On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan

Abstract

In this paper, I explore patience as an attitude towards imposed waiting in uncertainty among peasants in rural Northern Sudan who were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe dam construction project. My aim is to examine the complex temporalities that appear in the politics of displacement. I show how such temporal alterations were related to the implementation of a large infrastructural project and to the shaping of the Manasir people’s perception of time as they attempted to stay and revive life in their homeland on the shores of the emerging reservoir. Corresponding to the gendered experience of imposed inactivity and the resultant dissolution of time, patience is practised to varying degrees. Amongst the displaced communities, patience, as a temporal practice, represents a commitment both to future divine rewards and to living within the present situation. This commitment, in turn, offers hope and enables people to persevere. I argue that patience is not, as is often assumed, a quietist attitude, but a political practice directed against attacks by the state.

Dans cet article, j’explore la patience en tant qu’attitude envers l’attente imposée dans l’incertitude parmi les paysans dans le Nord-Soudan rural qui ont été chassés par les inondation de leur domicile au bord du Nil pendant le projet de construction du barrage de Merowe en 2003–2009. Mon objectif est d’examiner les temporalités complexes qui apparaissent dans la politique de déplacement. Je montre que de telles altérations temporelles étaient liées à la mise en œuvre d’un grand projet infrastructurel et à la formation de la perception du temps de la population Manasir alors qu’ils cherchaient à rester et vivre à nouveau sur leurs terres sur les rives du réservoir émergent. Correspondant à l’expérience sexuée de l’inactivité imposée et la dissolution du temps en découlant, la patience est pratiquée à différents degrés. Au sein des communautés déplacées, la patience, en tant que pratique temporelle, représente un engagement aussi bien envers des récompenses divines à venir qu’envers la vie dans la situation actuelle. Cet engagement, à son tour, apporte de l’espoir et permet à la population de persévérer. Je défends que la patience n’est pas, contrairement à ce que l’on croit souvent, une attitude quiétiste, mais une pratique politique dirigée contre des attaques par l’Etat.

Keywords:

• patience
• temporality
• waiting
• Islam
• infrastructures
• Sudan

Mots clés:

• patience
• temporalité
• attente
• Islam
• infrastructures
• Soudan

Introduction

In 2009, the former Sudanese government declared the construction of the Merowe Dam as a decisive moment in the history of contemporary Sudan. After a seven-year-long construction period from 2003 to 2009, Sudan’s recently ousted president, Omar al-Bashir, celebrated the first hydropower project on the main Nile in the Sudan as a milestone for the country’s progress. Painting a bright future for the Sudan at the dam’s inauguration ceremony, the president listed the project’s alleged achievements: the generation of cheap electricity and flourishing wheat cultivation in new irrigation projects. He also praised the cooperation with the international companies involved in the dam project. The German engineering company, Lahmeyer International, acted as general consultant for the entire project and Chinese contractors built the dam, which was mainly financed by Sudan’s allies on the Gulf and by Chinese donors (Hänsch 2019).

According to governmental visions, the two billion US dollar megaproject with its capacity of 1,250 Megawatts, was supposed to lead to the ‘renaissance of the Sudan’ (DIU 2010). The discourses around the dam’s construction cultivated Islamist state ideologies of Sudan’s ‘renaissance’, that in turn justified Islamic rule and the displacement of 70,000 peasants for the nation’s progress in the name of Islam.

To those who had to make way for the dam’s reservoir, the government promised a better life in state-run resettlement areas (DIU 2010). The riverine people, who lived along the Fourth Nile Cataract and belonged to three different ethnic groups, were to be relocated to newly built villages with adjacent large-scale agricultural projects in the deserts of Northern Sudan.¹

Yet hopes, promises and gains of infrastructure are unequally distributed and often remain unfulfilled (Harvey and Knox 2012). At the margins of the Sudanese state, for those who are displaced in the name of the common good, disenchantment, frustration and uncertainty prevail.

This paper draws on long-term ethnographic research (2006–2018) conducted among Manasir peasants, a group numbering approximately 50,000 people. The majority of the Manasir resisted being displaced to the governmental resettlement sites but they were eventually drowned out of their homes without warning. Here, I particularly focus on the time of the inundation of the dam’s reservoir, which lasted for about 10 months from July 2008 until April 2009. At that time, however, there was no official information available on the workings of the dam. Thus, the beginning and course of the damming of the Nile was unpredictable for me and my research partners.

