African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
    • Our philosophy
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics
Home›African Arguments›Politics›The Historic Struggle over the Judiciary

The Historic Struggle over the Judiciary

By Peter Woodward
June 8, 2009
1809
0

Reading this brought the past four decades cascading through my memory. Arriving in Kosti Boys School in 1966 my first introduction to my colleagues on the staff revealed that almost all wore Western dress and taught in English across virtually the whole of the curriculum. However two, known as “˜mullana‘, did not: they spoke no English; wore very formal “˜traditional’ dress; and taught Arabic and Islam. At one stage in the school year there was an open day featuring various school societies, and a very small and earnest group (one later to become governor of the Bank of Sudan under the NIF) set up a stall for the Muslim Brotherhood which attracted little attention.

How things were to change. Teaching in the University of Khartoum in the late 1960s I became aware of the struggles over the efforts to ban the Sudan Communist Party; while nearly 20 years later, from my base in Reading but still laced with regular visits to the University of Khartoum, I followed the execution of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha and the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The outline of the political story of all this is well enough known, but the exploration here of the struggles over the judiciary has never been written up in this very personal and penetrating manner, and we are all indebted to Abdullahi for it. It is also very revealing of the significance of judicial affairs in Sudan.

There has been a tendency in debates about African politics to write off, if not to ignore, issues pertaining to the judiciary but this book reminds us of just how inappropriate that would be in Sudan’s case where the struggles have been so significant and so intense. The struggle of course is ongoing, and may prove the formal aspect of the division of the country, since the CAP is built around the south’s rejection of sharia law. But even before we get to the referendum in the south of 2011 which will decide the issue, there are more matters to be attended to such as the press laws and other liberties which will be central to the conduct of the elections now scheduled for 2010. And beyond that, for the one or two states, it will be necessary to look to the institutionalisation of a stable legal system or systems if struggles such as those depicted here are not to be a continuing feature.

Previous Article

Understanding French policy toward Chad/Sudan? A difficult ...

Next Article

Sudan at the Crossroads (1)

Peter Woodward

0 comments

  1. Sadia al Imam 8 June, 2009 at 08:48

    Abdullahi Ibrahim provides us with a version of the crisis in the Sudanese judiciary from an Islamist viewpoint, as though the answer to the crisis is to be located in the triumph of Islamic law and jurisprudence. Abdullahi and his fellow travelers in the NIF had their way when Gaafar Numeiri proclaimed Sharia law in September 1983 and six years later when Hasan al Turabi came to power. The result is a complete shambles in the judiciary which has lost the respect of the Sudanese people.

    The Sudanese people despise and fear the judiciary. They despise it because the judges themselves have no respect for the law. They turn up late, unshaven and poorly dressed, pay no attention to proceedings and often don’t seem to know the law or care about it. Some judges have been trained by the University of Khartoum in the English law tradition and prefer to apply that. Some judges have been trained in Cairo and are at home in the continental civil law tradition so they apply that. But most of the competent judges were fired by the NIF in 1989 and instead the likelihood is that the judge presiding over the case will have been trained in Islamic law by one of the law faculties in the Sudanese universities where he will have learned his lecturers notes by rote and will use that and the Quran as his only references. It would be a miracle if any two judges asked to preside over the same case actually applied the law in the same way. They keep people hanging around without a proper schedule and no indication of when proceedings will start. Most of the time they are waiting for a bribe. Most of the poor people who are dragged before the courts have no idea about their rights under any legal system and all the judge does is take the police report whatever its flaws and convict the wretched defendant of whatever the police say even if the offence isn’t even there in the law. It is no wonder that most of people fear the courts and do everything they can to have their case settled before coming anywhere near a judge.

  2. Daniel Agundo 12 June, 2009 at 03:21

    I would appreciate any thoughts on where this leaves the hybrid courts proposal of the AU and Arab League. I see that Sudan has rejected both but they are still favored proposals by the two organizations.

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Politics

    Is Africa Immune to the Financial Crisis?

  • AngolaEconomy

    How long can Angola hold on with low oil prices?

  • Protesters in Togo have been taking the streets in almost weekly marches since August 2017.
    PoliticsTogo

    Togo protests: Will the planned talks go anywhere?

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81.7K+
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Recent Posts

  • Oligarchs, Oil and Obi-dients: The battle for the soul of Nigeria
  • Of cobblers, colonialism, and choices
  • Blackness, Pan-African Consciousness and Women’s Political Organising through the Magazine AWA
  • “People want to be rich overnight”: Nigeria logging abounds despite ban
  • The unaccountability of Liberia’s polluting miners

Editor’s Picks

Climate crisisEditor's PicksKenyaTanzania

“My house is crumbling”: Living in limbo along the East Africa pipeline

People along the route of the proposed 1,443 km oil pipeline talk of confusion, uncertainty and lives on hold. Following the recent signing of accords, the construction of a hugely ...
  • In Madagascar, extreme weather has contributed to myriad crises such as famine. Credit: Rod Waddington.

    The forgotten, cascading crisis in Madagascar

    By Manoa Faliarivola, Marc Lanteigne & Velomahanina Razakamaharavo
    January 18, 2022
  • Burna Boy claims to be a politically conscious “African Giant.” He’s not.

    By Wilfred Okiche
    December 17, 2021
  • Nigeria LGBTQ. Uzor. Credit: Ikenna Ogbenta.

    Duped through dating apps: Queer love in the time of homophobia

    By Caleb Okereke
    March 26, 2019
  • Nollywood has been mediocre for long enough

    By Dika Ofoma
    January 27, 2022

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
By continuing to browse this site, you agree to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu