Egypt, Empire, and the Making of Sudan’s Military

Rereading History of the Sudan Defence Force

Brigadier General ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Fakī’s History of the Sudan Defence Force (Tārīkh Quwwat Difāʿ al-Sūdān), published posthumously in 1971, is best read as the institutional self-history of Sudan’s founding military generation.

Born in Rufaa in 1899 and deceased in March 1968, al-Fakī belonged to the earliest cohort of Sudanese officers trained under late colonial rule. He served in the armed forces, crucially as a sapper in the engineering arm of the Sudan Defence Force (SDF), a background that left a decisive imprint on both his career and his historical method. Rising through technical and command positions and later playing a major role in drafting military laws, regulations, and administrative frameworks, al-Fakī stood at the infrastructural core of Sudan’s military formation as it moved from a British-commanded colonial force toward a nominally national army.

This positionality shapes the book’s character. Al-Fakī does not write as a political polemicist or a social historian of soldiers, but as an engineer-officer concerned with systems, logistics, command structures, and institutional continuity. The dense reproduction of memoranda, budgets, force tables, organizational charts, and legal texts reflects a worldview trained to preserve institutions rather than narrate experience. History of the Sudan Defence Force reads less as narrative history than as an effort to archive the blueprint of an apparatus of rule.

What this blueprint reveals, often unintentionally, is that Sudan’s military was never designed as a national defense institution. It was engineered as a colonial security apparatus whose central political purpose was to dismantle Egyptian military dominance in Sudan and replace it with a locally recruited but externally supervised force.

Al-Fakī situates Sudan’s military origins firmly within the Egyptian imperial project of the nineteenth century. Armed force in Sudan functioned as an extension of the Egyptian state, staffed overwhelmingly by Egyptian officers and subordinated to Cairo. Sudanese recruits were absorbed into Egyptian formations, and military authority flowed northward even after the “Anglo-Egyptian reconquest.”

Although Egypt itself was under British occupation after 1882, Britain governed Sudan through the legal fiction of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, treating Cairo as a junior imperial partner whose army and treasury administered Sudan while real authority remained firmly in British hands.

Far from being marginal, Sudan constituted the principal overseas deployment zone of the Egyptian army. Between 1898 and 1924, roughly two-thirds of Egypt’s regular forces were stationed in Sudan, transforming the territory into the core arena of Egyptian imperial militarization.

The scale of this presence becomes even clearer in al-Fakī’s breakdown of the army’s composition on the eve of November 1924. The Egyptian military establishment in Sudan numbered nearly thirteen thousand men. While Egyptian officers dominated senior command, the bulk of the rank and file consisted of Sudanese soldiers serving within Egyptian formations. Of approximately 12,943 personnel, just under 3,000 were Egyptian soldiers and non-commissioned officers, while more than 9,000 were Sudanese other ranks. Among officers, Egyptians remained preponderant, alongside Sudanese junior officers and a smaller cadre of British commanders embedded throughout the hierarchy.

The composition of the Egyptian army in Sudan, before Nov. 1924.

The Egyptian army in Sudan was thus not merely an occupying force imported wholesale from Egypt; it was a hybrid imperial formation in which Sudanese manpower was governed through Egyptian command structures under British supervision.

The fiscal burden of this apparatus underscores its political centrality. In 1924 alone, around LE1.3 million was spent on Egyptian forces in Sudan, from a total Egyptian military budget of less than LE2 million for that year. The overwhelming share of Egypt’s military expenditure was therefore devoted not to defending Egypt itself but to sustaining its army of occupation in Sudan. Sudan was not a peripheral possession; it was the heart of Egypt’s perceived military power.

Crucially, al-Fakī shows that British unease with this arrangement long predated the dramatic rupture of 1924. The 1919 Egyptian Revolution marked a turning point not only in Egypt but within the Sudanese military environment itself. Revolutionary nationalism spread by contagion through the ranks, carried above all by Egyptian officers and non-commissioned officers stationed across Sudan. Sudanese officers serving alongside their Egyptian counterparts were exposed directly to nationalist discourse, anti-colonial sentiment, and the language of self-determination. Al-Fakī describes how this ideological transmission translated into a rising sense of political consciousness among Sudanese officers, particularly in major garrison towns and administrative centers.

The author, 1920.

