Does Deng’s book foresee the conflict in Darfur?
Well, the reason I think he’s such a good author is that he’s a Southerner who served for many years in the 1980s in the only truly national government under Jafar Numeiri, an Islamist Northerner who was the only president who managed to reach an accommodation with the South. That constituted a ten-year gap in the civil war. Several Southerners served in Numeiri’s administration, so that allowed Deng to see the Northerners from close up, and he was able to write in detail very coherently about the North just as he was about the South. Deng held important jobs – he was a foreign minister and ambassador to Washington, but he also has a very academic turn of mind. There’s a lot of anthropology in there: he’s very interested in the religious aspects of both Southerners and Northerners as well as some of the politics, so you not only get to understand both – rare enough – but you also get a very rounded view of what makes them tick. When he was writing, the North and the South were at war a
