Juba, Southern Sudan
A columnist in the English-language Khartoum Monitor has it right. Under the headline ‘Blair; prove to us this is yogurt, not hot soup’, Mohamed Osman Adam reflects on the Egyptian saying that ‘he who has been burned by a hot soup, will blow at a bowl of yogurt’. His argument is about why the Khartoum government does not want UN intervention in Darfur, even if encouraged by Tony Blair’s suggestion of ‘incentives’, but I feel it applies to the Labour party’s attitude to Mr Blair back home. The columnist speculates that Mr Blair ‘could infiltrate the hearts and minds in Khartoum, by proving that this is yogurt. Amen.’ But, for all Tuesday’s tears, that infiltration is even harder work in Manchester. It is interesting how a Prime Minister’s support hollows out, rather than eats away from the edge. In her last years in office, Mrs Thatcher was an almost mythically popular figure in many parts of the world, yet was imploding in Britain. The speaker of southern Sudan’s assembly told me how marvellous it would be if Mr Blair were to visit them to push forward progress on implementing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) with the north; I’m sure the Labour party would happily spare him.
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As is often the case in Africa if you are British, it does not take long to hear that it is all your fault. On the day in 1956 when the flag of the Anglo–Egyptian condominium of the Sudan (the Sudan was never technically a British colony) came down, a southern district commissioner refused to run up the new flag, saying the new country represented ‘sunrise for the north, sunset for the south’. He was duly dismissed from his post. I was told this story to show that the persecution of the black, Christian south by the Arab, Muslim north was built into the structure of the country from the beginning, by British haste to be gone. The shape of the country remains British — the maps (now disputed), the main buildings, the division of southern areas between different Christian denominations. This resentment of us mixes curiously with a particular friendliness. James Ellery, the UN regional co-ordinator here and an ex-Life Guards officer, tells me that people assume that the British know their problems more than other white countries do. The columnist quoted above refers to ‘the British in their cunning way’: we are objects both of suspicion and affection.
The CPA is seen by many in the south as only a ‘breather’ in the war which effectively began with our departure half a century ago. People love telling me that in the north they use the same Arabic word for ‘black’ as for ‘slave’; and indeed there is slavery still, as well as a form of pawnbroking in which poor people pledge their children for money and hope to redeem the debt later. The Vice-President, Riek Machar, formerly of the University of Bradford, where he was a keen Spectator reader, gives me an interview in his car as we zoom all round Juba trying to find out whether the President, who must be greeted on his return to the capital, is at the airport or his residence. He tells me that the Islamist government in Khartoum is preparing 35,000 troops for Darfur to take control when the Janjaweed, which it backs, has done its ethnic cleansing. There is a Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) which has failed. Where the DPA has gone, the emboldened north hopes, the CPA can go next. The consequences for human life could make Darfur look like an imams’ tea party.
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In the meantime, Brigadier Ellery’s men do their best to ensure that the CPA is working. Under the guidance of a Latin-speaking Rwandan major whose Christian name is John Chrysostom (spelt phonetically), we bump away into the bush for a couple of hours to find the Central Equatorial Defence Forces, one of the militias which, under the agreement, must demobilise. Through ravishing country, in which small hills shaped almost like eggs rise out of the plain, we eventually reach what seems to be the Forces’ HQ. It consists of a few huts. On a wooden fence, military fatigues are hanging up to dry. Someone shambles off to find the commanding officer, and a touching little scene under a hot little awning of twigs takes place in which grandiose and friendly speeches are exchanged between the UN and the militia, and then all the villagers want their pictures taken. In Africa, one is constantly struck by the mixture of cruelty and death on the one hand and innocent friendliness on the other. Both are almost invisible in the West. Is there a tragic sense in which these opposites somehow go together?
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Juba airport is no great hub at the best of times (come to think of it, Juba has probably never known the best of times), so I am surprised, while paying for my exit visa, to hear someone calling my name. I turn round and find myself facing my oldest friend from Africa, Sousa Jamba. Many Spectator readers will remember him. In 1987, Sousa, who was then 21, appeared in The Spectator’s offices and introduced himself. He was Angolan, he said, and had fled the country when he was ten, walking for weeks to the Zambian border with a party which began as about 1,000-strong, but ended up as 30. Then he learnt English, translated the poetry of his country’s rebel leader Jonas Savimbi (‘It was extremely bad’) and somehow reached England. I asked him to write for the paper, and he immediately did so, with incredible freshness, ease and wit. We helped him get political asylum, and he had a novel published. Sousa fills me in on his recent story. He met a Brazilian girl on the internet, married her, and lives with her and their three daughters in Florida. He writes a column for a paper in Angola, and this is what takes him round Africa (accompanied, for some reason, by a small young student from South Africa, an older man with yellow eyes and a strong smell of drink, and a Rastafarian from Sheffield who is in town to try to start the Musicians’ Union of Southern Sudan). ‘The political ideas for my column come from The Spectator,’ says Sousa, ‘and my inspiration is part-Bernard Levin, part-Paul Johnson, and a little bit of Taki.’ One entire article was based on a description of the tin trunk saying ‘The Marquess of Salisbury’ which used to sit in the editor’s office. Sousa’s column is wildly popular, he assures me, and people are pressing him to stand for election in Angola on the strength of it. What does he expect in the Sudan? All the south want secession, which would have huge consequences for Africa, he says, because it would break the boundaries drawn up by the Berlin Conference in 1884–1845. The north won’t stand for it. ‘There will be war.’
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