Happy Birthday South Sudan

Image: gachara.wordpress.com

Hello there, cute little baby. Happy birthday South Sudan!

After a an excessively long and painful gestation the world now given birth to its newest country. Like all babies is arrives with the excitement and burden of potential and promise. The world has its cameras poised at the ready to capture all of your firsts. Your first steps, first day at school, your first kiss, first drunken spew in the gutter.

All of your most proud and embarrassing moments will be captured so they can be displayed at your 21^st birthday celebrations, causing much mirth for everyone. We will laugh at the change of fashions in clothing and hairstyles, tease you about the naked bath time images .

Life will have its challenges. Many countries will want to give you advice, some will also claim to be your best friend and over time you will become discerning as to who is genuine. You will have dates you wish never happened. You heart is sure to be broken, just don’t let it break your spirit and you will bounce back.

You are sure to have a dodgy uncle, nothing you can do about. As they say you can choose your friends but you are stuck with your relatives. The best advice for family gatherings is to say a quick but polite “hello” then sit on the other side of the room, ensuring you never get caught in the room alone with said uncle.

Please excuse us, if over coming years we come across as patronising on the basis that we are older and more experienced. In most instances it reflects genuine affection. Envious of your vibrancy, innocent naivety and curiosity, we will also want to nurture you, protect you and share the wisdom gained from decades and centuries of mistakes.

We just hope to give you enough space to develop you own sense of self and purpose. Some countries will try to dominate you living their own dreams and ambitions through you having failed in their own lives. Some, like the parents of child beauty pageant entrants, will try to completely dominant you and shape you into ugly caricatures of elegance, confidence and beauty.

Some world media outlets will treat your formative years like a reality television show. They will attempt to create controversy where none exists, exploiting minimally titillating moments for quick ratings grab and manipulating footage and dialogue to create soap opera-styled relationships and story lines. This will initially grab our attention but soon where thin as we slowly realise that reality television is indeed reality. We already live our own reality and find it stunningly mundane, punctuated by occasional, short-lived highlight; a birth, a marriage, a holiday.

May we soon get bored by the media’s concocted version of your emerging reality and leave you to live a long and mundane existence, with occasional highlight.

I bought you a birthday present – a pair of booties, matching jumpsuit and a few bath toys.