1The process of nation building that has characterized the recent history of South Sudan is based on several symbolic aspects, of which the religious factor is only one of many. However, religion is a more strategic component because during the second civil war, it sustained the activism of several Christian missions, including the powerful American evangelical organization Samaritan’s Purse, headed by Franklin Graham, [1] who during an evangelization “festival” that took place in Juba on October 26 and 27, 2012, explicitly linked independence, nation building, and Christian identity. [2] Yet the mark of American evangelism on South Sudanese society is not the whole story as regards the Christian impact of the Western powers on the newly created state. Despite it now being regarded as secular, Europe, starting with the United Kingdom, continues to play a role as the former British occupying power maintains influential networks through the Anglican Communion.

2In the long history of the South Sudanese provinces, other religious players have left a legacy, starting with Italy, which provided priests for the Comboni Mission. Although the history of this mission has not yet been fully written, [3] Comboni missionaries played a vital role under difficult conditions in bringing Christianity to the area, building dozens of large Catholic houses of worship, most of which are still standing, and contributing to the establishment of Catholicism in South Sudan, which remains as strong as ever. What was France’s role within the Catholic sphere of influence? The aim of this study is to examine the example of Bahr el-Ghazal and the city of Wau (capital of Western Bahr el-Ghazal) through the little-known work of Father Hubert Barbier.

3The context of the Marchand Mission (see below), which gave rise to the development of Wau at the end of the nineteenth century, set the stage for the establishment of long-term French influence. At the end of the first Sudanese civil war, the white Father Hubert Barbier built a medical center in Wau that was to become very important for the future of the region as even the deadly shocks of the second Sudanese civil war did not prevent the work of the center from enduring as part of the international activism of Father Barbier in support of the Christian cause in South Sudan.

France in Wau: The Legacy of the Marchand Mission

4Today, the historiography of the Congo-Nile mission known as the “Marchand Mission” (1896–1899) has been expanded by major works, [4] which relay witness accounts. [5] These reports shed light not only on the well-known Fachoda affair, which came to an end after cigars and brandy were exchanged between Lord Kitchener and Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand (1863–1934) [6]  with a French retreat in the face of British Imperial ambitions on the Upper Nile. It also helped greatly to refine the French impact over 6,000 km of land stretching from west to east. Far from leaving a temporary French footprint in South Sudan, Fachoda appears like the tail end of a comet whose influence was in reality deeper than might appear.

5In July 1896, after leaving Loango on Congo’s Atlantic coast and under the leadership of Infantry Captain Marchand, the French mission first embarked on a dangerous phase involving the transportation of 12,000 bearer loads (equivalent to 600 tons) across 1,500 km, with the French reaching Bangui on the shores of the Ubangi River in April 1897. A second one-year phase shifted from the Congo to the Nile. It was an epic journey, during which the Faidherbe steamboat (designed for sailing on the Nile) was dismantled and transported in separate pieces, and men advanced across unknown lands. The French infantrymen, bearers, and soldiers “suffered endless hardships,” reported Paul Barré, “no bread, no fresh meat, no wine, and new struggles every day!” (1898, 27). It was at the end of this second phase that Fort Desaix was built on the Jur (or Soueh) River in Bahr el-Ghazal.

“Fort Desaix! Last stage before Fachoda”

“Fort Desaix! Last stage before Fachoda”

Exterior wall of Fort Desaix, a small fort built in January 1898 by the infantrymen and local recruits of the Congo-Nile mission (known as the “Marchand Mission”), overlooking the Jur (or Soueh) River. This photograph was taken by Albert Ernest Baratier, right-hand man to Marchand, and became part of an album in a private family collection discovered and published in 2010 by Éric Deroo in La grande traversée de l’Afrique, 1896–1899: Congo, Fachoda, Djibouti. In his travel diaries, Baratier wrote: “Fort Desaix! Last stage before Fachoda! Fort Desaix, the true leader of our penetration; one more step forward and we will have accomplished our mission [. . .] The group of infantrymen and the Yakomas set up camp in the open. Brave Sudanese! [. . .] They covered all the jobs as transporters, carriers, tent guards, farmers, couriers, builders, woodcutters, paddlers, and road workers.” (General Baratier, Vers le Nil: Souvenirs de la mission Marchand, Paris: Fayard, 1910, 97)

