4 - Claiming rights and guarantees: chiefs' courts and state justice, c. 1900–1956

Summary

I decided to go to school because people were looting my father's cattle, so I wanted to defend his property by becoming acquainted with the British rulers. When I told my father, he refused, so I ran away and joined the school. Later I wrote an appeal letter to the British DC about the person who was looting my father, and the DC called all the chiefs to hear the case. I made sure that my father got his right, so then he realised the value of school.

This statement (in English) by a very elderly retired schoolteacher in Rumbek asserts the value of the new knowledge that might be acquired on the colonial urban and bureaucratic frontiers described in the previous chapter. His is a district where most people were reportedly reluctant to send their children to school, if they instead had cattle to look after. Yet while cattle-owning might have often kept young people away from the urban frontier and waged labour, cattle disputes would paradoxically bring many more people to the new institutional frontier of state justice. As a particularly movable, individualised and socially-embedded form of property, cattle were often the focus of multiple simultaneous claims, which may explain the frequently-observed litigiousness of Dinka and other cattle-owners.

More generally across the research areas, the new colonial chiefs' courts established in the 1920s evolved into arenas for the deployment and debate of rival claims to property and persons.