This region, about the size of Spain, larger than California but smaller than Texas, exists in what used to be the southern part of Sudan, a nation on the African continent immediately south of Egypt. The nation of Sudan had been experiencing civil war for over two decades, most recently as the northern Arab Muslim people who control the Sudanese government committed genocide against the black indigenous southerners who practice Christianity and animism. This fighting has also included the area known as Darfur, which today is the western part of Sudan (not South Sudan).
Most of this conflict has been a result of historical forces, including the fact that British forces, in conjunction with Egyptian forces, united this area, which included present-day South Sudan and the Darfur region, with the rest of Sudan a little over a century ago, and then around World War I shifted power to Khartoum in the north, to help keep the area out of the hands of the Ottoman Empire, which happened to the detriment of the Darfur region to the west and what eventually became South Sudan a century later. Let’s talk more about South Sudan.
As a result of these historical and colonial forces, power was given to the Arabs Muslims in the north, at the expense of regions to the south, which is populated by black sub-Saharan Africans who are Christians and animists. Then, with famine causing social upheaval in the 1980’s, came infighting among the tribes in the south, and after about a decade and a half of that type of infighting, the Arab government decided they would help in the process, and started to arm the Janjaweed Arabs against their black neighbors to the south. Since that time, there has been over 2.5 million deaths, millions of displaced peoples, and over 5 million effected by the turmoil, almost all on the side of the black south.
With all of this turmoil going on, it was argued that it would actually be better for the black population in the south to become independent and separate from the Arab Muslim people to the north. Instead of being treated like trash that needs to be eliminated by the Arabs who seem, in this case, to have a superiority complex similar to the Germans under Hitler, or the white supremacists in the American south decades ago, they can venture out on their own path, make their own laws, look out for their own, and so forth. And it didn’t help that the Arabs who controlled the north had an Arabization and Islamization program going on, which meant trying to force the Christians in the south to convert to Islam, and trying to get them to forgo their tribal cultures for the Arab culture to the north.
Fortunately, in 2011, the people of South Sudan held a landmark referendum to decide their own future, as to whether they should stay part of Sudan, or become their own independent sovereign nation, and to their joy, a vast majority voted to secede from Sudan. They acquired their independence after that landmark 2011 referendum, calling themselves South Sudan. They have since joined the United Nations, the African Union, and have signed the Geneva Convention.
Unfortunately, since that historic referendum, violence has returned to South Sudan, with the Arabs in the north continuing to attack the blacks to the south, with tribal warfare still going on within the tribes inside the country, and by corrupt political leaders. In 2013, a little over two years after acquiring its independence, a political struggle began between President Kiir and Riek Machar, a former deputy, has led to an ongoing civil war that has continued to this day – the political struggle represents ethnic conflict between the country’s two biggest ethnic groups, the Dinka and the Nuer. More than 4 million people have been displaced by this civil war, and another 400,000 people are estimated to have been killed.
South Sudan is today considered a failed state along the same lines as Somalia.
With that being said, here are some more facts (some of which I already mentioned): Christianity is the majority religion, there are about 12 million people that live here, and most people practice subsistence farming as the economy is one of the most undeveloped in the world and the infrastructure is basically non-existent. The country is covered in tropical forests, swamps, or grasslands, depending on the location.
That is all for now.
