Juba University is a community that is rebuilding itself. It has witnessed over fifty years of intermittent civil war; the university buildings were used as army barracks through much of the 1980s and ’90s and its scholars were forced to move their studies to Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. Now, on the eve of independence, the students and academics of soon-to-be South Sudan are returning to Juba, and bringing with them new life to its library and lecture theatres.
They truly are starting from scratch. Lecturers face lower wages and poorer housing conditions than in Khartoum, and the buildings they have to work in are still showing the effects of years of war and neglect. Many are not fully trained as teachers, as their own education was disrupted by the ongoing conflict between north and south. Most of the material they have to work with is written in a language their newly-independent country will reject. What we need is not money, they say, it is books.
On July 9th 2011, South Sudan is due to officially separate from the north of the country, and in doing so is to become the newest country in the world since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. For South Sudan, independence has been a long time in the making. Sudan was involved in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history for around twenty years before independence was seriously suggested; this conflict, between the Sudanese Government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), left over 2 million people dead and more than twice that number displaced. The upcoming July split is the result of a referendum taken in Southern Sudan in January this year, as a condition of the peace agreement between North and South dating back to 2005.
The recent history of Sudan is complicated, made more so by the various border disputes that have accompanied almost constant internal unrest since Sudan became independent of British-Egyptian rule in 1956. Civil war broke out in southern Sudan in 1962, and again in 1983, a result of rising tensions between the largely Islamic north and the various Christian and tribal faiths that dominate in the south. The imposition of Sharia Islamic law on the whole of the country in 1983 only exacerbated the situation, although issues of race, government, decolonisation and the south’s oil resources have all played their part.
By the time the Second Sudanese Civil War was brought to a close by the Naivasha agreement in 2005 over 2 million people had been killed, either as a direct result of the war or by famine and disease caused by it. Around 4 million had been displaced, often repeatedly, in attempts to avoid the conflict. It is estimated that as many as 200,000 Southern Sudanese and Nuba children and women were taken into slavery from southern towns and villages. Both sides of the conflict have recruited child soldiers and continued to do so after the peace agreement.
When South Sudan becomes a country in July, the challenges it faces will be immense. The cracks in its relationship with the north are already beginning to show; the oil-rich Abyei area is still contested, with the north (where the majority of oil refineries are situated) proclaiming that it will not recognise the southern state unless it concedes the region. After days of artillery fire and fierce fighting last month, fears were escalating that southern independence would only transform civil war into war between two neighbouring states. Abyei has since been declared a Common Border Zone, to be demilitarized and jointly monitored by both north and south, and the south’s president Salva Kiir said last week there would be no war over the northern occupation. At the same time, however, the Abyei disruptions have caused around 20,000 to leave the region, and an agreement regarding oil revenue has yet to be reached. It is against this politically turbulent back-drop that South Sudan as a nation will be created.
Now more than ever, education is key to rebuilding the infrastructure of the region, which has been damaged or ignored during the civil war. Although the south has been semi-autonomous since 2005, education for many has been sporadic and fractured; a lot of the students at Juba are adult learners whose studies have been intercut with civil war. Now South Sudan needs more teachers, politicians and journalists; a larger educated elite who can encourage the south to develop and grow as a country. The responsibility for such an education lies firmly at the door of Juba University.
“It demands a lot of hard work and sacrifice to build a nation,” says Adam Aham, an English Literature lecturer at the university. “Juba University aspires to develop itself in order to play a national role in developing South Sudan. The process is definitely an immense task and an immense responsibility, but education is the right medicine to cure poverty and ignorance. We are at the moment engaged in training primary teachers of the ten states of South Sudan.” That primary and secondary schooling is in a particularly poor state in South Sudan is no secret. According to the Minister of General Education, Milly Hussein, only 27 teachers are available in Warrap for the 4,000 pupils coming from the north of Sudan. A Ministry of Education report from the Government of South Sudan revealed what the new country sees as its largest challenges in education. These include high drop-out rates, shortage of classroom and sanitation facilities, a persistent gender gap in student and teacher enrolment and a high percentage of volunteer teachers. The report showed that around 37% of teachers are volunteers, while 32% are classed as untrained, that is, having no formal teaching qualification.