6Described by Baratier (1925) as the “true spearhead of our penetration,” the site was occupied by the French for little more than six months between December 1897 and June 1898. Yet the French took the time to forge ties with the local tribes, though not without some tensions as regards the Dinka people. Six months was a very short time! However, Wau owes its development to the French presence and the construction of Fort Desaix in January 1898 (including fortifications, building, and huts). Not only has this historical fact, which is largely forgotten today, been recorded (very briefly) in more recent historiography, but it was also the subject of early and sympathetic attention by Stefano Santandrea, an Italian scholar enthralled by the cultural and tribal Bahr el-Ghazal region.

7A Catholic priest in the Comboni Mission, Santandrea is the author of approximately twenty books and shorter texts on linguistics, anthropology, geography, and history. Their common link was the Bahr el-Ghazal region, where he dedicated himself for the most part to the mission of being a priest. In A Popular History of Wau, he recalled that the old city of Wau, which he described as a modest village, had been noted since the 1860s in a number of accounts (von Heuglin 1869; Schweinfurth 1984) but that it had disappeared following a Mahdist attack in the spring of 1884 (Santandrea 1964, 17). After it was destroyed, the original site was unable to rise from the rubble.

8The new Wau, which grew to become the third-largest city in South Sudan today, emerged out of Fort Desaix. At the confluence of the Jur (or Soueh) and Bussere (or Waou, as Baratier [7] calls it) rivers, it was a favorite site, where the French built their fort. As Santandrea, himself a resident of Wau, comments, “it is the site where Wau stands today” (1964, 18). In fact, Santandrea made an exceptional contribution to these conclusions since it was an oral tradition, which was still alive when he was writing in the early 1960s, that attributed to tribe chief Kwol Ukel (of the Akwer clan), who died in 1922, the initiative of having indicated to the French the best hill on which to build a fort. In the 1940s, a woman from the Balanda tribe named Undubor confirmed this account to the author, thus linking Chief Kwol Ukel to Captain Marchand as regards the birth of the contemporary city of Wau (Santandrea 1964, 20). After the French left, Fort Desaix became once again Wau, just as Fort Hossinger became Tamboura and Fort Dupleix became Deim Zubair. Yet even though the French imprint was brief, it left a long-lasting influence in the local memory as a result of a policy that was regarded as generous toward the local population. [8] However, under joint Egyptian-British rule, efforts were made to erase this memory, and the French origins of Wau were lost in the sand.

9Forty years after the work of Santandrea, a prestigious photographic volume was published by Deroo in 2010, providing visual evidence of the founding of the contemporary city of Wau through an exceptional set of photographs, most of which came from the family collection of General Albert Baratier, then right-hand man to Marchand. The photographs show the Fort Desaix site under construction on the banks of the Jur (Soueh) River and provide a unique testimony to the origins of South Sudan’s third-largest city (after Juba and Malakal).

A French White Father Builds a Medical Center in Wau (1976–1985)

10Following the vicissitudes of the Egyptian-British joint hegemony over the region came the sudden jolts of independence. In the meantime, Wau grew slowly, with an incomplete list of taxpayers in the city listing just 828 names in 1931 (Santandrea 1964, 71).

11The village that became a city was always characterized by the prominent presence of the Dinka tribe and its various subgroups. [9] However, it was also marked by a deep and less well known Catholic evangelization drive led mainly by the Comboni Mission. This took place as part of the rising influence of this Catholic mission in Africa, led by two emblematic figures, an Italian priest and a French priest. Influenced by a first missionary trip to South Sudan in 1858, Daniel Comboni (1831–1881) was the founder of an institute of diocesan law, the Instituto per le Missionari della Nigrizia, which he established in Verona and which was fully operational by 1871. Following the death of its founder in 1881, a religious congregation, the Comboni Mission, was gradually established between 1895 and 1910.

