9 - Reprising ‘tradition’: the mutual production of community and state in the twenty-first century

Summary

Question: Are chiefs part of the government or of the village?

Response: Both: they go there to bring the laws and information from the government, and then they come to talk and be with the people here as well. At night if there is a fight they are the ones to come and stop it. Because they are the nutu lo miri [government people].

As this response demonstrates, my original question to this young Mundari man near Juba was problematic because it assumed that the ‘government’ was a separate entity from the rural communities, when such a distinction was blurred or false. My question reflected the wider discourse that was increasingly manifest by 2005 at both local and national levels, of tradition and community as distinct from the state. Yet in practice, both traditional authority and definitions of ‘community’ were being produced in relation to, and in dialogue with, the state.

From the early 1990s the National Islamic Front government recognised and appointed chiefs in its garrison towns and in Khartoum to represent every part of the south, constituting a High Council of Chiefs with an office in Juba. The SPLM/A also formally recognised chiefs as part of the local government structures for the liberated areas formulated at its 1994 National Convention. A decade later, the SPLM stepped up its rhetorical endorsement of chiefship, increasingly expressed in terms of ‘traditional authority’, customary law, cultural rights and ethnic ‘nationalities’, a discourse promoted by some international agencies, as well as by prominent SPLM leaders, judges and administrators.