Al Qadarif - History

History

Al-Gada-ye-rif market place developed into a village; then into a town with dwellers cultivating its fertile soil with sorghum, sesame, peanuts and vegetables. Its green plains during the rainy seasons attracted many nomad herds and peasants from neighbouring areas.

According to Holt and Daly, the Shukriya, who were camel-owning nomads and the leading tribe of the southern Butana, were living and ruling the grain-producing rain lands of Gadarif or Qadarif, where a tribal market developed. This place, originally called Suq Abu Sinn (Abu Sinn's Market) has taken over the name Qadarif, anglicized as Gedaref.

The Scottish explorer James Bruce (who calls the town Teawa) passed through al Qadarif in 1772. He records that its sheikh, Fidele, was a vassal of the Kingdom of Sennar. Teawa or Twawa today is a name of a hill in the western part of the city. The British explorer Samuel Baker stopped in this town in November 1862. He mentions in his book The Nile Tributaries Of Abyssinia that it lay on the trade route between Khartoum and Kassala, and describes at length its twice-weekly market.

During the Turkiyah Egyptian rule, Gedaref became an administrative unit with a strong military garrison. The Mahdist forces preserved this statute when they occupied it in 1884 during the Mahdist Revolt, using it as a base to conquer other places in the area and neighbouring Ethiopia.

Sir Gawain Bell, who worked in the Sudan in 1931 to 1945 as Assistant Inspector for Gedaref, referred to Gedaref in his book (Shadows on the sand), as a town with more African appearance than Arab, because of its hut houses (locally called quttiyya) made of wood, reeds and grass. Its population was more than fifteen thousand, a mixture of Arab tribes and peoples from Nigeria, Eritrea and Abyssinia.

In September 1898 a British battalion led by Lieutenant-Colonel Parsons moved from Kassala toward Gedaref and clashed with a Mahdist Dervishes army composed of 3,500 men under the command of the Mahdist Emir Sa'ad-allah in a jungle located between the River Atbara and Gedaref town. The fighting was fierce, but the forces of Parsons managed finally to defeat the Mahdist Dervishes. In the town a small garrison was left consisting of 200 soldiers led by the Mahdi Emir Nur Angara. The Mahdist Dervishes who fought bravely realized their defeat and retreated to the west of the city. Most of the defeated army was composed of soldiers from the Darfur and Kordofan regions of western Sudan. They had no choice except to settle their status with the British to stay and live with their families in the western part of Gedaref, which later became the basis of the Mayoral Bakr, whose influence extends to the frontier town of Gallabat in the Sudanese Ethiopian border.

During the Second World War, Gedaref became very important for the Condominium of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, by providing food (mainly grain and oil seeds) to the armies of the Allies in East Africa. After the war the town became also more attractive for agricultural investment to many segments of Sudanese tribes, especially after the establishment of the Mechanized Farming Corporation in 1968.