that served basically political ends; the NIF successfully rearticulated the divide between the indigenous and the colonial realm and presented it as an ideological confrontation between English-speaking Secularism and Arabic-speaking Islamism, thereby firing at two directions with a single shot, the rebellion in the non-Moslem non-Arabic South and anti-Islamist opposition in the North. The typical Sudanese student today can only express him/herself in oral Sudanese colloquial Arabic, and since language is the tool of consciousness and mind, he or she is thus educated to remain politically, socially and mentally "illiterate" and hence objectively obedient, an observable fact that old taxi-drivers in Khartoum register with the simple judgement: "university students nowadays are no better if not worse than junior secondary school graduates in the seventies".

* Paper presented at the Conference Across Borders: Benefiting from Cultural Differences, 17-18^th March 2005, University of Nairobi, organised by: DAAD, Goethe Institute, University of Nairobi