The General Graduates' Congress — The First Inclusive National Organisation in Modern Sudan (1938)
After the 1924 Revolution was crushed, Sudanese national activity moved to the literary societies and cultural clubs in Wad Medani, Omdurman and Khartoum, and to the pages of the magazine «Al-Fajr». Then came the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, which decided Sudan's fate without consulting its people; the disregard for the educated elite provoked widespread resentment and pushed the graduates to seek an inclusive body that would speak in their name.
On 12 February 1938, the founding meeting of the General Graduates' Congress was held in Omdurman, attended by more than a thousand graduates (1,180 in most academic studies). Those present approved the Congress's constitution and elected a body of sixty members, which in turn chose an executive committee of fifteen members, and Ismail al-Azhari was the Congress's first secretary-general.
The Condominium administration approved the Congress as a social, not a political, body, so in its early years it occupied itself with spreading education and improving the social and cultural conditions of the graduates and of society. Its membership included graduates of Gordon Memorial College (today the University of Khartoum) and other institutes — teachers, employees and lawyers — and it became the widest organised framework for educated Sudanese at that time.
The decisive political shift came with the memorandum of 3 April 1942, which the Congress submitted to the Governor-General demanding greater Sudanese participation in administering their country and recognition of their right to self-government after the Second World War. The government responded, through its Civil Secretary Newbold, on 29 April by refusing to discuss Sudan's constitutional status at all, and the Congress thus effectively emerged from its social cloak into declared national political work.
The Congress's unity did not last long; it split between a moderate majority inclined to cooperate with the government and a more hardline current led by al-Azhari. By 1943, al-Azhari's current had taken control of the Congress and founded «Al-Ashiqqa», the first real political party in Sudan, while the moderates formed the Umma Party under the patronage of Sayyid Abd al-Rahman al-Mahdi. The Graduates' Congress is therefore considered the predecessor of the modern political parties and the incubator of the independence generation, and from among its leaders al-Azhari himself emerged to become the first prime minister of independent Sudan in 1956.
📚 Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica (Britannica) — «Sudan: The Growth of National Consciousness»; University of Malaya Journal of History (Jurnal Sejarah) — «The Graduates' National Movement in Sudan, 1918–1944»; The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History — a study of Anglo-Egyptian rule in Sudan 1898–1956. — Editorial Team
