- Title: SOUTH SUDAN: South Sudan's archives in race against time and termites
- Date: 24th May 2012
- Summary: VARIOUS OF ANYALLA HOLDING PHOTOGRAPH OF NIMEIRI AND FORMER ETHIOPIAN PRESIDENT HAILE SELASSIE
- Embargoed: 8th June 2012 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: South Sudan
- Country: South Sudan
- Topics: History,Politics
- Reuters ID: LVA75NQLEKZKVBFNFW8JDRZ0GQKP
- Story Text: South Sudan's historical documents lie scattered in a dank marquee in the capital Juba. Having voted overwhelmingly for independence and winning statehood last year, South Sudan is looking to its colonial history to help forge a sense of nationhood and collective identity before the archives are lost to the tropical elements.
Archivists are busy cataloguing, packing and moving fragile papers documenting the details of the rule under the Anglo-Egyptian condominium, as well as photographs, books and maps from the time under rule by Khartoum.
"Now, South Sudan is a new nation, there's no nation without history and to find your history you have to go back to your records, so that's why these records here are more important. How we can go back to our history from the 19th century," archivist Youssef Fulgensio Onyalla says.
The collection of civil service files and official reports tracks the southern territory's history through unified Sudan's independence in 1956 and the following years which saw back-to-back civil wars fought by African rebels - now South Sudan's rulers - against governments in the largely Muslim North.
Bursting out of sacks in the filthy tent floor, South Sudan's history is beginning to rot. Norway has promised to build a national museum to house the artefacts, and it can't come soon enough.
"If they don't hurry up with the building we are going to lose all these documents and then we come up also with this solution that we have to hurry up finishing sorting and categorising this," archivist Youssef Fulgensio Onyalla says.
The National Archives form part of an ambitious project, still in its infancy, to endow the emerging nation with a panoply of cultural heritage institutions, including a National Museum, National Library, National Theatre and Cultural Centre.
These cultural aspirations may seem lofty, even unreal, in a newborn African nation of over 8 million people that despite its subsoil oil resources is one of the least developed on earth, and where more than 70 percent of the population are illiterate.
But South Sudanese officials say forging a national identity out of a complex patchwork of more than 70 ethnic groups, some of them traditional historical foes, is as important a part of nation-building as constructing roads, schools and clinics.
"Now that independence is here and there's no more north to oppose collectively, now is the time to think about all those other factors that make South Sudanese feel they have a historical one-ness and above all that they have some kind of stake in this political entity called South Sudan," South Sudan's undersecretary of culture, youth and sport Jok Madut Jok says.
Since independence South Sudan has been shaken by hostilities and conflict with its neighbour and former civil war foe Sudan, but also by internal ethnic cleavages.
Blood vendettas and cattle raiding routinely leave hundreds of people dead in remote and inaccessible areas of the vast, swampy country.
Jok wants to try to put an end to this by educating South Sudanese about their commonalities and shared traditions. To this end, he wants to tour the country in a travelling museum, a bus crammed with traditional tools and historical objects from around South Sudan.
"The main reason for a travelling museum is to introduce South Sudanese to one another because so far the relationships between the ethnic groups are sometimes governed by myth and stereotypes, and it is these myths and stereotypes that may be at the root of some of the conflicts because we do not have correct understanding of each other, so it is a way to introduce South Sudanese to one another and that by interacting and engaging and talking and debating, you build a nation," Jok says.
In a country with dwindling financial resources, grinding poverty and priorities in every sector, Jok and his team of archivists are finding their task difficult. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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