The Sudan

The purpose of this research is to examine the concept of freedom in the works of John Locke and Karl Marx with reference to the Sudan case. The plan of the research will be to set forth the problems confronting Sudan as an underdeveloped but modern postcolonial African country and a point of departure for consideration of concepts of freedom in regard to the future of Sudan, and then to discuss minimum requirements for a society in a postcolonial state, with a view toward determining the kind of national development that might ensure the stability of freedom in that country.

The history of Africa reads very much like the history of Europe in Africa. European colonization of the continent in the nineteenth century can be seen as the origin of social, economic, and political problems that persist to the present day. Armstrong, Elphick, and Giliomee explain that Dutch colonialism included slavery, which included mutilation and torture, both inside Dutch colonies and outside, in Dutch-sponsored slave trade. As economic and political control of Sub-Saharan Africa (especially South Africa) gradually passed, via negotiation and conquest, from Dutch to British control, the slave trade was abolished as a matter of policy. But as Bradlow says (50-2), the abolition of slavery did not necessarily equate with freedom for the indigenous peoples, instead creating a basic economic and racial "formula" of white European superiority and instrumental use of the full range of African resources.

n's other African colonies. Wai (390-1), meanwhile, asserts that the real British mistake was formally uniting north and south Sudan, or more exactly abandoning the special governance forms for the south under the Condominium, in favor of the aggressive and oppressive nationalism of the northern Arabs (also Viorst passim). As Viorst notes, the first civil war began with independence in 1956, when the northern Arabs who assumed control of national government immediately "designated Arabic as the state's official language and sent Arabs to seize administrative posts in the south . . . declaring themselves in favor of Islamic rule . . . . As southerners saw it, benevolent British colonialism was being replaced by Arab tyranny" (Viorst 55). On this view, formal partition would have been a more sensible course of action (Hoagland 494); in any case, a series of modern civil wars was an inevitable consequence. A third view is that, given the history of Sudan since 1956, what is required is some version of neocolonialism. That is the view of Pfaff (2-3), who speaks of a need for disinterested Western colonialism in anarchic Africa, and of Mayotte (520ff), to the degree she argues the validity of UN or other forceful intervention in regar

Category: Foreign - T