I should like to suggest four additions to Fred Bridgland's excellent article (Fear and barbarism in Africa's forgotten state, The world, November 1).
The visceral hatred of the southern Sudanese for the northerners was engendered by centuries of slave-trading, which serviced the Middle East and North Africa. The very slow rate of development practised by the British was the same as that practised in all the British colonies south of the Sahara as it was assumed that it would take several generations to prepare these countries for African self-rule.
The incompatibility of south and north Sudan was so well understood by the British that they proposed to split the country and join the south to Uganda. This idea was shelved at the outbreak of the Second World War and never followed up after it. How the combined country would have fared, with the Nilotic tribes far-outnumbering the Bantu, is a matter for conjecture.
The rampages of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, southern Sudan and eastern Congo have brutalised the populations further and contributed much to the escalation of horror that the article describes.
David R Hill
Kinross
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