Under Shading Trees - Twenty years in the Sudans

Fergus Boyle, MA 1981

Under Shading Trees is a memoir detailing some of Fergus Boyle’s experiences working in the Sudans over a period of twenty years or more, intermingled with some of his father, Ranald’s, experiences from some forty years earlier.

Ranald Boyle was an Assistant District Commissioner in the Sudan Political Service, in the years leading up to the Sudan’s independence in 1956. His resignation in 1953 was prompted by his despair over Britain’s betrayal of the southern Sudanese to whom Britain had promised certain guarantees. He spent much of the remaining 45 years of his life advocating on behalf of the southerners, lobbying through national and international political, diplomatic and social circles.

Meanwhile, Fergus, bitten early by the Sudan bug, spent five years working for a leading British humanitarian agency in the Bahr el-Ghazal region of southern Sudan, established a small charitable organisation focussing on southern Sudan following the death of his father and then, later, served with the United Nations Department of Peace Keeping during the transitional period following the signing of a peace agreement which culminated in South Sudan becoming the world’s newest independent country in 2011. Using letters, journals, reports and articles Fergus has written a personal account of these turbulent times concentrating on his father’s and his own experiences, highs and lows, in order to present a picture of a country which, despite its enormous problems, holds a strange fascination over many of those who have lived and worked there for any length of time.

South Sudan in 1948, when Ranald first arrived by river steamer in the Gogrial area, was not very different from the same place in 1993 when Fergus first arrived there by Hercules aircraft. Even now, in 2019, much of South Sudan has little to show for having been part of the independent state of Sudan or the newly created state of South Sudan. The memoir is not an account of scandalous goings-on between aid workers, nor is it an attempt to explain in any detail the complicated politics and demographics of Sudan and its seemingly never ending internal conflicts.

These conflicts have devastated most parts of the country from Darfur in the west, the Red Sea Hills in the east and the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile areas in between, in addition to the south. It does try, however, to present the affection and regard of two men for a people and a country as well as the frustrations of working in a remote, insecure and underdeveloped region.

ISBN: 9781092558624