Early US-Sudan Relations

Upon Sudan’s 1956 independence, Sudanese-American relations got off to a healthy start—that is, until Sudan embraced nonalignment. The United States did not look favorably on Sudan’s relationship with Egypt when it turned to the Soviet bloc in 1955, and Sudan in turn resented US support for Israel and perceived the States as the new colonial power. However, when Sudan asked for technical and economic assistance in 1957, the United States—which looked to slow Soviet influence in the region—responded favorably. US aid from the late 1950s to 1967 measured $103 million and went mainly to education, transport, and agriculture.⁵ The US Agency for International Development (USAID) not only supported the University of Khartoum and secondary schools but also assisted in road construction that improved Sudan’s major export, cotton. In addition, the US Information Agency created a library that, in the words of one official, was “new and much needed … with books and films of the best and most up-to-date scientific, economic, historic, and mathematical information in the world.”⁶

Just two years into independence, Sudan experienced a shock to its political system when General Ibrahim Abboud led a coup in 1958. The overthrow that ended Sudan’s first democratic era is believed to have had tacit support from the United States and Britain; each were concerned about the precarious southern Sudanese situation and Khartoum’s leftist politics. As southern Sudanese who had previously been relegated to the margins of Condominium statecraft feared domination from northern Sudanese, it is pertinent to underscore the British role in encouraging Sudan’s North-South division.⁷ The British, who conceptualized the North as “Middle-eastern and Arabicized” and the South as African and “Negroid,” had divided and administered the Sudan along these regional lines.⁸ According to Muddathir ‘Abd al-Rahim, the Condominium’s “Southern Policy” attempted to administratively eliminate “all traces of Muslim-Arabic culture in the South and the substitution of tribal customs, Christianity, and the English language, with the ultimate objective of giving the three Southern provinces a character and outlook different from that of the country as a whole.”⁹ After 1946 North and South were reconstituted as a single unit, and in the 1950s the British-led Condominium government sought to unify the mainly missionary southern school system with the government-run northern school system. “Thus,” writes scholar Iris Seri-Hersch, “we are dealing with a situation in which Sudan was hastily reunited in a context of British imperial dismantlement.”¹⁰ The South did not experience major socioeconomic developments during the early independence years, and the Southern Union Party demanded federation. Other demands included the insistence that Christianity be an official religion along with Islam (the predominant religion of the North) and that English be the official language along with Arabic. Southerners were concerned about the nationalist vision shared by northern parties in which southerners would be assimilated into a Sudanese identity through Islam and Arabic.¹¹

Following the 1958 coup, Sudan warmed its relations with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Soviet-allied Egyptian government. From the 1960s onward the expanding South Sudanese civil war (which exploded into a full-scale conflict in 1963), the conflict’s specter of regional disintegration, and concern over Arab nationalist policies each influenced US relations with Sudan. Meanwhile the West was leery of the Muslim Brotherhood, who wanted an Islamic republic.¹² Sudan’s second civilian government took power after a 1964 coup unseated Abboud’s regime. Prime Minister al-Sirr al-Khalifa (1964–1967) was succeeded by Sadiq al-Mahdi (1967–1969). Sudan’s warm relations with the Soviet Union continued, and when the country—an Arab League member—sided with Arab nations and accused the United States of complicity with Israel, Sudan declared war on Israel in 1967 and severed its diplomatic relationship with the United States.¹³ In 1969 Colonel Jaafar Nimeiri led yet another coup, unseating Muhammad Ahmad Mahjub’s democratically elected government, after which US-Sudan relations did not change. Nimeiri supported Nasser’s pan-Arabism and established close relations with the Soviet Union. However, a shift occurred when Nimeiri suspected Soviet involvement in a 1971 communist attempt against his government. Sudanese-Soviet relations broke down, and Nimeiri aligned Sudan with the United States. Washington embraced this rapprochement, giving $18 million to rehabilitate southern Sudan and resettle refugees (the long civil war ended in 1972, resulting in a degree of southern autonomy). Nimeiri’s shift to the United States notwithstanding, a 1973 Palestinian terrorist attack in Khartoum resulted in the deaths of the US ambassador, his deputy, and the Belgian charge d’affairs. This violence severely undermined relations with Washington.¹⁴

In the early 1950s a small number of Black people worked in the State Department, and some magazine articles discussed the limited opportunities for African Americans in the department. In an interview with Black American ambassador Terence Todman, diplomatic historian Michael Krenn noted that several State Department documents from the 1940s to the 1960s discussed where the department “could or could not send black Americans to serve because of the country’s practices and so forth.” The department, Krenn noted to Todman, “seemed very tense about … sending black Americans to Arabic nations.”¹⁵

While Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pursued the matter of Black employment in foreign service work, only small inroads were made in the mostly white State Department and Foreign Service.¹⁶ Such lack of progress was evident in the African American representation in American posts abroad. In May 1966, the deputy under secretary of state for administration (William J. Crockett) wrote a memorandum to Joseph Palmer II, the assistant secretary of state for African Affairs. The memo was titled “Urgent Need to Increase Minority Group Representation at African Posts.” In it, Crockett shared that Bill Hall of USAID had recently passed along impressions from visits he had made to four African nations, including Sudan. Hall’s critique was categorically blunt: “None of the foreign affairs agencies had adequate minority representation on its staffs. AID and USIA are better than State, but all are completely inadequate. We need to consider how we can improve this situation.” Crockett said that Hall’s views were buttressed by a report Palmer had sent to African American congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. the previous December regarding Black Americans assigned to African posts. Twenty-six of forty AF (Bureau of African Affairs, Department of State) posts where Americans were assigned lacked any Black officers, and of the four posts Hall had personally visited there were two Black officers in Congo, one in Nigeria, two in Ethiopia, and none in Sudan.¹⁷

Despite the dire lack of representation of Black Americans in US foreign service at the time, African Americans found themselves at the epicenter of US-Sudan diplomatic relations. The narrative of their contributions begins with economist Andrew Brimmer.

