South Sudan’s Independence, Oil and Economic Self-Determination

On July 9, in keeping with the referendum vote that took place in January, The Republic of South Sudan became the world’s 195th sovereign state. South Sudan’s brand new news journal, The South Sudan News Agency, captured citizens’ great joy at achieving political independence and what they hoped signaled an end to the decades long struggle with the racist and corrupt regime in the north. Because what is now South Sudan has long been known for its vast oil reserves, the regime has been pillaging the region—and undermining its basic infrastructure and political institutions—almost since Sudan won independence from England in 1953.

The unified Sudan’s original borders were drawn in 1898, when England took formal control of the region awarded to it for economic expansion at the Berlin Conference of 1884. European leaders met that and divided the continent’s natural resources among European empires who hoped to prevent future inter-European wars. Like other African states, Sudan’s borders were drawn in piecemeal fashion by European leaders who had no concern for the natural boundaries separating, for example, different linguistic groups—and very little knowledge about the people who lived in the regions they hacked apart. In Sudan, as elsewhere, the borders made little cultural sense, containing both the predominantly-Arab descendents of colonizers in the North and diverse groups of black Africans in the South.

The British occupation was characteristic of most British-controlled enterprises in Africa. It enforced rigid separation between the occupiers and Sudanese, as well as between the people in the North and South. Though it maintained strict racial hierarchies, Britain had a tendency to build basic infrastructures and institutions that facilitated economic growth. When England finally withdrew, it left what had previously been a network of many cultures and principalities now divided in two cultural groups that it helped to reify and further segregate: the people of the North and the people of the South. The North quickly established political and economic domination before beginning a campaign of infrastructure destruction throughout the South. This may be the regime’s greatest sin against the people of Southern Sudan—that is, its determination to extinguish whatever meager institutions colonialism had built so as to leave the people in a state of chronic under-development.

In other words, colonialism exacerbated the Arab-African racial divide, and left the Southern Sudanese in a vulnerable economic and political position. So, it is no small wonder that the world community celebrated with such enthusiasm. Michael Lind of Salon.com even argues that the undoing of the European-established borders heralded the beginning of a second phase in the history of decolonization. Once the states in Africa recovered from the US-Soviet proxy wars throughout its states, he says, they can begin the task of rebuilding and reestablishing boundaries that make more sense. Lind thinks the borders counter democracy, such that “one vote and geographic mobility [must] be sacrificed forever to ethnic rights and ethnic brokering and official ethnic homelands.” Ultimately, for Lind, what he understands as “ancient ethnic hatreds” cannot really be undone in corrupt states like Bashir-controlled Sudan. So, there was never any hope of peace-brokering, and partition was always already the only humane approach.

The world community has rightly lauded the split because of the excesses of the Bashir regime, reasoning that self-determination from that regime and its horrific human rights abuses is a good in itself. But Lind’s simplistic assumptions about longstanding “ethnic disputes” in Sudan –and elsewhere in Africa—could not be more misguided or reactionary. It is true that the borders of African states have never made much geographic sense. It is also true that Western colonialism—and then Western interventionism—explicitly propped various religious and ethnic groups in African states against each other. The colonizers tended to conquer—and immediately begin enforcing strict racial hierarchy between Africans groups. The lighter-skinned people of the North—not unlike the Tutsis in Rwanda—were given preferential treatment and left to control the country when the British left.

But it is dangerous and inaccurate to claim that entrenched hatreds are to blame for the longstanding North-South struggle. This is almost never the case in African conflicts, no matter how popular the simplistic explanation is among Western media outlets. And though the Bashir government adopted some of the trappings of Wahabi Islam during the twentieth century, the differences between Islam and Christianity are not to blame for the long struggle either. Though the international media are selling the birth of South Sudan as a story about a people’s desire for political self-determination, it is not that simple.

More than anything else, the South Sudanese fought for so long to establish economic self-determination—that is, to control their own natural resources and create their own government institutions apart from the oppressive Sudanese regime. They fought to build something more stable and sustainable than what the British and then the Northern Sudanese government had given them. They will need the political freedom they have just won in order to develop any of these things, but it was never about a “clash of civilizations” involving static, immutable “ethnic groups.”

It is true that political scientists are watching Somalia carefully in anticipation of another changing of borders—that is a partition between Somalia and Somaliland. Discussions about border changes are not insignificant. But if we keep in mind that these entrenched struggles are really about economics, it becomes clear that transgressing and subverting the borders of European Empire—in some instances, a necessary step—is not really a second wave of radical decolonization. In some cases, yes, partition makes sense, but this is really about how control over resources affects people’s access to food, medicine and basic social services.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank enslaved the people living in many African states to lives of structural adjustment and corrupt, hollowed-out governance. Often bogged down in proxy wars, African states like Angola and Mozambique had no choice but to broker peace by abandoning all of their revolutionary—even egalitarian—ideals and cutting most social programs. Like the people of these states, the people of South Sudan will be pressured into ceding the economic freedom they have been fighting for all this time. They will not have these things if—in fact, when—they have no choice but to undergo the rigid austerity measures that international banking organizations like the IMF will impose.

Lind is wrong to imply that borders are the real impediment to freedom in the poorer states in Africa. Borders are a significant factor in modern African history, but we should not harbor naïve illusions about the end of colonialism. Now that large state empires are gone, Western states continue to undermine development and progress for African states through the World Bank and IMF. The Northern government of Sudan has so destroyed the South’s infrastructure that the new state has nothing to work with but passion and enthusiasm. It will be forced to cede its sovereignty to the IMF and World Bank as soon as it gets off the ground.

If South Sudan can ever find the means to establish control over its own oil reserves and resist the international economic meddling that would undo any progress it seeks for its people, that will truly herald a new era of decolonization. Border changes constitute a significant development, but borders can do only so much. It will really be something if there’s a day when the people of South Sudan—and elsewhere in Africa—are free to use their natural resources and wealth for the benefit of their people rather than the enrichment of Western powers. The goodwill of the international community is encouraging, but real political solidarity and action are what the people of South Sudan really need from the world.