Landscape Testimonies: Gulf Capital, “Deficient Deserts,” and Property‐Making in Central Sudan

ABSTRACT In the agricultural Gezira region of central Sudan, the term khalla refers partly to communal land that is used for grazing animals or rain‐fed farming. Beginning with the provocation that the khalla is “running away from us” due to large‐scale land investments and agribusiness practices, this essay takes up the khalla as a method through which to trace and analyze how past and emergent forms of capital accumulation, property, and empire‐making structure everyday life at the edge of the Gezira scheme, one of the largest irrigation projects in the world. It draws on Michel‐Rolph Trouillot's insight that landscapes testify to the layering of successive forms of colonial intrusion in a way that unites time and lays out how people have negotiated and contested these intrusions through forms of living beyond protest. The khalla testifies not only to waves of dispossession and destruction but also to continual processes of recovery and regeneration. While it may be running away, the khalla also persists in a way that prevents property from becoming a totalizing concept, allowing us to ask: What does and does not belong to the khalla ? If belonging often exceeds ownership, then what is the relationship between property and belonging?