Economical and Educational Work

Andrew Felton Brimmer Jr. was born on September 13, 1926, in Newellton, Louisiana. The son of a sharecropper, Brimmer picked cotton and attended segregated schools. Brimmer moved to the state of Washington after graduating from high school, lived with an older sister, and worked in a navy yard as an electrician’s helper. Drafted into the army in 1945, Brimmer attained the rank of staff sergeant and entered the University of Washington upon completing his duties. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1950. Discovered by Secretary of Urban Development Robert Weaver, Brimmer was awarded a John Hay Fellowship to complete his master’s degree, which he obtained in 1951. His interest in foreign economics resulted in a Fulbright Fellowship to India, where he did postgraduate work at the Delhi School of Economics and the University of Bombay. Brimmer enrolled at Harvard in 1952, married the following year, and completed his doctorate in 1957 with a concentration in monetary economics and economic development.¹⁸

From 1955 to 1958, Brimmer worked as an economist at New York City’s Federal Reserve Bank. It was during this time that he worked on a Federal Reserve Central Banking mission to Khartoum to explore the feasibility of a central bank in Sudan.¹⁹ The Sudanese government had requested the mission through the State Department, and the Federal Reserve System’s board of governors organized the project. Brimmer was joined by Oliver Wheeler (vice president of San Francisco’s Federal Reserve Bank) and Alan Holmes, who also worked with the New York Fed. The mission arrived in Khartoum on December 7, 1956, and Brimmer stayed there for roughly three months, departing on March 10, 1957. The mission was tasked “to advise the government of the functions and organization of a Central Bank for the Sudan which would best fit the economic and institutional setup of this country and to frame accordingly a draft charter of the Central Bank.” The Sudanese Ministry of Finance provided working facilities and arranged for interviews with government officials, commercial bankers, and members of the business community.²⁰

The Sudanese banking system before independence was essentially colonial banking; commercial banks were part of foreign institutions, and no local currency or central bank existed. Within this colonial milieu, the expatriate banks that largely comprised the Condominium’s banking and credit system aimed to serve the needs of export and import trade and accept deposits for foreign and Sudanese firms. Following independence, the Sudan Currency Board was established to issue the new national currency, and the Bank of Sudan Act was passed in 1959. In 1960 the Central Bank of Sudan’s became one of Africa’s first working central banking institutions. The bank took charge of foreign exchange and currency matters like regulating the issuance of coins and notes, developing a sound credit and banking system, and advising the government on banking and financing. The formation of the Central Bank was part of a larger transformation in government structure that by the mid-1960s was structured around a formidable Ministry of Finance and new organizations like the bank, planning agencies, statistical bureaus, and agricultural banks. The Sudanese state, through its capacity to tax and control credit, aimed to create a unified national market.²¹ Brimmer’s advisory role concerning the formation of a central bank placed the sharecropper’s son at the center of the process that laid the economic foundation for Sudan’s postcolonial state.²² He went on to become the assistant secretary of commerce for economic affairs and was serving in that role when President Johnson named the sharecropper’s son to the Federal Reserve Board in 1966. Brimmer, the board’s first Black member, became its international monetary policy expert.²³

Brimmer was not the only African American to work in Sudanese economic affairs. Robert Kitchen and Madison Broadnax followed in his stead. Kitchen was a Brunswick, Georgia, native and 1943 graduate of Morehouse College. He earned an MS from Columbia University, taught at Atlanta University and the Hampton Institute, and became an associate professor of business administration at West Virginia State College (all historically Black institutions). Kitchen’s association with US economic assistance programs in newly developing countries began in 1952 through his work with the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) mission in Liberia. He worked there as a staff assistant, officer, and acting director. Back in Washington, DC, Kitchen led the ICA’s Pakistan desk.²⁴

In November 1957—eight months after Brimmer’s farewell—Kitchen led a survey team to Sudan to explore the prospects of a US assistance program. As a direct result of the visit, the Sudanese and American governments signed a bilateral agreement in Khartoum on March 31, 1958. The agreement provided a framework for US economic and technical assistance to Sudan in agriculture, vocational education, road development, and communication. A US economic mission would be sent to Khartoum to create an ICA operations office there.²⁵Jet magazine reported that Kitchen, then thirty-six years old, had been appointed to lead the mission:

Robert W. Kitchen, Jr., was named to head a 12-man U.S. aid mission to the two-year-old country of Sudan in what State Dept. officials call one of the most important and strategic projects in Africa. Top aide to Dr. John W. Davis, who headed a Point IV mission to Liberia six years ago, Kitchen will supervise a study of the economic needs for the new African nation and will recommend self-help projects which could run well into the millions. The assignment is considered “highly delicate” since it is the first such U.S. aid group to be assigned to the Sudan, whose leaders in the past have turned down U.S. financial help. Senate confirmation is required for the post, which has diplomatic status.²⁶

