Throughout the conflict, Juba was in a state of suspended animation: the government controlled the town, but the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, seasoned guerillas who will form the government of Southern Sudan, had encircled it. A sleepy colonial trading town before independence, during the last part of the war, supplies were at a premium. Residents who remember that period speak darkly of searching for food in the rubbish. The core of the city is still the old town. Brick houses that are today an embattled stockade in the middle of the city, owned by Northern merchants fearing for their future. In 2005, a peace agreement ended the second civil war. Since then, a new form of urbanism has emerged. Tent cities are being erected along the banks of the Nile, catering to the UN workers and aid agencies that have flooded into the city since the peace agreement. $150 a night will get you a tent with air conditioning and electricity. Then there are the single-storey concrete bungalows built by soldiers and politicians who have come to the capital from all over the country, eager for their rewards after long years of fighting. Just outside town, endless squatter camps are going up – those displaced by war are returning home, and others are looking for opportunities in the capital. Nothing comes together. It is as if three worlds had been made to co-habitate in the same space, and, sullenly, they refuse to talk to each other. Their uncertain co-existence makes for an uneasy peace. Politicians, soldiers, East African immigrant workers, aid workers, and squatters.We all live next to each other in this city which is not quite urban, not quite a city and not yet a capital. The urban population in Juba is increasing dramatically, and poses the question of an emergent nationalism in terms of city planning. The question of how we make a nation out of disparate communities becomes one of how we make urban forms that people can recognise as part of themselves; forms that simultaneously build urban forms and, precisely, a sense of the people. Looking around Juba, I am not hopeful. From the aid agencies’ Land Cruisers cutting cartographies through the dusty roads, to the Kenyan and Ugandan immigrants doing all the work in the city, everything seems to promise an urbanism designed by others, occupied by those from elsewhere. Southern Sudanese speak angrily of East Africans taking all the money out of the country and look around with incomprehension at the aid agencies’ inefficiency and waste. If the the capital is the mirror of the country, then Juba belongs in a fairground.
Southern Sudan has never been nation. Across its enormous expanse there are hundreds of languages and tribes.Turkish and British colonial rule was lightly administered, and made little attempt to radically transform traditional forms of order. Before the first civil war broke out just over fifty years ago, Sudan did not have a shared language.Today in urban spaces Arabic holds sway as a language of commerce and exchange, while amongst the ruling elite – the oldest educated in missionary schools, the youngest in American universities – English is the language of government. There are few roads in the country, and even these tend to become impassable during the rainy season when whole villages shrink back from the rest of the country, closed into their own worlds. Conflicts that the media avidly call ‘steps to war’ are more often than not clashes between pastoralist peoples, fighting for grazing territory that is growing scarce as large scale agricultural projects, oil installations and environmental degradation squeeze them into smaller and smaller spaces. Loyalty is to tribe and family, not to the state. If there is a continuity among all the groups in Southern Sudan, it is a shared history of oppression by regimes located on the Central Nile. Sudan has been independent for fifty-five years, and for only fifteen of them has the south had a tenuous peace with the north. It is this history of struggle that might form the basis of a new Southern Sudanese nation. Not a soul is untouched by war, not a soul doesn’t feel Southern Sudanese. What that means, for now, is an anti-nationalism – not wanting to be part of the North. In Juba, the soon-to-be capital of Southern Sudan, the search for a new national identity has begun. Jok Madut Jok, the Assistant Minister for Culture, spoke to me enthusiastically about museums of national identity consecrated to the plurality of cultures you find in Southern Sudan, and of making a new language for the country, just as Indonesia created a new language for itself. Creating new urban forms is part of this challenge. Just as constant feuding between tribes was a feature of the hundred years before independence, so was inter-marriage and trade. The great Dinka spearmasters and Nuer prophets, spiritual figures capable of bringing together communities, had their particular places – people still speak of Ngungdeng’s mound, and of the tree under which Deng Majok used to sit and give counsel. But these forms of co-existence are not urban forms. In predominately rural Southern Sudan, the risk is that the government, sitting in Juba, takes on a form unrecognisable to its people; a form as unrecognisable as Juba urbanism is to most Southern Sudanese.
Juba – youth chill in a church near the Konyo Konyo market. In the background is the Konyo Konyo Mosque
Guilio Petrocco
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