Sudan's very own
By Michael Griffin Posted Oct 1 2004
Photo Cortesy of Michael Griffin
A group of southern Sudanese study a copy of Sudan's first independent newspaper, The Sudan Mirror. The newspaper was launched last October.
Until last year, southern Sudan was one of the last populated areas on Earth with no media.
This was as true for the 21 years of civil war with the Muslim north as it was for the half century of British colonialism that preceded it.
Generations of southerners have grown to maturity with only a smattering of schooling. At the United Nations’ last count in 2002, barely 2,000 students were in secondary school in an area as large as Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda combined.
The region has been ravaged by more than two decades of bloody conflict between the South’s secessionist Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Islamist government in Khartoum, which has imposed Sharia law on the predominantly Christian-animist population in the south and sought to exploit the area’s abundant oil and water resources. War and famine have killed around 2 million of southern Sudan’s 12 million people, while 4 million have been displaced to the north or live as refugees in neighboring countries.
Those that remain – no one is quite sure of their number – dwell in the pestilent marshes of the Sudd or in the South’s wide savannahs and have no immediate need for newspapers or radio. Little beyond aid goes into southern Sudan, and nothing comes out except refugees with tales of massacre, rape and looting.
There may be no press in the region, but there is not shortage of news: news of the government arming northern nomads to drive African tribesmen from their lands, using rape and fire as weapons; news of fighting over cattle, the region’s most valuable currency, between Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk or Didinga, to name just four of the pastoralist tribes that inhabit the South; and news from Kenya where, after two years of hard negotiation between the North and South, under pressure from the Bush administration, the SPLA and the Sudanese government have finally signed a peace accord that could lead to the South becoming independent six years from now.
But without any media to call its own, the South has remained incommunicado for most of its history, relying on broadcasts from London, Khartoum and Nairobi – or word of mouth – for information about its own affairs.
Enter Dan Eiffe, a former Catholic priest from County Meath, Ireland, and a veteran of Sudan’s serial humanitarian crises. Now married to a Sudanese woman from the city of Wau, Eiffe had long acted as a whistleblower on the carnage he witnessed during a career in Sudan that has spanned 15 years.
Widely known as Commander Dan for his unwavering support for the SPLA’s often-vicious war for secession, Eiffe came under fire scores of times as a field worker for Norwegian People’s Aid, an organization that was also pummeled in the media for taking sides during a war that pitted Muslim against Christian.
Two years ago, Eiffe gave up relief work to midwife into existence southern Sudan’s very first newspaper.
Launched last October, the biweekly Sudan Mirror is edited in Kenya, printed in Uganda and avidly devoured in the scores of Sudanese towns, villages and refugee camps serviced by the planes used by relief agencies due to insecure roads and the great distances involved.
Targeted at the South’s literate youth, the Mirror focuses on post-conflict resolution between the region’s tribes, who have been at each other’s throats as a result of being co-opted into the wider north-south conflict.
It also highlights problems such as HIV/AIDS and development issues, in particular the role of women in what in the post-war era has been breezily called the “New Sudan.”
Start-up funding came from Pact, a U.S. non-governmental organization that trickles government grants to local organisations to create skills, or to contribute to peace-building activities, such as the peace talks between Dinka and Nuer tribes held in March in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Other development agencies have since piled in with grants for computer equipment, communications and journalistic training for a new generation of southern Sudanese journalists.
“The reaction has been overwhelming,” Eiffe says. “People run under the planes to get a copy.” Eiffe reels off a list of aid agencies eager to climb on board a contraption that offers the one thing they all appear to lack in a Sudan that has been marooned by war and time: the chance to talk to a mass audience.
“In just one week, the Carter Center, which is fighting Guinea worm disease, ordered 6,500 copies, and another organization, working with refugees in the Red Sea Hills, ordered 4,000. All the refugee camps receive it. My aim is to get it up to 25-30,000 copies every month in English and Arabic.”
The idea of developing an information source specifically for the southern Sudanese germinated two years ago. The first question was: What kind?
“I juggled whether to work with radio or the newspaper,” Eiffe recalls over a Tusker beer.