Kitchen was appointed a Class I officer in the US Operations Mission to Sudan and counsellor of embassy, and the US Senate confirmed him in July 1958. Martha Kitchen, Robert’s wife, accompanied him to Sudan.²⁷

François M. Dickman, who worked as a foreign service officer in Sudan, described Kitchen as “highly intelligent and motivated.” Dickman recalled Kitchen’s return to Khartoum after the agreement was signed to lead the USAID mission. “Soon, we had a large number of AID technicians whose numbers completely dwarfed the embassy’s. However, the large AID mission resulted in the embassy receiving a Marine guard detail… . The embassy in Khartoum had changed from being a very small one to a very large one.”²⁸ On April 26, 1958, Kitchen wrote a letter from Khartoum to friend and former colleague John Warren Davis, long-time president of West Virginia State University. While he described his new responsibility as “awe-inspiring,” he noted that uncertainties in the political scene had postponed his swearing-in four times. He said that they would need “six absolutely top-rate trade and industry instructors within the next four months, with particular interest in the areas of building construction, automotive engineering, arts and handicraft and machine shop.” If Davis knew of any strong candidates, Kitchen continued, he should please let Kitchen know. “I have offered the Chief Extension job here to Madison Broadnax and hope that it will be possible to have him as the only outsider on our staff by mid-June.”²⁹

Sudan represented Broadnax’s first assignment with the USAID. Broadnax, a former professor of agriculture at West Virginia State College, joined the ICA in Sudan in 1958 and served there until 1962 (though he would return in 1972). “I knew,” stated Broadnax years later, “that my position was to go and assist the government of the Sudan in establishing the National Agricultural Extension Service… . I had to design it and sell it to the Sudanese, which wasn’t much of a problem really. But I had some barriers to overcome.” Broadnax arrived in Sudan just before the 1958 coup.³⁰ When the government provided its first extension workers, Broadnax was given six graduates from the College of Agriculture. In addition to being college graduates, these individuals had received postsecondary education at Khartoum’s Shambat Institute of Agriculture, where junior officers were trained beyond high school. The Ministry of Agriculture decided that they wanted to initiate the program in southern Sudan.³¹

The selection of the Shambat-trained agriculturalists shines a light on the broader context of development and empire in which Broadnax operated. A colonial institution, the College of Agriculture began operating in the city of Shambat in 1938. The first six students were given a three-year professional course in agricultural sciences and agricultural engineering, as well as tours “to familiarise the students with the peasant farmer and with the traditional method[s] and social life in rural areas.”³² The first students graduated in 1942, and all entered positions in the Sudanese Department of Agriculture. In 1945 the College of Agriculture was incorporated into Gordon College, an institution providing direct access to jobs in colonial government (and, importantly, often at the highest level available to northern Sudanese). In 1954 the Ministry of Agriculture established the Shambat Institute of Agriculture.³³ It is evident, then, that US cooperation with the Shambat Institute was both a form of nation-building agricultural assistance and, in another sense, a direct continuation of a colonial enterprise. The figure of Broadnax highlights one African American’s positionality working for the success of an early postcolonial African state while also being a Black neocolonialist in the golden age of African nationalism.

Broadnax later recalled, “When the government asked to introduce the program in the south, it turned out it was the best thing that could ever happen.” An agricultural adviser joined Broadnax at Maridi (in Western Equatoria, now a state in South Sudan). This adviser had a senior counterpart assigned there who was one of the six people Broadnax had been assigned, as well as three junior agricultural officers from the Shambat Institute. “There we built offices; we built houses, and we had a horticulture advisor to come on board shortly after that.” Broadnax suggested a 250-acre farm where every crop that could be cultivated in the South could be grown. “We could bring the chiefs in to give them training. Then we had satellite village farms. That’s where these junior officers were. They brought people into those satellite village farms.” In his view, the demonstration farms “revolutionized” farming through the Maridi area. Crop variety changed to those that were brought to the demonstration farm. “[They brought] open pollinated seeds so they could save the seeds,” Broadnax reported. “They would take these varieties back and try them.” Though the typical southern farm was small, the work—in Broadnax’s estimation—was significant. “We improved the crops they were growing—vegetable crops. And eventually, we put in … small tropical tree crops as a cash enterprise, including coffee and pineapple.” They placed one of the Shambat extension officers in charge. “[By the time the program was closed] we had increased the farmers’ income in that locality by five percent, which was a great achievement at that time.”³⁴

“In the northern provinces,” said Broadnax, “we used the farms that the government had already established and we improved them.” When they made a reconnaissance survey of the farmers in the province of Gezira—which contained a two-million-acre farm for cotton—they found that some of their practices did not yield maximum returns. “We organized the extension program around food crops,” he shared. “We were bringing farmers into Shambat for field days and show[ed] them a variety of vegetable crops and practices. In El-Obeid … we organized a demonstration in a village about 60 miles from there. We set up demonstration farms there too.” They also brought seeds from the United States. “[The US Department of Agriculture] backstopped us on selecting seed varieties that they thought would do well, and I must admit we didn’t fail on any. We had extension advisers posted in the capital, who taught cultural practices conducive to the region.”³⁵ In addition to his aforementioned labors, Broadnax taught a course in extension “to the Shambat Institute people” and taught elementary agriculture for a week to boys and girls at the Tang school in the province of Bahr el Ghazal. When asked to review his accomplishments during his tenure, Broadnax responded, “We trained 83 Sudanese in agriculture… . We sent them to the United States for short and long-term training. They came back and worked in the Ministry of Agriculture until opportunities came for better jobs, salary wise. They wanted to build houses and that sort of thing.”³⁶

