Racialization after Independence

In July 2011, an overwhelming majority of registered southern Sudanese voters chose independence over unity with Sudan. The partition of the country was understood globally as the solution to a context of racialized apartheid in which the Arab/African and Christian/Muslim axes of difference relegated the southern population to second-class citizenship. Despite decades of racialized marginalization in Khartoum, identifying who was southern required a new anthropological precision to create policy and institutionalize what had been an ideology of difference. In the wake of the referendum on secession, the parameters of citizenship shifted in both Sudans as the new border was made to align with the new racial-national configuration, southerners were to leave and return only as foreigners. I focus on the grievances of South Sudanese professionals who had returned to Khartoum in the wake of civil war in South Sudan. Their critique of post-secession citizenship highlights how the contours of Arab/African difference continued to shape the experience of, and ideas about, belonging after independence.