Over thirty years ago a Nuer said to me: ‘We do not want what you Turks call progress. We are free men. All we want is to be left alone.’ (Jackson, 1955: 150)

This brief essay sketches an outline of the social history of small towns and their role in transforming the social and physical environment of the pastoral Nilotes of the southern Sudan. In broad terms, it is a review of historical and ethnographic facts which have a wider currency in pre-colonial Black Africa. I am less concerned, however with the detailed peculiarities of this centuries-long Nilotic experience, than with an understanding of how unintended circumstances have, over time, engendered the many problems imposed upon local peoples in the contemporary world.

The increasingly common dependence on history for anthropology emerges clearly in the course of these remarks and observations. In the effort to highlight process rather than detail, the paper begins with some relevant observations written by 19th century travellers in the region, authorities in their own time who through their writings, invited and encouraged more intensive European occupation of these territories. Clearly, their observations on the effects of alien exploitation in the southern Sudan were not intended to serve this end, yet the 19th century sources offer muted echoes of the more recent observation by Southall (1979: 213) that “Most small towns [in Africa] appear as the lowest rung of systems for the oppression and exploitation of rural peoples.” A corollary to this insight is the obvious fact that small towns have been a vital resource for those in a position to oppress and exploit.