In summation, Madison Broadnax may have been among the most consequential individuals on Kitchen’s staff during his tenure in Sudan. When it came to supporting Sudan’s agricultural production during the early independence period, American assistance was significant. In addition to USAID’s role in helping to launch Sudan’s nationwide extension service, USAID assistance included agricultural research and crop development, livestock and poultry development, farm machinery training, pest control, agricultural economics, and rural water development. However, the civil war disrupted indigenous production systems in southern Sudan.³⁷ One country report from 1983 said that agricultural development was “frustrated by the absence of … infrastructure, technologies, extension, [and] supply of inputs.” “Emphasis on developing this important sector should be the core of the development assistance for this region, as it is in fact central to USAID concerns in the area [the South].”³⁸ Such realities should not obscure the significance of Broadnax’s labor. Done upon Kitchen’s invitation, it illustrates the multidimensional work of African Americans (and HBCU graduates) in the execution of US assistance to newly independent Sudan. Broadnax’s experiences provide insight into what such labor looked like in rural Sudan, such as that done by his Tuskegee predecessors, geographically distant from Sudan’s epicenter of economic and political power in urban Khartoum. Yet they also point to the mitigating effect that political unrest (and a civil war, no less) could have on the long-term impact of such assistance work. How deleterious was the war on Broadnax’s labor? How would history have remembered the impact and legacy of US aid during the early independence period in the absence of such serious shocks to Sudan’s political, economic, and social milieus? Such questions address the importance of not relying exclusively on statistical indicators in assessing the impact of African American foreign service work.

A couple of days before Christmas 1958, Kitchen mentioned to Davis, “[Sudan] could use sewing kits, carpentry kits, and a host of other packages which the American people have contributed to other rapidly emerging countries in recent years.” Kitchen, in the same letter, acknowledged that after an unbelievably fast nine months, he and his cohort were “rapidly approaching” the end of their tour.³⁹ In May he would remark to Davis, “[We are] swamped here in trying to stay on the tracks. The personnel situation has been horrible but stands to improve quite considerably over the next few weeks.” He added that he would be in the United States at some point in July and August for a month. “[We] are beginning to think in terms of being home next spring [1960] for leave and possibly transfer to Washington.”⁴⁰ Two months later, Kitchen informed Davis that he would be in the States in August and that health concerns were partially responsible for his forthcoming return: “I have had repeated nervous difficulty which the local doctors claim resemble cerebral hemorrhages … [and] the tour is up next April. However, there is some thought being given to going back to Washington working on problems of the Soviet economic war.” His wife, Martha, he shared, had also not been well: “Her condition is a factor to be considered also.”⁴¹ The September 3, 1959, Jet reported that Sudan mission chief Kitchen would be returning to the United States shortly for a new position with the ICA. In three fiscal years, Sudan’s USAID mission—the largest USAID mission and program in tropical Africa—had involved allocation, planning, and execution of projects that exceeded $100 million in expenditures. Kitchen, who had led the massive effort, would reportedly be considered for Sudan’s ambassadorship but never occupied the position. In November 1963 Kitchen became the first Black director of the USAID International Training Division.⁴²

Robert Kitchen’s stint in Sudan was remarkable for what it revealed and, in comparison, what it left wanting. Preceded by coverage in Jet magazine, the publicity given to Kitchen’s path to the Sudan reflected the Black press’s investment in highlighting African American activity in US diplomacy generally and in postcolonial Africa particularly. Unlike Brimmer—a graduate of two predominantly white institutions—Kitchen had an HBCU pedigree that linked him with Tuskegee predecessors a half-century earlier who had traveled to the Condominium as part of Leigh Hunt’s cotton project. While Kitchen may not have toiled in Sudanese agricultural fields, his time in Sudan represents an evolution in the type of African American aid work in Sudan and the continued presence of HBCU-affiliated figures involved in such work (including his bringing fellow HBCU alum Broadnax to the country). Given postcolonial Sudan’s long record of war and otherwise poor human rights record, Kitchen’s administration of the first major USAID program in Africa—the US mission to Sudan—positions him at the origins of US aid to independent Sudan (the United States, as of early 2023, was Sudan’s largest international humanitarian aid donor).⁴³ Yet, such elements notwithstanding, Kitchen’s correspondence—like Booker T. Washington before him—is silent regarding the Sudanese themselves. What did he think about the people? Did he identify with or perceive the Sudanese racially, politically, or otherwise? Those examining the archival record in search of such insights will leave unsatisfied. It would be irresponsible to conclude that such silence must mean that Kitchen did not see the Sudanese as racial kin. However, we lack primary evidence that he worked in Sudan with a concerted sense of racial consciousness and/or solidarity with the Sudanese. One is left to wonder how Kitchen reconciled his work in Sudan with the social and political forces of his time and the contemporaneous contexts of the rising US civil rights movement and African nationalism.

