‘Southern Sudan’ and ‘economic development’ are not terms often seen in the same sentence. The south of the country has been a stranger to many of the changes that have taken place elsewhere in Africa over the past century or so, having been kept in a state of ‘underdevelopment’ by both colonial and post-colonial governments based in the north. The British imperial authorities tended to see the southerners as inherently primitive and backward; the various Islamist regimes that have dominated Sudan since independence have had, if anything, an even more derogatory attitude to them. In both cases, racial theories have been at the heart of the lack of economic development. It is not surprising then that, as Yongo-Bure says, ‘No book has [previously] been published on the economic development, or lack of development, of the Southern Sudan.’

The present book thus represents an initial ‘scoping study’ of vast scale and ambition. Successive chapters cover, all too briefly, topics that in other contexts would have merited their own books: issues such as natural resources, industrial development, minerals and energy, transport and communications, human resources, fiscal policies, trade and foreign aid. In each chapter, the author has collated baseline data from a range of government reports, academic studies (including a number of American MA theses) and aid agency documents, and in each case he makes recommendations for further development of the relevant sector.

This wide-ranging macro approach has its drawbacks. The oil industry, for example, which is likely to be at the heart of any serious economic development (and which is also at the heart of continuing disputes between the south and the north, including their inability to agree even on what territory is to be included in ‘the South’) is covered in less than eight pages. There is no attempt to take a political economy approach and, in general, politics and history are inadequately covered, though they continually intrude, explicitly or implicitly, into what attempts to be a purely positivist, ‘scientific’ economic study.

More seriously perhaps, the actual economic lives of the majority of the people are systematically ignored or dismissed as ‘subsistence’ activities, and hence, by definition, wholly antithetical to ‘economic development’. In this respect, the book does not move away from the long-standing dismissal of the Southern Sudanese as backward and primitive, rather it reinforces exactly these views. However, such attitudes are not peculiar to the enemies of Southern Sudan; the doctoral thesis of the founder of the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army/Movement, John Garang himself, argued much the same thing in relation to the economic development of the Jonglei area.

Despite my criticisms, Economic Development of Southern Sudan is a brave and ambitious attempt to sketch the outline of a very neglected topic. As such, it will find a place on the shelves of everyone interested in the past, present and future of a region that may one day become an independent African state.