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| Photo: Unity of Buffalo |
This article addresses
some issues in Dr. Nyaba’s article, Letting the Cat out: Jieng
Dinka Attempt to Impose Hegemony and Domination in South Sudan!! [SSN, June 03,
2019]. Note that this is not a rebuttal to the central idea of the
article but a reminder about some arguments that risk undermining our collective
fight against political and tribalized totalitarianism in South Sudan.
Essentially, there are many fundamental sociopolitical issues all conscientious South Sudanese can agree on. Certainly,
the Jiëëng elites, especially the infamous JCE, are to blame for most of the
problems in South Sudan since 2013. It’s equally reasonable to argue that these
Jiëëng elites have a chauvinistic attitude they’ve tried and continue to impose
on the multiplicity of tribal nationalities in the country.
All conscientious Jiëëng
intellectuals would agree with this. While different ethnic communities have
committed heinous atrocities against one another, it is still reasonable to put
the blame on the Jiëëng community (minimally) and JCE especially because of
power imbalance and strategic positionality in the structures of power and leadership
machinery.
Other unproblematic issues are the questions of land, tribal marginalization and persecution of those whose views diverge from
the official narrative. A nation of a single opinion is what JCE would want to
institutionalize into our national consciousness.
So, admittedly, the ideological state apparatuses
(ISAs) as Marxist theorist, Louis Althusser, would call them, are guided by Jiëëng
elites and operationalized by a militarist tradition staffed mostly by Jiëëng military
officers. “But there are other tribes in the army, the government and all the
law enforcement agencies!” someone might say. Yes! But there is this thing.
Yes, this: I would see the tokenized non-Jiëëng elites
and officers as ineffective survivalists. Indeed, the superstructure informing
the ruling national consciousness is informed by Jiëëng elite’s ideas because
of the legacy of SPLM/SPLA and the manner in which state-building materialized
(or failed) in the hands of men and women who got lost in the sea of petro-dollars
between 2005 and 2012.
As a confession, I have in the past questioned the silence of these non-Jiëëng officials and military officers; however, I have
come to understand that hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci tells us, can work by
consensus. There are cases in which people are dominated with their consent
either because they have been forced into silence, or they have been duped to
accept the ruling narratives as the ultimate truth. So I would tell Dr. Nyaba
that hegemony doesn’t have to be imposed.
So far, these are the issues on which I can say I agree with Dr. Nyaba.
A Moral Responsibility
of a Writer
However, there is something that we, as writers, need to answer. Do we write for the sake of writing? Do we write because we
feel good writing the things we write regardless of their moral content?
Reasonable writers would say that a writer must have a message and a social
responsibility. Some writers even write for social justice; to ‘speak truth to
power’ as Edward Said argued in Orientalism. So, admittedly, we have a
social and a moral responsibility, I take it. However, Dr. Nyaba, as an
imminent intellectual and elder in our community sometimes seems to forget the
ethics of his writing. It is one thing to criticize JCE because this monstrous
tribal organization has done a lot to harm us and destroy the country.
However, we
have an ethical responsibility not to blur the line between Jiëëng as a
community and JCE as a chauvinistic lobbying group with vested interests. A
quote below confuses Nyaba’s message. Is this meant for Jiëëng community or Jiëëng chauvinists?
“Not that many of us didn’t know the consequences of
this Jieng parochial vanity, but we’d hoped the logic and imperatives of
constructing a state in modern times would impel prudence on the part of these
Jieng chauvinists to prevent backward drift towards savagery.”
(emphasis mine)
JCE works for its members not Jiëëng as a community and that should be clearly
stated by any serious writer. Nyaba’s part quoted above makes no such attempt. If
JCE worked for the interest of Jiëëng and for Jiëëng to dominate as a
community, then how come they don’t stop the bloody internal conflicts in the
former Lakes state and between Apuk, Aguok and Awan of former Warrap state? How
come they’ve not developed any Jiëëng towns? It’s our moral responsibility to
make distinctions as writers.
No reasonable Jiëëng intellectual would defend what
JCE has done even if we understand that they have their right to exist. While Dr. Nyaba doesn’t necessarily blame Jiëëng as a community, his writing doesn’t make
matters clear and it’s his responsibility as a writer to strike an unequivocal
sense of moral clarity.
Archaic, Colonialist
and Anthropological Language
It is reasonable to argue that unhelpful and
dangerous ideologies need to be discarded or reformed. However, it is sad to
see that Dr. Nyaba is using the same language and state of mind 18th
and 19th century racist European anthropologists used in
rationalizing African sociopolitical and socioeconomic realities. They
generalized and denigrated Africans before studying them. The use of archaic
anthropological terms like ‘primitive’ is both unfortunate and worrying. What
exactly does ‘primitive’ mean in this sense? Does it mean useless, outdated, or
does it simply mean inappropriate for our time? Dr. Nyaba owes his readers an
explanation.
In a way, this reminds me of what Kwesi Prah said in
Beyond the Color Line about African elite who adopt European attitude
toward fellow Africans. ‘It accepts,’ Prah writes, ‘the ideology of
primitivism of African culture and removes itself away from its historical
belonging.’ Calling fellow South Sudanese ways ‘primitive’ is to fit into what
Fanon calls colonial and racist pre-set framework. For someone like me, Collo, Jiëëng , Nuer and other tribal nationalities
have something to learn from one another instead of amplifying conflictual
climates.