On the day in March 2009, when the president was celebrating the nation’s progress at the dam site, approximately 50 kilometres away upstream, I was sitting with a group of displaced villagers in front of a diesel-powered TV, watching the event in some quickly built shelters alongside the dam’s emerging reservoir. Nine months earlier, their villages, date trees and crops had been inundated in the dammed Nile waters. Since then, my research partners, Nafisa and Halima, had moved three times ahead of the ever-rising Nile waters to higher areas in the adjoining desert. Each time they had dismantled and rebuilt their shelters. Stressing the hardship, uncertainty and enforced inactivity, Halima complained: ‘We are just sitting (qaᶜadîn bass)!’ Nafisa, a young married woman, was trying to encourage Halima by drawing on the ambivalent meaning of sitting: ‘We are staying (qaᶜadîn). We are practising patience (ṣâbrîn)’. The expression qaᶜadîn can mean both, sitting and staying and the two meanings are worlds apart. ‘Sitting’ in Halima’s sense expresses inactivity and existential immobility; in Nafisa’s sense it means ‘staying put’.

To be patient expresses the hope of realizing the long-nurtured vision of remaining in the homeland and staying close to the shores of the reservoir. For Nafisa and Halima, this hope of staying is grounded in a longing for permanence which is informed by past experiences of living an independent peasant life in intimate communities on the fertile stretches of the Fourth Nile Cataract.

Nafisa, Halima and their families are among those of the Manasir who, during a tense political process of negotiating their future lives with the central government, developed this alternative vision of resettlement. Instead of moving to distant state-run resettlement areas, the majority of the Manasir demanded the construction of new settlements close to the future reservoir, which would still be located within their homeland. After years of often violent struggles, the central government agreed to build the new settlements but implementation of this plan was postponed repeatedly.

This paper focuses on the Manasir peasants who were flooded out of their homes and depicts the attempts they made to stay. To stay in order to continue and revive their peasant life along the dammed River Nile, required, as Nafisa and many others told me, patience. In this paper, I explore patience as an attitude towards imposed waiting during the process of dam construction and forced displacement. In particular, I look at how different temporalities encompass patience by focusing on both the forces that compel actors into a state of waiting and people’s changing experiencing of time in moments of crisis. Both, in turn, give rise to the collective practice of patience as a responsive commitment towards the joint struggle of staying and maintaining a peasant life. I combine phenomenological with political approaches because the experiences and politics of waiting are entangled and constitutive of each other (cf. Janeja and Bandak 2018).

I suggest patience as an analytically useful lens for exploring the relationship between the politics of displacement – which inflict the time of infrastructural projects on people – and the temporal ordering among local actors who experience displacement. At this moment the temporality of the everyday, which usually flows quite unnoticed from one moment to another into continuous pasts and towards the future, is disrupted. The perceived temporal gap characterized by uncertainty, that is the inability to anticipate the future, is, as I will show, what keeps actors in wait and brings the perception of the present to the fore. Seen from a phenomenological perspective, waiting points to the heightened experience of and ‘attention […] towards time’ and, as an interruption in the flow of the everyday, is perceived as a gap between the present condition and envisaged futures (Göttlich 2015, 50).

Patience, as Procupez (2015, 56) argues in her study of housing activists among the urban poor in Buenos Aires, is ‘a political stance and is better understood as a collective mode of inhabiting temporality rather than as a cultivated virtue’. Expanding on the work of Procupez, I argue that patience is political in the sense that the struggle and long-nurtured commitment to stay is pursued and claimed collectively against a governmental politics of uncertainty aimed at attrition and, ultimately, at displacement. Contrary to conventional wisdom, patience can thus not be reduced to a quietist political stance.

Patience is not only political, but it is also, I contend, grounded in a virtue and becomes an all-embracing attitude towards the situation in which people are forced to wait in uncertainty. Patience among Muslims in Northern Sudan, and especially among the more traditional Muslims, is rooted in Islamic faith as an ideal virtue that informs ordinary practices in everyday life (Hänsch 2019).

In the course of state-led Islamization processes in the Sudan since the 1980s, the petty-bourgeois elite of the peasantry, especially teachers and other educated people, introduced a more orthodox version of Sunni-Islam thereby promoting a closer connection to the hegemonic Arab-Muslim culture of the central Nile valley. As a result, many traditional practices, for example, the drinking of millet beer among the Manasir ceased and mosques were built in almost every village. Due to the heterogeneous peasantry, however, different visions existed and likewise entailed the avoidance of control by the centre of the Nile Valley.

The virtue of patience is predominantly attributed to women as they are expected to practice patience. Yet, the situation of the flooding and displacement also required more patience on the part of male peasants, who experienced imposed ‘sitting’ differently than women. In contrast to Saba Mahmood (2001, 202), who conducted research in a very different context, namely among women of the mosque movement during the Islamic revival in Cario, here it is not a question of the ‘cultivation of the ideal virtuous self’, but of patience practiced collectively among men and women to varying degrees in order to persevere through imposed waiting.

Waiting has received considerable attention in studies on transnational migratory mobility and in studies of war, flight and exile in the context of conflict-induced displacement (Brun 2015; Elliot 2016; Hyndman and Giles 2011; Khosravi 2014; Turnbull 2016; Turner 2015). By focusing on those who try to stay rather than on those who are on the move, this article offers insights into how people actively seek to challenge the politics of displacement as related to the current wave of large dam projects in Africa that indicate the return or continuation of ‘high modernism’ on the continent (Abbink 2012; Dye 2016; Hänsch 2019; Verhoeven 2015). The planning state, coupled with authoritarian rule and a lack of civil society, embraces rationality and tends to concentrate on technical processes while ignoring its subjects (Scott 1998). Practising patience is a political response which involves fighting for one’s own vision against hegemonic practices and coercive resource exploitation.

