In 6½ weeks, Africa could have a new country.

Here’s something to add to your gratitude list this Thanksgiving: that you don’t live there.

January 9, southern Sudan is scheduled to vote on whether to become an independent country. Indications are the people overwhelmingly want it. But first, the question is whether they can overcome the significant obstacles to pulling off a legitimate referendum. Then it is a matter of whether a new political reality would actually improve life in one of the most blighted areas on Earth.

Southern Sudan is crushingly poor. Though it is almost as large as Texas, it has only 40 miles of paved roads. It contains the world’s largest, most inaccessible swamp, which is thick with malaria-bearing mosquitoes (63 known species of them, in fact). The population of between 7.5 and 10 million (census numbers are understandably suspect in this region) is a patchwork quilt of more than 200 ethnic groups. They are plagued with terrible health, and medical care is virtually nonexistent. The United Nations says that only one child in 50 finishes primary school. The adult literacy rate is 15 percent.

What holds southern Sudan together? Its beleaguered people have little sense of national identity; their ties to tribe and clan are far tighter.

But what they do have—what, in fact, has been their strongest uniting factor for decades—is their hatred of northern Sudan.

Hardly the most inspiring, ennobling foundation on which to build a new nation.

Nevertheless, this hatred does have firm roots in history.

Two Sudans

Where Sudan’s undeveloped south is home to diverse black tribes speaking several different languages and practicing native religions, the north—besides being far more populous, more developed and sophisticated than the south—is avowedly Muslim and Arabic speaking.

In 1871, Turco-Egyptian invaders from the north plundered the south and set up a brutal slave trade. To this day, southerners nurture suspicion and bitterness toward their northern neighbors—and northerners reciprocate with bald-faced condescension. Racism plays no small part: The north’s lighter-skinned blacks view the extremely dark-skinned southern blacks with contempt, calling them abid—Arabic for slave.

At the end of the 19th century the British brought the region under control, putting an end to the slavery. But in administering Sudan, Britain unwittingly exacerbated north-south tensions.

The British governed the country with two separate administrations: one for the more advanced north; another for the remote, backward south. In an effort to check the southward spread of Islam, they worked to turn southern Sudan into an anti-Muslim bulwark. They did this by intensifying its differences with the north: They made English the official language there; they imposed Sunday rest and outlawed Friday worship; they invited Christian missionaries from the West to open schools; they denied trade access to the north; they evacuated the north Sudanese who lived there; they forbade marriage between northerners and southerners. They even burned towns to create a swath of no-go territory between the two parts of the country.

“After a half-century of British tutelage, north and south Sudan moved into the mid-20th century as two mutually antagonistic nations divided by language and religion,” Blaine Harden wrote in Dispatches From a Fragile Continent.

When Britain began preparing for Sudan’s independence, the north was simply far better equipped to grab the reins. The south didn’t even have organized political parties. As a result, southerners were overlooked; they weren’t even consulted in negotiations. When Sudan gained its independence in 1956, northerners seized control of the government in Khartoum.

The seeds of a southern revolt had been sown.

Civil War

Two civil wars followed. The first began in 1963 after the Khartoum government tried to make the whole nation Islamic. Armed southern dissidents responded by launching a rigorous and sustained attack. The war that followed lasted a decade and took half a million lives.

In 1972, a northern leader named Gaafar Nimeiry negotiated peace with the south, allowing it considerable self-government. He also guaranteed freedom of religion by declaring the whole of Sudan a secular state.

But the agreement had much working against it. Divisions between north and south proved difficult to overlook. And when oil deposits were discovered in the south in 1978, tensions grew: Southerners wanted an oil refinery built right there; Khartoum ignored their wishes and built it in the north, increasing the already yawning economic gap between the two. The situation went from tenuous to untenable in 1983, when Nimeiry reversed his earlier decision and decreed that the nation would be an Islamic republic, ruled by Muslim law. He dissolved the south’s regional government—and again the nation descended into war.

This time the inferno lasted an interminable 21 years.

Southern Sudan was hit dreadfully hard. Its education system collapsed. Its population was largely displaced, if not massacred. What little wealth it had was exhausted. The rigors of war were exacerbated by periods of severe famine.

Even worse, the south was itself plagued by internal fighting among rival factions. In the early 1990s, a struggle for power over the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (splm) ended up killing tens of thousands—and a resulting famine killed several hundred thousand more.

