David Warren at David Warren Online ("my daily newspaper articles for the time since Sept. 11th, 2001") shared some nearly specialist-level area knowledge of South Sudan.
Money quote(s):
"The frontiers are not yet secure, and the ultimate shape of this new country depends on the resolution of the conflict with (northern) Sudan, over possession of the large district of Abyel, which is a melding zone between the Muslim north and Christian-Animist south, both geographically and demographically."
"Melding zone" is one way of looking at it. Abyei, within South Kordofan (the name itself is a form of arabization-inspired north Sudan cultural imperialism), is part of Islam's "bloody borders," marking the bleeding edge of moslem conquest as it marches (and rides, and raids) further and further up the Nile valley.
"Only in the 19th century did European adventurers become fully aware of regions like southern Sudan, thanks more to private missionary efforts than to imperial ambitions. It was an afterthought to the Anglo-Egyptian authorities, extending their rule into the swampland of the White Nile, a very long way from Cairo; and also to British East African officials, curious to find what lay beyond Uganda.
History, and in this case the imperial histories that underlie so many contemporary world issues, is unfortunately no longer taught except to ideological specialists, which is how I excuse this very general briefing. The British in fact saw the problem coming, of putting millions of tropical rainforest-dwelling black Africans under the rule of desert-dwelling Arabized Muslims, at least a century ago. Their intention to make the region an extension of Uganda, instead of Sudan, was defeated by "events."
So much of today's sprawling political and economic catastrophe through sub-Saharan Africa can be traced not to imperialism, per se, but to the imperial authorities' eagerness to leave around the signal year of 1960. It was an appalling cat's cradle of quick fixes they left behind.
The rest could be attributed to the people they put in power, or dangerously near power, during this evacuation: a generation of African statesmen educated in places like the London School of Economics, or the École Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer, on what were then the latest Fabian and socialist principles.
Add nascent African nationalisms - also encouraged by the chic, departing Europeans - and stir. In retrospect, the reduction of sub-Saharan Africa, with its extraordinary natural resources and diversity of alert and capable peoples, to desperate poverty and a violent hash, was just what we should have expected."
The preceding five short paragraphs encapsulate the historical truths it took me week, and volumes, to conclude. (Nice work.)
"Africa is not a mess because it is black. Africa is a mess because it was made into an immense Petri dish for asinine Utopian experiments, by people who walked when they started going wrong."
Simplistic and incomplete, but not untrue.
