The Permanent Transition of Postcolonial Constitution Writing in Sudan’s First and Second Republics

This chapter analyses how contradicting conceptions of the Sudanese nation, partially rooted in the colonial experience, led to Sudan’s transitional constitution becoming inadvertently permanent. Sudan’s pre-independence parliament of 1954 was meant to create a free and neutral atmosphere for the Sudanese to decide if they should become fully independent or form a union with Egypt. Accordingly, a new constitution would be written. However, in late 1955, parliament voted to declare independence, without having done so. Sudan became independent in January 1956 with a transitional constitution, which was a barely edited version of the Self-Government Statute of 1953. This chapter traces the different attempts to draft a new constitution in the two democratic periods in the 1950s and the 1960s, as well as the contents of the resulting drafts and disagreements over them. The two core issues at stake were the question of the south or more broadly regional devolution and the role of Islam in the constitution. This chapter argues that a number of factors explain why the Parliament found it so difficult to establish common ground; most importantly, the large number of other crises which different governments were embroiled in, the mechanics of coalition politics in Sudan, and the underlying lack of an agreed-upon notion of what was Sudan and Sudanese.