The years from 1953 to 1963 witnessed the transition from colonial rule to independence and escalating tension and violence in South Sudan. This was also a period of significant social and economic change. Despite the shift to Sudanese leadership, the new rulers perpetuated the colonial system of governance, which proved inflexible when operated by a national elite originating from the central Nile valley. In the early 1950s, a larger segment of South Sudanese entered the domain of modern politics in earnest. Southern politics itself was affected by the upsurge in nationalism and anticolonialism spreading across the African continent, and by the Cold War competition between the USA and the USSR. Within this context, South Sudanese nationalism became a narrative of marginalization, repression, resistance, broken promises and of South Sudan's distinctiveness and need for special constitutional arrangements.

The beginning of modern politics and the emergence of South Sudanese nationalism

The process of dismantling the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium was accelerated by the combined impact of the Free Officers’ coup in Egypt in 1952, an increasingly articulate and impatient Sudanese educated elite, and a growing British realization that European imperialism in Africa was on the wane. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed “the second colonization,” whereby the British pursued state-led social and economic development while preparing national elites for self-government. Motivated by the lack of revenue from the three southern Sudanese provinces and concern over the political legacy of its care-and-maintenance regime there, the Condominium government's policy of economic and social development would prove too little and too late. The very unevenness of that policy however, made more notable such innovations as the Rumbek Secondary School, which incubated a political elite. Very little of the plan for economic development had been implemented by the time of Sudanisation, as we have seen, for example, in the fate of the Zande Scheme. In this the colonial regime set the unfortunate tone for postindependence development efforts in the South.

The conclusion that “the South” had, at the Juba Conference of 1947, “cast their lot” to remain part of a united Sudan would have a prominent position in historical narratives of South Sudan.