“Radio is more complicated because you have to be on the air with something fresh every day, and the biggest problem in southern Sudan is newsgathering.”
“The newspaper has more advantages. First of all, it has retention. It can be used as educational material. There’s no other reading material in southern Sudan whatsoever. And then there are pictures of people, political leaders and so on. They can be passed on. And radio reception is poor, and it’s so difficult to get batteries.”
Certainly, the Mirror seems to evoke in its readers a delight that would be remarkable among other newspapers’ readers elsewhere in the world. In Rumbek, the capital of SPLA-held southern Sudan, wherever there was a paper, a group was milling round it, drinking in the words and laughing at familiar faces photographed for the first time.For most readers, it is also the first time they can look at the bigger picture of where their fledgling nation is heading, the problems it faces on the way and the plans being laid in foreign capitals for bringing the clinics, schools and jobs that the South has not enjoyed in two decades.
“They were starved of information about the processes that affect their lives,” Eiffel says.
Although independence is some way off, the new newspaper provides a model of what nationhood might entail, its processes and principles, functioning as a website for a nation that the Internet revolution has passed by.
The second challenge is to find journalists of southern Sudanese origin. Most southerners in the profession have either moved to the capital, Khartoum, in search of work, or taken posts as press officers with western aid agencies, the region’s largest employers. Others drifted off into petty trade to survive.
Eiffe and his editor in chief, John Gachie, went looking for talent in places like Kakuma, a sprawling refugee camp in northern Kenya, which is home to 86,000, mainly Sudanese refugees from the war.
“People forget that being a refugee has advantages as well as disadvantages,” Eiffe explains. “It’s bad losing your culture, but many refugees have had a secondary or tertiary education in Kenya and Uganda they could never have gotten in Sudan in wartime.”
“We may not be able to find many journalists in Sudan,” Eiffe continues, “But what we can do is to bring Sudanese who want to be journalists back home. They have a vocation in journalism, they have some training in it, and some have degrees. One day, hopefully, we’ll have a school of journalism in Sudan.”
Sylvanos Yokuju was one of the first to join the Mirror and is now bureau chief in Yei, Western Equatoria, where he reports on social affairs, crime and politics. How did the SPLA – a quasi-Marxist organization that is far from being a paragon of transparency – take to him snooping around?
“They’re very good to me, except for some individuals in the security network,” Sylvanos replies, selecting his words with care. “They’re used to thinking that filing information is limited to security men and they feel uneasy when a journalist comes to collect information. But they know we are non-political. Our reporting has been good. We’re objective.”
While Eiffe makes no bones about his commitment to the independence of the South, he is honest enough to realize that the Mirror has to rise above party loyalty if it is to become an authentic watchdog of the new government’s conduct.
“The SPLA is not used to dealing with critical media,” he says when asked about the movement’s predominant role in southern politics. “We’re in a honeymoon at the moment, and we’re very aware of it. There are elements of corruption developing in the SPLA, and we’re going to have to hit it. We’re going to hit it, but it’s going to cause problems for us, and we’re going to make enemies.
“But another difficulty we face – probably the biggest difficulty of all – is the suffering of the Sudanese people and a movement that’s had its bad moments but also its good moments. It’s a very delicate line. How do you maintain an objective criticism that challenges the SPLA, which we need to do, without playing into the hands of the Khartoum regime, which will exploit it at every turn?”
A more immediate problem is the cost of producing a four-color newspaper with 20 staff members scattered over Sudan, Kenya and Uganda. At a cost of 35 Kenya shillings (50 U.S. cents) a copy, the Sudan Mirror would not break even if it sold its entire 25,000-copy run. Eiffe can count on occasional funding for development-related supplements from aid agencies desperate to spread their messages and have something to show to the head office. The Irishman figures the future lies in commercial advertising.
With the Bush administration poised to spend US$376 million on rebuilding southern Sudan in 2005, and the European Union pledging a comparable amount, the future could be promising. Though “you can’t buy a bar of soap in southern Sudan right now,” sellers of transport services, construction materials, commodities and trade goods will be knocking down the door in 12 months’ time, Eiffe predicts.