I first discuss how the project’s time, that is the technical oriented logic of a linear, future-oriented planning process and its enforcement in the context of power relations, was inflicted on the people and shaped the local perception of the project. Following this, I explore the changing experiencing of time, the imposed ‘sitting’, among men and women during displacement and I analyse how patience was invoked to persevere through the forced inactivity and attrition which resulted from prolonged uncertainty.

Dam-time and the politics of uncertainty

Waiting often arises within power relations and the reciprocal interpretation of these relations (Auyero 2012). Someone makes somebody wait and in turn, different responses to enforced waiting are possible. Waiting, then, is ‘the social imposition of time’, which is to be understood as an interactional process of differently positioned actors (Göttlich 2015, 55).

While planning agencies aim at the synchronization of workflows in order to reduce waiting, (for instance, for money from donors, or for materials and technologies to arrive at the dam sites), the future lives of those who are in the way of the project are considered less relevant to the planning process: efforts to reach agreements between different stakeholders are postponed and the realization of promises are delayed. No agreements had been reached with the local communities about possible resettlement areas prior to commencement of the construction of the Merowe Dam in 2003.

At the beginning of the planning process in the 1990s, the majority of the Manasir people had agreed on resettlement to proposed state-run sites, but only under certain conditions. However, during a highly dynamic political process of negotiating resettlement and the modalities of compensation – e.g. recompense for private land ownership, monetary compensation for lost assets like palm trees, options for resettlement – their voices and wishes were increasingly sidelined by the managing authority of the Merowe dam project, the Dams Implementation Unit (DIU), and behind it, the government. The denial of Manasir participation in the decision-making processes, the lack of information and transparency surrounding the whole project and the manipulation of local leaders within patronage and state-society networks increasingly fuelled uncertainty and mistrust among the people. As a result, Khartoum’s ruling elites, who had already been perceived critically in the light of historical experiences of marginalization, increasingly lost legitimacy. In this unsettling situation, the Manasir searched for ways to realize a self-determined future and developed the vision of staying close to the future reservoir in new settlements.² This counter plan came to be known as ‘the local option’ (khiyâr al-maḥallî) among the Manasir people. A dystopic notion of a future life as displaced citizens dependent on state resettlement projects had haunted the people for many years. The ‘local option’ offered a way out, a hope for staying and making an independent living in the homeland. With Bloch (1986) we can speak of a ‘concrete utopia’, which was set against dystopia.

Elsewhere I have shown how this alternative vision of resettlement evolved and how the struggle to stay resulted temporarily in the establishment of a provisional autonomous zone, in which the Manasir developed their own administrative structures to organize their resistance. Those who left for the state-run resettlement areas were considered as ‘traitors’ to the community. The highly politicized and emotionally charged question over staying or leaving led to severe social disruptions among the Manasir (Hänsch 2019). Importantly, the vision to stay was a political decision, one which developed during interaction and confrontation with the rigid negotiation policy of an Islamist military government.

Only after confrontations with the state, such as the violent breaking-up of demonstrations and the imprisonment of Manasir leaders, could an agreement between the Manasir and the central government be reached in 2006 and renewed in 2007. In these agreements, steps towards the construction of new settlement sites, around the future lake, representing the ‘local option’, were guaranteed by the central government.

Proponents of the ‘local option’ debunked the aforementioned practices of divide and rule, and saw the denial of information as a purposeful politics of uncertainty which was aimed not only at achieving their subjection and deliberate displacement, but also at the self-enrichment of a powerful elite, referred to as the ‘dam gang’ by my interlocutors. The more importance that the vision of staying and a self-determined future assumed, the more state pressure was exerted, increasingly forcing people to wait in uncertainty, particularly after the government’s fulfilment of the agreements was delayed repeatedly. While waiting and hoping for the promised construction of the ‘local option’, the impoundment of the Nile started without warning in summer 2008 and flooded the villages.

Dam construction, reservoir impoundment and displacement prioritized the realization of technical plans and schedules – typifying the linear, technical orientation of ‘high modernist’ projects – rather than dynamic and contingent processes of socio-political negotiation. Instead, the project’s time was imposed on the Manasir. My interlocutors interpreted the way ‘high modernism’ operates, in which people’s concerns are usually ignored, as a politics of uncertainty. For them, this was made particularly clear via the constant delay in realizing agreements, the denial of information about the dam’s regime and the damming of the Nile even though the villages were still inhabited. In the Manasirs’ experience, the government was seldom able to actually implement what they had announced. In other words, time, or rather, control over time, worked as an instrument for the exercise of power through attrition, or as my interlocutors saw it, the act of deliberately displacing them from their homeland to the governmental resettlement areas. In this sense, the control of time is simultaneously an attempt to gain control over places. As I show in detail below, the politics of uncertainty, seen from an emic perspective, continued to unfold in the struggle over places by wearing people down to the point of having to leave the area.

