Sudan and South Sudan

From One to Two

B. Malwal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349493760
  9781137437136
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137437143
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Republic of Sudan's former Culture Minister and a leading architect in the movement to gain independence for South Sudan, Bona Malwal, provides a factual and personal account of the break up of Sudan. He explores its troubled history post-colonialism and offers a frank account of the many challenges that both nations face in the coming years.

1

South Sudan: The Beginning of the Struggle for Political Emancipation, 1947–2004

The current government of the newly independent South Sudan has extended the date of the political struggle of the people of South Sudan to the beginning of the 19th century. The political slogans of the government in Juba say that the struggle of the people of South Sudan dates back to the 1820s.¹ It is known that in the Turko-Egypt period in Sudan the people of South Sudan, of disparate ethnicities, were struggling against foreign occupation of their lands and against slavery, without politics playing any role. Political struggle is possible only by those who know what they want politically, and there were no educated South Sudanese at that time. Egypt and Britain, the colonial powers in Sudan, were not concerned with educating the South Sudanese. The British wielded the majority of colonial authority over the entire country, while Egypt was happy to play a secondary colonial role as long as Britain fully recognised that its public colonial civil servants in Sudan were agents of both Britain and Egypt. Egypt’s long-standing interest in Sudan was always the waters of the Nile. It remains a fact of life for Egypt that without the Nile waters there is no Egypt.

Britain’s extensive colonial interests in the Near East were clear. Even if Egypt shared these interests with Britain, the former’s intellectual and technological abilities did not match those of Britain. As a matter of geopolitical prudence and tact, therefore, Egypt conceded the number-one position over Sudan to Britain. From 1898 the country became known as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

At that time Britain had only recently abolished slavery at home, and it turned its attention to ending this social ill in Sudan as well. Northern Sudanese Arabs had no qualms about enslaving South Sudanese. Keeping slaves was not of much economic value to Northern Sudan, because it had not developed the types of farms and industries for which the American slave-holders, for instance, needed African slaves. Rather, the South Sudanese represented a valuable commodity in the Arab slave trade, where they were sold to Egypt and to the Arab Gulf.

The abolition of slavery was one of the most successful British policies in Sudan, but it represents the most divisive period in the history of Sudan as well. Most educated Northern Sudanese refuse to acknowledge that it required a difficult and protracted effort by the British to finally bring slavery to an end in South Sudan. In 1929 the British colonial authority enacted the ‘Closed District Ordinance’ to prohibit Northern Sudanese traders travelling to South Sudan, because it was difficult to know which of the traders were slavers.² Northern Sudanese elites interpret this policy as aimed at preventing political and social contact between the North and the South – a ‘divide-and-rule colonial policy’. It is interesting to note that Northern Sudanese never really talk about slavery in Sudan. Did it exist or did it not? And if it existed, who was enslaving whom? This is despite the fact that there is an entrenched joke amongst Northern Sudanese according to which all South Sudanese and black Africans are referred to as slaves.

Prior to 1947 no political contact occurred between the South and the North. In June of that year the British colonial civil secretary, Sir James Robertson, called the Juba Conference to inform the South Sudanese representatives – selected by the British, not by the South Sudanese themselves – that he had decided that South Sudan would now become part of Northern Sudan.³ Indeed, Robertson came to Juba accompanied by well-educated, sweet-talking Northern Sudanese intellectuals selected by the British for the purpose of reassuring the uneducated tribal chiefs of South Sudan that they would be in the very safe hands of their Northern Sudanese ‘brothers’. Nevertheless, the South Sudanese chiefs who attended the 1947 Juba Conference did not miss the point. Chief Lolik of the Nyanguara tribe of Eastern Equatoria, one of the most vocal of the chiefs attending the conference, told me in a private conversation in Juba in 1966, in the presence of his late son, Pacifico Lolik, that it was clear to the attendees that the British had decided to hand them over to new masters – the Northern Sudanese Arabs. ‘Southerners at the Juba Conference were unanimous in their rejection of the British move on the first day of the conference’, Chief Lolik told me. ‘The second day was different’, he went on. ‘The second day followed the night. Many things happened at night.’