Broadnax’s work in agricultural education was complemented by advances made by other African Americans in Sudanese education during the early independence era. In July 1961, F. A. Williams—dean of North Carolina A&T’s University’s Graduate School—left for an ICA assignment in Sudan. He was tasked with serving as an economics professor at the University of Khartoum for the year and did so with a State Department grant under the Smith-Mundt Educational Exchange Program. While Williams returned to the United States for three months the following summer, he reportedly returned to Sudan for the beginning of the first semester of the 1962–1963 year.⁴⁴ Gordon L. Bradshaw, former press room instructor at Hampton Institute, was appointed for a two-year tour of duty with USAID in Sudan. Bradshaw was then serving as printing instructor at Ferris Institute in Big Rapids, Michigan. A report published by Virginia-based Black newspaper New Journal and Guide noted that Bradshaw would “advise and train Sudanese education officials in printing techniques and produce printed materials for instructional use.” The paper added, “He will be accompanied by his wife on the trip to Africa.”⁴⁵

African Americans also contributed to Sudanese dentistry education, the New York Amsterdam News reported on February 3, 1962: “[An abundant number of students around Khartoum] were given a ‘Come Ahead’ this week because two farsighted Harlem businessmen donated a complete office of dental equipment for their use in the course of their dental studies, at the University of Khartoum.” The men at the center of this were dentist and Howard alumnus W. Kenneth Williams and Roosevelt Zanders, described as “probably richest chauffer in the world” and “the close friend of celebrities, diplomats. actors and heads of state.” Williams and Zanders, who had traveled the world together, reportedly had witnessed firsthand the extreme need for technical equipment in schools abroad and students’ eagerness to study dentistry. The donated dental chair, which Williams had once used, was said to have had a storied history: luminaries including Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Ethel Waters, Dina Washington, the Peters Sisters, Countee Cullen, A. Philip Randolph, and Jackie Robinson had used it.⁴⁶

Valaria McCaw distinguished herself as a teacher for blind Sudanese. Born in Texas in March 1912, she later became a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and she married Arthur McCaw in 1931. Arthur’s government positions took him around the world, and Valaria used her talents and art teaching degree to train artists in Korea and design materials for demonstrations there. In time, Arthur’s work took him to Sudan.⁴⁷ Following a visit to Khartoum’s Nour Institute for the Blind, Valaria started a ceramics class so that its students could “see beauty through the use of their fingers.” She received help from the headmaster, Khartoum Technical Institute’s art department, and Khartoum Ophthalmological Hospital’s chief surgeon. In addition to leading regular classes at the Nour Institute, she trained a Sudanese woman to carry on the program with twenty-eight students. Nour students, despite their blindness, could reportedly make cups, Sudanese coffee pots and bowls, and sculpture heads by using their faces as models for accurate proportions. “It was most rewarding,” Valaria recounted. The class of twenty-eight ranged from ages ten to twenty-two and included one girl. The Lions Club of Sudan sponsored the school, the Ministry of Education provided the building for the activity, and “the American Women’s group in Khartoum provided materials for the project.”⁴⁸ Arthur McCaw said, in a statement published in the Pittsburgh Courier on March 26, 1966, “Valaria has been an asset and a compliment to me in my career.”⁴⁹

From Brimmer’s work on Sudan’s Central Bank to McCaw’s work with blind students, African Americans provided unique contributions to the Sudanese economy, agriculture, and education during its early independence era. Their activities provide insight into the shifting nature of Black American engagements with Sudan. For a few decades, US newspapers had covered the country but not African Americans’ experience in it. The labors of Valaria McCaw and others show ways that the new relationship between the United States and postcolonial Sudan was actualized on the ground. Yet the African American presence in Sudan in the 1950s and 1960s was not limited to the service described in this section. On the contrary, it was in areas of art, other culture, and society that Black American engagements made their strongest impacts.

Social and Cultural Contributions

During the early days of the Cold War, global condemnation of US race relations hindered US foreign policy objectives. As a result, the State Department sent prosperous Black Americans on overseas goodwill tours to highlight that community as prominent figures in the African diaspora rather than the victims of systemic racism that they, of course, also were. The US State Department, in its aim to secure the loyalty of Ghana and other African countries, sponsored an African tour for Wilbur de Paris’s New Orleans (and all-Black) jazz band. He became popular with Sudanese jazz fans.⁵⁰ In June 1958, John Warren Davis sent Robert Kitchen a copy of a letter that he had just received from Dr. Randolph Edmonds of Tallahassee. Edmonds wanted to present a group of his drama students in Sudan. “May I respectfully ask you,” queried Davis, “to pass this request of Dr. Edmonds to the proper officials of your staff and/or of the Government of the Sudan for consideration and action.”⁵¹ While it is unclear from Kitchen’s papers at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center whether or not he did as Davis requested, a few months later the New York Amsterdam News reported that Florida A&M University’s Playmakers Guild had departed New York for a two-month tour of Africa that would include a stop in Sudan, among other nations. The Amsterdam News noted that the tour, arranged by the King Travel Organization, would be in cooperation with the President’s Special International Program for Cultural Presentations (a program ultimately administered by the State Department). Ten student actors made the trip with Dr. Edmonds, head of the university’s Speech and Drama Department. The students were slated to present four plays: Robinson Jeffers’s Medea, Thornton Wilder’s The Happy Journey, Paul Green’s Fixin’s, and George Kelly’s The Flattering World.⁵²

In March 1966, the De Paur Chorus visited Sudan as part of the State Department’s cultural exchange program. New Jersey–born Leonard de Paur was an orchestra and chorus conductor who served as director of community relations for New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, worked as a consultant for cultural development in Tunisia, and received an honorary doctorate from Morehouse College, among other accomplishments in his long career. In 1966 his chorus visited several African countries, and their time in Khartoum included stops at the University of Khartoum, Omdurman’s enormous outdoor stadium, and a public garden in the city. “The university presentation was well attended,” one observer later remembered, “and enthusiastically received by the Sudanese intellectuals. The chorus’ stadium appearance did not fare as well because the broadcasting station’s public address system was not synchronized. A large segment of the audience could not hear the chorus clearly.”⁵³

