Watch Francis Buk, an escaped Sudanese Christian slave, tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee his heartbreaking story of childhood abduction, orphaning, enslavement, beatings, and racial abuse at the hands of his Arab master. Francis was the first actual former Sudanese slave to tell his story in English before a government body. It was his testimony and activism, among that of many others, which eventually caught the ear of the new Bush administration, and finally on October 21, 2002, President Bush signed the Sudan Peace Act, a law which gave U.S. approval for the black Christian southern Sudanese to have a referendum on whether they should remain within Muslim Sudan. On January 7, 2011 — almost exact six years after the end of Khartoum’s jihad against the south — the referendum began, and on July 9, black South Sudan officially became the newest country on earth.