BDAEMCKOGNRSOTURNADT IOOFN PSROTESTERS AND PARTICIPATION IN

The lists of White Flag members and other activists

The historiography of 1924 has unanimously considered that the White Flag League included 120 members, whose names are all known, thanks to a list found by the Intelligence Department in the home of one of them. This list offers us an unequivocal picture of the socio-professional background of the members, which in turn is often quoted to justify the apparent failure of the League to reach outside the ‘Effendi’ group that made it up. We know the professions of half of these 120 members, and 90% of this half were educated Sudanese. Most of them worked in departments such as the Railways and the Post and Telegraph, followed by discharged Egyptian Army officers and a handful of artisans and traders, but no serving officers.

It is extremely problematic, however, to attempt to base membership of the White Flag League on this list, for several reasons. First of all, the list has a number of peculiar features that might lead to its authenticity being questioned. Besides the fact that it was found at the home of Ḥassan Midḥat, who was one of the main witness for the prosecution (The White Flag Trials, pp. 58-68), there are some strange features regarding the individuals included in it. For example, it contains en bloc the names of a group of discharged officers who had signed two petition-telegrams a few weeks earlier (their names spelled exactly in the same way, which is unusual in colonial documents), but who otherwise never came to the attention of the Intelligence Department for having taken part in any other protest.But even if we do not go so far as to believe that the list might be a forgery, the fact that it does not include some of the League's most famous members, such as Zayn al-‘Ābdīn ‘Abd al-Tām, or Ṭayyib Bābikr – both of them were instead included the list of about twenty early activists kept in the house of ‘Alī ‘Abd al-Laṭīf – or again ‘Alī Malāsī, one of the leaders of the League in Port Sudan, leads to the question of its value. Second, this is by no means the only existing list of White Flag members. On the contrary, the colonial archives are particularly rich in lists.