The De Paur Chorus stop in Sudan occurred during James Mack’s tenure as a cultural affairs officer in Sudan. James Mack was born in Edwards, Mississippi, on June 4, 1916. After his father was offered a job as a messenger in the Department of Agriculture, the Mack family moved north to Washington, DC. Mack later recounted a day when his mother and father locked all of the doors and windows and lowered the shades and curtains. “We had never locked the doors,” he remembered. “My father said many Ku Klux Klansmen were coming up G Street from Union Station. Some men were marching with their faces masked and wearing long white sheets.” His father said that they were in Washington for a Klan convention.⁵⁴ Decades later—in April 1963—Mack received a letter from the US Information Agency informing him that he had received a five-year appointment to the limited officer corps. After six months of French-language training, there was an urgent need for a cultural officer in Khartoum, and he was placed in the position.⁵⁵ In Mack’s first overseas assignment as a US diplomatic representative, he and his wife Marjorie arrived in Khartoum in May 1964 and stayed in Sudan for three years. Mack noted, “Some have cultural shock seeing people in long white jallabias reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s attire.” But the reality was far from this. “The Sudanese surprise you by being courteous, friendly, and efficient, speaking Arabic and English,” Mack noted.⁵⁶

The United States offered specialists to African governments through its educational and cultural exchange programs. Mack, as cultural attaché in Sudan, led the cultural exchange program on behalf of the State Department. As fate would have it, Mack’s first effort in this regard occurred just two weeks before the conclusion of the 1964 October Revolution that removed General Abboud from power. Ethiopian king Haile Selassie had invited Howard University professor of history William Leo Hansberry to visit Addis Ababa to receive the Haile Selassie Award for his research on African history and culture. Majorie Mack’s mother knew the Hansberrys and asked if Mack would stop to see them in Sudan. The professor said that he would be delighted to be their guest in Khartoum. He arrived in Khartoum on Friday, October 16, 1964. Friday was the weekly Islamic holy day (and all government offices consequently closed), but James Mack recalled, “We were fortunate enough to make phone calls on Thursday to invite Sudanese officials and members of the American Embassy country team.” While some embassy officials were apparently unsure as to whether Sudanese would attend a reception on such short notice—senior government officials preferred at least a week’s advance notice before accepting an embassy invitation—they did indeed attend. “Professor Hansberry’s visit was a special occasion and they accepted,” Mack later recalled.⁵⁷ He received a phone call the morning after the reception requesting an interview with Hansberry, and two Sudanese reporters subsequently conducted a two-hour interview at the Mack household. At the end of the exchange, one of the reporters said that Hansberry was “very knowledgeable about the history of the Sudan, especially the Nubians.” A full Arabic account of the interview appeared the next day, and Mack forwarded the report to Hansberry (with an English synopsis). “The professor was impressed and pleased with his visit to the Sudan, and so was I,” Mack would remark in his autobiography.⁵⁸

Notwithstanding the visits made by the De Paur Chorus and the Hansberrys, Langston Hughes’s May 1966 stop in Khartoum was perhaps the most significant Sudanese visit by an African American during Mack’s assignment. Mack was familiar with the famed author’s early success as a poet, dating back to Hughes’s days at Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC. On May 1, 1966, the Khartoum-based Morning News newspaper reported, “Langston Hughes, distinguished American Negro poet and author, is visiting the Sudan from April 28 to May 4.”⁵⁹ The article said that Hughes’s visit would be made in cooperation with the University of Khartoum, School of Extra-Mural Studies, and the US State Department’s cultural program. After noting that he would give a public lecture at the University of Khartoum titled “American Negro Fiction,” the News remarked, “[Hughes] has long been one of the most effective spokesmen for the American Negro and has kept in touch with many young Negro poets and writers throughout the years.”⁶⁰

When Hughes arrived in Khartoum, just before midnight, Mack greeted him and took him to his hotel (the Sudan Hotel, facing the Blue Nile). “The one important factor for Hughes’ visit to Khartoum,” Mack would write, “was [that] the Sudanese inherited the Arabs’ love of poetry. They love to write poetry but receive greater satisfaction from the written words. Thus this visit could not have been more suitable for Langston Hughes.” Mack enlisted the support of Ishag el Mahdi and Ahmed Abdul Halim, director of the University of Khartoum’s School of Extra-Mural Studies. While they planned Hughes’s itinerary together, Halim scheduled Hughes for talks and readings at the university’s lecture hall and a tea party at the student union. Before his university lecture, Hughes met Vice-Chancellor Nezeer El Defalla, a poetry enthusiast.⁶¹

“The lecture that night,” remembered Mack, “was stimulating and the lecture hall filled to capacity, including many professors, civil servants, students, and diplomats. Langston gave a short talk about the Harlem Renaissance movement in New York City and the growing influence of Negroes in the arts in America. Then he read a few of his poems, including ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers.’”⁶² The poem, which Hughes had written in 1921, traces a continuous stream of Black history from the Nile River and the Congo to the Mississippi:⁶³

