Juba, SUDAN—Cinderblocks lie around the half-built theater hall, loose wires stick out from the top of the clock tower with its nonworking clock, and packs of goats wander the dirt paths that make up the campus. Welcome to the University of Juba, one of Southern Sudan's most recently repatriated refugees. Two decades ago, at the height of a bloody civil war, the university fled -- like many citizens of the south -- to the relative safety of the northern capital, Khartoum. In 2006, just as displaced southerners began trickling back across the border, so too did the university. Today eight of the 12 faculties have been repatriated to Juba. Torn by conflict and now reeling from the challenges of rebuilding amid peace, the university has come to embody the struggles of Southern Sudan more broadly as it inches closer and closer to independence.
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Juba has suffered centuries of trauma: neglect by Ottoman, British, and Egyptian overlords; slave raids that lasted well into the 20th century; the war against the Arab government in Khartoum, which broke out even before Sudanese independence in 1956. In 1972, an agreement signed in Addis Ababa between the government and the southern rebels gave the south something it desperately needed: a period of calm. As the fighting stalled, hope spread out from Juba into the south's towns and villages. Three years later, at the urging of southern citizens who wanted a school that could train new skilled workers to address their region's needs, the Sudanese government decided to give the south its first-ever institution of higher learning: the University of Juba.
The university's first eight years were bustling and exciting. Students came from all regions of Sudan, north and south, to learn. To be a student there in the 1980s was not all that bad -- especially in comparison with today's conditions, recalls Samson Wassara, an alumnus who is now dean of the College of Social and Economic Studies. "You [were] accommodated in single or double rooms, especially when you are an upperclassman. You have someone cleaning your room, changing the sheets for you ... and you have a variety of foods -- you have chicken, you have fish," he told me. "We had expatriates from all over the world teaching at the school, and even our library was up to date, getting collections from different journals, periodicals from the World Bank, the IMF, [and] the European Union."
In the meantime, however, the fragile peace had begun to shatter. By the early 1980s it was clear that Khartoum had reneged on its promise to allow greater autonomy for the south, dominated by Africans whom the Arabs of the north saw as subjects. First, the government attempted to redraw the border between north and south to include the newly discovered oil fields in the Bahr el-Ghazal and Upper Nile regions. The final straw came in 1983 when Sudanese President Gaafar Nimeiry began to impose sharia law across the entire country and the fighting resumed. By the late 1980s, Juba, which was then home to a major contingent of northern soldiers, was under siege by the Sudan People's Liberation Army, the southern rebel movement. The fighting around the city was so intense, Wassara remembers, that during the quiet days "we would wonder, 'Why was there no shelling today?'"
The fighting became too much, and university students who had come from the north began pressuring the Sudanese government in Khartoum to do something about their predicament. In 1989, citing the deteriorating security situation, the northern regime decided that the university -- students, equipment, everything short of the buildings themselves -- would relocate to Khartoum.
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