Writers have also found the complex ethnic makeup of South Sudan a challenge to describe. Embarrassed by the colonial overtones of the word “tribe,” they replace it with either “ethnic group” or “clan,” implying that all South Sudanese societies are bounded by small kin-based groups. There are serious objections to using “tribe” in any context (Ehret 2002, 7), but “tribe” and “ethnic group” are not interchangeable. Anthropologists Ferguson and Whitehead make a useful distinction between tribes as “bounded and/or structured political organizations” and ethnic groups, which “are a cultural phenomenon with only latent organizational potential” (2000, 15). In South Sudan’s ethnographic and administrative literature “tribe” and “clan” have distinct meanings and are not interchangeable. Tribal organizations are recognized administrative units with their own internal political structure: the Nuer people are organized into a number of different tribes, as are the Dinka people. Clans are kin units whose significance differs among South Sudan’s many peoples: some are territorial and central to a tribe’s political organization, others are nonterritorial and widely dispersed. In this book I use the word “people” to describe groups who share the same language and similar social principles or cultural practices, “tribe” when referring to specific administrative-political units, and “clan” only when appropriate for certain kin groups. The use of ethnic names in South Sudan is undergoing a change as South Sudanese intellectuals seek to replace the English terms with indigenous self-names. However, until some consensus is reached I retain the more conventional forms established in the literature: Shilluk rather than Collo or Ocolo, Nuer rather than Naath, Dinka rather than Jieng, Mandari rather than Mundari, Lotuho rather than Otuho, and so on.
Linguistic terms are sometimes applied as broad ethnic labels, and there are also popular meanings unrelated to scholarly use. The term “Nilotic” is particularly problematic. Linguists now identify three broad branches of Nilotic within the Nilo-Saharan language family: Western, Eastern, and Southern (see chapter 2). The first are found in Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Uganda; the second in South Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya; and the last in Kenya and Tanzania. Yet “Nilotic” also has different cultural and political connotations. In Ethiopia it is a general term for lowland peoples of diverse languages and origins. In Uganda it refers to the peoples of the north associated with past dictatorial regimes, not all of whom speak a Nilotic language. It has acquired similar political overtones in South Sudan and is applied almost exclusively to the Western Nilotic-speaking Nuer, Dinka, and Shilluk, less often to the Atuot and Anuak, but not to the Mabaan, Acholi, and Pari. I use it here only in its linguistic sense. The Eastern Nilotic languages of Bari, Lotuho, Toposa, Turkana, and Maasai were at one time classed as “Nilo-Hamitic” but, as the “Hamitic hypothesis” of a race of light-skinned civilizers in African history has been thoroughly discredited and we now recognize that there were no such people as “Hamites,” there can be no merging of Nilotes with Hamites, and the archaic label “Nilo-Hamitic” has been dropped even by linguists.
Religion is another area of confusion. Despite the existence of a large body of sophisticated ethnographic descriptions of South Sudanese spiritual beliefs, the great majority of South Sudanese are routinely dismissed as “animists” who worship spirits embedded in natural objects. The anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard explicitly stated that the Nuer “are not animists and there is no evidence that they ever have been” (1956, 158), yet journalists still write of them as praying to their “animist gods” (Purvis 1993, 46). Animism has no place in the description of African religions, for as Chris Ehret trenchantly states, “This terminology, besides failing to fit any particular African religion, does violence to historical reality: it lumps in an amorphous mass what are in actuality immensely different sets of ideas with distinctive consequences for the history of thought and culture in different parts of the continent” (2002, 15). South Sudan has a long history of the mingling of monotheistic ideas and theistic religions, both indigenous and imported.
Terms of indigenous authority in South Sudan also vary according to ethnographic tradition, alternating between kings and chiefs. Here I follow the anthropologist Simon Simonse’s useful restatement of the distinction between the two. Kingship is not determined by the size of territory over which authority is claimed but by the exercise of sovereignty over a whole structure. A chief is a subordinate in that structure, “a local-level official whose authority depends on a long-standing connection with his subjects and on recognition by a more powerful state” (Simonse 1992, 7). By this definition there were many kingdoms in precolonial southern Sudan, but the basis on which a king exercised sovereignty differed between societies.
The sources for the study of South Sudan’s past vary in quality. The archaeological record has not got beyond the exploratory stage. Historical linguistics is providing avenues for making long-term connections between significant language groups, but a thorough analysis of Western and Eastern Nilotic is yet to be completed. For the nineteenth century there is a wealth of contemporary observations in the exploration literature, sources of primary importance but ethnographically superficial and inaccurate (Evans-Pritchard 1971b, 145). The administrative literature of the first half of the twentieth century provides a more intimate contemporary record, especially in the local documents being assembled in the South Sudan National Archive, as it was produced by men conversant in some of the languages of South Sudan and in long-term contact with its peoples. Yet as detailed as these documents are they still provide mainly an external view of South Sudanese peoples and their societies. We are fortunate to have an extensive body of contemporary field-based ethnographic literature created by anthropologists such as Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt, and Jean Buxton and by missionary ethnographers and linguists such as Fathers Hofmayr, Crazzolara, and Santandrea, which helps us understand how South Sudanese peoples organized themselves, interacted with their environment and each other, and responded to internal and external events to become the peoples they are today. The writing of South Sudan’s history must build on this ethnographic foundation as new fieldwork begins a more systematic collection of South Sudanese oral testimony.
African historians have developed tools for analyzing oral sources, but these have not been systematically applied in South Sudan. There is a need to establish reliable, if relative chronologies. The narratives of population migrations are told in foreshortened time, compressing multiple movements and a complex series of attachments and separations into a single strand. The standard method of counting the generations backward from the present to a founding ancestor is unreliable because the purpose of tribal genealogies is not to measure time but to establish social and political connections. As the anthropologist Ian Cunnison warned, “Historically a tribal genealogy is, purely and simply, a falsification of the record” (1971, 189). Nuer and Dinka genealogies express both social and political distance within and between lineages rather than time depth (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 107–8, 198–99; Lienhardt 1958, 106). Establishing any dates much beyond five generations on the basis of genealogies without first analyzing indigenous systems of time reckoning and age-sets is speculative, and recent valiant attempts to extend tribal chronologies backward into a medieval past are yet to be confirmed (e.g., Beswick 2004; Kuendit 2010).
Dynastic lists, such as those of the Zande and Shilluk kings and the Dinka spear-masters, offer another approach to chronology. Of these, the Shilluk king list has been the most studied and begins to give us semireliable dates for events along the White Nile, especially when corroborated by the dynastic lists of the Blue Nile sultanate of Sinnar. But even dynastic lists are problematic. The king lists for the Ugandan kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro, for instance,