THE NEWEST AFRICAN FARCE

Juba, South Sudan.  The first thing you see upon arriving here are huge billboards declaring, "Welcome to Africa’s Newest Nation," and:

Yes, the giant country of Sudan – the size of the entire USA east of the Mississippi – is splitting in two, between the Arab Moslem north and the Black Christian/Animist south.  It’s a teachable moment in the lunatic history of African geopolitics.

There are make-believe countries, colonial constructs that have no unifying or historical basis for legitimate nationhood – such as Pakistan.  Africa is a make-believe continent.

Few people grasp the enormity, the sheer size of Africa. Take a look at a world map. It is as far from Casablanca, Morocco to Mombassa, Kenya as it is from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok in Russia (4,000 miles).

You could fit the largest country in the world, Russia (6.6 million square miles or msqm), the second largest country in the world, Canada (3.85 msqm), and the largest island in the world, Greenland (840,000 sqm) all into Africa (11.7 msqm) with room left over.

Yet until around 150 years ago, it was called the Dark Continent not just for the skin color of its inhabitants but because, save for a handful of ports and coastal enclaves, it was unknown, terra incognita to the West. 

Then, in 1859, a private French company began building the Suez Canal, completing it 10 years later.  The Brits, who originally opposed the canal, realized it was now a vital connection linking England with British India.  By 1882, they had managed to convert Egypt into a British Protectorate.

And the "Scramble for Africa" was on, with Britain and France racing to colonize as much territory as possible; Portugal, which had been in Africa since the 1500s, expanding their coastal enclaves inland; plus Spain, Belgium, and newly-created Italy and Germany demanding their share of the colonial spoils. 

Within 30 years, the entire continent had been carved up by these European colonial powers, with almost no regard for natural, cultural, or tribal borders.  Out of all those 11.7 million square miles, only Liberia – founded in the early 1820s by freed American slaves – and the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia (also known as Abyssinia) were independent and un-colonized.  Here is the map of Africa in 1914 on the eve of World War I:

As you can see, the main contest was between the Brits and French, with Bismarck’s Germany horning in.  Since the Brits ran Egypt and much of southern Africa, their focus was north-south, the goal being Cape to Cairo.  The French focus was west-east, the goal being Dakar on the Atlantic Ocean to Djibouti (Fr.Som. on the map for French Somaliland) at the entrance to the Red Sea.

Where these two goals collided was Sudan – specifically at a place called Fashoda (see map) in southern Sudan in 1898.

Ever see the 1966 movie Khartoum starring Charlton Heston as British General Charles "Chinese" Gordon and Lawrence Olivier as a Moslem fanatic known as The Mahdi?  It was a true story.

Gordon had eliminated the Arab Moslem slave trade in northern Sudan – for centuries the Arabs had been enslaving blacks from the south – and in response, they declared a Jihad against the Christian infidel who had destroyed their livelihood to which they had a divine right  – for slavery is repeatedly sanctioned and authorized by Allah in the Koran.

The Mahdi’s forces overwhelmed Gordon’s small garrison in Khartoum and killed him in 1885.  North Sudan became an Islamic theocracy with a brutal imposition of Sharia Islamic law, and the slave trade resumed.

Thirteen years later, Lord Herbert Kitchener led 8,200 British soldiers back to Khartoum to destroy a Mahdist army of 52,000 Arab Moslems.  The Battle of Omdurman (near Khartoum) took place on September 2, 1898.  Kitchener wasted no time savoring his victory.  He immediately ordered the flotilla of British gunboats that had brought his forces to Khartoum to continue up the White Nile all the way to Fashoda.

That was because over a year before, the French had decided to take advantage of the British absence in southern Sudan, and dispatched 120 soldiers and 7 officers to trek from Brazzaville, the capital of French Equatorial Africa, all the way to Fashoda to secure southern Sudan as a French protectorate.

It took them 14 months, arriving in July 1898.  They were still recovering from their ordeal across the remotest heart of Africa when Kitchener showed up in mid-September with his gunboats to inform them they were trespassing on British territory.  It was a bluff, for no outside power had ever controlled the world’s largest swamp that was southern Sudan.

The bluff worked.  After threatening war, Paris buckled and ordered Major Jean-Baptiste Marchand and his men to withdraw, which they did via Djibouti.  With that, the Brits declared the entire gigantic region between Egypt and British East Africa to be their imperial possession of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.  It lasted until 1956.

In 1952, the Brits were too incompetent to prevent fewer than 100 soldiers led by Colonel Gamel Abdel Nasser from overthrowing King Farouk and taking over Egypt.  When Nasser then threatened to take over Sudan as well, the Brits concluded their only option was to grant Sudan independence.

