1 - Frontier societies and the political economy of knowledge in the nineteenth century

Summary

Based on the availability of written sources, histories of South Sudan have tended to begin from the coming of the ‘Turk’: the incursions up the Nile from 1840 onwards by ivory and slave traders and Turco-Egyptian government forces. The subsequent decades of the nineteenth century have been characterised as a time of violent disruption and predation, epitomised by the slave trade itself. Gray and Collins depict the people of the region as ‘ill-prepared’ for these foreign incursions, having been ‘isolated’ from any external contact prior to 1840. In the early 1980s, an anthropologist contrasted the history of the Bari on the Nile with West African societies, where commercial middlemen had dealt with foreign traders, protecting their societies and generating major socioeconomic change and class formation. The Bari, Huby argued, were instead ‘passive bystanders forced into a political and economic game which was directed from elsewhere’; no group or class ‘emerged among the Southerners with some degree of power to influence the course of events.’

Certainly the violent depredations of the nineteenth century had a devastating impact on many parts of the region and established an enduring awareness of the extractive, brutal potential of the forces of the hakuma [government]. But relations were more complex than the histories of passive victimhood have suggested. From the outset, certain individuals and groups entered into dialogue with these foreign forces, and some succeeded in negotiating more positive relations of exchange and interaction, even if temporarily.