A Lecture—The Blood of Experience: The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: A Search for Common Ground

A Lecture— The Blood ofExperience The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: ? Search for Common Ground Robert O. Collins University of California, Santa Barbara The blood of experience meanders on In the vast expanse of the valley of time The new is come and the old is gone And time abides a changing clime. AH A. Mazrui Any review of the Southern Sudan today is a remorseless and melancholy task whose reward is more in the expectation of better things to come than a lament for a tragic past. All of us gathered here this evening need not dwell upon the years of drought and death, fierce fighting with its civilian and military fatalities, opportunities lost through personal ambition, humanitarian assistance compromised by greed, international intervention frustrated by national interests. To many Sudanese and non-Sudanese who have followed the course of events in the Sudan and particularly die South, they despair at any solution to the current imbroglio and sadly surrender to an historical inevitability that the Southern Sudan is ungovernable, a Hobbesian state where every man's Presented at the Conference on "The Conflict in the Southern Sudan: A Search for Common Ground" sponsored by the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel College, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and the African Studies Association in Canada, Project Ploughshares, and the United Church of Canada.»Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 4, No. 1 (New Series) 1997, pp. 21-37 21 22 Robert O. Collins hand is raised against every other. There are those who subscribe to such a doleful portrait, like Dorian Gray, stripped of the facade ofyouth, hope, and vitality to expose a decay before years, pessimism without contemplation , lethargy in despondency. They conclude that history has dealt the cards to the southern Sudanese from a stacked deck and extract from the pages of the past the words of alien rulers to prove it-Baker, Gordon, Karamallah Kurkusawi, Symes, Robertson, Ibrahim Abboud-whose opinions are succinctly summed up by the infamous remark of Sir Harold MacMichael during his first official visit to the Southern Sudan in 1927 when he dismissed the region as a "Serbonian Bog into which had drifted or had been pushed all the lowest racial elements surviving north of the equator and a great deal of equally decaying vegetation." Nothing, however, is inevitable in history. Few have ever waxed philosophically about the Sudan, let alone the future of the South, but it is not foreordained by the Azande henge cult nor The Washington Times that "a whole culture, a whole civilization is disappearing." Despite the millions who have died, the destruction ofmaterial and social structures, the continuation of conflict, one cannot deny that man is powerless to confront the catastrophe of the Southern Sudan, that he is no longer the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. Despite the soothsayers of doom and gloom we cannot yet admit that the obstacles to the current calamity are insurmountable, that the hope of resurrection, so fundamental to the human spirit, is to be denied in an age on the threshold of a new century when everywhere man's fate appears more sanguine, paradoxically, after the most ferociously destructive century in this millennium. If we abandon faith in our endeavors to ameliorate, if not resolve, the tragedy of the Southern Sudan, we have diminished none but ourselves. Moreover, the degree of human and material destruction in the Southern Sudan has never been constant. The years from 1985 to 1989 witnessed death in unprecedented numbers, principally among the Nilotic peoples. This was not all man's doing, for severe drought and epidemic disease produced famine and death made all the more terrible, however, by man's war more often than not conducted by the rabble, the murahilin, who possessed none ofthe restraint of the professional soldier and all of his vices. And the vultures of violence-the jallaba, officials, adventurers-gathered in droves to feed on the unfortunate and the helpless . Ten years later the fighting continues even though abated by the The Blood ofExperience 23 internal divisions, sagging morale, and the exhaustion of the warriors. Nature in the past several years has returned to its...