Herbert.Ekwe.Ekwe.prof.USAfricaonline.com contributing editor.columnist

Sudan’s 2011 referendum: who’s afraid of freedom?

By Prof. Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

Special to USAfricaonline.com and CLASSmagazine, Houston

Jean Ping, the chair of the Addis Ababa-based Commission of the Africa Union, recently criticised the likely outcome of next year’s referendum by the people of south Sudan on the restoration of their independence. Ping told a French radio station interviewer that he feared that the Sudan was “sitting on a powder keg” and that a “yes” vote for south Sudanese freedom could have “catastrophic” consequences: “Will the independence of Southern Sudan not lead other players in Darfur and in other places, which are currently not asking for independence, to seek independence as Southern Sudan will have done?”

These are shocking and sad comments made by such a highly placed African public official. It is not certain how much of the Sudan’s recent history, especially the 1956 post-British conquest epoch, that Ping is familiar with. The 2011 referendum that he refers to is in fact a crucial feature of the terms of the 2005 cessation of the north-south Sudanese war that had been waged for 22 years. 1.5-2million Sudanese, overwhelming majority of them southerners, were killed during this war. South Sudan has long resisted its totally subject sociopolitical status, occasioned by the British hand-over of supreme political power to the minority Arab north Sudanese population on the eve of the formal termination of its occupation of the Sudan in January 1956. We mustn’t fail to recall that James Robertson, the outgoing British occupation governor in Khartoum who sealed the infamous Sudan deal, flew southwest to Nigeria, another conglomeration of British-occupied African peoples and states, and crafted and sealed yet another “post-conquest” albatross in Africa in October 1960.

The 2011 referendum is therefore an historic opportunity for Africans in south Sudan to regain their freedom. Africans, elsewhere in the Sudan and indeed anywhere else on the continent, who similarly wish to exercise their freedom to be free from the burden of subjugation, cannot be stopped by any interests and calculations. Freedom is inalienable. No one should fear freedom – and its consequences.

Prof. Ekwe-Ekwe, contributing editor of USAfrica, USAfricaonline.com and CLASS magazine, is an influential research scholar and historian. He has worked at Senegal’s Africa Research Institute and the director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies in Dakar, Senegal. He has taught at the London School of Economics, and is author of several books. Several of his essays have appeared, some exclusively, on USAfricaonline.com, including the heavily referenced commentary: Obasanjo’s obsession with Biafra versus facts of history. http://www.usafricaonline.com/ekweekwe.biafra.html . He has started in 2010 a new blog www.re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/