Creating Nations in South Sudan and Post-Colonial Africa
Volume 3 | Issue 4 - Landmarks
Article by Tom Hartley. Edited by Stephen Woodward. Additional Research by Jack Barnes.
One of the most notable events in Africa in 2011 was the Sudanese referendum that saw the independence of South Sudan on July 9th. While their northern neighbours Egypt and Libya were moving from an Arab Spring into a tumultuous and uncertain autumn, Sudan was seemingly bringing to an end a perennial civil war with peace and democracy.
The referendum that secured South Sudan’s independence was a landmark not just for those who voted, but for Africa as a whole. It was only the third time a new nation has been formed in Africa since decolonisation swept the continent in the 1960s and 1970s. The first two changes were seen as internal decolonisation in themselves. In 1990 Namibia, formerly a German colony, asserted its independence from apartheid South Africa. Three years later, Eritreans voted overwhelmingly to become independent from Ethiopia, having been swallowed up by the most powerful state in the region and oppressed for over 40 years.
But South Sudan is different. Unlike Namibia and Eritrea, the boundaries that contain the new nation have never previously existed. Prior to British colonisation, the region had consisted of multiple smaller ethnic groups. After colonisation, it became incorporated into the state of Sudan. The ‘nation’ of South Sudan is in its infancy – just six months old, in fact. Just as the region lurched jubilantly out of one crisis, it appears to have entered another. Now its leaders are faced with the challenge many African leaders faced in the 1960s – to forge an African nation.
Continent-wide debates over the nature of African nationalism can be traced back to 1961. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, leaders of Africa’s already-free states sat down to discuss the future of the continent. The Organisation of African Unity, the predecessor of today’s African Union, was formed. Integral to the issue of Africa’s future was the question of territorial boundaries. There was an inherent paradox in every African independence movement – they were defined along the lines on maps defined by Europeans. In independence speeches, leaders such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah championed the ‘nations’ that had been formed by their former colonisers. In order to win support for their own brand of anti-colonialism and potential future governments, leaders had to instil a sense of nationalism in disparate regions.
Having had to reawaken old ideas in the independence movement, Africa’s first generation of leaders now had to hush them up in order to retain power. After much debate over the merits of keeping or abolishing the old colonial boundaries, the decision was made to ‘respect the territorial integrity’ of African states. This put to an end the hope by some members that the right to self-determination could lead to the disintegration of the colonial states into their pre-colonial forms. Instead the priority was to create strong states – free from internal strife and neo-colonial influence. And of course retain their grip on their newly acquired power.
Of course the reality was much harder to achieve. Rhetoric warning about the potential Balkanisation of Africa wasn’t reflected in the leaders’ abilities to actually do anything about it. The first real test for the OAU’s policy came in the Congo in the 1960. The Congo had like many other African states been formed by explorers signing treaties with natives, and European politicians drawing lines of maps. The Congo’s independence hero, Patrice Lumumba, had secured a popular victory in the first democratic elections. But as the colonial superpower left, Congolese ethnic identities reasserted themselves. In the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga, local politicians began demanding the right to self-determination from the central, distant, Congolese state. Despite denouncing the independence movement as a neo colonialist puppet, Nkrumah and his allies were unable to intervene to save Lumumba’s government. Although the Congo remained bound by its colonial borders, internal division ensured the downfall of Lumumba’s government and the creation of a strong, Western-backed dictatorship in the heart of Africa.
It is only natural that in these states which have been defined by an external force – imperial powers – there is a sense of disillusionment and detachment. The highly ethnicised nature of African politics means ethnic identity has re-emerged in many states, caused in part by the ‘nationalist’ leaders themselves. In some countries, such as Tanzania, politicians have successfully highlighted similarities rather than differences in order to form a genuine nation. In others, such as Botswana, simply strong and even political and economic development that transcends ethnic lines has meant ethnic division has played little part in post-colonial society. But these are the success stories. Many states – particularly those such as Nigeria and the former Sudan which contain regions of various Muslim, Christian and independent religious ethnicities – still see ethnic violence.
Now South Sudan is faced with a similar problem, despite the break from the Muslim-dominated north. There is not a single South Sudanese identity, and maybe there never will be. Instead, what the referendum has achieved is to remove the common enemy – a core idea behind all nationalist movements. While the new Sudan still has a stranglehold over the South’s resources, old identities are threatening to re-emerge to rip the new nation apart. With Nigeria threatening to descend into similar chaos, perhaps the Balkanisation of Africa is finally beginning.