SOUTH SUDAN ANNIVERSARY: If Nelson Mandela was President

Nelson Mandela (Photo: www.biografiasyvidas.com)

I unconsciously smile whenever I lay eyes on an outdated map of our old heart-shaped Sudan, a romantic shape that does not reflect its heartbreaking reality. This usually sends my mind on a journey, and in one such journey, I pictured Nelson Mandela as the president of the Sudan, both Sudans.

If Madiba, as he’s lovingly called by his clan, was our president, would we have fought and killed over 2 million people? Would we have displaced over 4 million others? We are a “rainbow nation” too; one with lots of oil and natural resources. So what has Madiba done to bring his people together that we couldn’t do?

South Sudan would have had the right to self-rule and been exempted from specified laws that do not apply to them. They would have had their own state laws and policies, courts and institutions that are suited to their culture, beliefs and value systems.

Mandela believes that “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. He would have considered South Sudan’s dismal literacy rate of 27% as a personal failure on his part, and would have worked to build schools in all parts of the country.

Sudan, both north and south, is rich with colorful, and often contrasting, tribal cultures. Mandela would have effortlessly promoted each cultural tradition as sources of pride for the country. We would have celebrated the myriad of languages spoken in the Sudan, making the most wide spread language official, and teaching the others in cultural centers or elementary schools of their respective regions. It would have agonized Mandela to hear the word “abd” (slave) or “insects” used so freely and without remorse. He would have sternly addressed this issue with a state law, similar to South Africa’s Act No. 4 of 2000 “Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act”, with clear clauses prohibiting hateful speech, turning previously “common” offensive terms into outlawed racial and ethnic slurs that now send shudders down people’s spines if heard.

I also imagine Mandela urging those of us in the South to love the North, despite its faults and transgressions, encouraging us to turn the other cheek. He would have told us to wish them well, as he himself had wished well one of his brutal prison guards after more than two decades of imprisonment.

The past eleven months of South Sudan’s independence have been far from peaceful, neither with itself nor with its older sister. South Africa’s Archbishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, in his visit to South Sudan on the occasion of its first anniversary of independence, asked Salva Kiir and the South Sudanese one question: “What difference does it make to be independent, and continue to be poor?”

Imagine the difference it would make if our children in the Sudans were taught in schools about Mandela’s struggle and success. Although it may seem to us now that it is too late to bring about change, remember what Madiba himself once said: “It always seems impossible until it’s done”.