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In the early 1960s, a group of exiled southern Sudanese politicians published a book and a quarterly journal calling for the secession of southern Sudan from Sudan to be a global concern. Roughly coinciding with the 1963 founding of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the publications articulated a case for equivalence between anti‐colonialism and secessionism, thus raising uncomfortable and fundamental questions of the project of Pan‐African solidarity. This essay engages these works to explore the frictions within the Pan‐Africanist vision, with attention to the aftermath of what George Shepperson described as the moment when W.E.B. Du Bois ceased to be in direct control of the movement as it “passed into African hands” between the end of the Second World War and Ghanaian independence (Shepperson 1962, 347). In the process, it deploys a perspective on the Pan‐African world in which London and New York become secondary to Khartoum and Kampala. It offers a way to contrast an “actually existing” Pan‐Africanism from a universalist ideal version in order to help us to reckon with the contributions to Pan‐African thinking that derive from lived experiences of south‐south forms of domination, rather than from axiomatic propositions of continentally shared interests.

South Sudan joined the East African Community (EAC), a regional economic and political organization in 2016. It 2011, it became the newest nation-state in the world when it seceded from Sudan. As a result, the new state of South Sudan is at a crossroads of multiple processes of unification and fragmentation. I analyze this moment of accession as one characterized by both substantive practices of political institution-building and intimate ideas about cultural belonging. In this context, a trans-border cultural imagination has become entangled with technocratic expertise committed to harmonious regional integration. The process of accession represents a broader socio-political formation that contains ideas about family, the colonial legacy, cultural continuity, and geopolitical relationships that are primarily narrated and experienced as transnational. Regional integration has therefore become a site of desire, frustration, futurity, and the production of normative ideals. To address these intersecting processes and ideas, the author develops region-craft and geopolitical intimacy to make sense of how they take shape on multiple scales of social and political life. The broader stakes of this process are making sense of the unequal dynamics of power that I argue emerge as intra-African discourses of asymmetrical competency and paternalism.

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