This book embodies a lifetime's knowledge, experience and relationship of and with Sudan. The late author, Robert Collins, maintained his close connection with the country and its people throughout the half-century with which most of the book is concerned, and his personal, first-hand, perspective infuses this account. Those familiar with his work will immediately recognise his distinctive style, with its frank opinions, brisk narrative, and flowery and occasionally convoluted phrasing. They will also recognise the familiarity and sometimes affinity with which he describes the key characters of his narrative, or the broader characteristics of whole groups, as well as his defence of aspects of British colonial rule. In fact, I hope it implies no insult to compare Collins' writing with that of a long-serving colonial official, whose knowledge and experience of ‘their’ patch has produced genuine affection and lifelong loyalty, and yet whose foreign vantage-point has permitted a paternalist criticism and sense of disappointment at the unfulfilled potential of a country.

Even for the reader familiar with the author's earlier work, there will be much to learn from this book. It is primarily a history of post-colonial Sudan, and it contains unique, original accounts of political and military episodes. Collins has succinctly condensed his own research and documentation of key events, producing particularly useful sections on the first civil war and the subsequent period of Southern Regional Government. He also navigates the intrigues of Sudanese politics and the fluctuations of its wars through a gripping narrative, and in more detail than other general histories. From the account of decisive Israeli support for the Anya-Nya leader Joseph Lagu, to President Bashir's plan to hand over Osama Bin Laden to the USA, the narrative is revealing and refreshing. At times brevity verges on omission, as names and Arabic terms are abruptly introduced with insufficient context (e.g. the ‘Imam's Umma’ Party on p. 89). A reader new to Sudan might well find the consolidated detail of the narrative rather bewildering at times. Perhaps the core difficulty with this book is its claim to be a general history, and the resulting absence of referencing. Although this frees the narrative from cumbersome footnotes, the book combines synthesis of a wider body of literature with original, opinionated and anecdotal passages, and references would therefore have assisted the discernment of the reader.

The book follows a largely chronological structure, and the earliest chapters contain the most problematic essentialist or outdated views. Ethnicity is conflated with religion when the Sudanese are divided into ‘two broad encompassing categories – Muslims and non-Muslims’ (p. 4). The population of the Nuba Mountains are said to have ‘lived in isolation since the beginning of memory’ (p. 5), ignoring their linguistic heterogeneity and relations beyond the mountains, while the western supporters of the Mahdi were ‘vulgar, rustic Baggara’ (p. 24). In unrepentantly outdated language, the Khedive Ismail was a ‘Westernized Oriental potentate’, while the European officers he employed were ‘incorruptible’ (pp. 17–18). There are some even more questionable statements, such as the remark concluding an account of the Mahdist state's difficulties in Darfur: ‘Fur separatism has never died’; or the depiction of Sudanese Sufism as isolated and static (pp. 17–18). The SPLA are described as a ‘peasant army’ (p. 203), betraying little understanding of it or the livelihoods of its recruits, and there is a carelessly provocative suggestion that perhaps ‘the Dinka-dominated SPLA’ opened a front in Western Bahr el Ghazal ‘as another exercise in the historical expansion of the Dinka people’ (pp. 257–8).

As the narrative picks up pace to focus on the leading personalities and parties of Sudanese political history, such sweeping and dubious statements are less frequent. Instead there are more entertaining, though no less controversial, opinions on the characters of Sudanese leaders, or, for example, the rebuttal of certain environmentalist denunciations of the Jonglei canal as ‘absolute nonsense’ (p. 121). The focus is always primarily on the individual politicians and military leaders, making for a characterful and gripping narrative. But there is very limited understanding of wider social and cultural change; Sudanese people appear only as the ‘millions of al-nas, the ordinary folk’, who were merely the victims of their ‘failed, avaricious politicians, military dictators, or religious mandarins’ (p. 301). Often whole swathes of the population are said to be in a particular state of passivity or resentment: ‘the southern Sudanese sullenly simmered in humiliation at their impotence’ (p. 123); ‘Sudan settled into a sonorous slumber’ (p. 41); ‘the southern Sudanese continued to bask in their isolation’ (p. 57).

The summary in the epilogue of ‘four perennial themes’ reveals the limitations of the overall analysis. The first two themes are concerned with centre–periphery relations and the distinction between them is blurred in the presentation; the second theme is the inability of the state to govern its periphery, but the discussion repeats the points about wealth disparities that fall under the first theme. In fact this second theme could have been further developed; there are interesting points earlier in the book about the composition of the armed forces that could have been connected to this notion of state weakness. The first theme is presented through a rather static model of ‘hostility between centre and periphery’, yet the author also suggests that the marginalisation of the periphery was ‘born’ in the first twelve years of Sudanese independence (p. 92). The other two ‘perennial themes’ offered in the epilogue are the familiar problem of ‘a Sudanese identity’, and the recurring theme of the book: the failure of leadership. The simplistic idea that the characters of politicians and the ‘intellectual elite of greater Khartoum’ (p. 301) are to blame for the failings of government invites inevitable comparison with negative colonial views of the educated Sudanese (even if some Sudanese have made similar points). More importantly, it – and the book – neglects to really address the shifting economic, political and international structures within which these flawed personalities were playing out their careers. Yet in telling the stories of those careers, Collins takes us on a fascinating journey through the recent history of Sudanese governments. He may not advance analytical understanding of the Sudanese state in this book, but he condenses fifty years of personal insight and research into a highly readable, revealing and thought-provoking narrative. It is without doubt his history of modern Sudan, and will be read with interest by all and with particular affection by those who knew him and valued his wider contribution to the country and its students.