Mack recalled that Hughes’s lecture was well-received and that the audience included members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sudan Communist Party.⁶⁵ This was no small feat. “The Islamists have expressed public distaste and hatred of communism,” Mack noted. Just two years after Hughes’s visit, Islamic sectarian political parties in Sudan passed a bill depriving eleven communist MPs of their parliamentary seats on the basis of their perceived atheism.⁶⁶ “Fortunately,” wrote Mack when referring to their collective attendance at Hughes’s lecture, “they all had one thing in common, their love of poetry. After the lecture, selected persons received autographed copies of Hughes’ book, The Best of Simple.” The following evening, Halim invited some of Khartoum’s most renowned poets to attend a tea party. “The Sudanese, with their Islamic teachings, were especially interested in hearing Hughes’ poetry… . The poets were honored to have a such a distinguished American poet visit their country.” After tea, some Sudanese recited poems in Arabic and English. Hughes was apparently pleased to listen to poetry “with such rhythm and phrasing.” While the evening was supposed to conclude with him reading some of his poems, the Sudanese poets would not allow the festivities to end without some of them reciting his material from memory. “I cannot remember having a nicer Sudanese-American evening,” Mack would recall, “and Langston was the vehicle for it all.”⁶⁷

Ishag el Mahdi was apparently so pleased with the party’s outcome that he made a special effort to have another, more elaborate bash the next evening. Hughes was an honored guest, and among those present at that dinner were President Ismail al-Azhari, Prime Minister Sadiq el Mahdi, and the University of Khartoum’s vice-chancellor Nezeer El Defalla; the ministers of foreign affairs, interior, and information; the US ambassador; University of Khartoum professors; and Mack, the cultural affairs officer. While it was “most unusual” for the president and prime minister to attend the same event (unless it was a state affair), Mack wrote, “Ishag was able to persuade all to come. A huge cow, instead of a lamb, was cooked, and a variety of cakes were served. Langston Hughes, an American, had been paid the supreme honor by the Sudanese people… . The next day Langston left the hotel for the airport.”⁶⁸ Hughes would be dead in a year, passing away on May 22, 1967.⁶⁹

If Langston Hughes was arguably the most prominent Black American to set foot in Sudan during this period, the most significant visit by a group of African Americans was that made by the women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Founded by twenty-two Howard University students on January 13, 1913, the organization—in the words of historian Paula Giddings—“has shaped and been shaped by its members—many of whom rank among the most important figures in American history.” Its first public event involved marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, in the momentous women’s suffrage demonstration leading up to Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration.⁷⁰ Headquartered in Washington, the Deltas counted thirty-two thousand college-educated women in its ranks by 1962. In January 1962 the New York Amsterdam News reported that the sorority had recently announced a plan to tour Africa that summer. Senegal, Guinea, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan would be included as stops on the trek. The tour aimed to provide the organization with primary knowledge concerning problems facing the continent. Later that spring, national president Dr. Jeanne L. Noble announced that the tour would commence July 26 and include eight African countries (Guinea was apparently removed from the itinerary). The African tour was planned in lieu of an annual convention and highlighted the sorority’s Golden Anniversary.⁷¹ “Members of the sorority who elect to make the tour,” reported the Pittsburgh Courier, “will study the dynamic social, economic and cultural forces which are revolutionizing the long-dormant continent. In many places they will be met by fellow members who are now working in Africa in key positions.”⁷²

On July 18, 1962, travel entrepreneur Freddye Henderson wrote to Arthur McCaw. Arthur—himself a member of a Black fraternal organization, Kappa Alpha Psi—had begun his stint as chief end-use officer for USAID in Khartoum earlier that year. As noted, his wife, Valaria, was a Delta. “We are very pleased that you and Mrs. McCaw would like to entertain the members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Tour when they come to Khartoum. Delta, too, is pleased to have so distinguished a Soror in Khartoum, and would be pleased and honored to share their time with you and Mrs. McCaw.” Henderson informed McCaw that the Deltas would arrive in Khartoum the morning of August 7 from Lagos, Nigeria, and remain for a day.⁷³ The State Department sent an airgram to each of the locations on the trip concerning the “Tour of 45 members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority to Africa and Europe.” Dr. Noble, whom the airgram described as “a very able young women, well known to the Department,” would lead the tour with Anna Harvin Grant (professor at Grambling College) and Charlayne Hunter (the University of Georgia’s first Black student). The traveling group would be composed of college students and older women, freedom riders and conservatives, women from large Eastern cities and small Southern towns.

For many of the women this is their first trip abroad and their first face-to-face contact with Africans. They will be interested in observing women’s organizations and activities in the countries they visit, as well as the secondary educational needs of the African nations, with a view to evaluating future project proposals. The women will also be interested in locating an African woman leader in the field of volunteer organizations to bring to the United States next year.

The airgram said that State Department officials had met with the sorority’s executive director about the trip and supplied informational material and a reading list on the continent. For their part, the Deltas hoped that country briefings could be arranged by the respective posts.⁷⁴

On August 7, 1962, the McCaws honored the visiting Deltas at their Khartoum home. In addition to the Deltas, other guests included Mrs. Gerri Majors of Jet and Ebony magazines; Ambassador William Rountree and his wife; the USAID mission director; and Sudanese government officials, educators, and press representatives. Valaria introduced Dr. Noble to the gathering, and the sorority president spoke of Delta’s interest in Africa’s emerging nations and women’s welfare in these countries. Noble introduced Dr. Grant, who presented each member of the traveling sisterhood and shared their individual accomplishments. “The Americans present,” wrote Arthur McCaw, “were all agreed that the Deltas had succeeded in creating an atmosphere of good relations between the U.S. and the Sudanese that had never been reached before.” The following day, Wednesday, August 8, Valaria and Fresno State’s Mildred Edgar took the visitors on a tour of historic locations in Khartoum and Omdurman. The Delta contingent departed Sudan for Nairobi the next morning.⁷⁵

