South Sudan preserves past to forge a proud future
| focus |
 |
JUBA — Yellowing papers, nibbled by termites and dumped on piles waist high, crowd the sweltering-hot giant tent: The raw documents that make up the history of the world’s newest nation to be.
As south Sudan prepares for full independence, due on July 9 after last month’s referendum that saw almost 99 percent of the mostly African Christian south vote to break from historical domination by the Arab-Muslim north, work is going on to preserve its past.
“It is a major task, but it is so important to preserve these documents before it is too late,” said archivist Youssef Fulgensio Onyalla, tasked with heading the rescue work by the southern government.
Jumbled scraps of papers in Arabic and English lie alongside political assessments from the 1920s, traditional shields and spears, and century-old hand-drawn maps of regions newly explored by British colonial administrators: a muddled treasure trove for historians piecing together the past of a long-troubled land..... MORE
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20110210com7.html
0 comments
Post a Comment