Scripting the nation: extraverted political propaganda from the Southern Sudanese Liberation Movement

This paper examines a series of political propaganda made by the Southern Sudanese Liberation Movement (SSLM) between 1970 and 1972. The investigation asks how ‘the nation’ was scripted to achieve various external and domestic aims. The article shows representations of a militarised ‘black African’ nation, which is against the Arab governance of the North, and above chiefdom systems rooted in the South. The representational analysis demonstrates these are not straightforward depictions of elite ideologies. They are also not symbolic of enduring colonial influences, uneasy Cold War alliances, and regional moral solidarities. In fact, the representations actively destabilise and undermine the long-term diplomatic ambitions of the newspaper’s own contributors. Instead, they serve immediate-term and highly pragmatic goals; namely, securing support from Israel and crushing dissent within the SSLM. The paper therefore complicates understandings of the racialised militarism at the root of Southern Sudanese statebuilding. It clarifies and extends knowledge of postcolonial African political development, in particular, how elite ideas of ‘state’ and ‘nation’ are not necessarily ideological symbols but the contingent products of immediate-term political strategizing.