Sudan was always an invented country. Maybe we should invent it again

Sudan — a country that ceased to exist in 2011 — is or was one of the last untouristed wildernesses on earth. And for good reason: while it still existed it was the biggest country in Africa, a mainly flat and uninhabitable wasteland, mostly brown, with barely a mountain or a bosky valley to its name, unbearably hot, unhealthy, poor, and full of every sort of trouble. And yet …

The author of this new book on what are now the two Sudans — the country has voluntarily split into two lesser states — says that this is one of the world’s most interesting places. That is true. As anyone who has spent time there will tell you, the Sudans (as we must now call them) both north and south exert a fascination. There is something both entrancing and horrifying about this territory, with its populations of infinitely hospitable people, its mind-stretching million square miles, its southern swamplands and eerie dry forest provinces, its sweet Nilotic villages and dusty diesel-fume towns, and its almost limitless capacity for brutal self-harm.

This book is mainly concerned with what happened after the recent secession of the southern part of the country, creating what was certainly the world’s newest and possibly least viable state. The split was a disaster for both parts of Sudan. But to explain how things got to that point it is necessary to go back.

Sudan was always a fiction. When the British sent an expeditionary force down the Nile to attack the forces of the late 19th-century Islamist known as the Mahdi it was in a belated fit of vengeance for the death of the British mercenary and anti-slavery agent General Gordon. Thus the blistering desert of northern Sudan was acquired.