Preserving Sudan’s cultural heritage

Dr. Khalifa Omer is turning a unique collection of old Sudanese manuscripts and documents into an online catalogue. This meticulous work ensures that these rare insights into Sudanese history are preserved and available for generations of researchers to come.

Every Tuesday and Thursday from 10 am till closing hour you’ll find Khalifa Omer at the Special Collections at the University of Bergen Library. There you will see him bent over old documents, property certificates, land transfer contracts and a myriad of other papers documenting Sudan’s history from medieval times up until now. His excitement upon finding a marriage certificate from Northern Sudan describing the dowry in detail – from sharing a donkey to the ‘pigeon’ coloured cow – is contagious.

Giving the Sudan milieu in Bergen an edge
As part of the Sudan Norway Academic Cooperation (SNAC) project, Khalifa Omer, historian and associate professor at the University of Khartoum, is currently digitalising parts of the voluminous Rex Seán O’Fahey collection based at the Special Collections at the University of Bergen Library.

Throughout his career, the Bergen-based Sudan scholar Rex Seán O’Fahey did a meticulous effort collecting documents from official records like the Sudanese National Records Office (NRO) and the Ministry of Culture and Information, but also from family collections. The documents that Omer now works his way through, the Khartoum collection, as O’Fahey titled the copies he made of manuscripts and books while resident in or visiting Khartoum in the 1970s and 1980s, have a special relevance for him as a University of Khartoum scholar. He emphasizes the importance of preserving archival material that is unique in its richness, covering all aspects of Sudan from geography to cultural and economic history.

-The material is also unique in the sense that it is hard to find similar information anywhere else. Having the opportunity to go through this collection enriches my experience as a historian. It gives me so much knowledge about several texts that I previously didn’t know a great deal about, like the marriage certificates and land tenure documents, he says.

The work has an extra dimension with the current war as a backdrop. Sudan’s cultural heritage is under severe threat from combat action and looting. Several museums have already been obliterated.

-We know that NRO is safe for now, but it is hard to get reliable information. We simply don’t know what the situation is like in regard to many culturally and historically significant archives and collections. With the imminent threat of destruction and with Sudanese students and scholars unable to get access to libraries, the work we are doing here is especially important, says Omer.

The copies are in most instances unique in their kind.

Creating a bilingual catalogue
In practice, Omer is turning the Khartoum collection into a digital catalogue of searchable sources on Sudan’s heritage that will be available to everyone. This catalogue will contain information like dates, authors and topics in addition to a short description of each listing.

The catalogue will be made available in both Arabic and English, making it an invaluable resource to Sudan scholars.

-This gives the Sudan research environment in Bergen an edge compared to other institutions. I am not aware of any other academic institutions in Europe that can offer this deep insight into Sudanese history and heritage in both Arabic and English, he says.

Learning from the past to create a better future
Omer is currently on a guest researcher stay in Bergen. The Khartoum files on which he is working include items covering the timespan from the Sultanate of Sennar to the Mahdist state, while also extending into the Anglo-Egyptian period, and the modern and contemporary history of Sudan. The collection covers a wide range of subject matter related to the history of Sudan including but not limited to social, economic, educational, administrative, and religious aspects. So far, from this collection, Omer has reached modern times but there is still a plethora of documents and manuscripts to cover. Towards the end of his stay, in late November, he and Alexandros Tsakos, Senior Academic Librarian and Scientific Director of Manuscripts' and Rare Books' Collection at the University of Bergen, are planning a seminar that will deal with the importance of digitalising sources for the generations to come and of such collections as a gateway to understanding the people and cultures of the past.

The importance of understanding history should never be underestimated according to Omer. A former graduate of the university in Manchester, he likes to tell his students to look to the British government.

-So many students plan to get a degree in engineering or medicine. But how many of the members of the British government are engineers or doctors? Only very few. How many have a degree in history? There is always someone. And why is that? Because you must learn from the past in order to prepare for the future.