12Following the creation of the Institute and the founding of the Mission, over the course of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Catholic priests and sisters in Bahr el-Ghazal established a small but enduring Catholic presence in the area. [10] Today, the mission’s website shows the remarkable trajectories of missionaries such as Alfonso Polacchini (1927–2003), who remained in his post in Bahr el-Ghazal (mainly in Raja) between 1957 and 1994. [11] After settling during difficult times in a geopolitical space “caught in the crossfire” of one civil war after another (Schomerus and Allen 2010), the Mission supported a minority of Christians from 1930 onward (primarily members of the Kresh Gbaya tribe). While Comboni was establishing in Italy a network of missionaries destined for Africa and the upper Nile Valley in particular, Cardinal Lavigerie (1825–1892) in France was setting up the congregation of the White Fathers (1868) and the missionary sisters of Africa (1869) (Ceillier 2008), whom he sent to sub-Saharan Africa with a view to Catholic evangelization, following the Council of Algiers (1873). From then on, the White Fathers and the Comboni Fathers were to leave a strong imprint on the Christianization of the region.

13Elegant churches in yellow-earth brick decorated with rosettes are today testimony to field-based Catholic missionary work away from the spotlight or commentators. Established as an apostolic prefecture for Bahr el-Ghazal on May 30, 1913, and affiliated with the Apostolic Vicariate of Central Africa, [12] Wau first became a Vicariate on December 12, 1974, and then a Diocese, thus reflecting the slow but steady growth of Catholicism in the region up to Raja (a city with two Catholic chapels). In the meantime, the ecclesiastical personnel became more indigenous, the clergy losing its European (mostly Italian) and missionary characteristic with the appointments of the first Apostolic Prefect Antonio Stoppani [13] and Cardinal Gabriel Zubeir Wako, a native of Mboro who was made first Bishop of Wau in 1974. This process was accelerated by the repressive policy of the Khartoum government, which expelled foreign missionaries during the first civil war and destroyed numerous religious buildings, including churches and schools.

14The relative Catholic conversion of Wau during this period was coupled with a growing—though more discrete—Protestant presence. In contrast with other southern Sudanese regions, where there were powerful Protestant churches, starting with the Episcopal Church of Sudan affiliated to the Anglican community, the religious glue of the former British colonial rule (Sharkey 2003), Protestantism came third in the region after Islam and Catholicism. However, it was strengthened after the 1970s by the growth of evangelism, “a Protestantism of conversion” characterized by a strong proselytizing culture (Fath 2004). Its presence was attested in Bahr el-Ghazal by the missionary work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), [14] which developed (among other initiatives) a translation project for the Kresh Gbaya tribe that started between 1975 and 1978 but was interrupted in 1991 (Brown 1991). The Samaritan’s Purse, an NGO founded by Bob Pierce in 1979 and headed since 1979 by Franklin Graham, was involved in South Sudan after 1993 through the reconstruction and erection of chapels [15] and targeted humanitarian work “in the name of Jesus Christ,” as illustrated by the Lui hospital (in the state of Western Equatoria), which has been managed since 1997 by Ken Isaacs on behalf of this evangelical NGO. [16]

15The evolution of the religious landscape of Wau and its region was part of an extremely tense political situation. In many newly independent African countries, argues historian d’Almeida-Topor (1993, 236), “national cohesion was often achieved only through coercion,” and Sudan did not escape this process, triggering in return resistance by the people of the South, who felt that they had been abandoned. The first civil war that took place from 1955 to 1972 devastated Bahr el-Ghazal. What little infrastructure existed was destroyed, thus severely affecting the local population. At the end of the conflict in the early 1970s, Wau looked like an emerging city that was isolated and particularly disadvantaged, at the heart of a “gray zone” characterized by the unraveling of authority and decline. [17]

