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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Sudan
Index
In preindependence Sudan, most southern communities were
small, except for the large conglomerate of Nilotes, Dinka, and
Nuer who dominated the Bahr al Ghazal and the Aali an Nil
provinces and the Azande people of Al Istiwai Province. During
the condominium, the colonial administration imposed stronger
local authority on the communities. It made local leaders chiefs
or headmen and gave them executive and judicial powers--tempered
by local councils, usually of elders--to administer their people,
under the scrutiny of a British district commissioner. As in the
north, the relatively fluid relationships and boundaries among
southern Sudanese became more stabilized.
There is no systematic record of how independence, civil war,
and famine have affected the social order of southern peoples.
The gradual incorporation of southerners into the national
system--if only as migrant laborers and as local craftpeople--and
increased opportunities for education have, however, affected
social arrangements, ideas of status, and political views.
An educated elite had emerged in the south, and in 1991, some
members of this elite were important politicians and
administrators at the regional and national levels; however,
other members had emigrated to escape northern discrimination.
How the newer elite was linked to the older one was not clear.
Secular chieftainships had been mostly gifts of the colonial
authorities, but the sons of chiefs took advantage of their
positions to get a Western education and to create family ties
among local and regional elites.
Southern Sudan's development of an elite based on education
and government office was facilitated by the absence of an
indigenous trading and entrepreneurial class, who might have
challenged the educated elite. Southern merchants were mostly
Arabs or others of nonsouthern origin. In addition, the south
lacked the equivalent of the northern Muslim leaders of religious
orders, who also might have claimed a share of influence. Instead
of several elites owing their status and power to varied sources
and constituencies, the south developed an elite that looked for
its support to persons of its own ethnic background and to those
who identified with the south's African heritage. It was
difficult to assess in the early 1990s, however, whether the
civil war still allowed any elite southerners to gain much
advantage.
In traditional Nilotic society clans were of two kinds. One
kind, a minority but a large one, consisted of clans whose
members had religious functions and furnished the priests of
subtribes, sections, and sometimes of tribes. These priests have
been called chiefs or masters of the fishing spear, a reference
to the ritual importance of that instrument. Clans of the other
kind were warrior groupings. The difference was one of function
rather than rank. A spearmaster prayed for his people going to
war or in other difficult situations and mediated between
quarreling groups. He could function as a leader, but his powers
lay in persuasion, not coercion. A spearmaster with a considerable reputation for spiritual power was deferred to on many
issues. In rare cases--the most important was that of the
Shilluk--one of the ritual offices gained influence over an
entire people, and its holder was assigned the attributes of a
divine king.
A special religious figure--commonly called a prophet--has
arisen among some of the Nilotic peoples from time to time. Such
prophets, thought to be possessed by a sky spirit, often had much
wider influence than the ritual officeholders, who were confined
to specific territorial segments. They gained substantial
reputations as healers and used those reputations to rally their
people against other ethnic groups and sometimes against the
Arabs and the Europeans. The condominium authorities considered
prophets subversive even when their message did not apparently
oppose authority, and suppressed them.
Another social pattern common to the Nilotes was the age-set
system. Traditionally, males were periodically initiated into
sets according to age; with the set, they moved through a series
of stages, assuming and shedding rights and responsibilities as
the group advanced in age. The system was closely linked to
warfare and raiding, which diminished during the condominium. In
modern times the civil war and famine further undermined the
system, and its remnants seemed likely to fade as formal
education became more accessible.
Historically, the Dinka have been the most populous Nilotic
people, so numerous that social and political patterns varied
from one tribal group to another. Among the Dinka, the tribal
group was composed of a set of independent tribes that settled in
a continuous area. The tribe, which ranged in size from 1,000 to
25,000 persons, traditionally had only two political functions.
First, it controlled and defended the dry season pastures of its
constituent subtribes; second, if a member of the tribe killed
another member, the issue would be resolved peacefully. Homicide
committed by someone outside the tribe was avenged, but not by
the tribe as a whole. The colonial administration, seeking
equitable access to adequate pasturage for all tribes, introduced
a different system and thus eliminated one of the tribe's two
responsibilities. In postindependence Sudan, the handling of
homicide as a crime against the state made the tribe's second
function also irrelevant. The utilization and politicization of
ethnic groups as units of local government have supported the
continuation of tribal structures into the 1990s; however, the
tribal chiefs lacked any traditional functions, except as sage
advisers to their people in personal and family matters. In the
contemporary period, some attempts have been made to transform
these ethnic tribal structures in order to produce a national or
at least a greater subnational identity. For instance, in the
early formation of the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement
(SPLM), one of the main ideological tenets was the need to
produce a new nonnorthern riverine area solidarity based on the
mobilization of diverse ethnic groups in deprived areas. Although
its success has been limited, to achieve this new sense of
solidarity it has attempted to recruit not only southerners, but
also the Fur, Funj, Nuba, and Beja communities.
The subtribes were the largest significant political
segments, and they were converted into subchiefdoms by the
colonial government. Although the subchiefs were stripped of most
of their administrative authority during the Nimeiri regime
(1969-85) and replaced by loyal members of the Sudan Socialist
Union, the advice of subchiefs was sought on local matters. Thus,
a three-tiered system was created: the traditional authorities,
the Sudanese civil service, and the political bureaucrats from
Khartoum. During the 1980s, this confused system of
administration dissolved into virtual anarchy as a result of the
replacement of one regime by another, civil war, and famine. In
the south, however, the SPLM created new local administrative
structures in areas under its control. In general, thus, although
severely damaged, the traditional structure of Nilotic society
remained relatively unchanged. Loyalties to one's rural ethnic
community were deeply rooted and were not forgotten even by those
who fled for refuge to northern urban centers.
Data as of June 1991
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