British economic monopolies shaped early Sudanese nationalist organizing

Evidence

Al-Latïf needed an organization that would accept his presence and assume his issues about race as well. His first political exercise was to join the League of Sudanese Union, formed in the early 1920s to counter the conservatism of the Mahdist and Sufi notables and in protest against the government’s policies of taxation and its sugar and cotton monopolies, which were raising the prices of staples and forcing Sudanese economic development to focus on massive agricultural enterprises like the Gezira irrigation plan. The Sudanese Union also protested the exclusion of Sudanese and Egyptians from high official positions, an exclusion that was reinforced by the paucity of decent schools available to the Sudanese. The union also stated its support for the unity of the Nile Valley, an issue strongly opposed by the sayyids of the Ansar group. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 1031