16It is in this context that a French White Father, Hubert Barbier (born on September 8, 1926), entered the scene. [18] Nothing initially predisposed this man to dedicate himself to Wau. A priest who had been ordained in Carthage (Tunisia) in 1953, he was familiar with French Sudan (now Burkina Faso and Mali), where he worked for twenty-two years. But Anglophone Sudan was a different world to him. Yet this fails to take into account his great talents as an administrator and project manager, for which he was greatly valued by the White Fathers. It was these less-well-known aptitudes that led the House of Cardinals of the White Fathers to turn to him for a large-scale project, namely the building of a medical center in Wau. Originally an initiative of the Conference of Bishops of Sudan with the help of White Father Arthur Dejemeppe, the project was supported by Sudanaid (Caritas Sudan) with a view to assisting in the reconstruction and development of a largely Christianized South Sudan and where the Catholic Church had several contact points. The objective of the medical center was to put in place a medical infrastructure in a destitute area and to make it possible to train doctors and nurses on site. [19]

17This initiative was part of the (re)construction of the southern provinces of Sudan following the first civil war (1955–1972). However, the issue of aid raised political questions, both locally and elsewhere. [20]  In a great number of cases, as historians Coquery-Vidrovitch and Moniot (1992, 452) argue, “for the countries that had to relinquish their empire,” aid “remained a means to extend their influence.” However, the project headed by Father Barbier in Wau was different from these neocolonial ambitions. Primarily with the interests of the local population in mind, it was supported by the Catholic Church itself, with financial backing by the German Catholic organization Misereor. [21]  The project was part of the perspective of “seeing in the elimination of colonial subjection the opportunity for an authentic Christian influence to prevail” (Guillaume 1994, 85), free from imperial ambitions. Between 1976 and 1983, Barbier achieved the unthinkable, putting in place a large and fully operational medical center with the support of the local clergy, starting with Mgr. Gabriel Zubeir Wako, then a young bishop from Wau diocese. [22] However, he did not work in Wau as a Frenchman but as an administrator and project manager in the service of the Catholic Church. To do this, he formed numerous and lasting bonds with the political circles of southern Sudan, learned English, and took multiple trips to Europe, where he worked together with sponsors and the WHO as a Caritas International delegate for Sudan (Barbier 2004). Yet he forgot neither his country of origin nor Marchand’s impact on Wau, as indicated by a photograph taken by Barbier himself in Wau around 1980 showing the foundation stone for Fort Desaix, which was still visible together along with parts of the original fortifications.

18Ultimately, twenty buildings were built 2,000 km from the closest seaport, equipped with medical programs and adequate personnel and completed in cooperation with the government of South Sudan and the WHO. In addition, part of the government hospital was renovated to house the practical training for the students. The Institute was officially inaugurated in 1983, and the first student midwives received their diplomas in 1985 against the backdrop of Barbier’s departure for France in April 1985, just as the second Sudanese civil war was breaking out.

The Enduring Work of Hubert Barbier

19What does the future hold for this initiative? In the short term, all signs point to the conclusion that it will end in failure. The second civil war broke out just when the medical center was about to take off. The result was an infrastructure that could not be made to function on site. Moreover, Barbier was sent back to France against his wishes by order of the White Fathers, leaving him feeling that he left something unfinished, and protests broke out among local stakeholders, who were disappointed by his departure, which they viewed as premature. After the civil war broke out and its founder left, it seemed that the Wau medical center was stillborn and that the driving force provided by Barbier had come to an end. However, in the medium term, the impact was quite different as the work in Wau had two long-term effects.

20The first is a legacy that consisted of developing a strong humanitarian activism in support of the Christians of South Sudan. Back in France, Barbier forgot neither Wau nor the Sudanese people. A well-connected person and a good team leader with the charisma of conviction, he dedicated himself to the creation of the Sudan Vigilance Committee (Vigilance Soudan) for human rights and freedoms in the country (1991), which he set up jointly with François-Xavier Vershave of Survival for Development (Survie pour le Développement) and the Egyptian Copt Georges Mansour, with French political figures such as Simone Veil and Bernard Kouchner also lending their support. The situation in South Sudan and particularly in Bahr el-Ghazal increasingly attracted the attention of organizations specializing in the defense of human rights, including Human Rights Watch (HRW). In a 1992 report, HRW indicated that the policy of the Khartoum government led to the repression of all forms of civil society, arrests, detentions, and the torture of dissidents and to an extremely brutal war in the South. [23] Led by Barbier, the Sudan Vigilance Committee spearheaded a campaign to raise awareness of the key issues affecting Sudan among the general public in France.