British authorities watched this process with growing alarm. What unsettled them was not only unrest among civilians but also the politicization of the officer corps itself. The army, once conceived as a stabilizing instrument of order, appeared increasingly as a vector of nationalist mobilization. Because Egyptian and Sudanese officers served under identical conditions and within the same command structures, the military became a space of political transmission rather than insulation. By the early 1920s, British officials had already concluded that the continued integration of Sudanese officers within an Egyptian-dominated military structure posed a structural risk to colonial rule.

The events of 1924 did not create this anxiety; they crystallized it. In the wake of unrest in Cairo and the assassination of Sir Lee Stack, British authorities moved decisively. The assassination was followed by open rebellion among Egyptian troops in Khartoum, who mutinied, clashed with British forces, and killed several officers in what became the most serious military challenge to colonial authority since the Mahdist era. For British administrators, this was the ultimate confirmation that the Egyptian military presence in Sudan was not merely politically suspect but actively dangerous. The army had ceased to be an instrument of order and had become a vehicle of nationalist revolt.

Egyptian involvement in Sudan’s military apparatus was declared untenable. The memoranda reproduced by al-Fakī are striking in their bluntness. Egyptian officers were portrayed as structurally disloyal, inherently inclined toward political intrigue, and hostile to any curtailment of Egypt’s influence in Sudan. Loyalty was framed not as an individual virtue but as a political impossibility rooted in nationality.

Economic reasoning reinforced this political judgment. Egyptian officers were depicted as costly, demanding higher pay and superior living conditions than Sudanese personnel. Yet these arguments functioned largely as rationalizations. The core objective was political: the systematic removal of Egyptian influence from Sudan’s coercive institutions.

Structure of the British-controlled Egyptian Army in Sudan, before 1924.

The solution was the creation of what British administrators termed a “purely Sudan force.” Yet al-Fakī’s documentation makes clear that this was not a project of Sudanese sovereignty. The SDF was to be Sudanese in manpower while remaining firmly under British command and supervision. Egyptian units were withdrawn en masse, Egyptian officers purged, and a new force constructed around localized recruitment, fragmented formations, and continuous European oversight.

The organizational logic of the SDF reveals its governing purpose. Units were divided geographically and functionally, authority was dispersed, and British officers embedded throughout the hierarchy. This fragmentation was deliberate. Colonial planners explicitly warned against allowing indigenous officers to accumulate excessive authority or develop unified command structures. The force’s primary mission was internal security: policing frontier regions, suppressing unrest, and pre-empting rebellion. External defense remained secondary. The SDF was conceived as an armed constabulary scaled to territorial governance rather than a conventional national army.

Here, the book makes its most significant historiographical contribution. It demonstrates that Sudan’s military was political by design rather than by later degeneration. Long before coups and authoritarian rule, the army was engineered as a governing instrument optimized for control, dispersion, and surveillance. Al-Fakī’s engineering sensibility captures this institutional logic with exceptional clarity.

Equally important is the legacy of fragmentation this structure produced. By preventing the emergence of a unified indigenous command and embedding external supervision at every level, colonial administrators created a security sector predisposed to factionalism. Authority was localized, loyalties segmented, and organizational coherence intentionally constrained.

This architecture of divided force did not disappear with independence. Postcolonial regimes inherited a military apparatus already structured for internal domination rather than national integration. Subsequent rulers deepened these patterns through special units, parallel security services, and militias, all justified in the name of regime survival.

Read from the vantage point of 2026, amid the devastating war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, al-Fakī’s history appears less antiquarian than diagnostic. The proliferation of rival armed institutions is often attributed to late twentieth-century authoritarian politics. Yet the deeper institutional logic that made such fragmentation viable was embedded at the moment of the army’s creation.

The Sudan Defence Force was designed to be loyal but divided, effective at repression but weak as a unified national institution. It was built to govern space rather than to embody the state. That foundational purpose has echoed across more than a century of Sudanese military development.

Al-Fakī himself does not fully theorize these long-term consequences. Writing as a sapper-officer and institutional custodian, he presents the formation of the Sudan Defence Force largely as a necessary evolution. Yet the documentary record he assembles invites a more critical reading. It exposes the colonial architecture of coercion that continues to structure Sudan’s military politics.

History of the Sudan Defence Force thus stands as more than a work of military history. It is a foundational text for understanding the political economy of force in Sudan, revealing how the army emerged not as a national shield but as an engineered instrument of rule. Read today, it offers an unintended explanation for why Sudan’s military has remained trapped in cycles of fragmentation, politicization, and violence for over a century.