Your first book is War of Visions by Francis Deng.

To me it remains the best book on Sudan. It was written in the early 1990s, so it’s almost a generation old now, but it remains the best analysis of why Sudan has descended into so much conflict. Better than that, though, it’s the best analysis of both North and South Sudan. The problem with a lot of books on Sudan is that the authors come from one part of the country and only write about the part they know. The same applies to foreigners who tend to get obsessed with one part of the country, normally Darfur or the South, and then become experts on those regions. 

Why? 

Well, because Sudan is the largest country in Africa, and trying to understand the whole place is admittedly extremely difficult. And for most of its history it’s been locked into a civil war between the North and the South, which defined conflict in the country. The same focus leads to mistakes in how Sudan is treated internationally, because once again a lot of politicians, the UN and so on, become obsessed: let’s concentrate on one particular area of the country; let’s fix Darfur, for instance. That was the classic mistake: there was a peace deal reached between the North and the South in 2005, but then everyone’s attention went off to Darfur, and that deal was allowed to wither with the result that the South was allowed to suffer. Again, there had been a low-intensity guerrilla war going on in the East from the 1980s until 2006, and everyone forgot about that, because they were concentrating on Darfur, and before that the South. 

Does Deng’s book foresee the conflict in Darfur? 

Well, the reason I think he’s such a good author is that he’s a Southerner who served for many years in the 1980s in the only truly national government under Jafar Numeiri, an Islamist Northerner who was the only president who managed to reach an accommodation with the South. That constituted a ten-year gap in the civil war. Several Southerners served in Numeiri’s administration, so that allowed Deng to see the Northerners from close up, and he was able to write in detail very coherently about the North just as he was about the South. Deng held important jobs – he was a foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, but he also has a very academic turn of mind. There’s a lot of anthropology in there: he’s very interested in the religious aspects of both Southerners and Northerners as well as some of the politics, so you not only get to understand both – rare enough – but you also get a very rounded view of what makes them tick. When he was writing, the North and the South were at war again, so he was very much concerned with what made the clash there, but he talks a lot about Darfur, and you get a sense of the dislocation between Darfur and Khartoum, and central Sudan. So, although he’s writing before the conflict really blew up in 2003, you get an idea of what’s coming.

Your next book? 

A History of Modern Sudan, by an American historian called Robert Collins. It’s probably the best narrative academic study of the country ever produced. He manages to draw a lot of his own scholarship and other people’s books together to get a comprehensive view of the country. Although he was writing before the conflict in Darfur, there’s an appendix dealing with the causes of the war there, so he gives us an understanding of it. It’s also the best book on internal Sudanese politics: he really gets into the governments of the 1970s and 80s. He’s very good on the regime of Numeiri and the appalling government of Bashir, and Hassan al-Turabi in the 1990s: how they destroyed the country and erected this repressive Islamic state. I think that it’s the best history of Sudan written by an outsider. Many books on the Sudan are pretty impenetrable: they tend to get lost replaying these micro-political disputes of the Sudanese élite in the mid-1970s. 

Who are the élite?

It’s very Khartoum-based. One of the problems with Sudan historically is that it’s been a very over-centralised state. This is a legacy of the British: basically they constructed Khartoum as the centre of economic activity and devoted almost no attention to the rest of the country, despite it being so big. So the people who held power in Khartoum held power in the rest of Sudan. They were traditionally from the Northern tribes – the ‘Nilotic’ or ‘Riverine’ élite: Arab Muslim tribes who settled on the banks of the Nile, the source of wealth being water for centuries of Sudan’s existence. It’s been a pretty exclusive monopoly of power: very few presidents have come from other regions.

Your next book?

War Child by Emmanuel Jal, who’s mainly known as a Sudanese rapper. The story he tells in songs is that he was a child soldier, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, basically the children of South Sudanese who were killed, and their villages destroyed, in the 1990s by North Sudanese militias, the forerunners of the Janjaweed. The Lost Boys then had to trudge for months across Sudan to find safe haven in the refugee camps over the border in Ethiopia.