The patrimonial legacy of the city of Wau

The patrimonial legacy of the city of Wau

This photograph shows the remnants of the stone wall and mortar work of the interior of Fort Desaix (Bahr el-Ghazal), erected in January–February 1898 under the authority of Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand of the Congo-Nile expedition, photographed more than a century after construction. The remaining walls include a founding plaque built into the structure, where we can read “Fort Desaix, 1898.” Further back, we can see the Jur (or Soueh) river, which flows in the north and feeds the Bahr el-Ghazal River, a tributary of the Nile. Yet this legacy has remained hidden in the Anglophone historiography and is a testament to the key role played by the French in the subsequent development of the city of Wau, which was supported by the short-lived Marchand mission that briefly settled locally. These photographs were generously donated in 2013 by White Father Hubert Barbier, founder of the Vigilance Committee for Human Rights and Freedoms in Sudan, who spent seven years in Wau building the medical center (1976–1983).

21After a conference held in the French Senate on December 12, 1992, on minorities in the Middle East, Father Barbier had the opportunity to address the UN Human Rights Commission at the United Nations in Geneva. [24] Following a pugnacious speech on February 16, 1993, in which he denounced the severe human rights violations and pressures brought to bear against “churches, religious personnel, and believers,” a special rapporteur was assigned to investigate human rights violations. It was then up to Barbier to raise wide awareness in France of humanitarian issues following the second civil war. To this end, he used the religious argument of protecting Christians under threat from the Islamist regime of Khartoum. Until June 2009, Barbier was alone in his support of the Sudan Vigilance Committee, developing a website and publishing a lively newsletter, subsequently handing this responsibility to someone else.

22In the meantime, the second legacy of his work in Wau became reality with the re-opening of the medical center he had set up. With the full financial backing of the Catholic Church, it was renamed the Catholic Health Training Institute (CHTI) and opened its doors in February 2010 following a long period of rebuilding on the original site. After the first group of seventeen students joined, others followed. Supported by Solidarity with South Sudan, [25] the Institute is part of a consortium of Catholic organizations established in 2005 after the end of the second civil war with the aim of fulfilling a mission seen as critical by the newly created independent state of South Sudan (2011), namely the training of qualified medical staff in the context of the extremely precarious situation of the local population. With the support of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), [26] the Institute had sixty students in its second year of operation (2011–2012), originating from Central Equatoria, Eastern Equatoria, Western Equatoria, Western Bahr el-Ghazal, Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, and Warrap, but also from South Kordofan and Khartoum (North Sudan). [27] Established on the basis of bringing people together and being open to recruiting personnel from North Sudan in order to serve a population traumatized by war and despair, [28] the CHTI is today a testament to the humanitarian and educational impact of the Catholic Church [29] and especially of a French priest, White Father Huber Barbier.

Conclusion

23If we compared today the visibility of the humanitarian undertaking of Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse in South Sudan with the legacy of Father Barbier and his team of builders in Wau (Western Bahr el-Ghazal), the verdict would undoubtedly be that compared to the “ambitious aid policies” [30] implemented by the United States in cooperation with powerful religious evangelical NGOs [31] such as Graham’s organization, the unique role of Father Barbier between Wau and Geneva remains in the background, being part of the broader work of Catholic organizations. The same can be said, though even more so, on the subject of the mostly erased memory of the French origins of the contemporary city of Wau (the Marchand Mission). However, it is up to historians to remind us that despite France’s reputation for having never been “skilled in the strengthening of civil society, even within France itself” (Chafer and Cumming 2010, 59), a small “French tune” was played away from the spotlight, thus contributing to the contemporary standing of Wau in the fragile independent state of South Sudan.