between 1972 and 1983, and to observe the evolution of historical research through alternating periods of peace and war. Prior to 1972 the main focus had been on the causes of civil war (e.g., Oduho and Deng 1963; Beshir 1968; Abdel-Rahim 1969; Albino 1970; Wai 1973). The outlines of South Sudan’s long colonial period were delineated in the pioneering works of Richard Gray (1961), Robert Collins (1962, 1968, 1971, 1983), and the Sandersons (1981). While virtually no one claimed as bluntly as A. J. Arkell that South Sudan had no history before 1820, the year of Egypt’s invasion of Sudan (Arkell 1961, 2), the internal histories of South Sudanese societies received little attention during the Addis Ababa peace when new fieldwork was possible. The long second civil war refocused attention on the twin tragedies of war and slavery (Wakason 1984; Hutchinson 1995; Jok 2001; Beswick 2004). The conclusion of peace in 2005 reopened South Sudan to field-based research, and a new generation of researchers has continued the work of earlier field-workers in creatively combining exploration literature, administrative records, and older ethnography with new fieldwork (e.g., Jal 1987; Simonse 1992; Leonardi 2013a; Cormack 2014; Tuttle 2014; Stringham 2016). There is now also a serious effort to examine South Sudanese intellectual history and the ideas underpinning its nationalist ideology (Poggo 2009; Tounsel 2015), as well as detailed studies of the conduct, consequences, and aftermath of war (Schomerus and Allen 2010; LeRiche and Arnold 2012; Pinaud 2013; Badiey 2014; Grabska 2014; Falge 2016).
A new history of South Sudan thus has much to draw on. There are still many challenges, quite apart from the basic contradiction here of attempting to fit a longue durée history into a Short History series. There are lingering stereotypes in the earlier literature commonly referred to and promoted by South Sudanese themselves that must be confronted. Because the historiography of South Sudan has lagged behind much of the rest of Africa’s, the quality of the sources and the way they have been used must be examined. For this reason there will be a running reference to historiography throughout this text. Inevitably chapters become more detailed the closer we get to the present, but they will not be detailed enough for those readers who are mainly interested in what is happening now. The purpose of a longue durée history is to give shape to a nation’s past and not let the present define that past.
Ever since Richard Gray’s characterization of southern Sudan as isolated from the great centers of power and historical trends of the continent (Gray 1961, 8–9), writers have taken the region’s historical isolation as proven, even describing the region as “cut off from the rest of the world” and “as remote an environment as can be found” (LeRiche and Arnold 2012, 4; cf. Poggo 2009, 21). But representatives of nearly every major African language group are found within its borders. One of the themes of this book is to show how South Sudan is a missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of African history and identify both historic and recent connections between South Sudanese and communities beyond their borders. A new history for a new nation must combine the internal history of indigenous communities with a record of South Sudan’s involvement with the wider region.
Writers have also found the complex ethnic makeup of South Sudan a challenge to describe. Embarrassed by the colonial overtones of the word “tribe,” they replace it with either “ethnic group” or “clan,” implying that all South Sudanese societies are bounded by small kin-based groups. There are serious objections to using “tribe” in any context (Ehret 2002, 7), but “tribe” and “ethnic group” are not interchangeable. Anthropologists Ferguson and Whitehead make a useful distinction between tribes as “bounded and/or structured political organizations” and ethnic groups, which “are a cultural phenomenon with only latent organizational potential” (2000, 15). In South Sudan’s ethnographic and administrative literature “tribe” and “clan” have distinct meanings and are not interchangeable. Tribal organizations are recognized administrative units with their own internal political structure: the Nuer people are organized into a number of different tribes, as are the Dinka people. Clans are kin units whose significance differs among South Sudan’s many peoples: some are territorial and central to a tribe’s political organization, others are nonterritorial and widely dispersed. In this book I use the word “people” to describe groups who share the same language and similar social principles or cultural practices, “tribe” when referring to specific administrative-political units, and “clan” only when appropriate for certain kin groups. The use of ethnic names in South Sudan is undergoing a change as South Sudanese intellectuals seek to replace the English terms with indigenous self-names. However, until some consensus is reached I retain the more conventional forms established in the literature: Shilluk rather than Collo or Ocolo, Nuer rather than Naath, Dinka rather than Jieng, Mandari rather than Mundari, Lotuho rather than Otuho, and so on.
Linguistic terms are sometimes applied as broad ethnic labels, and there are also popular meanings unrelated to scholarly use. The term “Nilotic” is particularly problematic. Linguists now identify three broad branches of Nilotic within the Nilo-Saharan language family: Western, Eastern, and Southern (see chapter 2). The first are found in Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda; the second in South Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya; and the last in Kenya and Tanzania. Yet “Nilotic” also has different cultural and political connotations. In Ethiopia it is a general term for lowland peoples of diverse languages and origins. In Uganda it refers to the peoples of the north associated with past dictatorial regimes, not all of whom speak a Nilotic language. It has acquired similar political overtones in South Sudan and is applied almost exclusively to the Western Nilotic-speaking Nuer, Dinka, and Shilluk, less often to the Atuot and Anuak, but not to the Mabaan, Acholi, and Pari. I use it here only in its linguistic sense. The Eastern Nilotic languages of Bari, Lotuho, Toposa, Turkana, and Maasai were at one time classed as “Nilo-Hamitic” but, as the “Hamitic hypothesis” of a race of light-skinned civilizers in African history has been thoroughly discredited and we now recognize that there were no such people as “Hamites,” there can be no merging of Nilotes with Hamites, and the archaic label “Nilo-Hamitic” has been dropped even by linguists.
Religion is another area of confusion. Despite the existence of a large body of sophisticated ethnographic descriptions of South Sudanese spiritual beliefs, the great majority of South Sudanese are routinely dismissed as “animists” who worship spirits embedded in natural objects. The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard explicitly stated that the Nuer “are not animists and there is no evidence that they ever have been” (1956, 158), yet journalists still write of them as praying to their “animist gods” (Purvis 1993, 46). Animism has no place in the description of African religions, for as Chris Ehret trenchantly states, “This terminology, besides failing to fit any particular African religion, does violence to historical reality: it lumps in an amorphous mass what are in actuality immensely different sets of ideas with distinctive consequences for the history of thought and culture in different parts of the continent” (2002, 15). South Sudan has a long history of the mingling of monotheistic ideas and theistic religions, both indigenous and imported.
Terms of indigenous authority in South Sudan also vary according to ethnographic tradition, alternating between kings and chiefs. Here I follow the anthropologist Simon Simonse’s useful restatement of the distinction between the two. Kingship is not determined by the size of territory over which authority is claimed but by the exercise of sovereignty over a whole structure. A chief is a subordinate in that structure, “a local-level official whose authority depends on a long-standing connection with his subjects and on recognition by a more powerful state” (Simonse 1992, 7). By this definition there were many kingdoms in precolonial southern Sudan, but the basis on which a king exercised sovereignty differed between societies.
The sources for the study of South Sudan’s past vary in quality. The archaeological record has not got beyond the exploratory stage. Historical linguistics is providing avenues for making long-term connections between significant language groups, but a thorough analysis of Western and Eastern Nilotic is yet to be completed. For the nineteenth century there is a wealth of contemporary observations in the exploration literature, sources of primary importance but ethnographically superficial and inaccurate (Evans-Pritchard 1971b, 145). The administrative literature of the first half of the twentieth century provides a more intimate contemporary record,
