On patience: perseverance and imposed waiting during dam-induced displacement in Northern Sudan

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.