With independence scheduled for January 1956, Arab Moslem northerners grabbed all the positions of power and resumed their traditional imposition of Islam and slavery upon the blacks of the south.  The blacks rebelled, formed a guerrilla force called Anyanya (named for a poison made from snake venom and rotten beans), and the Brits went right ahead with independence during an all-out civil war and mass slaughter.

Sixteen years and a half-million lives later, Sudan’s latest ruler, Gaafar Numeiri (who had seized power in a military coup in 1969) ended the civil war in 1972 by giving the south autonomy and freedom from Islam.

Then oil was discovered in 1978 – several billion recoverable barrels, and all in the south.  Numeiri figured the only way to keep the oil for himself and his Arab Moslem northerners was to reimpose Islamization and Sharia Moslem law upon the whole country including the south.

I was in Khartoum when this edict was enforced in September, 1983.  The only place you could get a beer was the American Club.  Everyone knew that Numeiri’s replacing beer with Sharia law upon the blacks of the south guaranteed another civil war.

Sure enough, thousands of southern soldiers mutinied and formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), led by Col. John Garang.  He was a capable guy, having taken the U.S Army’s Infantry Officers Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and earning a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at Iowa State University. 

The SPLM soon gained control of much of the south, Numeiri was overthrown by a group of Arab Moslems more fanatical than him, who organized militias called Murahleen to plunder, rape, and enslave as many blacks as possible. 

Since the SPLM was primarily composed of Dinka, the largest tribe in the south, the Arab Moslem regime in Khartoum paid other tribes to organize anti-Dinka militias under a strategy called aktul al-abid bil abid – kill the slave through the slave.  Everybody began raping and killing everybody else.

When the SPLM finally came out on top in 1989, the leader of the Khartoum regime, Sadiq al-Mahdi, announced he would make peace with the south and lift Sharia law there.  He was promptly overthrown in a military coup led by General Omar al-Bashir, who created an Islamic dictatorship worse than anything Sudan had ever seen in its miserable history.

Bashir declared it was the sacred duty of all Moslems to kill infidel blacks.  He welcomed Moslem terrorists from all over the world to Sudan, attracting one in particular named Osama bin Laden, enabling him to form an Islamofascist group called Al Qaeda – The Foundation/Military Base.

By the early 1990s, Sudan was a rogue state sponsoring Moslem terrorism all over the world, culminating in an assassination attempt against Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak in 1995.  Mubarak threatened war, Bashir kicked the foreign terrorists out including Bin Laden (who went to Afghanistan), and focused his energies on massacring  and enslaving blacks in the south on a massive scale.

Bashir made a deal with the chieftain of the Nuer, the south’s second largest tribe, named Riek Machar, promising to share millions of oil revenue if his Nuer militia would exterminate the Dinka.  By 2001, Sudan was producing a quarter-million barrels a day.

After 9/11, George Bush denounced Sudan for its "brutal and shameful war against its own people, and signed, along with Britain and Norway, the Sudan Peace Act forcing Khartoum to make peace with the SPLM and stop supporting Machar.  After a civil war lasting 20 years and costing two million dead, in 2002 Bashir granted the south autonomy, freedom from Sharia (which continued in the rest of the country), and the right to secede via a referendum.

Soon after, black Moslem tribes in the western region of Darfur decided they wanted the same deal as the south.  Bashir responded by organizing tribes of Arab camel herders into a heavily armed militia called Janjaweed ("hordes") licensed to "kill, loot and rape at will."

After five years of genocidal mass murder and rape, in 2008 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir accusing him of genocide and war crimes in Darfur.  The African Union, the League of Arab States, and France denounced the warrant.  Nothing has come of it, and Bashir is still in power today.

A few weeks ago in January, the Referendum for Secession was held in southern Sudan, receiving a Yes vote of 98%.  Under extreme international pressure, Bashir has said he will recognize the south’s full independence, which is scheduled to be formalized this coming July 9, whereby the Republic of South Sudan will become the 193^rd member state of the United Nations.

John Garang died in a mysterious helicopter crash in July 2005.  His successor as SPLM leader, Salva Kiir, will become the first president of the world’s newest country.  What future does this new country have?  From what I have seen here, there are little grounds for realistic optimism.

Salva Kiir is a Dinka.  The South Sudan government will be dominated by Dinka and tribal rivalries will continue.  People in the south identify themselves by membership in a tribe or clan.  With over 200 separate ethnic groups or tribes, there is almost no national unity other than hatred for the Arab Moslems of the north.  Quite a few are Christian, at least nominally, but most are Animist, ascribing to traditional placating worship of envious spirits and magical entities.

