Paper long abstract:

In December 1953 Sukumar Sen, an Indian civil servant, bid farewell to Sudan, after ten months as Chairman of the Electoral Commission which had just overseen Sudan's 'self-government' election. 'Your election', he told the people of Sudan in a radio broadcast, 'can legitimately claim to have been a model of its kind'. Sen was something of an authority in the new field of end-of-colonialism elections, having organized the Republic of India's first election in 1949, but he was not alone in the idea that Sudan's polls might be a model. As polling began in November 1953, the Sudan Government - with the permission of Sen's multi-national Electoral Commission - had released a photographic book on the election, intended to 'arouse the interest and sympathy of all democratic people' by showing the polls as an example. Purporting to show the whole electoral process, from the defining of constituencies, through the casting of ballots to the final announcement of the victor's name by a uniformed Returning Officer, the book casually blurred representation and reality, offering staged photographs with the assurance that 'they faithfully represent the scenes which are talking place during the elections'.

For some, at least, the ability to stage this process in itself asserted - to an international audience - Sudan's readiness to join the international community. As Sen, again, had put it at the start of the election, this was for the people of Sudan 'a rare opportunity of demonstrating to the entire world that they possess political maturity and the qualities that go to make a nation great and progressive, namely: tolerance, discipline, integrity and a sense of civic duty'. But what form should this model take? The election saw determined attempts at manipulation - by Sudanese and by Sudan's rival colonial masters, Egypt and Britain. Much of this manipulation revolved around the mechanics of the election, and there were bitter arguments within the Electoral Commission which belied the bland good cheer of the picture book. The Egyptians believed that direct voting would favour their supporters; the British thought that indirect voting would serve their interests, and as a result the ballot was a curious mixture of systems - direct and indirect, and with voting 'by acclamation' and by token as well as by ballot.

Yet all involved were driven by a concern over representation - over how the election would look, to outsiders and to those involved. Was it to be a demonstration of incipient nationhood, as Sen suggested, or a evidence (as one British official privately observed) of the 'farce of self-government elections [for] peoples who consider themselves as belonging to a tribe and not to a nation'? And behind the disputes over details of process, all involved in planning the election shared a concern with the election as an exercise in governmental ordering: this was a performance which was aimed also at a participant audience - the Sudanese people, for whom the election was an experience of being listed, ordered, and marshalled, as much as one of exercising choice. In the aftermath of the election, British officials consoled themselves on the disappointing (for them) result by reaffirming this aspect of the ballot: 'it's a comfort', remarked one, 'to see the Sudanese still retaining their stolid placidity and respect for law and order'.

This paper will examine the visions of election offered by the photographic book as an exploration of late-colonial ideas of what elections should be, and will also note the significant elisions effected by this pictorial record, which foregrounded the educated and rendered invisible those whom the electoral process tended to exclude. It will suggest that, for those who organized it, the election was concerned not so much with representation of the will of the people, but rather with the representation of process.