Trapped in uncertainty and crisis

When the River Nile started to rise considerably during the annual Nile flood in 2008, everyday conversations in the villages revolved around the all-important question of whether the dam had closed its gates to impound the Nile or whether the waters were only rising due to the annual Nile flood. No officially verified information was available on this issue, only rumours arriving on a daily basis. Due to the politics of uncertainty, sceptical peasants no longer believed the government’s statements anyway.

The flood affected the villages in varying degrees, depending on their distance from the dam. Over the course of just one week, the Nile waters drowned the first villages, the agricultural fields and date trees. Families tried to rescue their belongings and started to build improvised shelters in the adjacent desert. Exhausted, I was sitting with my friends Zainab and Nafisa under the shade of their quickly built shelter on a rocky hill. We looked down at the village, which had collapsed into the Nile waters. In shocked disbelief, Zainab asked: ‘What is happening, what kind of story is this?’ The situation of being drowned and displaced to a rocky hill seemed to be inconceivable to her. After many turning points during an already crisis-laden process, the flooding was experienced as a truly radical event.

Regarding the temporal order, we can observe that we usually rely on the continuous flow of time. It gives us the confidence that things will go on and continue. However, in this moment, usual activities could no longer be performed and everyday life no longer followed its predictable course. The context in which everyday practice occurred had changed so rapidly and in such multi-layered ways that a perceived gap appeared between the known everyday world and the actual situation. Koloma Beck (2012, 139) conceptualizes this kind of moment in her research on wartime experiences as a ‘rupture in the flow of transitivity’. This means that the ‘stream-like’ experience of the everyday, which usually ‘moves on silently and undisturbed’, is radically disrupted (Koloma Beck 2012, 41).

For my research partners, the disruption of everyday temporality rendered the present situation as something that stood outside ordinary time, creating a feeling of unfamiliarity and alienation, as if one found oneself in another, ‘strange’ world or in the words of Zainab: ‘It’s a story in itself’. The disruption of the temporality of the everyday foregrounded the perception of the present, as Bryant (2016, 20) puts it: ‘In such moments, we become aware of the present that ordinarily slips out of consciousness, and it becomes something viscerally present, a point hovering between past and future.’ This moment of a perceived temporal gap between the past and the future is characterized by the inability to anticipate the future. My research partners experienced a heightened sense of uncertainty defined as ‘the lack of absolute knowledge’ and hence the ‘inability to predict the outcome of events’ (Whyte 2009, 213). The experience of uncertainty differed tremendously from that of the past few months and signified crisis. Until the last moment, people had been trying to uphold everyday life and thereby bracketed an incipient crisis for some time. Speaking in phenomenological terms, routines and habitual knowledge lost their validity to the extent that the taken for granted and the existential experience of a familiar everyday world was fundamentally shaken. Schütz (2004, 171–172) describes such situations, when the principles of habitual knowledge become questionable and consequently anticipated life perspectives also dissolve, as a ‘crisis’, as a ‘turning point’ of life.³

The life of my research partners finally fell apart and people lost their common ground, which in turn rendered the future fundamentally uncertain, or in the words of Nafisa: ‘ḥaya mujahjaha’. This local expression in Sudanese Arabic literally means a ‘life without direction’, in short, an uncertain life. Nafisa continued: ‘We do not know what is coming. We are thinking hard about what to do. What should we do? How can we support ourselves?’ She directed her questions to the near and far future, asking how people could possibly stay in the homeland and make a living. Nafisa’s words make clear that it was hardly possible for her to anticipate how far the river would rise, or whether the government would use armed force against people, or whether life itself would be possible at all alongside the emerging reservoir.

The impossibility of anticipating the future forced people to wait. In the face of destruction and fear, I asked Nafisa what we should do now. She replied: ‘We are staying (qaᶜadîn)’. As already discussed above, the word qaᶜadîn means both staying and sitting. On the one hand, Nafisa thereby stressed that she and her family would not leave to the governmental resettlement areas despite the drowning. On the other hand, she expressed her powerlessness to influence the situation. The only thing she could do was to continue sitting there and waiting for the future to come, to see how the situation would develop. Although ideas about building new agricultural projects or starting a fishery existed, these visions were only based on speculation, since the future, as elaborated above, was unpredictable, hence fundamentally uncertain.

In the next section, I will analyse how my research partners perceived the imposed waiting. The gendered experience of inactivity, that is, prolonged ‘sitting’ intensified the feeling of attrition and stagnation. Not only did the physical world fall apart, but also the existential order of the world, namely the spatial and temporal order. Space does not permit extended discussion of spatial ruptures here: since this article concerns waiting and practising patience, I will focus on time and its dissolution and illustrate how people patiently tried to hold together the temporal order and to resist the disintegration of the daily temporal order.

