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For Wendy, with love
Contents
1. Introduction: “This Is Where We Came From”
2. South Sudan in the Nile Basin
4. Trade and Empires, Tribal Zones and Deep Rurals
6. The Dual Colonialism of the Condominium
7. The Politics of Competing Nationalisms
9. Self-Determination in the Twenty-First Century
Illustrations
Figure
Banner of ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Latif and John Garang, 2005
Maps
1. Topography of Sudan and South Sudan
2. South Sudan in the nineteenth century
Tables
2.1. Some languages of South Sudanese and related peoples
8.1. Comparisons of civil wars
Map 1 Topography of Sudan and South Sudan. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
Map 2 South Sudan in the nineteenth century. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
Map 3 South Sudan in 1956. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
Map 4 South Sudan in 2011. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP
1
Introduction
“This Is Where We Came From”
On 9 July 2011 I attended South Sudan’s formal independence ceremony in Juba, an event that marked a departure for Africa. Most African countries became independent on a negotiated “transfer of power” from a colonial authority to a new national elite. South Sudan’s independence came from the directly expressed will of its people. There was a shared sense of the historical importance of the event beyond the exercise of self-determination by Africa’s newest nation. My companions that day included a Kenyan and a Ugandan, both from communities who shared languages and histories with South Sudan. “This is where we came from,” one of them commented. “This is our home.”
Watching the arrival of several African heads of state, one sensed a change in Africa as well. When the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was founded in the early 1960s, Sudan was already locked in its first civil war. South Sudan’s exile leaders, fighting what they called their own anticolonial struggle, were shunned by the new African governments bound in solidarity to each other. South Sudanese warnings against the nascent OAU becoming a club for dictators proved all too prescient, but as John Garang, South Sudan’s leader in the second civil war, later commented, “We were the pariahs of Africa,” and the warnings were ignored. Yet here Africa’s leaders now were lining up to watch the flag of one African Union member go down as that of a future member went up.
My own introduction to South Sudan began more than forty years earlier as a student at Makerere University College in Uganda sharing classes with South Sudanese refugee students. Sudan was then nearing a turning point in its long first civil war. Ja’afar Nimeiri’s May Revolution had proclaimed that the war needed a political rather than a military solution. Southern guerrilla forces, the Anyanya (named after a local poison), were finally coalescing around a unified leadership. Despite pronouncements of an imminent peace, the war continued for nearly three more years.
This was also a time of revolution in the writing and teaching of African history, moving beyond the histories of colonial pioneers and embracing the investigation of the indigenous past. The recently published Zamani: A Survey of East African History presented an integrated regional history based on this new research. As welcome as this was, there were still some silences. East Africa stopped at the northern borders of Uganda and Kenya. Aside from references to prehistoric “River Lakes Nilotes” and nineteenth-century “Khartoumers,” South Sudanese history was absent. I came away from these combined experiences with the desire to write for South Sudan the type of history that now defined the field of African history.
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