MUGORO, Sudan — They walked in their best clothes past villages and down dirt roads until they came to the church to fold away the pain of war and redraw the map of Africa in a referendum that began Sunday on independence for southern Sudan.
They carried walking sticks and memories of people lost in decades of bloodshed to mark a moment in history and begin a chance for reinvention in one of the continent’s poorest corners. They cast ballots as a children’s choir sang from a radio and a goat- skin drum thumped in the distance.
“This ends our slavery at the hands of the Arabs,” said Kasimiro Mogga Joseph, a priest at the All Saints Roman Catholic Church. “The Arabs considered us animals. They wanted this land but not its people. Being a priest, you feel the difficulties of your parishioners. They came to us crying and suffering during the war. We took them to hospitals and gave them hope.”
Nearly 4 million mostly Christian and animist southern Sudanese are expected to vote overwhelmingly over the next week to secede from the predominantly Muslim and Arab-led north. The anticipated outcome — final results will be announced in early February — would divide Africa’s largest nation and officially close a civil war that claimed 2 million lives before a 2005 peace treaty.
Those at the threshold of perhaps the world’s newest country were joyous, dancing and singing in the southern capital, Juba, and waving banners across deserts and bushlands dotted with thatched huts and cattle herds. Posters depicting Jesus, guerrilla heroes and Salva Kiir, president of the semiautonomous south, urged voters to choose independence.
It was a day to savor, not to reflect on the precarious future where disease and malnutrition are widespread and 80 percent of the population illiterate. The humanitarian group Oxfam says a 15-year-old girl here has more chance of dying in childbirth than finishing primary-school education.
Fears that the voting would ignite another round of fighting have eased in recent weeks. Minor clashes broke out over the weekend between Muslim and Christian tribesmen along the disputed border near Abyei, killing five people. Thousands of southern soldiers and police patrolled polling stations as voters, some holding umbrellas, stood for hours in the sun.
“I arrived here at 4 a.m., and still I have not voted,” said one man. “I will come back tonight and camp out to make sure I get to vote tomorrow.”
Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, facing pressure from Washington and Europe not to return to war, has said he would accept the vote results. But in comments broadcast Saturday, Bashir said the south “does not have the ability to provide for its citizens or create a state or authority.” The statement was political venom from a leader whose pleas for a unified Sudan ruled by Islamic law were ignored by Christians who long complained of discrimination.
But even as visits from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and actor George Clooney offered a sense of hope, the problems of the south could be seen in children selling charcoal in the dust and women with hammers breaking rocks for gravel roads.
North and south may break apart politically but will be, at least temporarily, bound by nature and need. The south, governed by the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, generates 80 percent of the country’s oil output. But it needs northern-controlled pipelines to reach the shipping ports on the Red Sea. The pact in which they share oil revenues could be rewritten.
“I’ve been waiting for 20 years to cast this ballot,” said Martin Laku, who checked the open palm symbol signifying independence instead of the clasped hands for unity. “This freedom will improve our land. It will change my life. Businesses and factories will come, and I will get a job.”