Just sitting all day long: the dissolution of time

By attending to relevant tasks at hand, such as building shelters and cooking, the displaced villagers gradually created provisional living arrangements in the desert. Men and women generally upheld the gendered division of labour. Daily life in the makeshift shelters slowed down. Before the flood, everyday life had been oriented towards agricultural practices, which in turn were embedded in the cycle of seasons and the annual rise and fall of the river. Men and women followed a very regular and closely timed rhythm of work, characterized by an ‘intensive pattern of working hours’, averaging between 8 and 11 hours a day (Beck 1999, 231). Married women, in particular, had been busy during the day and were often overloaded with work: looking after the children, cooking, working on the fields and caring for the livestock. They had only a short time-window to rest after lunchtime.

In the first weeks following the flight to the adjoining desert, the three mealtimes per day and the five prayer times produced a minimal temporal order to the day. Apart from that, little else was left to do. At first, younger, married women, but also older ones with grown-up children felt relieved from the pressure of work. A neighbour of Nafisa’s commented: ‘It is better now. There is less work. We do not have much work simultaneously; everything is more relaxed. We can take more time to carry out our activities’. The women now devoted themselves extensively to praying, cooking, washing clothes and providing for the livestock. Domestic work such as cooking was not considered arduous by Nafisa and her neighbours, it was simple and easy. For them, the hard and physically strenuous task is the daily work in the fields, weeding and cutting the lupin with the sickle, but this work had been lost. They now stretched out their domestic activities so as to pass the time, which was abundantly available.

In contrast to the women who still had domestic work, the men perceived the enforced inactivity as unbearable. An elderly neighbour of Nafisa complained: ‘There is no work, we want the sickle, we want to weed!’ Driven by a physical urge, he walked restlessly around in search of distraction. Other men were playing cards, chatting with friends or helping their neighbours to construct shelters. But these activities were not considered meaningful, they were like doing nothing. A neighbour described the situation: ‘We are just sitting around!’ Working the soil with the hoe and the crops with the sickle is at the heart of Manasir peasant identity. In general, leisure and idleness are frowned upon. Sitting, chatting and hanging around are not skilled practices, in the sense of a culture of leisure, since they were not part of everyday practice and contradicted the work ethic. According to one’s own perception as a Manasir peasant (man or woman), it is unthinkable not to work because one must work hard in order to be able to make a living in a remote area where land for cultivation is scarce. This ethical principle could no longer be performed. Some men were even afraid of losing their physical strength, worried that their bodies would get used to doing nothing. Without work, women too felt their body as ‘tired’ (fatrân): it became weak.

The situation became more severe when the water levels rose again after one month. For the second time, Nafisa’s family and neighbours had to leave for higher ground; shelters were dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere, approximately two kilometres away from their old homes. Even the women, who first appreciated the relief from work got more and more frustrated by the prolonged ‘doing nothing’ and ‘sitting around’ which now dominated the day. Ongoing inactivity generated the experience of an unstructured, infinite time, as described by Halima:

Now all people do is sit around. The men don’t work, neither do the women. There is no work at all. People get stuck and sit in the camps. It’s boring. There is nothing. The day is long. In the past, the day passed very quickly, people were at work and diligent.

Not working, not cultivating the fields leads to stagnation, existential immobility and boredom. Life and the body become weak. Nothing moves and progresses, time does not pass, the day drags on endlessly. In their classical study on the effects of long-term unemployment in Austria in the 1930s, Marie Jahoda and her colleagues described the experience of the permanent same – whose only punctual emphasis and temporal orientation are the meals (and prayer times) – as ‘Zeitzerfall’ that is ‘the dissolution of time’ (Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 1975, 92). Just as in the Austrian case study, the dissolution of time affected Manasir men most.

For Ali, an experienced peasant in his fifties, the time between meals consisted of aimlessly wandering around and visiting neighbours. He expressed the dissolution of time, that is the incessantly same-same without a difference, as follows:

When I get up in the morning, I see the stones, the rocks, the mountains. When I drink the morning tea, I see the same thing. Then I walk from shelter to shelter. There is nothing to do, there is no program. In the evening I see the stones, rocks and mountains again.

During the last seven months of ‘sitting’ on the rocky hills, Ali visibly aged by years. The strain of increasing attrition carved deep wrinkles into his face. He became increasingly frustrated and worn down by enforced inactivity, boredom and the feeling of being stuck. Being stuck means not being able to secure life and to generate an income. Everything stops and is always the same, like the rocks. Before the flood, Ali had cultivated a flourishing garden, now he was forced to do nothing, to wait. He was trapped in the situation, and yet leaving for the state-run resettlement areas was not an option. He had hoped to stay and to build a large agricultural project in his vicinity but lacked the means as he was waiting for the promised irrigation motors to be delivered by the regional government to start the project.