South Sudan, almost the size of Texas, is the world’s largest swamp called the Sudd.  Dry as a bone during the dry season (now), it is a floodplain of the Nile for most of the year.  Here’s the Nile near Juba:

It is landlocked, with its northern border challenged by Arab Sudan along its entire length. The border province of Abyei, where the Arab-Black war continues, is just one region in contention. All its oil is pumped out through a thousand-mile pipeline that is mostly in the north to a Red Sea terminal – in the north.

There are 8 million people in this new country, almost all of them illiterate and innumerate subsistence farmers or cattle herders who live out in the bush.  The only paved roads in the entire country are in downtown Juba, a capital of over a million folks, hardly any buildings over two stories, festooned with trash – especially "African daisies" (plastic bag litter) – and ludicrously expensive as everything has to be trucked from ports thousands of miles away.  There are no trains or rail system.

More women die in childbirth in South Sudan than anywhere else in the world:  over 2,000 per 100,000  live births.  Infant mortality is among the world’s highest at 112 per 1,000.  The dreary statistics go on and on with no end in sight.

There also seems to be no end in sight for rebellions within the country.  The latest is being led by a disgruntled "general" in the SPLM army, George Athor, who was frustrated last year in his attempt to rule a province called Jonglei as his private fiefdom.  Last month (February), his rebels staged a series of attacks in Jonglei that butchered some 200 people including women and children.

The bottom line is that "Africa’s newest country" is not a real country.  It’s political make-believe – just like most all the other national fictions pretending to be countries that make up the whole continent.

There are exceptions.  How ironic that Somaliland is one of them and can’t get recognized.  And why is that?  The refusal to recognize Somaliland’s separate existence and no longer belonging to the fiction of Somalia, is an admission of many African governments that their countries are also fictions that would splinter and shatter apart if not held together by dictatorship and Western support.

Five years ago (April 2006), I wrote Why Is Africa So Stupid?  It’s worth re-reading.  Exhaustive research over the past 30 years reveals that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is 67.

The research cannot be accused of white racism, for it shows that East Asians (Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, but not China) have on average 5 IQ points higher than Europeans and European-Americans (105 vs. 100).

And it cannot be dismissed as inconsequential.  Plotting a country’s per capita GDP on an x-y axis with that country’s average IQ (see article) shows that there are smart-rich, smart-poor, and stupid-poor countries – but there are almost no stupid-rich countries.

IQ certainly isn’t everything.  Moral values count for at least as much as intelligence if not more, and there is no correlation between them.  Just look at how many high-IQ liberals there are lacking any moral scruples.  And I’ve met plenty of Africans of average intelligence whose moral character and integrity I respect.

So – there are two bottom lines here.  One is that there are problems in the world that are intractable and simply will not be solved easily or quickly.  Dozens of African countries have no business pretending to be such, have no business being members of the United Nations with their rulers strutting on the world stage. 

Much of the map of Africa has to be completely redrawn  — and that’s not our job.  It should be the job of the folks who drew the map in the first place – the Brits, French, Germans et al – working with Africans without their rulers.  Good luck on that, guys.

The other bottom line is this.  When you come to a place like South Sudan to see what reality it faces and learn its history, the problems of America suddenly seem so small by comparison.

Really small.  Yes, America’s problems are our problems, which give them infinitely more significance to us than any problems somewhere in Africa.  But it is in Africa more than anywhere else on the planet that you come to appreciate the incredibly unique preciousness of America – and that whatever problems she faces, the intelligence and moral values of Americans will enable them to be solved.

Americans are no strangers to historical farces, from the Civil War to Woodrow Wilson’s fascism to the Great Society and the Hippie/Black Panther 60s to Jimmie Cahtuh.  We are currently experiencing the Newest American Farce with this malevolently incompetent anti-American Zero in the White House.

Yet comparing this to the Newest African Farce of South Sudan should give us renewed confidence that we can triumph and overcome.  Ronald Reagan deeply believed that America’s best days are in front of her, not behind.  Here, in the dust and heat of Juba, I am more sure than ever that Ronald Reagan was right.
 

Note:  American sports fans may be somewhat familiar with South Sudan because the tallest basketball player ever in the NBA, Manute Bol (7-foot-seven) was a Dinka.  Luol Deng, currently playing for the Chicago Bulls, is a Dinka. 

The Dinka are the world’s tallest people on average.  Here’s a Dinka fellow I ran into outside of Juba.  He said he’s the short one in his family.