3 - Constituting the urban frontier: chiefship and the colonial labour economy, 1920s–1940s

Summary

In 2006, a very elderly Bari man, a former mechanic, recalled being moved when still a small child in the late 1920s to make way for the building of the new provincial headquarters of Juba. He stated that the chief at the time, Gaddum, had been made chief because he knew more Arabic than the rest of the people, and that he was responsible for conscripting labour for the government.

People at that time did not know government affairs… A chief of long ago was not good: he would beat people, so the people were very much afraid of him. Now people are good; they know laws. But at that time, if you were a brave person, you were beaten for nothing; actually there was no law. And people were forced to work without being paid; working on the roads for no money.

Knowledge of Arabic and ‘government affairs’ had often been converted into chiefship in the early years of the Condominium by individuals like Gaddum. For this interviewee, and for many others, the enduring memory of such chiefship was its coercion of labour and its arbitrary force. In general the documentary records and oral histories similarly emphasise the forced extraction of labour as the most obvious feature of colonial rule in southern Sudan, and as the primary function of chiefs, together with the often associated collection of tax.