The Many Hats of the Sudanese Magistrate: Role Conflict in Sudanese Criminal Procedure

The Sudan, a vast country of approximately one million square miles, is a political rather than an ethnic unit. Beside the Arab tribes, which are not as homogeneous as their common origin may suggest, there are numerous non-Arab tribes of several racial and linguistic families. In any description of the population one is reduced to such generalisations as “predominantly Arab and entirely Islamic in the north, and predominantly negroid and pagan in the south, but there are so many exceptions and qualifications…”