By John Knox
Like storm clouds on a weather map, planet Earth’s political isobars seems to be changing quicker and quicker every day.
Revolutions of various colours are sweeping across the Arab world. Eastern Europe has just been through a mighty transfiguration. In the past 20 years, 22 new nations have joined the United Nations, a birth rate of more than one a year. And another country is about to join this growing family, South Sudan.
A Sudanese neighbour, who came to dinner the other night, reminded me that I had travelled through the Sudan 35 years ago, before all the recent troubles began. We read through my little blue-covered diary with increasing embarrassment at its innocence and its quaint colonial assumptions.
South Sudan is an oil rich country of more than 5 million people with their own distinct culture. For the past 20 years it has been loosening its ties with its larger neighbour. But that’s where the comparison with Scotland ends because even the SNP would be astonished by the decisiveness of last month’s independence referendum.
Over 98 per cent of the people voted "yes" to independence, on a turnout of 97 per cent. But no wonder, because it follows a long and bloody civil war between North and South that only ended in 2005. It left two million people dead. Now the country is on course to become the world’s newest independent state, on 9 July, once final negotiations with the North are complete.
The only region where there were doubts was South Darfur where 63 per cent wanted Sudan to remain united. The figure points to the root of the problem - the ethnic differences between the Muslim Arab peoples of the North and the Christian non-Arabs of the South.
In 2003, this conflict reached a flash-point in Darfur, where Janjaweed militias, backed by Omar al-Bashir’s government in Khartoum, attacked ordinary civilians in their villages, killing thousands of them and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes. It led to a huge international aid effort and to the International Criminal Court issuing a warrant for the arrest of al-Bashir on charges of genocide.
When I travelled through Darfur in 1975, there was no hint of the troubles to come. It seemed to me a poor, quiet backwater of the African interior. I was on my way home after a two-year stint as a volunteer teacher in Cameroon. It was an amazing journey and my first real encounter with the Arab world and Islam.
My diary entry for 25 June, 1975, reads:
Did about 8 km, all on foot. Lorry stuck in awful mud. Dead flat muddy/sandy country. Walked into Sudan at 12 noon - great achievement! Lorry arrived late in evening. Sleeping in Commissariat.I was half way through a three week long journey from Bangui in the Central African Republic to El Fasher in the western Sudan on board an old Bedford truck, trading tobacco and tea across the border. I was travelling with a group of white-robed traders and a lorry crew of driver and two “boys”, eight of us in all, and no common language. On 27 June, my diary records:
Bad luck again today. The road was atrocious - very soft. The second major hole of the day, at about 11am, stuck us fast, and of course, the engine had to cut out on us. No starter, no jack, ground too difficult to dig us out. Tried unloading the vehicle. Tried other ideas. No, we have to wait and see what tomorrow brings. Spent a mosquito troubled night. Saw a long grey/green snake moving with great rapidity through the trees.There was no progress the next day. But in evening of the following day, a party of shepherds passed us and, for a suitable sum, offered to take me on horseback to the next town. Monday, 30 June:
Left camp at 2.15am in the moonlight. Rode 13 hours with only one stop, after 6 hours, to adjust the saddle. Only four biscuits and one gulp of water all day. Searing hot sun from 9am till 3pm. Lips burst despite my hat. Blood all rushed to my feet, sore and swelling. The journey almost finished me. Dismounted painfully at Etoile and took two hours to recover with six cups of tea and lots of water. Left again by lorry at 8pm but had to stop for the night after 8km because the driver was too drunk.I remember the bonnet of the truck kept lifting up, obscuring the driver’s already doubtful vision. But by the end of the next day we had arrived at a place called Igbifuldi and I was writing in my diary:
Sudan is quite an independent and viable civilisation. Donkeys and camels are the main means of transport. Was befriended and spent the night in a grass hut in somebody’s compound.My dinner guest read these stuttering diary entry entries with me in polite amusement. What he really thought I wasn’t sure. For him it was all a long time ago and in a distant part of the vast south-western Sudan. It turned out that he was probably in school in Omdurman the day I visited the war graves there when I finally reached Khartoum. From my book shelves we dug out Winston Churchill’s account of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 when he was a young solder in the 21st Lancers.
The advance continued. The Dervish left began to stretch out across the plain towards Kerreri - as I thought, to turn our right flank. Their centre, under the Black Flag, moved directly towards Surgham. The right pursued a line of advance south of that hill. This mass of men were the most striking of all. They could not have mustered less than 6,000. Their array was perfect. They displayed a great number of flags - perhaps 500 - which looked at a distance white, though they were really covered with texts from the Koran and which by their admirable alignment made this division of the Khalifa’s army look like the old representation of the Crusaders in the Bayeux tapestry.For my guest it must have been so strange to hear of such battles long ago, and journeys through the outback on Bedford trucks, by young white men from a distant land. It’s the irreverence of it all, especially when set against the thought that the Sudan is one of the world’s oldest civilisations and has seen many an empire rise and fall in its sands since the first Pharaohs bathed in River Nile. And now the Sudan is going through yet another re-incarnation. The South is breaking away and the 22 year old regime of al-Bashir is under pressure - there have been Tunisian/Egyptian style demonstrations in Khartoum. What the shifting sands of the political desert will reveal is anyone’s guess. Past records are not promising. What we can only hope is that all this nation-deconstruction and nation-building - in Africa, the Middle East and Europe - will lead to happier lives for individual people.
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