The Power of Creative Reasoning: The Ideas and Vision of John Garang

by Lual A. Deng

Overview

Seventy-two percent of South Sudan’s population is under thirty years of age. It is this generation that must create a new South Sudanese identity that is inclusive of all its nationalities. In The Power of Creative Reasoning, author Lual A. Deng shows how the ideas and concepts touted by Dr. John Garang could facilitate the advancement of the ideals of freedom, liberty, and human dignity.

The Power of Creative Reasoning provides an insider’s perspective on Garang, a visionary leader who used a combination of strategic thinking and a path-goal approach to resolve complex societal problems. Deng has coined the term “Garangism”  as the pursuit of Sudanese commonality with conviction, courage, consistency, and creativity to end all forms of marginalization.

Deng shows how Garang employed symbolic logic in the form of Venn Diagrams to articulate the vision of New Sudan and presents ten power-ful ideas to help the Sudanese as they are facing serious challenges of leadership, democratic governance, sustained peace, economic growth, poverty, and corruption. The Power of Creative Reasoning communicates that the leadership of the new Sudan can manage these challenges by internalizing Garang’s ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475960303
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	01/25/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	474 KB

Read an Excerpt

The Power of Creative Reasoning

The Ideas and Vision of John Garang

---

By Lual A. Deng

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Lual A. Deng
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6028-0

---

Chapter One

Introduction

One of my favorite stories of possessing vision is about Walt Disney. Because Walt had passed away before the Grand Opening of Walt Disney World, Mrs. Disney was asked to appear on the stage at the opening ceremony. When she was introduced to come to the podium and greet the crowd, the master of ceremonies said to her, "Mrs. Disney—I just wish Walt could have seen this!" Mrs. Disney simply responded, "He did!" —John C. Maxwell (2001, 137)

This is not a biography of John Garang. It is about only one characteristic of his entire life cycle: creative reasoning. John Garang was an economist, a soldier, a revolutionary, a political thinker, and, above all, a family man. The above quotation caught my imagination when I started contemplating the process of writing this book in December 2005. I was then leading the wealth-sharing team of the Government of National Unity (GONU) at the Darfur Peace Talks in Abuja, Nigeria. I had not been, however, successful in completing the writing before the end of the interim period due to many intervening factors beyond my control. But I would not have told the full story about the ideas and vision of John Garang had I published it at that time. The invisible hand of providence must have been behind these intervening factors.

But why write a book anyway? I set out to write this book with the main purpose of providing critical tools of analysis to the young generation of Sudanese (in the now two new Sudans) in their search for self-identity on the one hand and in understanding their historical heritage/legacy (commonwealth) on the other. I have decided to call the body of knowledge based on these critical tools of analysis "Garangism," which I define as the pursuit of Sudanese commonality with conviction, courage, and consistency. I would like the young generation in the North (now Sudan) to know that the cumulative policies of successive regimes in Khartoum have finally broken the back of the Sudanese "golden camel," thereby splitting the country into two independent states. This young generation can, if it internalizes the vision of John Garang, avoid further disintegration of Sudan into smaller states of Darfur, Nuba Mountains, Funj, Beja, and Kush.

Seventy-two percent of the population of South Sudan is under thirty years of age. It is this young generation that must utilize Dr. John's power of creative reasoning underpinning his ideas and vision in creating a new South Sudanese identity that is inclusive of all its nationalities. This calls for a nation-building project that looks beyond our tribes and geographical locations on the map of South Sudan. They must focus on the unifying factors of the people of South Sudan, not on what divides them. William Gumede of South Africa, as if offering some guidelines to the young people of the South in their quest for a new South Sudanese national identity, states,

South African identities are not "gated communities" with fixed borders; more often than not, they overlap meaningfully, beyond the occasional shared word or value. Our modern South Africanness therefore cannot be but a "layered," plural and inclusive one, and one based on acceptance of our "interconnected differences." (2012, 144)

If you replaced South African with South Sudanese in the above quotation, you would essentially be talking about our situation in South Sudan. I do not want our youth, who constitute more than two-thirds of the South Sudanese population, to let my generation get away with pervasive corruption, "service delivery failure, autocratic behaviour, and wrongdoing in the name of advancing the liberation or independence project" (Gumede 2012, 11). This book is therefore a powerful tool to utilize in advancing the ideals of freedom, liberty, and human dignity, for which Dr. John (as our people call him) gave the ultimate. He formulated the New Sudan Project as a way of achieving these ideals of the liberation struggle, utilizing the illustrious history of the Kush kingdom as a guide in his creative reasoning.

Dr. John brought down the walls of injustice and marginalization by securing our mental liberation from the self-imprisonment we suffered in the jails of ignorance, hatred, and jealousy. This mental liberation came through knowing the truth about our rich historical heritage that the thousand-year empire of the Kushites bequeathed to us (Welsby 1996). John 8:32 informs us, "The truth shall make you free."

