Video available by permission from the South Sudan Embassy in London and NicoSoft Media
The background to the event recorded in this video is as follows:
Many heads of state attended the Coronation of King Charles III in London on May 6 2023. Some sent a delegate. South Sudan’s Minister for Presidential Affairs, Dr Barnaba Mariel Benjamin, represented President Salva Kiir. On May 9 the South Sudan Ambassador, Dr Agnes Oswaha, arranged a press conference at a London hotel for Dr Barnaba to issue a public statement and answer questions. At the same event she made space for a British IofC veteran, Jim Baynard-Smith, to present historical items linked to an early African statesman, Buth Diu.
The original Sudan, largest country in Africa, was ruled by Egypt and Britain from 1898 to 1956. As Independence loomed in the 1940s, Buth Diu emerged as a leading politician in the non-Arab South of the country. He campaigned (without success) for federal status for the South, sometimes with great resentment. In 1958 he was Minister of Works in the National Government in Khartoum.
Early that year Jim Baynard-Smith and another MRA colleague David Hind were invited to Sudan by the Prime Minister Abdullah Khalil as guests for several months. Part of their work was to show the new MRA all-African film Freedom widely, as an aid to national cohesion. Buth Diu was one of those greatly stirred by the film. The Prime Minister selected him as one of four delegates to the 1958 summer conference in Caux. There his political thought was enlarged in meetings with the makers of the film from several African countries. He made a public apology for his resentment of the Arab North, and returned to Sudan a changed personality.
In 1965 as Minister of Animal Resources in a new government, he arranged for Sudan to donate leather for the panelling of MRA’s new London centre. A year later he came to London to take part in the opening. There he also donated a hippo-leather shield and spears from his South Sudan region, as a symbol of his personal commitment to peacemaking. In the following years, alongside many Northern colleagues, he played a notable part in the lead-up to the Addis Ababa Accord of 1972 which ended Sudan’s first civil war. He died in 1975.
In recent years Buth Diu’s weapons have been in the keeping of his old friend Jim Baynard-Smith in Oxford. He offered them to the South Sudan Ambassador and she scheduled the handover at the press conference. She asked Peter Everington, former teacher in Sudan and friend of Buth Diu, to introduce the theme. The whole event was live-streamed, and the video offered is here is just the part of the press conference which specifically focused on the handover.
Later in May the ambassador wrote a letter of appreciation to Jim Baynard-Smith.
