The 1924 Revolution and Ali Abd al-Latif — The White Flag League and the First Organised National Resistance
Sudan had been under Anglo-Egyptian condominium rule since 1899, although actual administration was in British hands. After the First World War, the educated urban elite was influenced by a wave of anti-colonialism that swept the region, foremost among it Egypt's 1919 revolution and the declaration of its nominal independence in 1922, and began demanding the employment of Sudanese in responsible posts and movement towards self-government, while London watched this small class with caution and preferred to rely on traditional tribal and religious leaders.
In this climate there emerged Ali Abd al-Latif, the former Sudanese officer born in Wadi Halfa to a father from the Nuba Mountains and a mother from the Dinka, both from families that had suffered from slavery. In 1921 he founded the "Society of United Tribes", which called for an independent Sudan in which tribal and religious leaders would share power, then his movement was re-formed in 1923 under the name the "White Flag League", and he assumed its presidency while Obeid Haj al-Amin was his deputy. The League included officers, employees, clerks, artisans, merchants and workers, among them workers of the railway headquarters in Atbara, the country's first industrial complex, and it raised the slogan "Unity of the Nile Valley", calling for Sudan's independence and its unity with Egypt.
Anti-British demonstrations began in June 1924 in Khartoum, Omdurman, Port Sudan and other cities, and the authorities arrested Ali Abd al-Latif on 4 July 1924, but his arrest aggravated the protests instead of ending them, and Obeid Haj al-Amin took over the leadership. On 9 August 1924, students of the Military College in Khartoum — numbering 51 students according to academic studies — came out in a demonstration and mutiny that spread across the three cities, and the demonstrations were suppressed by force and people were killed in Atbara and elsewhere, while the League's founders and most prominent members were arrested or exiled.
Events reached their peak in November 1924: on 19 November the Governor-General of Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, was assassinated in Cairo by Egyptian nationalists, and the British High Commissioner issued his famous ultimatum demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Egyptian army from Sudan. On 27 November, during the evacuation of the Egyptian battalions from Khartoum, the Sudanese Eleventh Battalion mutinied, refusing to take orders except from an Egyptian authority, and a bloody confrontation broke out that lasted two days, in which the mutiny's leader, Officer Abd al-Fadil al-Maz, was killed, and four of the participating officers were then sentenced to death. Britain expelled Egyptian employees and officers from Sudan, and in 1925 established the "Sudan Defence Force" to prevent a recurrence of the mutiny. As for Ali Abd al-Latif, he was tried, imprisoned and exiled, and he died in Cairo in 1948.
Historian Elena Vezzadini describes the 1924 Revolution as a turning point in Sudan's history and the first episode of anti-colonial resistance to use an explicit nationalist ideology, within a global wave that followed the First World War. Despite its suppression and the small number of the League's members, the movement was distinguished by the diversity of its members' origins, classes and professions, and after it was crushed the British administration moved to restrict education and rely more on traditional leaders, and the memory of 1924 remained marginalised in later historical narratives for long decades before modern studies restored its standing as the first organised modern struggle for freedom in Sudan.
📚 Sources: Elena Vezzadini, «Lost Nationalism: Revolution, Memory and Anti-colonial Resistance in Sudan» (James Currey, 2015 — the author is a researcher at the University of Bergen and the Institute of African Worlds in Paris); Library of Congress, Country Study on Sudan, chapter «The Rise of Sudanese Nationalism»; Yoshiko Kurita, «Ali Abd al-Latif and the 1924 Revolution» (studies published in the journal Sudanic Africa, 1996, and available via the University of Pennsylvania academic repository). — Editorial Team
