Sudan

The Arabic word sudan is the plural of aswad, meaning black. Arab geographers of the 9th and 10th centuries used Bilad al-Sudan, the land of the black people, for the broad sub-Saharan belt stretching from the Atlantic coast to the Ethiopian highlands. Al-Masudi, writing around 947 CE, applies the term to a vast territory containing dozens of distinct kingdoms and peoples. It was a geographic category, not a political boundary.

The name entered European cartography through medieval translations of Arab geographic texts. By the 16th century, maps from Venice and Antwerp labeled the region Sudan or Soudan in close imitation of the Arabic. The Ottoman Empire, which administered Egypt after 1517, used Sudan for the territories south of Aswan. British and Egyptian forces jointly administered the Nile territories after 1899 as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

The territory that became modern Sudan was given fixed borders by the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium agreement of 1899. The British ran the actual administration while Egypt held nominal co-sovereignty. Independence came on January 1, 1956, and the new republic took the name Sudan from the colonial designation it had been assigned. It was among the first sub-Saharan African nations to achieve independence in the postwar era.

South Sudan split from Sudan in 2011 following a referendum in which 98.8 percent voted for separation. The division followed decades of civil war rooted partly in the colonial redrawing of older political boundaries. The word sudan, which once named a continental belt, now names two countries, neither of which contains all the peoples it originally described. The meaning has narrowed; the word remains.