Imperial Echoes: The Sudan - People, History & Agriculture Arthur Staniforth Oxford: Worldview Publishing, 2000.

On a plane out of San Jose, a dot.com millionaire leans over in conversation: "What’s amazing now is you have these kids, twenty years old and barely out of college, running entire divisions responsible for new products." I hold up my copy of Arthur Staniforth’s book: ‘No," I said, "what’s amazing is that sixty years ago kids, twenty years old and barely out of college, were running entire districts of the colonial empire in the Sudan."

That is the theme that stands out from Staniforth’s short, but amusing, memoir. He and many of his colleagues in the colonial services in the Sudan were extremely young by comparison with the responsibilities entrusted to them. Staniforth defensively raises, and answers in the affirmative, the interesting and eternal question of whether Africa, and the Sudan specifically, was better off by colonial rule. He usefully reminds the reader that British ruled in the Sudan with a light touch; his memoir is the proof. It is indeed hard to imagine that an administration of pretty naive 25-year-old’s ‘oppressed’ the Sudanese. There are too many clever men in the Sudan not to have gotten the better of these administrators. Yet that is precisely the unfortunate truth that Staniforth does not want to quite confess to. British rule may in the large not have been characterized by direct oppression, by it created and fostered the conditions under which clever men manipulated government rather than served it. That tradition of manipulation as opposed to public service led almost directly to the debacle that is the Sudan today.

Staniforth served five years in the Sudan, from 1944-49, before wisely reading the writing on the wall, cashing out his pension, and accepting a position back in England. Now, quite some time later, his memory of events and people remains sharp (aided by occasional extracts from letters written home to his parents). He was trained in tropical agriculture, and so the book is useful for people interested in colonial agriculture. There are short descriptions of the pump scheme on the White Nile at Umm Gerr, the flood irrigation scheme at Khor Abu Habl in Kordofan, and cotton marketing at Meridi, southern Sudan near the Congo border. There are also short descriptions of a few prominent personalities: the diplomat Mekki Abbas, the governor Robert Howe, and the Mahdi’s son Sayyid Abd al Rahman Mahdi.

It is not an academic book, by any means, and so should be read perhaps as an accompaniment to more serious treatments of the colonial period (i.e. M. W. Daly’s two volumes on the subject). Staniforth unfortunately is a bit unfocused as to audience: Sudanist academics would rather have read more details of his day-to-day work and life; a generalist audience will be baffled by the occasional, and very selective, reviews of academic work interspersed with the personal reflections. On this latter point, it is almost as if Staniforth felt the need to back up his personal observations with a reference to an article (often one published in Sudan Notes and Records). What he saw or heard, he saw or heard, and in a memoir like this there really was no need for ‘references’. His experiences were interesting enough to stand on their own.