Kush (or Cush) in the Nilotic languages means "unknown," and it is a name normally given to a child who is born after his (for Kush) or her (for Akush) mother has repeatedly lost children in infancy. So the newborn after such misfortunes is named Kush or Akush, meaning it is not known if he or she will live.

Historians and archeologists are still discovering the ancient kingdom of Kush. They have managed to establish that it was the center of culture and military might in Africa, but they are still attempting to decipher its language. Dr. John, a "true Kushite," used this rich historical heritage to reposition Southern Sudanese at the center of Sudanese politics instead of a minority clique in Khartoum marginalizing it.

Although Dr. John left us before the completion of the New Sudan Project, he saw it all through his vision of New Sudan. His analysis of the New Sudan through Venn diagrams constitutes clear evidence in support of my statement that Dr. John saw the New Sudan. He was always ahead of us by several steps. He was a pioneer in the real sense of the word, a visionary who revolutionized the way we think and the manner in which we behave individually as well as collectively. Dr. John lived a life worth living, for he has impacted, more than any other South Sudanese leader, the way of life of the current and future Sudanese generations.

Let us look at how he could have seen the New Sudan by walking through a strategic route (Venn diagrams or models of Sudan) of path-goal approach to the Sudanese crisis of state and identity.

I first provide the intellectual foundation (in the form of his ideas) of the vision of the New Sudan Project in chapter 2. The central message of this chapter is that the might and glory of the ancient kingdom of Kush could be restored to the present Sudans through the power of ideas of a courageous and visionary leader, such as John Garang, with a sense of mission to serve his people by rescuing them from a vicious circle of ignorance and injustice. He made some of us understand our history of who we are by showing where we came from. Knowing where we came from evaded many Southern Sudanese leaders who came before John Garang. Why is this? I would argue that, because his point of departure was the Sudanese commonality, which places the Kushites at the center of Sudanese heritage and being, this consciousness and awakening of being—or, as the famous Sudanese singer Mohamed Al-Wardi put it, "abina muluuk fi zaman"—has demolished the wall of ignorance about who we are. In addition, Derek Welsby validates this point in the following passage:

Consideration of the Kushites alongside such giants of the ancient world as the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians is justified on account of the longevity of the kingdom and of its size, if for no other reasons. At the time when Rome was a small village on the banks of the Tiber and the Greek city states held sway over minuscule territories, the Kushites ruled an empire stretching from the central Sudan to the borders of Palestine. The Kingdom of Kush outlived the Greek city states and the period of Macedonian hegemony over vast traces of the ancient world, and co-existed with the rise, heyday and much of the period of decline of the Roman Empire. (1996, 8–9)

Chapter 3, the backbone of the book, is where I try, using Dr. John's models (Chart 3.1), to walk the reader through the South's various unsuccessful attempts to govern itself. I do this through five phases by exploring five times when the South gave the unity of Sudan a chance—in 1947, 1956, 1965, 1972, and 2005. But every time, the cultural and political elites ruling in Khartoum failed miserably to make unity attractive. The country was stuck at Model 3 of Chart 3.1, where it entered a cycle of crisis of state and identity, resulting in a devastating civil war in the South.

A durable solution was found only when a visionary leader arrived. This leader was John Garang, who identified a strategic path-goal approach to solving the problem. He further developed an analytical framework in which he utilized Venn diagrams to elucidate the concept of the New Sudan (Chart 3.1). "Venn diagrams or set diagrams are diagrams that show all hypothetically possible logical relations between finite collections of sets" ("Venn diagrams," Wikipedia). Dr. John used these hypothetically possible, logical relations as models in search of a lasting solution to the Sudanese crisis of state and identity.

I conclude the book in chapter 4 with ten shining moments of John Garang at the Republican Palace as the first vice president (FVP) of Sudan on the one hand and president of the Government of Southern Sudan (GoSS) on the other.

Chapter Two

The Ten Powerful Ideas of John Garang

Around 5,000 years ago, a rich and powerful nation called the kingdom of Kush (also referred to as ancient Nubia) was a center of culture and military might in Africa. Ancient Nubia had a wealth of natural resources such as gold, ivory, copper, frankincense and ebony, but they also produced and traded a variety of goods such as pottery.

Dr. John had many powerful ideas, but I have chosen only ten that I think will help us understand what is emerging in the two Sudans as Garangism. I settled on these after a long, soul-searching debate within me as a person whose social, political, and professional beliefs and convictions have been shaped by ideas and visions of John Garang de Mabior. The ten selected ideas are essentially attributes of Garangism, which I define as the pursuit of Sudanese commonality with conviction, courage, and consistency (the three Cs). The above quotation has elucidated this commonality, which provides a strong foundation for our belief in the correctness of the vision of New Sudan. That is, the two Sudans could be a center (New Kush/Cush, for that matter) of culture and military might in the heart of Africa. And one cannot discuss the ideas of John Garang without, in his own words, "historical context and contemporary realities." I will not discuss the historical context of Garangism, for the above quotation already illustrates it.

