documents being assembled in the South Sudan National Archive, as it was produced by men conversant in some of the languages of South Sudan and in long-term contact with its peoples. Yet as detailed as these documents are they still provide mainly an external view of South Sudanese peoples and their societies. We are fortunate to have an extensive body of contemporary field-based ethnographic literature created by anthropologists such as Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, and Jean Buxton and by missionary ethnographers and linguists such as Fathers Hofmayr, Crazzolara, and Santandrea, which helps us understand how South Sudanese peoples organized themselves, interacted with their environment and each other, and responded to internal and external events to become the peoples they are today. The writing of South Sudan’s history must build on this ethnographic foundation as new fieldwork begins a more systematic collection of South Sudanese oral testimony.
African historians have developed tools for analyzing oral sources, but these have not been systematically applied in South Sudan. There is a need to establish reliable, if relative chronologies. The narratives of population migrations are told in foreshortened time, compressing multiple movements and a complex series of attachments and separations into a single strand. The standard method of counting the generations backward from the present to a founding ancestor is unreliable because the purpose of tribal genealogies is not to measure time but to establish social and political connections. As the anthropologist Ian Cunnison warned, “Historically a tribal genealogy is, purely and simply, a falsification of the record” (1971, 189). Nuer and Dinka genealogies express both social and political distance within and between lineages rather than time depth (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 107–8, 198–99; Lienhardt 1958, 106). Establishing any dates much beyond five generations on the basis of genealogies without first analyzing indigenous systems of time reckoning and age-sets is speculative, and recent valiant attempts to extend tribal chronologies backward into a medieval past are yet to be confirmed (e.g., Beswick 2004; Kuendit 2010).
Dynastic lists, such as those of the Zande and Shilluk kings and the Dinka spear-masters, offer another approach to chronology. Of these, the Shilluk king list has been the most studied and begins to give us semireliable dates for events along the White Nile, especially when corroborated by the dynastic lists of the Blue Nile sultanate of Sinnar. But even dynastic lists are problematic. The king lists for the Ugandan kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, for instance, expanded in the twentieth century as clan ancestors and clan shrines were incorporated in the genealogies as a way of enhancing dynastic prestige through the assertion of greater antiquity (Henige 1980). The Shilluk king lists vary between sources, many disputed kings are included, and regnal dates are calculated in different ways (Westermann 1970, 135; Hofmayr 1925, 48; Howell and Thompson 1946, 84; Crazzolara 1951, 135–38; Lwong 2013). What can be said with some certainty is that the kingdom was well established by the early to mid-seventeenth century, and that with the founding of the royal capital at Pachodo toward the end of that century, the installation of the reths (kings) became institutionalized and more reliable dating can proceed from that time.
In any book of the longue durée there is the danger of reading back into the past identities that were centuries in the making. With South Sudanese still debating their own national identity, it would be an anomaly to apply the terms South Sudan or South Sudanese to earlier periods. At the risk of offending South Sudanese readers, I will refer to southern Sudan and southern Sudanese for periods before the mid-twentieth century and to South Sudan and South Sudanese when describing the evolution of nationalist politics. I will use the administrative terms of Upper Nile, Bahr el-Ghazal, and Equatoria where convenient, even though the composition of those regions changed over time (the Zande kingdoms, for instance, at different times were part of Bahr el-Ghazal, Equatoria, and Western Equatoria).
Themes of violence and war run throughout this book, but there are other aspects of the shared experience of South Sudanese that have promoted coexistence in the past and might be the foundation for reconstruction in the future. Ancestral southern Sudanese societies were part of a Sudanic culture with other Nile Basin communities and drew on a common pool of symbols, images, religious ideas, and patterns of authority. Modern South Sudanese societies are products of a long process of cultural assimilation and borrowing of ideas and institutions between communities.
Mobility and migration are common themes through several historical periods. South Sudan is a mosaic of settled agricultural communities, centralized states, and mobile nonstate pastoralist societies. States fostered assimilation of different peoples, often by force. Nonstate societies provided an alternative to states, even for northern Muslim pastoralists who sought refuge among Nilotic border communities to escape the demands of the northern sultanates.
South Sudan has experienced an escalation of violence ever since the intrusion of external powers in the nineteenth century. New technologies of war brought new forms of military and political organization. The Turco-Egyptian conquest of Sudan radically altered relations between many southern Sudanese communities and between southern Sudanese and their northern neighbors. The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were greater in scale than the wars of the nineteenth not only in their levels of violence, the involvement of external powers, and their impact on civilian communities but in their legacies of violence during subsequent periods of peace.
Warfare on an expanded scale accelerated population dispersal and the formation of new communities through the recombination of scattered peoples. The introduction of slavery and the international slave trade created the new phenomenon of south Sudanese diasporas, exported to other parts of Sudan and beyond, or combined into the military formations of multiple armies. The refugee diasporas produced by Sudan’s postindependence civil wars have been scattered across the globe. They are now returning, as earlier diasporas did, with acquired experiences and skills that will have a significant impact in shaping South Sudan’s future.
The experience of multiple colonialisms defined the territorial and political outlines of South Sudan and helped shape the definition of who was South Sudanese. The trade empires of the nineteenth century shifted regional connections and created networks that began to knit together the different territories of southern Sudan. The dual colonialism of the twentieth-century Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, where Sudan remained an Egyptian colony governed by Britain, left a contradictory legacy. Local administration was established by force but is remembered as benign in the creation of an administrative system based on customary law and customary institutions, though neglectful of education and economic development under the restricted terms of the Southern Policy.
The history of Sudan and South Sudan since the mid-twentieth century is a history of contested nationalisms and the failure of the politics of national unity. The power struggle between the northern nationalist parties left the southern provinces and other rural regions marginalized from the centers of economic and political power. The emergent South Sudanese political elite began to fashion a coherent nationalist ideology of its own, based mainly on opposition to the northern parties’ construction of a national identity around the external ideologies of pan-Arabism and Islamism. South Sudan’s struggle was and continues to be part of a wider struggle in postindependence Sudan, a struggle that remains unresolved by South Sudan’s own independence referendum. The failure of the politics of national unity in Sudan has contributed to the current failure of the politics of national unity in South Sudan.
There is as yet no single comprehensive history of South Sudan, and this short history can be no more than an introduction to some basic facts, ideas, and interpretations, illustrated by vignettes of specific persons or events. It cannot name-check all the peoples of South Sudan or do justice to all their historical traditions. It is offered to stimulate conversation, debate, and further research about South Sudan’s past. All historical writing is a work in progress, and this book is no more than an interim report.
2
South Sudan in the Nile Basin
In 1929 a German tourist reading a local paper on the verandah of Khartoum’s Grand