Fueling the conflict was outside assistance flowing in from other governments that had a vested interest in the war’s outcome. Chinese oil investment, for example, flooded Khartoum with enough cash that the government—under Omar al-Bashir, who remains Sudan’s president to this day—was able to nearly double its military spending between 1998 and 2000. Al-Bashir prosecuted his Islam-fueled war with ruthlessness—shooting, burning, poisoning and enslaving his way through the south. “The combination of Sudan’s record of supporting international terrorism, its savage conduct of the war in the south and its repression of all opposition had made Bashir’s government one of the most reviled in the world,” wrote Martin Meredith in The Fate of Africa.

All told, that second civil war snuffed out nearly 2 million souls, and displaced an additional 4 million. It was the bloodiest chapter in the book of nightmares that has been Sudan’s history as an independent nation.

Not until Islamic terrorists attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001, and President Bush vowed retaliation did the al-Bashir government suddenly take an interest in negotiating an end to the war. Over the next couple of years, a peace deal was hammered out that would give southern Sudan the right to self-determination. (Compounding the nation’s tragedy, however: Just as that war settled down, another, even more savage war erupted in west Sudan, in the region of Darfur.)

In January 2005, the two sides signed an agreement to allow the south to vote on independence in 2011. Which is where we are now.

South Sudan’s Future

Sadly, the chances of a successful vote giving rise to a peaceful secession for southern Sudan are remote.

First, simply staging the referendum is a complicated endeavor made all the more so by southern Sudan’s uneducated populace and primitive infrastructure. The semi-autonomous government in Juba, under President Salva Kiir Mayardit, has spent millions to bring expatriated south Sudanese natives home to vote, but questions remain. A referendum with less than 60 percent turnout would have questionable legitimacy—and as Brookings’ Mwangi S. Kimenyi wrote, 60 percent is “a tall order in one of the most inaccessible regions of Africa.”

Complicating matters, the government in Khartoum is hardly eager for the south to break free, mostly because it would jeopardize its claim to the 480,000 barrels of oil per day coming from southern oil fields. Omar al-Bashir’s administration appears to be already looking for an excuse to cast doubt on the vote; it has threatened to reject the outcome if voter registration issues aren’t properly resolved.

Many observers fear that if the vote does occur, Khartoum may take that as a cue to resume its war on the south.

The U.S. and other nations are devoting attention to ensure the vote happens; they talk as though they want to guarantee a peaceful implementation of its outcome. But the reality is, the international community’s record on containing violence in Sudan is nothing short of atrocious.

Then there is the issue of south Sudan’s government. During the last civil war, the north effectively used a devilish divide-and-conquer strategy against the south—arming various southern factions to fight each other. It wasn’t hard to do. The disunited nature of southern Sudan, with its tribe-first mentality, makes it especially vulnerable to such tactics even now. A conference last month in Juba aimed at unifying the potential nation’s political and military leaders was attended by no fewer than 23 political parties. The three-day powwow had to be extended to five when it bogged down in infighting. Somehow, though, it produced an agreement on the transitional government that will take power in the event of a yes vote.

If it does take power—and manages to avoid war with the north—this internally conflicted government will assume control over a beggarly new nation. Oil profits account for 98 percent of the government’s revenue, and for now all of its oil exports must go through north Sudan. The south also depends on the north for much of its food supply—and that has already begun to slow down in anticipation of the independence vote. The World Food Program expects food shortages after the vote; it has distributed 75,000 metric tons of food throughout the south.

“Development experts say that perhaps no country in the last half-century has come into existence needing so much help from the outside world,” the Miami Herald reports (emphasis mine).

Will the vote succeed? Will the Muslim north quietly relinquish control? Will Juba’s political and military elite be able to stay unified? Will the new country hold together? The questions over south Sudan’s future are enormous—and the potential consequences of failure, frightening.

Yet still the people of south Sudan hope. After all, what do they have to lose? After decades of unimaginable hardship, this referendum is a remarkable testament to their resiliency.

The pain endured by the long-suffering people of south Sudan could well be viewed as the birth pangs of a new nation. But signs are that its young life will likely be no less painful—and could be soon cut short.

Of Africa’s manifold tragedies, those that have plagued Sudan are perhaps most epic. It offers the planet’s most eloquent testimony of the evils of human nature, the perils of political power, the violent potential of religious conflict, and the ungovernability of man. It also provides powerful proof of the need for a “strong hand from someplace” to intervene and establish the longed-for peace that all too easily escapes us.