Welcome, South Sudan

I'm sitting in a mosquito-infested prefab in southern Sudan drinking bourbon from the bottle and popping pain killers.

Sounds like a snippet from an adventure novel, doesn't it? It's not as bad as it sounds.

Let's rewind.

My purpose in Sudan is another one of those high-profile exercises that it would be unwise to blog about. Once again, therefore, my ramblings will have to say on the personal side. I was looking forward to this trip, until about three weeks ago when I threw my back out. Since then, I've been dreading the plane ride, the suitcase-hauling, and most of all the bouncing and shimmying over dirt and rocks in Land Cruisers. The first two proved to be much easier than I'd feared. The latter is quite literally a pain in my ass. Luckily, I've got a few bottles of prescription fun to take the edge off. I can't take them during the day, but at least I can sleep at night -- especially if I kick the sedative effect into overdrive by adding a shot of booze.

Southern Sudan looks exactly like I expected. I mean, exactly. I've seen it all before -- the baseball diamond-coloured roads, the skeletal cattle, the tin-shack mobile phone vendors, the gutters choked with garbage. Everything -- trees, buildings, clothing -- covered in a layer of red dust. Women in colourful robes with bundles on their heads, children with bare feet and torn clothing, idle men with bloodshot, hostile eyes and bright white teeth. TIA.

But if much of the scenery is generic Africa, some of it is quite specific. Everywhere, there are reminders of the momentous January referendum, the vote that decided southern Sudan's destiny as the world's newest republic. Before even leaving the tarmac at the airport, visitors are greeted by a banner proudly welcoming South Sudan as country number #193. Billboards are still plastered with posters. A vote for independence is a vote for freedom, one peeling sign reads. We pass through an intersection where a massive digital clock sits dark, its countdown to the vote long expired. It's the hangover from a nation's birthday party, like Times Square on New Year's Day.

It is all but decided that the name of the new country will be... drumroll please... South Sudan. This caught me off guard. I had assumed that the southerners would want to dissociate themselves completely from the reviled neighbour to the north (aka Sudan). And so they do, but I had overlooked one very compelling fact: the cohesion of South Sudan is fragile indeed. Absent the bogeyman in Khartoum, there is little to unite the power groups here, which are fractured along ethnic lines. Re-naming the new country is too much of a potential can of worms. Should it be called Dinkaland? Nuerland? Something else? Calling it South Sudan saves them the headache.

I was discussing this with a Pakistani colleague, who characterized himself as a rabid anti-colonialist (naturally). He opined that the only good thing the imperial powers ever bestowed was language. If English wasn't the official language of government in Pakistan, what would it be? Urdu? Baloch? Arabic? Which dialect of Arabic? Countries like Canada and Belgium and Switzerland think they have it rough. India has 22 official languages. The alien-ness of the imperial languages -- English, French, Spanish -- was precisely their advantage.

And so, South Sudan it is. Good luck and Godspeed.