A key contemporary reality is this: South Sudan is endowed with natural resources (for example, oil, vast agricultural land, water, and minerals), but it is a landlocked country surrounded by six countries with a total land boundary of 5,413 kilometers (CIA Factbook, 2012). The countries are Sudan to the north (2,184-kilometer-long boundary), Ethiopia to the east (934-kilometer-long boundary), Kenya to the southeast (232-kilometer-long boundary), Uganda to the south (435-kilometer-long boundary), Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to the southwest (639-kilometer-long boundary), and Central African Republic (CAR) to the west (989-kilometer-long boundary).

This contemporary reality is composite, as it combines natural resource endowment with geopolitical realities of a landlocked country, which would require, in my view, strategic thinking and rational behavior on the part of South Sudan as a new member in the community of sovereign states at three levels: regionally (with its six neighbors), continent-wide, and globally. I will return to this point later on while discussing Dr. John's idea of tamazuj.

I would like to briefly look at the three Cs (conviction, courage, and consistency) before discussing the ideas and vision of John Garang. I consider the three Cs to be the moral virtue inherent in these ideas.

On conviction, Dr. John articulated the Sudanese commonality as the shared heritage, which the richness of our diverse cultural traditions and beliefs passed down to us from the Kush/Nubian ancient kingdoms symbolizes. I would like to illustrate this conviction with a quote from a message from my younger daughter (Abiol) to one of her sisters:

I wish you could have been with me when I went to the ruins of the Nubian kingdom in Sudan. We were born in this life with an advantage to so many other Africans. Not only do we know where we come from—we have an illustrious history. But our ancestors did not sacrifice, struggle, fight for us to be the way we are now.

Indeed, our ancestors fought for us and bequeathed to us a solid commonwealth, such as cultural heritage from which various generations of Kushites can begin to create other wealth.

The words of Abiol do underline the depth of our innate emotional core inherent in Dr. John's conviction of Sudanese commonality. It also underscores the caring aspect of Garangism that I have not mentioned previously. In fact, there are five Cs—conviction, courage, consistency, creativity, and competency—that are fundamentals of Garangism, but I have chosen to focus on only three at this stage. I touch upon the other two Cs in chapter 3 with respect to leadership.

A people without traceable cultural heritage would not have a body of knowledge to create commonwealth and sustainable legacies for their future generations. In this respect, throwing away the rich legacy of the Kushites, as some elements in South Sudan propose, would be an act of self-denial and social suicide. Our very being is our heritage bequeathed to us over five thousand years since the time of the Kush/Cush kingdom. Dr. John's conviction is evidenced-based belief, for biblical sources and archeological research findings support it. The book of Genesis (10:6) talks of Cush/Kush as the son of Ham, the son of Noah. And archeological research has confirmed the Kush/Cush kingdom to be the first recorded kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa. Because of our lazy thinking, we have not been able to dig deep into our history. But Dr. John did that for Abiol's generation, a generation of dotcom that will never betray his legacy for which he paid the ultimate.

Dan Morrison of the National Geographic News reported, "The first recorded kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa, Kush was one of the first civilizations to take hold in the Nile River Valley." Moreover, according to the University of Chicago archeologist Geoff Embeling, the kingdom "was unusual in that it was able to use the tools of power—military and governance—without having a system of writing, an extensive bureaucracy, or numerous urban centers." But I would contemplate that more archeological research would reveal one day that the Kush kingdom had a written language, the Meroitic language, for instance. And even if it is true that it did not, we should still take pride of our illustrious history, especially with more revelations about being the birthplace of the iron industry and the irrigation system (Herman Bell 1998; Christine Henry).

So the challenge is for our historians to join hands with world-renowned archeologists in their quest to dig deep into the Kushite system of governance, for the ugly face of racism and prejudice concealed this historical reality. One of the leading archeologists, Dr. Timothy Kendall, well articulates this point:

Historians have long known about Kush, but relegated its importance to a vassal state of Egypt, significant only for its gold reserves. Early excavations in the Kush capital at Kerma suffered from the innate racism of the archaeologists. Fabulous grave goods, discovered in the 20th century, were thought to have belonged to Kush's Egyptian overlords. They didn't consider that a black African culture could have challenged Egypt's supremacy.

A revelation more consistent with Dr. John's political philosophy and morality is the Kushite redistributive system. A Wikipedia article quotes Derek Welsby as follows:

Some scholars believe the economy in the Kingdom of Kush was a redistributive system. The state would collect taxes in the form of surplus produce and would redistribute to the people. Others believe that most of the society worked on the land and required nothing from the state and did not contribute to the state. Northern Kush seemed to be more productive and wealthier than the Southern area.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Power of Creative Reasoning by Lual A. Deng Copyright © 2013 by Lual A. Deng. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments....................vii
Chapter One: Introduction....................1
Chapter Two: The Ten Powerful Ideas of John Garang....................6
Chapter Three: The Vision of New Sudan....................70
Chapter Four: Brief Shining Moments of the Sudanese Presidency....................174
Bibliography....................195
Index....................201