10 - Knowing the system: judicial pluralism and discursive legalism in the interim period, 2005–2010

Summary

I have a case in the town chiefs' court concerning my brother's daughter's dowry. My brother died since the last court hearing, so the family asked me to re-open it because I am an intellectual and it needs someone who can read and write the papers…

And my sister had a problem with her neighbour… She said she doesn't know the procedures for going to the police, so I went with her to the Attorney-General…

In the courts you can spend the whole day going from office to office. It is just like in the market where village people will be charged more because they don't know the price…

But if you know the system you can go step-by-step and you will get your right.

People had long been drawn to the towns not only to obtain services and commodities but also to access the state and to acquire knowledge of its ‘procedures’. This was always a risky strategy, because the urban frontier was subject to the unpredictable threat of repressive or exclusionary government force emanating from the town centres or military barracks. Unsurprisingly, the nodal, urban state has been characterised as dangerously capricious in the existing literature on South Sudan's history, in common with much analysis of post-colonial African states. Yet the idea that government works according to fixed, predictable rules and systems has nevertheless been taken up over the last century; by the 2005–11 interim period, people were asserting that by knowing ‘the system’, they could claim rights, resources and the protection of the state.