5 - Containing the frontier: the tensions of territorial chiefdoms, 1930s–1950s

Summary

It is hoped that in these more peaceful times a purely territorial unit (comparable to a small English village) may come to be accepted in native eyes as a genuine coherent group. [1938]

The ideal of the village community as a territorial, social and administrative unit was imported by colonial officials from their British homeland, and in some areas imposed forcibly upon the indigenous geography of southern Sudan. During the 1920s and 1930s, such visions had interacted in tension with the emphasis of Indirect Rule on tribal units of Native Administration, culminating in the mid-late 1930s in the Equatoria Province policy of harnessing units of descent and kinship, in the hope ultimately of building tribes. By this time, however, the Condominium government was already moving away from Indirect Rule ideologies and beginning to promote territorial ‘Local Government’ on the model of English counties and parishes, governed by local councils. In the southern provinces this was expected to be a very gradual process, and administrators tended to modify the terminology rather than the basis of Native Administration, turning the existing chiefs' B courts into councils. But they did adopt the new policy with some relief, as justification for their previously pragmatic efforts to create territorial units of administration. Largely abandoning their quest for the elusive ‘tribe’, they concentrated now on the further ‘amalgamation’ of chiefships into larger territorial chiefdoms.