The Manasirs’ situation corresponds with what Hage (2009, 99) describes as ‘existential stuckedness’; here it is the dissolution of time resulting from the loss of work and the inability to change the situation that signifies stagnation. Suspended life, that is, being trapped, is characterized by a dominant perception of the present, a same-sameness that does not form meaningful coherences and appears ‘strange’.

Patience and perseverance

The hope of being able to stay in the homeland, though severely challenged, was supported by the virtue of patience. It was this quality which enabled people to persevere, and which is founded on their outlook of the world shaped by divine power. Practising patience is a form of temporal ordering, and a way of future-making, which not only renders waiting in the present meaningful but also counters the politics of displacement. Patience ordered time in an existential sense by creating confidence in an uncertain and distant future, which, in turn, generated hope and the courage in the present to be able to stay.

Most of my interlocutors expressed growing tension, doubts and fear in terms of ‘confused thoughts’, that constantly circled back and forth around the question of what could be done. Food aid supplies organized by the Manasir leadership ensured survival for the next few weeks, but how to sustain life in the future was uncertain. Depending on the location and the availability of suitable land with agricultural potential, some men started to construct small irrigation projects to escape ‘doing nothing’ and to test the soil’s quality in their vicinity. However, after some weeks the new fields were again swallowed by the rising river. Ahmed, a middle-aged man described this state of being as a ‘war of nerves’. He asserted that the government was aiming to make the Manasir ‘tired’ and to ‘wear them down’. His interpretation feeds into the politics of uncertainty discussed above. In his opinion, which was shared by many of my interlocutors, the central government deliberately produced uncertainties in order to intimidate, wear down and ultimately unsettle the people to such an extent that they would leave the area. The withheld information concerning the final contours of the reservoir, the constantly rising waters and the failure to construct the new settlements (the ‘local option’) confirmed this view.

My research assistant Omar countered the ‘planned’ uncertainty of the government by saying: ‘But we won’t be driven away, we’ll stay (qaᶜadîn)’. He was convinced that they would be able to master the difficulties after some time and, in the long run, life would be better than in the state-run resettlement areas.

When it came to the question of future life, the omnipresent answer was: ‘God is merciful’ or ‘God is there’ and ‘we trust in God’. What people could still rely on were God’s mercy and goodness. ‘We are practising patience (ṣâbrîn)’ was the general attitude of women and men in light of the crisis and its burden of ‘sitting’.

Patience (ṣabr) is a religiously anchored virtue. In Islamic theology, the concept of ṣabr forms an important part of faith and is ascribed a high value; various meanings are associated with ṣabr, such as perseverance in faith and during difficult situations, and being patient. The holy month of Ramadan, in which eating and drinking during the day are forbidden, is sometimes called the ‘month of patience’ (Wensinck 1995, 685–687).

Patience here is to be understood as part of a straightforward ‘everyday Islam’ (Fadil and Fernando 2015, 60). Patience unfolds in the various situations of everyday life, for example when dealing with small children, when they cry all night and prevent their mothers from sleeping. Likewise, in the time after the death of close relatives, patience is required to endure the loss and deal with it, without constantly complaining or indulging in anger and grief. It is divinely recommended to master these situations by practising patience. Nafisa considered patience as a capacity that enables a person to live through adversity, to bear a difficult situation while still pursuing certain aims.

In the context of the crisis, however, faith, devotion and piety received an increased commitment, which was of existential significance. The 10-year old son of Nafisa, for example, who had not performed the five daily prayers before, began to pray. The virtue of patience received especial attention. In fact, it became an all-embracing way of being and living the situation. Patience is here closely associated with perseverance and steadfastness. For the people, it meant persevering through uncertainty, hardship and the wait. The many invocations of patience, which are grounded in everyday Islamic ethics, call for courage, not giving up, but looking boldly into the future and relying on God. Nafisa invoked this sense of trust and courage: ‘God is with the patient’. In this way, to persevere is a commitment to living the present situation in order to be able to stay, in the long run, in the homeland.⁴ At the same time, practising patience represents an investment in the far future and in the afterlife, as expressed by Nafisa’s citation: ‘He who practices patience will be rewarded by God’. The hope was that God would compensate them for bearing the present hardships on the day of the Last Judgement at the latest.

To persevere and not to be overwhelmed by anxieties, however, no longer fell only within the sphere of the individual. Patience also needed to be practised collectively since the commitment to stay was continuously subject to disruptions and accompanied by doubts, and hence required constant maintenance. Halima’s commitment to stay began to crumble. She worriedly said: ‘We are done. Shall we die of hunger?! We cannot endure this bad life’. In many conversations, her neighbours encouraged her not to give up. Yet, some families, who saw no way to stay, eventually decided to move to the government’s resettlement areas. About those who left it was said: ‘They cannot persevere through the pressure of hardship, which is inflicted upon us by the government’. It is precisely in this sense that patience counters the politics of uncertainty, experienced as a ‘war of nerves’, while simultaneously offering hope not only for the here and now, but also for the hereafter. Thus, patience, as a virtue supported the collective struggle against displacement to the governmental resettlement areas.

The notion of patience displays a certain attitude towards life and the future, which is closely associated with people’s past experiences and Islamic predestination. Even before the drowning, life was not easy but characterized by everyday scarcity, poverty and uncertainty. In order to keep life going and cover financial shortcomings, people used whatever resources were available: in short, they improvised. Locally conceived improvization is a routinized way of keeping life going and is based on the sedimented experience that there is always a way to manage everyday difficulties. Everything else, such as potential problems, would be solved in the unknown far future – and the future, according to my interlocuters, in the end, lies in the hands of God. What is in the future is always uncertain, only God knows. One’s own destiny, in the common understanding, is always already divinely determined by God’s decisions. But it depends on how the individual deals with the situation while following their own imagined future.

Although uncertainty prevailed in a much more radical way than previously, the families continued to concentrate on making ends meet in the here and now – everything else the future would bring, which is already determined by God.

This raises the question of whether the flooding was understood as God’s will. A representative of the River Nile State capitalized on the notion of divine predestination. In a public assembly, he declared the flooding as God’s will (‘qadr min Allah’), to call on the Manasir to accept their divinely shaped fate. My interlocutors met this hypocrisy with tired, sarcastic smiles. Long before that, people had already unmasked the government’s tactic of making use of Islam only for its own purposes and they denied governmental representatives the status of righteous Muslims. Indeed, the DIU, the foreign companies involved, and the central government were held responsible for the flooding. Since divine determination is not known, my interlocutors tried to make the best out of the situation and to follow their envisaged futures in the hope of being rewarded by God.

By orienting themselves towards cosmological rewards through persevering against their ‘stuckedness’ in order to work towards a much-desired future (staying), my interlocutors put the far, uncertain earthly future into brackets. Hence, practising patience is a temporal practice, which not only opens and forecloses certain futures but also their associated hopes and doubts experienced in the present. The virtue of patience coupled with an attitude towards life, that in principle is never wholly predictable and always predetermined by God, supported, in an existential sense, the belief and hope in the here and now, of being able to stay.

Patience versus apathy and resignation

My discussion so far may have given the impression that people were patiently ‘waiting out the crisis’ (Hage 2009). But patience is not passive. As Gaibazzi (2015, 129) shows in his study of young, male Gambians, patience means ‘to work towards’ what has been divinely designated, and thereby ‘creating an opportunity’ and ‘time’. However, we need to consider the fragile line between patience and perseverance on the one hand and tendencies of apathy and resignation on the other.

Apart from the many invocations of patience that offered courage, practising patience was reflected in the efforts and activities aimed towards reviving life. As soon as circumstances allowed, some men started a commercial fishery at the emerging reservoir. Fishery had not played a role in the peasants’ economy before and so represented a new way of generating income. Others tried to set up new agricultural projects alongside the camps. As soon as the river no longer seemed to rise, the men also began to build houses.

The construction of new houses did not mean that people stopped to wait for the implementation of the ‘local option’. Instead, they wanted to occupy and claim the area before someone else did and to avoid further displacement. They also wanted to foster a sense of emplacement and the feeling of ‘home’. Whoever built a house or started a fishery communicated his intention of trying to stay and revive life. Others followed and built houses too, following the encouraging example set by their neighbour. It is precisely these emerging material signs of life that generated hope made manifest in the realization of a ‘concrete utopia’ (Bloch 1986). At the same time, such activities ordered the people’s unstructured time and the minimal time–space-rhythms so that these rhythms and routines became gradually denser again.

However, not all of my research partners were able to exercise patience in the same way. Although men were sometimes busy with the construction of new agricultural projects, their time, unlike that of women, still tended to be unstructured. Tendencies of apathy spread, especially among the younger men. The lack of material resources, the frequency of moves to higher ground, the enforced inactivity and the many setbacks, which foster apathy, played a role in this, as did personal experiences and social positionality. The women started to complain that their husbands had got used to doing nothing, to a life without work. One woman told me: ‘Our men are lazy, they only eat, sleep, and do not work! They could have constructed agricultural projects or built houses a long time ago. They just let us sit here!’ These men did not give up hope, rather they let themselves slip gradually into apathy. They endured, but they did not practice patience.

