About South Sudan

The elementary school Jok attended was called Luonyaker, which is the name of the small town in which it is located. This village is located in what is now East Gogrial County, in the federal state of Warrap. The people here are cattle-keepers and farmers. At the start of the war, this school had four classrooms built with mud walls and grass roofs. It was a six-year elementary school, so many students attended their classes under the big tree in the school yard. The school was burnt down in a government raid in May 1983 and has not been rebuilt. Many attempts have been made by the local community to continue lessons under the tree, but there are no teaching materials and no funds to maintain qualified teachers. Few people in Luonyaker have salaried jobs, so it is hard to raise any funds at all.
A student doing homework in Marol
Many of the pre-war government schools, which are concentrated in the towns, were taken over in the 1990s by the radical Islamist government and turned into Islamic schools teaching only the Quran. This is in a region of the country mostly inhabited by Christians. For example, one of the only two high schools for girls in the South was located in Juba, the Southern capital. This was turned into “the University of al-Quran al-Karim” by the Islamist government. It now lies empty.

Such policies have further diminished the resources available for South Sudanese children. Throughout the years of the war, sporadic studies were conducted by relief organizations operating in the south and in refugee camps. These painted a picture of mass illiteracy, a tragic decline from the advances that had been made before the war broke out. These studies established that 80% of school-age children in rural South Sudan have not had the opportunity to attend school.

Children as young as 10 years of age joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the Southern movement fighting against the Khartoum government. Education could only be accessed by leaving the country and entering refugee camps in the neighboring countries, or crossing the battle lines to move to the north. But even in northern Sudan, it was difficult for southern children to access good schools due to racial, religious, and class barriers—the causes of the war they were fleeing. Some of these children were conscripted into the national army after graduating from elementary school to fight against their fellow-southerners.

Children displaced and robbed of education are trapped. Violence and war may be their only option. For the last two decades the art of violence is what children in the South have learned. This will continue unless the cycle is interrupted by education.