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To cite this article: Valerie Hänsch (2020) On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan, Critical African Studies, 12:1, 79-92, In this paper, I explore patience as an attitude towards imposed waiting in uncertainty among peasants in rural Northern Sudan who were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003-2009 Merowe dam construction project. My aim is to examine the complex temporalities that appear in the politics of displacement. I show how such temporal alterations were related to the implementation of a large infrastructural project and to the shaping of the Manasir people's perception of time as they attempted to stay and revive life in their homeland on the shores of the emerging reservoir. Corresponding to the gendered experience of imposed inactivity and the resultant dissolution of time, patience is practised to varying degrees. Amongst the displaced communities, patience, as a temporal practice, represents a commitment both to future divine rewards and to living within the present situation. This commitment, in turn, offers hope and enables people to persevere. I argue that patience is not, as is often assumed, a quietist attitude, but a political practice directed against attacks by the state.Dans cet article, j'explore la patience en tant qu'attitude envers l'attente imposée dans l'incertitude parmi les paysans dans le Nord-Soudan rural qui ont été chassés par les inondation de leur domicile au bord du Nil pendant le projet de construction du barrage de Merowe en 2003-2009. Mon objectif est d'examiner les temporalités complexes qui apparaissent dans la politique de déplacement. Je montre que de telles altérations temporelles étaient liées à la mise en oeuvre d'un grand projet infrastructurel et à la formation de la perception du temps de la population Manasir alors qu'ils cherchaient à rester et vivre à nouveau sur leurs terres sur les rives du réservoir émergent. Correspondant à l'expérience sexuée de l'inactivité imposée et la dissolution du temps en découlant, la patience est pratiquée à différents degrés. Au sein des communautés déplacées, la patience, en tant que pratique temporelle, représente un engagement aussi bien envers des récompenses divines à venir qu'envers la vie dans la situation actuelle. Cet engagement, à son tour, apporte de l'espoir et permet à la population de persévérer. Je défends que la patience n'est pas, contrairement à ce que l'on croit souvent, une attitude quiétiste, mais une pratique politique dirigée contre des attaques par l'Etat.

In this article, I explore how Sudanese communities have attempted to visually document, witness and communicate a silenced history of forced displacement. Thousands of peasants in rural Northern Sudan were flooded out of their homes along the Nile during the 2003–2009 Merowe Dam construction project. My aim is to examine both the complex local interactions with and appropriations of the anthropologist’s video camera, which, in the relational process of witnessing, turned into a stage to provide audio-visual evidence against hegemonic discourses of Sudan’s successful hydroelectric future. I show how my video camera’s affordances of capturing and mediating ‘truth’ evoked specific performative genres of representation in moments of crisis and illustrate how these usages differ from everyday interactions with a video camera. These performative genres of ‘crisis witnessing’, I contend, resonate with globally distributed media realities and thereby reproduce certain practices of communication that are stereotyped in the mass media.

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In this special issue, we explore the pivotal role that the future as a social perception of time and temporality plays in dealings with uncertainty. There are four linkages between uncertainty and future, as the chapters in this special issue show: Firstly, visions of the future result from current and past interpretations of culturally embedded everyday lives. Secondly, a multitude of co-existing models of time is possible. Thirdly, actors adjust their visions of the future when present conditions change. Fourthly, present actions are directed towards a vision of the future which merely serves as a guideline rather than a potential reality. Thus, the temporality of people’s actions and imagination in uncertain times is at the fore of this special issue exploring the unfolding tension between the immediate and the imagined, the actual and the perceived.