Sudan was the largest country in Africa until 2011, when the south voted almost unanimously to leave after two civil wars that between them consumed most of the years since independence. The organising argument of this reading order is Douglas Johnson's: that these were not separate conflicts but one continuous crisis between a narrow riverain centre and peripheries — south, west, east, the Nuba mountains — that the state governed as internal colonies.
Read chronologically, and read Johnson early. Darfur gets a stage of its own because that is where the historiographical argument is sharpest, and because our catalogue holds two entirely different books that display under the same one-word title.
Before independence
P. M. Holt's A modern history of the Sudan is the standard survey, later revised and extended with M. W. Daly; our catalogue holds it under the earlier edition title. Holt's The Mahdist State in the Sudan covers the Mahdi's movement and the state it built between 1881 and 1898, which matters well beyond the 1890s, because it is how Sudanese Islamists have understood their own politics ever since. Winston Churchill's The River War, written in 1899 by a young officer who was at Omdurman, is a primary source on the imperial mind rather than a history — its judgements on Sudanese Islam are exactly what you would expect, and reading it as evidence of its author is the point.
The civil wars
Douglas Johnson's The root causes of Sudan's civil wars is the single most important book on Sudan in English and belongs before anything else on the conflicts. Francis Mading Deng's War of visions, by a Dinka scholar and diplomat who negotiated in the war, is the best account of it as an argument about what the country was — Arab and African, Muslim and Christian. Deborah Scroggins's Emma's war tells the story of the British aid worker who married the SPLA commander Riek Machar, and through her the 1991 SPLA split, the Bor massacre and what the aid industry did in southern Sudan; it is the most readable book here.
They poured fire on us from the sky is testimony, not history. Benson Deng is one of three of the Lost Boys of Sudan narrating their own walk out of Bahr el Ghazal as children — a participant account rather than a historian's. Read it after the analytical books, where it supplies what none of them can.
Famine, aid, and the argument about both
Alex de Waal's Famine that kills studied the 1984-85 Darfur famine at close range and overturned the standard model of famine mortality, showing that most deaths came from disease during displacement rather than starvation, and that people's own coping strategies were rational attempts to protect a future livelihood. It changed relief practice. His later The real politics of the Horn of Africa describes regional politics as a transactional marketplace of loyalty payments, a framework that explains a good deal institutional accounts miss.
Darfur, and the two books with that title
Name the author every time. Gerard Prunier's Darfur is a short history whose original edition carried the subtitle The Ambiguous Genocide — his argument compressed into three words. He documents mass atrocity and then interrogates whether the legal term fits, with the emphasis falling on Khartoum's deliberate use of militia against the western periphery.
The other Darfur is by Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, built on field reporting, and is far more attentive to Darfur's own long internal history of land tenure, drought, migration and tribal administration. The two books document the same atrocities and differ in weighting and vocabulary: Prunier reads the conflict largely downward from Khartoum, Flint and de Waal read a great deal of it upward from within Darfur, and de Waal has argued publicly against applying the genocide label while documenting the killing in detail. Reading them back to back is the whole point of the stage — two well-sourced books that disagree.
Richard Cockett's Sudan — again the bare title — is an Economist correspondent's survey of the modern state with Darfur at the centre, and the best book for seeing Darfur as an instance of Johnson's pattern rather than an isolated horror.
Partition and after
Matthew LeRiche's South Sudan, written with Matthew Arnold just as independence arrived, follows the SPLM from guerrilla movement to government and the institutional weaknesses it carried across; its cautions read differently with hindsight. Peter Martell's First Raise a Flag runs from the long war through independence to the 2013 collapse, told through the people who lived it, and is the right place to stop.
The ordered stages, each with a study plan, are on the history of Sudan reading path.
