The fifth column? An intellectual history of Southern Sudanese communities in Khartoum, 1969-2005

Abstract

This is a study of vernacular political thought and organisation among southern Sudanese residents of Khartoum during the last Sudanese civil wars. Characterised variously as dangerous revolutionaries at the heart of the Sudanese state, or as collaborationist sell-outs, southern Sudanese displaced and migrant residents of Khartoum were engaged in multiple and often competing or contradictory nationalist and ethno-nationalist projects; this thesis is a study of home-grown political philosophies.

Based on archival sources and ethnographic research conducted in 2012-13 and 2015 in South Sudan, this thesis draws on retrospective accounts and on personal archives of literature, poetry and song produced within Khartoum to explore these residents’ multiple political projects to articulate, engage and mobilise a “southern” community. It evidences the slippery plurality of personal and political identification, and the messy intellectual work of imagining radical futures while getting by in the violent everyday realities of civil war.