In these days of the global village, to uncover the subtle possibilities of freedom in a nation-state where the expectation of freedom or liberty is unfamiliar and remote seems a likely possibility. Now these days also customarily oblige the Western democracies of the global village seasoned in everyday use of terms like freedom to acknowledge the existence and be ready to affirm the positive value in cultural difference, and more, to refrain from insisting, after the well-documented Western habit of mind, on the superiority of Western cultural values. Thus for the Western democracies to insist on freedom as a fundamental entitlement or value of all human society may carry some risk of being labeled hypocritical. Indeed, a critical part of the history of Western imperialist and colonialist culture throughout the world, including Sudan, is the fact that the West in the modern period has been obliged to acknowledge that missional colonialism as a matter of policy was a mixed blessing and that in any case lessons of freedom and self-determination did not really need to be taught to the colonized. Hence the tendency toward independence, toward nation-state formation, toward enlargement of the community of nations, including Sudan, declaring themselves signatories to the United Nations charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Yet in the Sudan, where the properties of the global village itself are entirely absent on one hand, or unfamiliar and remote to the great mass of people even where they may be present, there is compelling evidence from history and from modern political praxis that to speak of freedom is to chart undiscovered country. The reasons for this are many, but an analysis of the economic challenges facing so much of Africa suggests something of the challenges to the implementation of a culture of freedom as it is understood and articulated by the UN:
[E]ven within the same country, very few Africans speak t...