The Southern Sudan and its Future
By EDWARD ATIYAH
THE air passenger from Khartoum to Juba—making today in five hours the one-thousand-mile journey which used to take fourteen days by Nile steamer—can see at a glance at least one reason why the Arab-Moslem penetra- tion of the Sudan did not extend beyond Molokai. This glance will show him, about half way through, that he is passing, geographically, from the Middle East to equatorial Africa. Thus, while in the Northern Sudan the invading Arab tribes and their camels, thrusting down from Egypt in the centuries following the rise of Islam, must have obviously felt at home treading open desert spaces of scrub and pasture-land, one can imagine them halting suspiciously on the fringe of the alien South, loth to trust themselves to its long and heavy rainy season, swampy ground and dense bush and grass. Because their advance was arrested there, the Southern Sudan remained purely negroid and, in the main, pagan and non-Arabic- speaking, while the North became Arabised and Islamised much in the same way as most of the Middle East and North Africa had been. The big question now is whether what the Arabs failed to do originally by conquest can be accomplished peacefully in the next few generations by their descendants, the Northern Sudanese, with the co-operation of the Southerners—whether, that is to say, the three million inhabitants of the South can be sufficiently assimilated to the five or six million inhabitants of the North to make permanently secure the political union of the country.
For the present the Southerners (or, more properly speaking, their handful of educated representatives) have chosen to link their destinies with those of the North in the constitutional developments that are leading the Sudan towards self- determination. But it should be recognised that they had really no alternative to this choice. Fear of white supremacy pre- cluded any consideration of a common future with the territories of Billfish East Africa; while every - thinking Southerner could plainly see that the South by itself was not a viable country. To have parted with the North without seeking any new affiliation would have left it—though with continued British help and guidance—in an impossible vacuum. Could they have had their own way, the Southerners would have preferred to wait a little longer for self-government and independence, so that the gap in education and political development between them and the Northerners could have been somewhat narrowed before they were left face to face with one another. But the pace was forced on them, and they had to go with the North, prematurely or not. More- over, the Northerners, pointing to the extreme backwardness of the Smith after fifty years of the present regime, were able to argue with some plausibility that the feared gap would be more quickly reduced if South and North went forward together under the creative impetus of self-government than if the South were to choose some special protected regime for the time being that would keep it cut off from the North and its developments.
The South-did not choose this. It chose to be represented in the Legislative Assembly when that first organ of self- government was set up in 1948; and in the four years of the Assembly's life that have just ended the contingent of Southern members (mostly mission-educated, Christian and English- speaking) made their mark in Khartoum, playing their full part in the constitutional experiment, holding their own on all issues concerning the South, and winning the respect of their Northern colleagues, who found them reasonably co-operative. Yet some of these Southern parliamentarians were no more than low-grade government clerks in their native districts, and continued to be that even while they sat in the Assembly, being granted special leave to attend its sessions and returning, on adjournment, from national politics to parochial administration. A little time ago I saw one of them at a remote district near the frontiers of the Belgian Congo, sitting behind a small desk in shorts and white canvas shoes. He rose deferentially with a " Good morning, Sir," when the District Commissioner entered his office—very much the subordinate official. In a few days' time he was due to fly to Khartoum to express his views on the new constitution for self-government in debate with Ministers and Secretaries. Being one of the very few educated people in his country. he was needed both as a clerk and a legislator. A pleasant story is told of another of these Southern legislators of the Sudan. He had started life as a house-boy in the service of a District Commissioner, who had recognised his exceptional intelligence and sent him to a mission school. Last year. visiting England as a member of the Legislative Assembly, he was invited to stay with his old employer, the D.C. No sooner had he arrived than he took off his coat and got down, with undiminished skill, to his old chores, insisting on giving the family a complete rest while he was in the house.
Now, having secured two important safeguards in the con- stitution for self-government (the reservation by the Governor- General, as Head of State, of special powers with regard to the South, and the condition that the Council of Ministers shall always include at least two Southern members), the Southerners are willing to explore, with their more numerous and advanced Northern compatriots, the near approaches to independence. Their attitude, that is to say, is a cautiously experimental one. They see that they can derive considerable benefits from their association with the North on account of its more highly developed educational apparatus and its superior financial resources. On the other hand, they have their fears. They (i.e. the educated minority that speaks for them) are mostly Christians, while the Northerners are Moslems. Fifty years ago the Northerners were raiding them for slaves; thirty years ago many of them, though theoretically emancipated, were still living as slaves in Northern households, and, though that relationship may be assumed to have passed for ever into history, its psychological manifestations are not yet entirely dead.
As for the attitude of the Northerners towards the South, ten years ago it was unanimously categorical—a staunch determination to hold on to the South. For this ardent possessiveness there were two principal reasons: the belief that the South held vast potential riches, and the suspicion that the British were segregating it from the North with the object ultimately of cutting it off,rompletely and annexing it to their other possessions in East Africa. Both these factors have to some extent ceased to operate. Whatever their intentions in the past, the British have now themselves fostered the union of North and South. As for the El Dorado legend, the Northerners are beginning to realise that, whatever ultimate benefits they may hope for from the South, it will be a very long time before these can be realised, and that meanwhile the South will be a liability and a drag on the North, demanding for its development a share of Northern resources that can be ill spared by a country itself under-developed and struggling with the problems of its own development. Lastly, doubting whether they can assimilate the Southerners to the Arab- Moslem tradition, some Northern thinkers are tending to shrink from the prospect of carrying a large alien minority whose purely African affiliation may run counter to the natural orientation of the North towards the Arab Middle East.
True, this new trend in the thought of the Northern Sudanese is still a minority trend, uncertain And unofficial. But it may gain strength with time, particularly if the Southerners become difficult and threaten to hold up the forward march of the North towards full independence, as they well may. What they have accepted now is only self-government under a British Head of State invested with special powers for their protection. Can they, in a few years' time, be induced to accept independence without foreign safeguards, should that be the choice of the North ? Or take the question of assimila- tion. It is obviously the intention of the North to assimilate the South by making Arabic its lingua franca and Islam its religion. No one can in fairness deny the legitimacy of this intention, and there are many who agree that it is in the interest of the Southerners themselves to become Arabic-speaking Moslems if they are to form one nation with the North. As far as language is concerned, there will be no trouble; the Southerners are quite pleased to adopt Arabic as their common language. Already a rudimentary form of it is the general medium of intercourse between different tribes, and the new syllabuses introduced by the Ministry of Education into the South (with the approval of the Southern members) provide for the teaching of Arabic in all primary schools. But obviously the settlement of the religious issue will not be so easy. The trend of the last fifty years in the South has been towards Christianity, not Islam. Education was almost entirely entrusted to Christian missions of various denomina- tions, which, unlike their counterparts in the Moslem North, were not debarred from proselytising among pagans. As a result, there are about 100,000 Christians in the South at present and only about 10,000 Moslems. It is obvious that the politicians of the North will not want that trend to con- tinue, that they will not for long tolerate the influence and activities of the missions in so far as these run counter to the Northern policy of assimilation. But the Southern politicians are mainly Christians and supporters of the missions by whom they were educated., Will they acquiesce in a policy of Islamisation from the North ? These are the problems that will have to be solved if the two parts of the Sudan are to cohere permanently—to form one nation, or at least one State.
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