The Coloniality of Literacy: Latinisation and Arabicization of the Script in Sudan

We, the British, who whatever our failings, are better qualified than any other
race, by tradition and taste and training, to lead primitives up the path of civic
progress, are going to stand on guard here till the South can dispense with a
guard, and are not going to see the South dominated by an Arab civilization in
Khartoum which is more alien to them.
(T. R. H. Owen, the British colonial Governor of
Equatorial Province, 1947, cited in Beshir 1968: 127)
If the South Sudan secedes, we will change the Constitution, and at that time
there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity … Sharia
(Islamic law) and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the
official religion and Arabic the official language.
(The Sudanese President Omer Al-Basher 1989–2019)1
The above epigraphs articulate the conditions of coloniality in which languages,
bodies, spaces and times in Sudan have become entangled sites of ideological
classification and regulation by various universal designs of knowledge and
power. We use the coloniality of literacy as an analytic perspective to discuss how
the colonial logic of power racializes forms of writing, and how this coloniality of
writing is maintained, perpetuated and transformed in successive ‘postcolonial’
contexts. Coloniality of literacy is an aspect of the colonial logic of power (Kell