Besides, the manner in which acephalous communities are
rationalized in the article is both misleading and archaic. ‘As an acephalous society
…’ Dr. Nyaba writes, ‘the Jieng [sic] are in a state of perpetual segmentation
and therefore never evolved a tradition of indigenous statehood or centralized
authority.’ From the outset, this assumes that tribal nationalities with
centralized tribal authorities (like Zande & Collo) have no ‘perpetual fragmentation.’
This flies on the face of historical facts. So, the quote either means Dr.
Nyaba doesn’t understand how acephalous communities operate or he’s being
intentionally misleading for I don’t think someone of his caliber doesn’t know.
Essentially, statehood and government of the people are social constructs not naturally occurring realities. There was a reason for which people decided to come together as a collective community. Statehood is not a natural necessity but an instrument that can be used to govern people. However, some communities developed a way in which they can govern themselves without making one man as ‘the know all.’ Societal government, whether understood in a Hobbesian sense or in a Rousseauean sense, presupposes an idea meant to deal with a human problem: conflict. A centralized authority is not a necessity if there is a way to govern society. In the west now, too much centralized government, referred pejoratively as statism, is frowned upon. Some even call for its abolition.
Truly, Nyaba’s primitivist denigration is the same conceptual
mistake anthropologists used to make until they studied the traditions of the so-called
acephalous communities. These communities are socially egalitarian (but mostly
value personal autonomy) and regard social norms and traditions as sufficient
to govern the people. Even the term ‘acephalous’ wildly assumes that a ‘head’
of the community is a natural necessity.
This is an erroneous conceptualization that has been
discarded even by anthropologists. When Europeans anthropologists met the Collo
or Zande people, they noted that they had kings, so they immediately associated
with that sociopolitical reality because they had Kings in Europe. However,
when they met the likes of Nuer and Jiëëng, who had no kings, they assumed that
these people have no concept of organization so they considered them anarchic.
Not until they conscientiously studied these communities did they realize that
the system of kingship is unnecessary for these people. As David Ronfeldt
writes, ‘a tribe’s members are deemed roughly equal to each other. The aim is
not so much absolute equality as respect for individual autonomy, especially
the autonomy of individual households.’
In the same vein, late Dr. Wal Duany, in Neither
Palaces Nor Prison, echoes this invisible organizational and governance
structure as Douglas Johnson calls them: “..Persons are divided among political
units without any single administrative hierarchy of officials and without any
single person to direct all of common affairs of the society. Although Nuer lack
the machinery of centralized government, this does not lead to mere anarchy and
indiscriminate violence. There are regulative ideas at work-being acted upon
which are constitutive of a way of life.”
Primitive Mode of
Production
Most of Africa is using the pre-capitalist mode of
production so I’m not sure why the Marxist phrase ‘primitive mode of
production’ should be restricted to Jiëëng. And I am not sure how pastoralism
is a primitive mode of production and farming using rudimentary farm equipment
not a ‘primitive mode of production’. During colonization in Rwanda, Tutsis,
who were mostly nomadic, were wrongly regarded as more ‘civilized’ than the
Hutus, who were farmers. So, Dr. Nyaba’s use of pastoral life of Jiëëng to
explain the madness in Juba is both regrettable and worrying.
In that case, the statements below make no coherent
contribution to our critique of JCE:
‘The reason is simple; being a backward class, in
terms of primitive mode of production, they didn’t plough into productive
enterprises the billions of dollars they stole; instead they stashed it in
foreign lands in the forms of real estate, cash in banks, luxurious cars or
froze this money in form of cattle.’
Remember, some of these so-called elders are
politicians and ‘intellectuals’ so assuming that they are in tune with the Jiëëng’s
sociocultural way of life is preposterous at best or ignorant at worst. The JCE
men have more in common with Dr. Nyaba than they have with the average Jiëëng in
the villages in terms of their socialization. And most of the internal fighting
among some Jiëëng communities is fueled by Juba politicians.
The cultural and experiential dissonance between
self-styled ‘elders’ in Juba and the actual way of life of Jiëëng is considerable and a well-meaning writer
cannot ignore that. Throughout postcolonial Africa, post-independent leaders
turned from liberators-to-oppressors.
These compradors, as Marxists would call them, or ‘nationalist
bourgeoisie’ as Fanon calls them, are a grand problem in Africa. We should
unite to excise these cancerous elements in our society rather than make
arguments that undermine the unity of all conscientious South Sudanese.
Last Word
There is no doubt that the current tribal government
in Juba needs to be dismantled and an inclusive one put in place. We also need
to work against any chauvinistic attitude in the country, especially among the Jiëëng
who assume that they ‘liberated’ the country, to fashion a sense of ‘South Sudaneseness.”
Those of us who read history carefully know that the first liberation war was
initiated and run mostly by Equatorians. We also know that the first two battalions
of the SPLA [104, 105 & Tiger and Timsah) were mostly Nuer. Not until
Koryom, did the Jiëëng start to have large numbers in the SPLA liberation
struggle. So, history is there to correct pernicious revisionists.
However, we need to be responsible as writers so
that we don’t spread the same disease we are trying to cure. People like Daniel
Awet Akot cannot even sing the national anthem. Remember, South Sudan would be
a better place if these JCE people used Jiëëng traditional values. So, blaming Jiëëng
way of life and values instead of attacking the vile way in which they are
being subverted by JCE is something any respectable South Sudanese intellectual
should avoid. Using a tribal language in the process of fighting tribalism is
both an ethical and a logical contradiction.
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*Kuir ë Garang is the editor of "The Philosophical Refugee." Follow him on Twitter @kuirthiy
