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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.
