Farmers, Herdsmen and the State in Rainland Sinnār

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Abstract
In earlier publications the present writer was at pains to emphasize that the state of Sinnār was not a mere confederation of nomadic Arab tribes; rather, it rested upon a firm agricultural base and was governed bureaucratically, while incorporating an ingeniously conceived system of nobility. This interpretation, though valid as far as it went, rested largely on evidence from riverain Sinnār and left little room for nomads. The present study, based primarily upon sources from the Sudanese rainlands, proposes that such a view of the place of herdsmen in the society of Sinnār is not well founded, and indeed that the habit of thought which perceives a sharp and enduring distinction between the peoples of ‘ the steppe and the sown’ – however appropriate in other contexts – does not pertain to Sinnār. The vision of rainland life which emerges from the sources here examined reveals a single society of herdsmen and cultivators, a society in perpetual metamorphosis within a framework of possibilities limited by ecology and custom. Ruling houses came and went; tribes grew, sundered and re-formed into new polities. Individuals and groups migrated freely, occasionally over vast distances, and changed their mode of livelihood whenever the opportunity for herding or the necessity for cultivating presented itself. All were subordinate to the state, whose continuity of authority in the long run overshadowed the more ephemeral corporate realities of the moment.

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