Reinventing the Wheel? Local Government and Neo-Traditional Authority in Late-Colonial Northern Sudan

Abstract

This quotation from a piece in a 1950s issue of Punch, entitled "Frustrated Export to New Britain," is a cynical comment on the establishment of elected local councils in Britain's imperial territories after World War II.1 It amused the director of local government in Sudan sufficiently for him to keep it among his personal papers. But the image of "talking themselves white in the face" hints at how the introduction of "Local Government" in the British Empire was part of a wider project of postwar imperial policy to make "other" political …