In 1948, the British nominated a legislative assembly in Khartoum, representing the North and the South. Most of the educated South Sudanese who participated in the 1947 Juba Conference were appointed by the British to the new National Assembly in Khartoum. It was difficult not to infer that such appointments were in fact rewards for support of the British position at the Juba Conference a year earlier. In that sense, the South Sudanese appointed to the National Assembly benefited from unity with the North.

As with any political step gone wrong, it is difficult to avoid blame and counter-blame. However, a careful reading of the minutes of the 1947 Juba Conference makes clear that the decisions reached there had been originally decided upon by the Colonial Civil Secretary prior to convening it. Robertson’s own memoirs clearly support this interpretation.⁴

The South and the British

Having decided that the South was not capable of ruling itself, Britain had other options besides annexing South Sudan to Northern Sudan; for instance, annexation to one of its two East African territories, Kenya or Uganda. Those with a low opinion of South Sudanese say the British thought they would have a destabilising effect on the countries of East Africa and so decided to annex South Sudan to Northern Sudan, which was thought to be more capable of managing the unruly South Sudanese native peoples than were the East Africans. The paradox is that the Northern Sudanese never believed it was as a result of British vengeance against the South that South Sudan had to toil for so long under Northern Sudan’s misrule. With no empirical justification, the Northern Sudanese believe that South Sudan and Northern Sudan were always one country and that the British broke it apart. Whatever the justification for ‘one Sudan’, clearly it did not work. The country finally broke up on 9 July 2011 after a long and costly liberation struggle by the South.

The failure of the Sudanese colonial experiment over South Sudan rests entirely with Northern Sudan. It is unbelievable that the British should have judged Northern Sudan capable of managing itself and South Sudan not. Many people in Northern Sudan believe that the South Sudanese struggled so hard against the North due to racist hatred for the Northern Arabs and a refusal to share a country with them. If in fact there was hatred for the Arabs among the South Sudanese, it arose as a result of their treatment by the Northern Sudanese, who are passionate about being Arabs and Muslims. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with such feelings, they believed they could impose these foreign values on the South by force, rather than through persuasion.

In deciding to annex the South to Northern Sudan, the British also believed that South Sudan could not survive on its own. While the South voted to become independent, it remains to be seen whether it will manage to survive given the glaring failure of leadership confronting it at the present time. But it was not conceivable, given the terrible mistreatment it endured from Northern Sudan, that the South would vote to remain part of the same country as the North.

Even the British, who put the two Sudans together as one country in the mid-1940s, were forced in the end to acknowledge that the ‘one Sudan’ project was unsustainable. Thus Britain came to support the right of the people of South Sudan to self-determination. Like most people around the world, the British may be unconvinced as yet that South Sudan will survive as a state, given the current blatant failures of governance in South Sudan. But at least the British have accepted that Northern Sudan did not manage the South well at all.

I had the opportunity to become acquainted with Sir James Robertson following his retirement to Oxford, in the United Kingdom. During our very friendly conversations he expressed deep regret for the human suffering resulting from events taking place between Northern Sudan and South Sudan, but he was not convinced that the South and the North of Sudan could not still be kept together as one country.

I first met Robertson at a state dinner at 10 Downing Street in London, the residence of the British prime minister, in 1974. President Jaafar Mohamed Nimeiri, who had signed the 1972 peace agreement with the South and brought me into his cabinet in Khartoum as minister of culture and information, was on a state visit to the United Kingdom, and I was part of his official entourage. During a state dinner in honour of President Nimeiri hosted by the then prime minister of Britain, the late Edward Heath, I was seated to the right of Robertson and we engaged in a light-hearted conversation about the colonial past of Sudan and his personal role in its history.

