The Sudan Handbook

thE P ast & futuRE of PEaCE 305

less than a third of Sudanese children joined primary school on reaching

primary age. Once again, there are huge regional variations. Northern

Bahr al-Ghazal state recorded a net intake of just one per cent. In River

Nile state it was 70 per cent. In Darfur the conflict may, paradoxically,

have increased school intake: the ethnic cleansing campaigns were also,

effectively, urbanization campaigns, since they drove huge numbers of

Darfur population into displacement camps on the edges of cities where

access to schooling became easier. In the south, gender disparities in

education are starker than elsewhere. One in eight girls get married

before they are 15; a third are married by 18. It is in the area of mother

and child welfare that the starkest difference between the periphery and

the centre lies, in the statistics for maternal mortality. The figures for

mothers dying in childbirth in southern Sudan are among the worst in

the world, reaching one in every fifty births. Rates of orphanhood in

Jonglei are twice the national average – one fifth of children in Jonglei

have lost a parent.

War and poverty have not slowed Sudan’s birth rate, which remains

about three per cent per annum. The ranks of youth are still swelling.

In the boom-towns where wealth is concentrated, the richest youth can

tune in to global culture and high-end global consumption patterns. But

most youngsters will have a different set of choices – as migrant workers,

young soldiers, living on the peripheries of urban areas, seeking their

livelihoods and identities in an undefined space between the kinship

networks they are born into, the unrealized optimism of peace deals,

and the hectic change of Sudan’s globally exposed economy. It would be

rash not to expect that the youth growing up in these peripheries will

find new forms of resistance.

Recommended Reading

Nyaba, Peter Adwok, Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View.

Kampala: Fountain, 1997 & 2000.

Mahmoud, Fatima Babiker, The Sudanese Bourgeoisie: Vanguard of Development.

London: C. Hurst and Co., 1984.

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).