Here, apathy is closely associated with resignation. Ali, the experienced, older peasant, could not realize his vision of implementing a large agricultural project. The delivery of irrigation motors was constantly delayed, other problems followed. The monetary compensation for his lost palm trees, which was eventually partially paid by the government in 2011, was quickly consumed by his large family. To sustain his family, Ali worked for some time, like many other Manasir men, as a migrant labourer. But he wanted to cultivate again, to work the soil; that was his life, he told me. Over the years he has become increasingly lost in apathy. When I met him in 2015 and again in 2018, he had changed from an agile, capable person to a passive man. Years of being stuck and waiting made him a broken man. It is a dehumanizing experience, one that robs people of their dignity. Speaking in more general terms, the changing perception of the self, increasingly dissolved his being-in-the-world as a peasant. He lost hope and courage and finally resigned himself to what had happened. But he was still enduring, for the sake of his grown-up children and grandchildren. Patience, then does not mean to ‘simply’ endure, but to persevere, to be courageous in order to work towards desired futures, and this ultimately means trying to change the situation.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have explored how patience is invoked by Manasir peasants to persevere through imposed waiting, prolonged uncertainty and the gendered experience of inactivity in the course of dam-induced displacement in the Sudan.

‘High modernist’ projects, currently on the rise in Africa, and their technically oriented implementation processes, do not consider local time and concerns but instead impose the project’s time on the people who are in the way of the project. My research partners interpreted this practice as a politics of uncertainty, which was experienced as a ‘war of nerves’.

Usually, patience is understood as a quietist attitude, that might be political, but only in the sense that it supports those in power (cf. Hage 2009). I argue that patience, grounded in an Islamic virtue, is political, since it means to collectively hold on to visions and to persevere against attrition. Some were indeed worn down, but overall the Manasir collectively managed to give the impression that they refused to be worn down by the ‘war of nerves’, and instead, remained steadfast. They resisted the politics of displacement and followed their long-term commitment to stay and revive life in their homeland.

Practising patience is a commitment to both living within the present situation and to securing divine rewards. Hence, it is a temporal practice that, in an existential sense, generated confidence in an uncertain distant future and at the same time rendered waiting meaningful and created hope in the present: it thereby contributed to the collective struggle to stay in the homeland.

I agree with Procupez (2015, 63) when she writes ‘patience […] is waiting while working to make something happen […].’ Yet, patience does not necessarily need a ‘project’, as she argues. In the case under discussion people indeed followed the long-term political project of staying, but patience as an Islamic virtue is simultaneously being rewarded by God and can stand also for itself. I would argue that, in this case, patience consisted of waiting while holding on to a commitment and resisting attrition.

The former Sudanese Government frequently made use of the Islamic notion of patience, calling especially for patience in relation to failed service deliveries in order to calm social unrest. As I have shown, people neither patiently accepted the situation nor ‘waited out the crisis’ (Hage 2009). Thus, patience is not to be understood as quietist but as an active political practice. Apart from the attempt to revive life in the homeland, the Manasir continued to organize collective actions in order to claim their rights to monetary compensation and for the construction of the (still) promised new settlements (the ‘local option’). In 2011, for example, Manasir representatives organized a major protest lasting several months by occupying a public square in Ed-Damer, the provincial capital of the River Nile State.

Over the years, immediate waiting ceased to exist, but people still persevered through the rather precarious situation. To revive life ‘from nothing’ needs time, work, money and indeed, patience.

Acknowledgements

I thank the men and women I here called by various pseudonyms for their willingness to share their experiences with me. Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the workshop on ‘Krisen/Zeit. Krisenhaftigkeit und Temporalität im Nahen und Mittleren Osten und Nordafrika’ at the Conference of the German Anthropological Association (GAA) and at the workshop on ‘Waiting in Africa’ at the University of Bayreuth. I thank all participants for their comments and the lively discussion. I also thank the reviewers of the article for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The Open Access publication of this article was funded by the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, University of Bayreuth.

Notes

1 For more details on the dam project see Hänsch (2012, 2019). I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among Manasir families at the Fourth Nile Cataract and in the governmental resettlement areas of al-Mukabrab and al-Fidda during 2008–2009. The paper also draws on follow-up research conducted in 2010, 2015 and 2018. Apart from widely known politicians, all the names of the persons mentioned have been changed to ensure privacy.

2 More than two-thirds of Manasir families (about 10,000 families) attempted to stay in their homeland along the Fourth Nile Cataract, whereas only one-third (about 2500 families) resettled both before and during the drowning in 2007–2010 to the governmental sites al-Mukabrab and al-Fidda (Hänsch 2012, 2019).

3 I am aware of the problems and effects of the term ‘crisis’ which appears as an omnipresent term in today’s discussions of the world and which has been critically engaged by several scholars (Goldstone and Obarrio 2016; Roitman 2014). I do not take ‘crisis’ as an a priori but refer to a phenomenological notion of ‘crisis’ (cf. Schütz 2004) as a crisis of the life-world, which I have outlined above to describe the experience of my research partners.

4 There is a strong parallel to the concept of sumud in the Palestinian context. I thank the reviewer for drawing my attention to this concept. According to Schiocchet (2012, 69), sumud means steadfastness in the process of resistance against the occupation; sumud is essential for social practices of ‘hyper-expression of identity’, which represent ‘Palestinianness’. In contrast to the Manasirs’ practice of patience, sumud is much more elaborated in popular culture.