All day, the tanker trucks rumble up to the White Nile. Young men pump filthy water into the tanks, add a dash of chlorine, and then the trucks rumble off to deliver the tainted water to the mud huts of southern Sudan’s biggest city. As soon as they leave, more trucks take their place.
With water sloshing out of their tanks, the trucks roar past a pipe that was installed years ago to fill the tankers with treated water from the municipal system. The pipe is broken and abandoned.
An estimated 80 to 90 per cent of Juba’s household water is taken from the polluted waters of the White Nile, not far from places where foul waste is dumped into the river. As a result, this fast-growing city of a million people is left vulnerable to cholera and other diseases. Cholera outbreaks have erupted almost every year since 2006.
Southern Sudan is one of the poorest and hungriest places in the world, racked by tribal violence, with rates of child malnutrition and maternal mortality that rank among the worst on the planet. Yet a year from now, this desperate region is likely to become the world’s newest sovereign country.
Half a century after the colonial era ended, the imminent birth of a new nation in South Sudan is the first real challenge to Africa’s artificial colonial borders. Those borders, drawn up in the 19th century by European officials with no knowledge of Africa’s realities, are still fuelling the wars and conflicts of today. They shape Africa’s future, too, by hampering trade and economic growth.
But by acting as midwife to the birth of a new nation, is the world repeating the same mistakes that it made 50 years ago? Will this “baby nation” be able to swim in the seas of independence?
New borders will not fix Africa’s problems. The splitting of Sudan, promoted for strategic reasons by Washington, will fuel a fresh set of conflicts along the new border. It will create a fragile new country, landlocked and impoverished, with a heavy dependence on foreign aid – just like many of the fledgling countries of half a century ago.
Much of modern Africa is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Seventeen nations, a third of the continent, became independent in 1960. But there is an equally significant anniversary this year: the 125th anniversary of the Berlin Conference, which carved up Africa among the European powers. The decisions of that meeting – the climax of the notorious “Scramble for Africa” – continue to distort Africa to this day.
As the historian Martin Meredith has documented, the colonial boundaries cut randomly through 190 cultural or ethnic groups that had existed for centuries. Nearly half of these borders were geometric lines that were easy to draw, yet had no connection to reality on the ground. Hundreds of diverse ethnic groups were lumped together or torn apart. Some 250 ethnic groups were thrown together in Nigeria alone. Around 10,000 polities – including monarchies, chiefdoms, empires and other societies – were suddenly amalgamated into 40 European colonies or protectorates.
“We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were,” British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury admitted as the colonial powers grabbed as much as they could.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, these colonial inventions were abruptly given their independence. Ethnic groups, often hand-picked by European powers to administer their colonies, were soon battling for dominance. “Those arbitrary boundaries carried the seeds of much subsequent destruction, notably the terrible national/ethnic wars that have plagued Africa,” said Gerald Caplan, the Canadian activist and author of The Betrayal of Africa. “Sudan is a perfect example, Nigeria another.”
