Over 70,000 Ethiopian refugees are stranded in Sudan amidst escalating conflicts. The complex challenges of repatriating them emphasizes the need for coordinated legal, humanitarian and diplomatic interventions.
The war in Sudan has displaced millions and cast a shadow over the country’s future. Against these odds, the spirit of popular struggle endures in ‘minor’, indeterminate scales of social and political action.
Sudanese poet, Safia Elhillo, feels very differently now about the idea of belonging than she did at the time of writing her award-winning collection, The January Children. Looking back, she was ‘so concerned with a sort of diasporic longing that centered nationhood and nationality as the primary sites of belonging, and I just really don’t believe that anymore.’
The transformation from the OAU to the AU meant accepting that the challenges Africa faced had changed from those faced during the decolonization era. Among the new challenges, the most perverse were internal wars. The AU attempted to invest heavily in mechanisms that would ‘silence the guns’ on the continent. In Sudan and Somalia, it seems that silencing the guns has remained an elusive dream.
The African Union’s diplomatic efforts in Sudan are evidence of the difficulties faced by the continental organization with regard to its autonomy and credibility. But its efforts, despite not solving all the problems, are not completely insignificant.
The African Union’s absence in Sudan is not merely a matter of geopolitical interest; it is a crisis with significant human costs and far-reaching implications for the credibility of the union’s regional governance.
Award-winning writer and Sudanese novelist, Leila Aboulela, discovered Akuany, the protagonist of her most recent novel, River Spirit, on a bill of sale in the Sudan Archives at Durham University.
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