The Republic of Southern Eloi
Many of today’s amazing things H.G. Wells imagined years earlier: electrical tools capable of reviving the unconscious, manned space travel to and from the moon, machines that could perform computations at high speed, and so on. As a fan of Wells since I was a young bookworm, one thing I did not think he could describe a century in advance was the Republic of South Sudan. But Wells succeeded in this, too. I recently returned from South Sudan, the world’s youngest country and the closest foreign country to where I live in northern Uganda.
In Juba, South Sudan, the rate of illiteracy is one of the highest of any city on earth. South Sudan as a whole has the lowest literacy rate in the world, despite its proximity to northern Uganda and Congo, both epicenters of post-conflict educational philanthropy. What literacy exists is not quite “functional literacy,” which the UN and other organizations define as the type of literacy needed to complete basic transactions and understand the packaging of foods and medicines. Instead, it is basic numeracy (the ability to understand and record integer values) and a tiny common vocabulary.
Juba is situated in the lower extension of the Nile River Valley, a gorgeous location with great historical significance to our species. This is where our common ancestors invented the basic concepts of agriculture, which allowed early humans to spread across the African savannah with a bountiful food supply. It is also where clever people – whose identities were long ago forgotten – invented the rudder, channel-and-reservoir irrigation (the basis of all modern systems), and the earliest combination block-and-tackle pulley systems. The Nile, a limitless source of fresh water originating in what is now Uganda, fed every reservoir irrigation system outside China prior to 2,000 B.C (perennial irrigation was known in Mesopotamia and parts of Asia).
In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, a race of people called the Eloi live in what appears to be a Utopian society. Long ago, like the people of the lower Nile (which is erroneously named, as it is actually the “upper Nile” in maritime or riparian parlance), the Eloi made amazing technological advances. As a result of these long-forgotten inventors, there is no disease or poverty among the Eloi. However, the Eloi have forgotten how to produce any of the things their Utopia consumes – for instance, they have glistening glass libraries, but cannot read (or engage in the kind of architecture and engineering presumably prerequisite to the structures Wells describes). The Morlocks, another species that lives below ground, operate the enormous machines that make the Eloi lifestyle of affirmatively ignorant leisure possible.
There are no Morlocks under Southern Sudan operating huge machines. But the South Sudanese have something else underground to make their low industrial productivity, shortsighted policy decisions, and rampant illiteracy sustainable, at least in the short-term: lots of oil. How much? Enough that the Chinese have already shown their willingness to bid billions of dollars for exclusive extraction rights in the country. Before South Sudan’s separation from its northern neighbor, the area contained over two-thirds of the oil and more than 90% of the light first-tier crude. And a few billion dollars goes a long way for a country with fewer than ten million people and with a per capita GDP well under $2,000.
The ingenious ancient people of the lower Nile would be, no doubt, disappointed in this dubious legacy. The most striking thing in South Sudan, perhaps, is one particular symptom of the country’s complete lack of education: an absolute absence of modern print advertising. I saw one person selling (unsuccessfully) newspapers – this was the only person I saw selling reading material during my whole time in South Sudan. There is not a book store in South Sudan’s capital city. At Noto’s, a mostly-expatriate bar not far from the center of Juba Town, foreigners read the New York Times and al-Jazeera on their iPad 2s while adults on the other side of the cinderblock walls are unlikely to have the mathematical ability, linguistic comprehension, or historical knowledge of a Hong Kong or London primary school pupil. Pressure to hire local staff leads to continuous calls for locals with professional skills; these routinely go without replies or are answered with proposals that are barely decipherable and even less realistic.
The only billboard advertising in Juba focuses on conversion SIM card kits for foreigners (featuring the country’s new country code), increasing South Sudan’s already-substantial alcohol consumption (always with photographs rather than slogans), or how much “progress” is being made in the young country in cynical, heavy-handed advertisements clearly aimed at visiting donors and aid agencies rather than residents. As in Wells’s future, life goes on with most of the country seemingly oblivious to current events; in the book, the Eloi fail to notice that they are food for the subterranean Morlocks. Similarly, the South Sudanese seem unaware that they are simply a cheap source of oil for the world’s major players; the country already has a reputation in international policy circles as an incompetent negotiator. I could find no credible domestic business reporting on any of the oil negotiations underway, though these discussions are central to the success of the South Sudanese state.
When it comes to numeracy, even elementary arithmetic proves a challenge for many residents. The lack of mathematical ability in South Sudan (and in northern Uganda) can be traced, in part, to a difference between those brilliant early inhabitants of the Nile region and its current occupants. It is nearly impossible to do any substantial mathematics in a number system with no zero. Sometime around the year 500, the number zero (and its arithmetic significance) was lost in this region, but preserved in the Arab regions to the north. Even societies that suffered from very low literacy rates – like those in northeastern Africa after the Crusades – have been able to make contributions in the field of mathematics so long as a zero was retained. But the number of zero-less civilizations with any meaningful engineering, architectural, or mathematic achievements is tiny. The zero joins the pile of forgotten inventions that could have given South Sudan a future.
And the Eloi ethos of the South Sudanese isn’t isolated to the poor. At airplane check-in leaving Juba for Entebbe, only a dozen people in the queue had South Sudan passports, but there wasn’t a single piece of reading material among them. Both of the attempts to start a newspaper of any substance or circulation in South Sudan quickly failed. Even the UN has abandoned its efforts to communicate in writing, with UNHCR and other UN missions preferring local radio stations and announcements at community meetings. Pictograms along the road leading west, depicting what to do if a land mine is discovered, are more similar to cave drawings than modern public service announcements.
Experts in political economy have long theorized that vast natural resources in developing countries create irresistible profit motives among corrupt leaders. Others have suggested that young governments are motivated to liquidate any exploitable resources, even at disadvantageous prices, to raise hard currency quickly. Still others suggest that the motivation for conflict is tied so closely to natural resource extraction that these places are locked in a state of permanent warfare (the so-called “resource curse”). Most scholars analyzing motivation overlook the possibility that many developing areas with natural resources will look like the Eloi wonderland of South Sudan: with no motivation at all.
