Colonial ethnographic findings shaped tribal land claims and fund distribution

Evidence

Works such as these, and there were many, could well have gathered dust on the shelves of the administrators’ own libraries were it not for the fact that their jobs turned such explorations of Sudanese identity into political realities. For example, when his influential works were published, MacMichael was the district commissioner of Kordofan and responsible for settling tribal land claims, distributing government funds, and supervising the secular education of young Sudanese within his jurisdiction. His conclusions about the identities of the Sudanese played a large role in how they were included by his government. Fortunately, as the scholar Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim claims, MacMichael actually paid attention to local genealogies and what historical and cultural identities Sudanese tribes ascribed to themselves; but other officials were not always so thoughtful. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 838