While half of all South Sudanese secondary schools don’t have access to drinking water, one quarter don’t have access to a toilet. The backgrounds and circumstances of the pupils themselves also show the strain of prolonged warfare; just under 12% of primary school pupils are orphans. 84% are overage, and trying to catch up with the education they missed when they were younger. Two per cent are demobilised child soldiers who have themselves fought in the conflict. Nadusfilms, a charitable organisation operating in the south claims that only 2% of boys and 0.5% of girls in South Sudan actually finish their primary school education. A young girl has a better chance of dying in childbirth than she does of completing primary school.
One of the most difficult challenges facing the South Sudanese education system is the re-integration of “internally displaced persons”: those who migrated to the north as a result of the civil war and now wish to return to South Sudan as it becomes an independent country. According to the Overseas Development Institute, around two million have already returned, accompanied by up to 200,000 more refugees leaving the north for the first time. As well as creating conflict over land and placing strains on basic services like health centres and water, an influx of people on this scale is also putting huge pressure on educational services. While the official language of South Sudan will be English, many of the learning resources currently available are still written in Arabic. Most people returning to Juba only speak either one or the other.
For Juba University this issue is further complicated by the return of thousands of university students originally from the south, who moved to Khartoum to complete their studies. Following the preliminary announcements of the referendum results in favour of independence, 4,000 students have abandoned classes in Khartoum and moved south to complete their education. Since the preliminary results of the referendum were announced, the Sudanese parliament says that they are being perceived as foreigners in North Sudan. One student told a southern news agency how students from the south were being encouraged to move, despite the fact that the south’s three main universities would struggle to accommodate them. He also added how suspicions against southerners had escalated since the results of the referendum. “They always ask, “what are you waiting for?” They tell us “you have voted for separation and now you have independent country in the South, then what are you waiting for?” Southerners have also become nervous and scared in the North.” As the Minister of General Education points out, “the needs in the education sector, as in most other sectors in Southern Sudan, are vast. The limited resources available have to be used strategically to make sure that they are applied where they can make the most impact.”
University of York student Anthea Gordon visited South Sudan and Juba University earlier this year. “The main impression I got from talking to everybody at Juba was that they were really starting from the beginning. The Juba University and the English Department are also particularly important as they often teach people that will go on to be teachers themselves in primary and secondary schools – so if the University improves then education across the country can improve too.” Anthea is currently in the process of collecting old and unwanted books to send to Juba, and plans to compile an anthology of creative writing from students at York and at Juba.
“During some of my time in Sudan I taught adult teachers in a place called Yambio, and ended up reading them children’s books one day. Afterwards two women came up to me very excitedly and said ‘we need more stories’ and so from then I gave them more things to read and also got them all to write their own stories, which is partly where I got my idea for the anthology.” The anthology, which will be centred around the theme of “change”, aims to forge ties between the two universities and highlight the importance of education, particularly in nation-building. Anthea also hopes that funds raised from selling the work will go towards improving Juba University’s resources, and encouraging more people to donate books to the university.
“It’s quite a big effort for them to start to re-establish the university in Juba. The English Department also said to me that they needed books, not money, and another problem was that many lecturers hadn’t been fully trained because their own learning had been disrupted. Overall I felt like everybody was very keen to move on and improve the teaching there. They have an interesting syllabus and told me they teach classics, but they lack the materials and teachers to really make much progress right now.”
At the moment, despite the ongoing tensions between north and south, the mood in Juba is hopeful. “The tomorrow that we thought would never come came finally as we join the club of free nations” says Adam. “Our students, their parents and the people of South Sudan as Africa’s 54th nation would like to have special ties with the world and hopefully this can happen once the results of the referendum are officially announced.”
Anthea is considering inviting students from Khartoum, in north Sudan, to contribute to the anthology. She asked Adam what he thought of this idea, conscious that the current political situation does not perhaps lend itself to collaborative creative writing anthologies. Adam was slow to respond, as Juba University still suffers from frequent power cuts and persistent problems with connecting to the internet. “This project is not about politics,” he told her, “this project is about people writing.”
For more information on the York-Juba anthology, search “York Juba English Department” on Facebook. Submit all entries to [email protected].