Arthur McCaw, at Gerri Majors’s request, provided the aforementioned summary of events to Robert Johnson of Johnson Publishing Company, which he addressed “for your personal attention for Jet.” McCaw lauded the Deltas to Johnson, noting that the impact they were having on African countries was “tremendous”: “The fact that they are paying their own way [and] that they represent an organization of 32,000 American College Women, strikes the African mind as increditable [sic] and brings much admiration for them and our country. The good they are doing in public relations for the U.S. is immeasurable.” McCaw then congratulated Johnson on his “great publications,” saying, “I have for a long time admired and boosted the Negro Press.”⁷⁶Jet published photographs from the visit in its September 6, 1962 issue.⁷⁷

A month after Jet featured the Delta’s Sudan visit, President Noble sent a letter to Arthur McCaw expressing gratitude for material that his office had sent concerning the trip. “I certainly want to take this opportunity,” wrote Noble, “to thank you and Soror McCaw for your gracious hospitality. From the moment you met us at the airport, to the final evening both of you were most gracious. And, that party was just wonderful.” Acknowledging that there were other people that she should thank for their work on facilitating a good trip, Noble requested that McCaw forward specific names he felt were important.⁷⁸ In their 1963 Christmas message, Val and Arthur McCaw said that the visit was the “highlight of the year.” “[The Delta women’s impact in] advanc[ing] the interest of womenhood in this Moslem country was something to behold. People who had been here for a long time called the party we gave in our home for them and 200 Sudanese the most effective affair that has been held to advance U.S. Sudanese relations.”⁷⁹

While the visits of Langton Hughes and the Delta Sigma Theta sisters represented major moments of the African American presence in Sudan, their visits were not reported to a broader audience in the white American press. This negligence in reportage does not, however, diminish the significance of those two trips in the history of Black engagements with Sudan. Mention of the Delta Sigma Theta stop in Sudan in venues like Jet and the Chicago Defender show that even if such diasporic moments were ignored by the white US mass media, they did not escape the purview of the Black media—an industry with voluminous sweep.⁸⁰ That the only source we have concerning Hughes’s visit comes from the memoir of James Mack—the African American cultural affairs officer who facilitated the poet’s visit to Khartoum—speaks both to the significance that the visit had for him personally and the fact one should not conflate impact with publicity (fewer readers, no doubt, have read his memoir than have read the New York Times). Thus, while Hughes’s Sudan trip may not directly relate to how Sudan informed Black American understandings of Black definition, consciousness, and solidarity, it is nevertheless worth including in this study as proof of Sudan’s appearance in the late life of one of Black America’s greatest writers and of the richness of all documentation—official or otherwise—produced by Black US foreign service workers in memorializing such diasporic moments.

Sudanese independence and the establishment of relations with the United States resulted in the greatest presence of African Americans in the country to date. Black foreign service workers played more than a marginal role in the nascent years of US-Sudan relations. From Andrew Brimmer’s examination of the prospects of a Sudanese central bank, Madison Broadnax’s work in agricultural training in northern and southern Sudan, and James Mack’s facilitating opportunities for Sudanese to engage with Langston Hughes to Valaria McCaw’s education of young blind people in Sudan, African Americans provided vital economic, educational, agricultural, and cultural resources to Sudan at a time when both the United States and Sudan were embroiled. This reality is not only important for understanding African Americans’ role in US-Africa relations during decolonization but also fits into the genealogy of Black American engagements with Sudan in significant ways.

The period explored in this chapter was not only the most significant era of African American labor in the country since the Tuskegee project, it was also, in many respects, a continuation of the kind of aid work that those men had done decades earlier. The Tuskegee project and foreign service work explored in this chapter were two cases in which African Americans traveled to Sudan for the purposes of helping the Sudanese (rather than receiving assistance from them). Though separated by half a century of time and colonialism, the neocolonial labor in the second mirrored that of the first. Another link connecting those two moments was the role played by graduates of historically Black colleges. Those Black Americans who embarked to Sudan were a particularly classed and race-conscious cadre. However, an important distinguishing factor between the early twentieth century and the 1960s was the presence of Black American women in the country in the latter. Finally, if the Black American diplomatic work examined here in some ways evoked the earlier Tuskegee project, it also foreshadowed the work of other Black individual and organizational work performed in Sudan under the auspices of the US government in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Taken together, this period shows an important transition from what were primarily Black American media engagements with Sudan to more interpersonal interactions with Sudanese. While the following chapter shows that African American writers continued to keep Sudan under the gaze of Black newspaper reporters, more African Americans traveled to the “Land of the Blacks” than ever before.

While Black newspapers in the preceding decades were full of depictions of “Black” Sudanese and “Arab” Egyptians, the First Sudanese Civil War—waged between northern “Arabs” and southern “Blacks”—brought racial differences in Sudan to the fore. Against this violent and racially charged backdrop, Black Americans in Sudan observed and recorded their racial perceptions of northern and southern Sudanese. Did they consider Sudanese “Black” in the way that Black newspapers had previously portrayed Sudanese? How did their depictions of Sudanese align or conflict with Black newspaper coverage of the war? Finally, how did the war generally impact Black America’s relationship with Sudan? As the following chapter shows, the First Sudanese Civil War not only set in motion decades of division along racial and religious lines in that country; it also stoked the same divisions in Black America’s relationship with Sudan.