Robertson boasts in his memoirs of having alone made Northern Sudan and South Sudan into one country.⁵ After Sudan gained independence in 1956, he went on to serve as the last colonial governor-general of Nigeria, where he is credited with building the federation that exists amongst the various regions. In spite of Nigeria’s many political problems, federation survives in that country at the time of writing. When I asked him why he had not created a similar federation in Sudan, and whether it might not have spared the country the terrible bloodshed that ensued, Sir James replied frankly that, throughout his long service in Sudan, he never had the opportunity to serve in South Sudan. Prior to our meeting in London in 1974, he had not had a single South Sudanese friend. His Northern Sudanese friends, all ‘honourable people’ according to him, had assured him that they would look after South Sudan. The idea that they would fail to do so was something he could never have anticipated. My first conversation with the last colonial civil secretary of Sudan made it clear that the British at the time thought that South Sudan had to be looked after, rather than being prepared and enabled to look after itself. South Sudanese were considered backward tribespeople in need of a caretaker. As political circumstances were forcing the British to liquidate their colonial hold on the Sudan, that role would have to be transferred to their friends, the Northern Sudanese.

Relations between South Sudan and Northern Sudan had never had a blueprint or a point of reference. The British simply handed South Sudan over to the Northern Sudanese – a gift, as it were – as part of their plan to give power to Northern Sudan to run the two parts of the country. Unfortunately the Northern Sudanese were never grateful for this British gift.

At the outbreak of the August 1955 uprising in South Sudan the new prime minister of what was to become the state of Sudan, Ismail al-Azhari, said, ‘This is a storm in a tea cup.’⁶ But in fact the ‘mutiny’ in the South, as the Southern uprising was derogated by the North at the time, was for very clear political purposes: the South had been ignored completely in the filling of nearly 1,000 jobs that were taken over by the Sudanese from the British – not one of these jobs went to a South Sudanese.

There was never room for reconciliation with the South, as far as the political leadership of Northern Sudan was concerned. There were other occasions when Northern Sudan might have delivered political overtures to South Sudan, not only in terms of material, but also political accommodation. It was becoming increasingly clear to Northern Sudan that the South deeply resented the fact that the country was moving towards the Arab world. The South resented Arabism as an ideology for the country, and they feared forced Islamisation and cultural assimilation by the Arabs. These fears and doubts were expressed by the South Sudanese, who were in need of political reassurance from Northern Sudan.

What did Mr Azhari do? On 1 January 1956, independence day, Prime Minister Ismail al-Azhari declared Sudan an Arab country and joined the Arab League of Nations. This pronouncement, more than anything else, likely entrenched the feeling of resentment and separation among the South Sudanese. For the first time, terms like Arabisation and Islamisation became negative slogans with which to rally the people of South Sudan to the struggle against the North. Relations between South Sudan and Northern Sudan never once became normalised following independence in 1956 and the proclamation of Sudan as an Arab country. These terrible relations, moreover, were exacerbated by human rights atrocities in the South. Unfortunately for South Sudan, all the tangible resources and means with which to manage the state of Sudan at that time came from the North.

With rebellion and resentment of the rule of Northern Sudan being the order of the day in South Sudan, the Northern Sudan political elite simply decided there would be no socio-economic activity in South Sudan until the resentment was suppressed and effectively subdued by force. Efforts by the political leadership of South Sudan to discuss and resolve contested issues and to normalise relations between the South and the North were simply ignored.

It is clear that political links between South Sudan and Northern Sudan were really only established with the 1947 Juba Conference. Contact had occurred intermittently between the ethnic communities of the South and the North prior to 1947 but these were limited to native administrative contacts.

In the Cairo discussions of 1952, when the future of a united Sudan was discussed and negotiated by the two colonial powers, Britain and Egypt, the colonial people of Sudan were only represented in these very serious discussions by the Northern Sudanese political elite. South Sudanese were excluded in all the political discussions, in spite of the 1947 Juba Conference. Thus only the views of the North were presented, because it was most unlikely that the Northern Sudanese elite negotiating with the British and Egyptians over the Sudan cared about the views of South Sudanese in these talks.

By the time of the 1947 Juba Conference, it was public knowledge that the civil secretary in Khartoum had requested reports from his officials in the South on which to base his decision about the unity of South Sudan with Northern Sudan. The majority of these reports were negative – the British colonial civil servants serving in South Sudan did not want the South to be united with the North. This could explain why the civil secretary in Khartoum considered the possibility of annexing South Sudan either to Uganda or Kenya, both of which were also British colonial territories. But the British changed their minds about attaching South Sudan to Uganda or to Kenya, likely due to the preferences of Egypt and Northern Sudan. Both Egypt and Northern Sudan were keen to extend their control over the Nile River because of their dependence on the Nile waters. Controlling South Sudan would enhance their control of the White Nile.

