Mohammed Wardi, the legendary Sudanese crooner, has joined the pessimistic chorus predicting a weak and battered Sudan after next month’s southern secession vote.

In a recent interview with the Al Ahdath newspaper in Khartoum, translated by the Sudan Votes website, Wardi says “the current unity [of Sudan] is nothing but a lie and it is not attractive.”

Do you mean that we are living on borrowed time?

We do not even have borrowed time. I am really worried about what will come later. Oil and borders are not the only issues to worry about; there is also the future of Darfur, the East and the North. Eventually, Sudan will turn into dub-districts.

As I recounted in this 2007 article, Wardi is beloved in Sudan and across the Sahel region for incorporating diverse melodies and rhythms into his songs. He’s been imprisoned and exiled for his stands against Sudan’s various dictators, and he was by far the most prominent northern member of  Sudan People’s Liberation Movement. (A more evocative account of my meeting with Wardi — complete with a pair of caged fauns and a fast-flowing bottle of Chivas — can be found in Chapter Nine of The Black Nile.)

Wardi’s interview with Al Ahdath dwells mostly on Sudanese music. Even here, though, the singer is critical of a parochialism that he says has kept Sudanese from appreciating or even acknowledging the broad mosaic of cultures that make up Africa’s biggest country.

Having not approached the South in this regard, it is only because not a single artist is well- informed about the southern style of singing, which in turn does not help us staying united. Cultural intermixture and artistic creativity exceed politics and economy in enhancing unity. What I want to say to many new singers is that graduation from universities is not enough. They should pay attention to knowledge because lacking it causes them to be marginalized.

Wardi was speaking by telephone from China, where he is undergoing medical treatment. (He had a kidney transplant in Qatar a few years back.) Here’s a clip from his famous 1993 concert before a quarter million southern Sudanese refugees in Addis Ababa: