4 Jul 2011

Countdown to Sudanese independence day

South Sudan will be born poor and troubled. People’s lives of aching poverty and hardship will not improve quickly. The danger of war, either with the north, or between southern Sudanese, is ever present.

When we drove up to film it, the Countdown to Independence clock in the centre of Juba wasn’t showing the time because of an electricity cut. It was a forlorn structure, a black box, sitting slightly wonkily on a black pedestal in the middle of a road junction.

All over town, women in teeshirts reading “Keep Juba clean and green” were busy sweeping the dust from the gutters. Some have household brooms, but others are working with bundles of twigs. Under roadside trees, other women, surrounded by scraggy toddlers, were breaking rocks with hammers, filling buckets with small stones to sell for a few pennies.

South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, is being born into desperate poverty. The statistics speak for themselves: only 10 per cent of children complete primary school, 84% of women are illiterate, 36% of the population is “food insecure”, meaning they frequently cannot grow or buy enough to eat.

Yet there’s huge enthusiasm for Independence, which will be celebrated next Saturday. Opposite the John Garang Mausoleum – named for South Sudan’s liberation hero, who died in an air crash in 2005 – I saw people practicing traditional dances, the bystanders ululating and cheering as a short man in military fatigues performed a routine of such energy in the mid-day sun it made me tired just to watch. Two girls stood with their arms around each other’s shoulders, their backs covered in elaborate beadwork.

Posters celebrating independence are all over town. “We got here through bullets and ballots” reads one, meaning that first the people of southern Sudan endured decades of war, and then voted in a referendum to separate from the north.

Archbishop Paolino Lukudu Loro has seen it all. I first met him more than 20 years ago, when southern Sudan was mired in conflict and he had been in post for just a few years. Now he’s been Archbishop of Juba for more than a quarter century.

“I think independence is a kind of miracle,” he told me. “God wants South Sudan to be independent.”

But he has no illusions, talking frankly about corruption in the new government, and the dangers of tribalism whipped up by leaders who are more like warlords than politicians. This is the legacy of nearly three decades of war – more than that, if you count the conflicts which followed Sudan’s independence from Britain in 1956. Generations of South Sudanese men have known no life but that of a rebel soldier.

South Sudan will be born poor and troubled. People’s lives of aching poverty and hardship will not improve quickly. The danger of war, either with the north, or between southern Sudanese, is ever present.

“But we will be free,” said Archbishop Paolino. “We will be free men and women in our own land.”