The White Nile flows through Sudan for nearly 2,000 miles before crossing into Egypt from Northern Sudan. Egypt was especially keen not to lose control of the flow of the sources of the Nile, and while their influence there lasted, the British did not let the Egyptians down on this point. Britain therefore surrendered control of South Sudan to Northern Sudan to please both Egypt and Northern Sudan and to secure British control of the Suez Canal. South Sudan, lacking any voice or influence, was powerless to prevent it. This, of course, is now history.

The Northern Sudanese mismanaged the whole of Sudan, including the South, and the British lost control of the Suez Canal to its legitimate owner, Egypt, in 1956, under Gamal Abdel Nasser. South Sudan struggled for most of the next sixty years until it finally gained its independence.

As the Sudanisation of the Sudan civil service took shape and Northern Sudan took over full control of the administration of the South from the British, political discontent was widespread across South Sudan. After 1947, when the future independence of Sudan appeared inevitable, the British organised and trained a new army for Sudan, the Sudan Defence Force. This army was recruited, trained and organised regionally.

The main army unit of the Sudan Defence Force for South Sudan was based in Torit, Eastern Equatoria. This made sense as Torit is strategically important in terms of defence. It borders Kenya and Uganda, as well as Ethiopia in the northeast. Soldiers of the Sudan Defence Force were a source of pride and happiness for the people of the South, wherever they were stationed in South Sudan. They were tough and very disciplined.

As the date for the independence of Sudan was being debated, it appears that the Northern Sudanese political elite, who had taken total control of the state political and administrative machine from the British, were beginning to worry about what to do with the Sudan Defence Force unit at Torit, who they feared might disrupt the plans for independence by mutinying. The South Sudanese soldiers were unhappy that, in the process of Sudanisation of the military, the British commander of the Torit unit had been replaced by a Northern Sudanese. Had it been a fair Sudanisation process, one of their own South Sudanese officers should have been promoted to unit commander. The North took note of the discontent in Torit and decided to test the waters. The decision was made in Khartoum to transfer the Torit unit to Northern Sudan, four months before the celebration of independence. In fact, the proclamation of the date for the independence of Sudan was made later, on 19 December 1955. So why was the decision taken to transfer this South Sudan unit of the national army to Northern Sudan?

Preparations for the transfer itself were also handled in a very clumsy way. The South Sudanese soldiers were to be disarmed and would have to travel to Northern Sudan, some 1,000 miles and at least two weeks’ journey away, without weapons. Never has an entire military unit ever travelled over such a long distance unarmed. Something was fishy.

On 16 August 1955, four months before the independence of Sudan on 1 January 1956, the Sudan Defence Force unit at Torit mutinied. At least both Northern Sudan and the British colonial powers called it a mutiny. For South Sudanese, it was the beginning of their revolution. That day in Torit is now a national public holiday in South Sudan.

The army was ordered from the North to take over the South. The dreaded Hagana command, the force from Western Sudan that was largely drawn from the people of the Nuba Mountains, were flown by air to Juba. They took over Juba town in a matter of hours, making Juba Airport their command post. All the schools were closed in the South as a result of the Torit uprising.

My own school, Juba Commercial Secondary School, in the centre of Juba town, was taken over by the military. The headmaster of the school, Mohamed al-Hassan Fadl al-Sid, had reported to the Ministry of Education, South Sudan sector in Jub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Liberation or Political Realism?
• 1 South Sudan: The Beginning of the Struggle for Political Emancipation, 1947–2004
• 2 Northern Sudan and South Sudan: Denying the South Autonomy Led to Independence, 1947–2011
• 3 The Anya-Nya Liberation Movement, 1955–72
• 4 The Southern Front and Self-Determination, 1964–2011
• 5 The Nimeiri Regime and the Oil Debate, 1980–83
• 6 South Sudan and the June Islamic Revolution in Sudan, 1989–2011
• 7 The SPLM/A: As Liberators and Rulers of South Sudan
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index