War of Visions

"To me it remains the best book on Sudan. It was written in the early 1990s, so it’s almost a generation old now, but it remains the best analysis of why Sudan has descended into so much conflict. Better than that, though, it’s the best analysis of both North and South Sudan. The problem with a lot of books on Sudan is that the authors come from one part of the country and only write about the part they know. The same applies to foreigners who tend to get obsessed with one part of the country, normally Darfur or the South, and then become experts on those regions. Well, because Sudan is the largest country in Africa , and trying to understand the whole place is admittedly extremely difficult. And for most of its history it’s been locked into a civil war between the North and the South, which defined conflict in the country. The same focus leads to mistakes in how Sudan is treated internationally, because once again a lot of politicians, the UN and so on, become obsessed: let’s concentrate on one particular area of the country; let’s fix Darfur, for instance. That was the classic mistake: there was a peace deal reached between the North and the South in 2005, but then everyone’s attention went off to Darfur, and that deal was allowed to wither with the result that the South was allowed to suffer. Again, there had been a low-intensity guerrilla war going on in the East from the 1980s until 2006, and everyone forgot about that, because they were concentrating on Darfur, and before that the South. Well, the reason I think he’s such a good author is that he’s a Southerner who served for many years in the 1980s in the only truly national government under Jafar Numeiri, an Islamist Northerner who was the only president who managed to reach an accommodation with the South. That constituted a ten-year gap in the civil war. Several Southerners served in Numeiri’s administration, so that allowed Deng to see the Northerners from close up, and he was able to write in detail very coherently about the North just as he was about the South. Deng held important jobs – he was a foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, but he also has a very academic turn of mind. There’s a lot of anthropology in there: he’s very interested in the religious aspects of both Southerners and Northerners as well as some of the politics, so you not only get to understand both – rare enough – but you also get a very rounded view of what makes them tick. When he was writing, the North and the South were at war again, so he was very much concerned with what made the clash there, but he talks a lot about Darfur, and you get a sense of the dislocation between Darfur and Khartoum, and central Sudan. So, although he’s writing before the conflict really blew up in 2003, you get an idea of what’s coming."