John Garang’s legacy

By Moyiga Korokoto Nduru*

July 31, 2006 — John Garang will be remembered in history as someone who had done something an African has never done before. He locked up his doctorate degree in a suitcase, picked an AK-47 assault riffle and joined thousands of other volunteers to liberate his people.

With a doctorate degree in agro-economics in his possession, Garang had an opportunity to negotiate a job of his choice anywhere in the world. But he chose to go to the bush – not to Washington, London or Geneva – and be with his people and share a life in a jungle infested with mosquitoes, snakes and wild animals. A selfless individual, Garang was.

For 21 years Garang led a revolution to free and restore dignity to his people. Southerners have been treated as third class citizens (after Arab Muslim men and women) in their own country since independence from Britain in 1956.

The day the fateful helicopter carrying Garang disappeared in the mountain ranges along the Sudan-Uganda border I was in Pretoria interacting with some of his representatives who had been serving him around the world. To pay them back for their unflinching loyalty, Garang sent them for a diplomatic course in South Africa’s capital. It was a sad day.

Returning home to Johannesburg in the middle of the night that day, my mind wondered from the leadership vacuum created by Garang’s death to the future of South Sudan.

Within 24 hours the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) surprised the world by rallying behind Salva Kiir, Garang’s deputy. The Islamists and, indeed, the rest of the northerners were expecting southerners to embark on an orgy of a bloody power struggle, tearing each other into pieces. They were proved wrong.

In a memorial service held for Garang in Pretoria, former Haitian President Jean-Bartrand Aristide was scheduled to deliver the key speech. He didn’t turn up. Fortunately, his able wife Mildred stood in for him and delivered a speech loaded with inflammatory socialist and anti-imperialist rhetoric. The Aristides were in exile in South Africa.

Listening to Aristide’s wife speaking was like listening to Garang during the early days of the revolution before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall off the Berlin Wall. Garang had come a long way and I was wondering what might have been going on in his mind when Madame Mildred was delivering her speech. He might have been smiling and saying ?Oh boy, some people never change. They never change’.

The presence of an Aristide at Garang’s memorial service showed that the vision of the late rebel leader resonates beyond South Sudan’s borders. When his death was announced, there was a disbelief in much of sub-Saharan Africa.

Writing in a Sudanese online publication last year, I captured the following observations: ?’Skepticism about the cause of Garang’s death is not confined to South Sudan. I witnessed a similar disbelieve when touring a number of African countries recently.

?’Garang’s name doesn’t come out easily but people do remember that bearded, charismatic former rebel leader who died in a mysterious plane crash while returning from neighbouring Uganda on 30 July 2005.

?’It’s hard to come across a single soul in sub-Saharan Africa who accepts the official version that the helicopter, provided by his long-time friend, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, crashed in a bad weather. Garang was flying late at evening in bad weather, over a rugged territory, covered by high mountain ranges.

?’A South African colleague looked at me in disbelief when I told him that the fateful chopper carrying Sudan’s former First Vice-President Garang, who was also the President of the Government of South Sudan, was landing in an area where there is no electricity. At least apartheid, an evil system that it was, looked after its downtrodden blacks; but the ruling Arab elites in Sudan have performed worse than the Boers.

?’To the people of Africa, Garang has joined the list of modern revolutionaries like Chris Hani, the anti-apartheid guerilla leader, who was gunned down before South Africa’s liberation; Josiah Tongogara, the Zimbabwe guerilla leader, who died in a mysterious car accident while on his way from Mozambique to Zimbabwe just a year before that country’s independence; and Fred Rwigyema, the Rwandese rebel leader who was murdered before his forces could storm and seize power in the capital Kigali.

?’The list is endless.”

* The writer is a South Sudanese journalist based in South Africa’s commercial hub of Johannesburg. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]