The many lenses of South Sudan’s inter-cultural dialogues

After exploring just governance and inclusive economics in the first two parts, we look at our third human security theme of inter-cultural dialogue.

Caux Forum framing: Differences are often exploited to fuel division and hatred. A heightened understanding and respect across cultures is crucial to global cooperation. 

In the Caux Forum context, this was approached in different ways, indigenous dialogues a recurrent theme, particularly from the Canadian and Australian experiences. In South Sudan, the inter-cultural dialogue has many angles to it: between its 64 tribes, between different sections of the 64 tribes, between themselves and non-Africans, themselves and other Africans, those who’ve always lived here and those who’ve spent formative years in other countries, between humanitarians and peacebuilders, between the institutionalised and the entrepreneurial, the urban and the rural, the western educated and the informally educated.  The church would transcend identity politics, and yet we often see those divisions reinforced. Similarly, the distance of the diaspora might encourage constructive approaches, yet often fuels and finances violence.

To take the inter-communal relations between the Dinka, Nuer and Murle of Jonglei and GPAA, the inter-cultural dialogue is as important as any other aspect. Some discourse outside GPAA has people pointing the finger at Murle culture itself. The diffuse social structure around age sets, combined with the increasingly violent process of separation as each new age set breaks away, enmeshed with the geography and the neighbours, all converge around some challenges. But the simplistic narrative takes an incredible leap of logic: violence + a culture that’s different = the culture is the problem. 

There are problems in Jonglei and GPAA, and they are serious problems. But reducing these to problems of either cattle or culture leads nowhere, except back to the problem. 

In Rumbek, the cattle camp research process in 2020 that set the foundation for the strategy there very deliberately launched its inquiry from a point of interest in the culture of the cattle camp communities. The primary objective was not to understand the violence that everyone was preoccupied with, but the values driving the life of the cattle camps. Unsurprisingly, what emerged was not a deep love of reckless death and destruction, but values of legacy, authority, hospitality, dignity and restorative justice, hierarchy, discipline, responsibility… and women as a pillar in sustaining community life.

And out of this also surfaced the urban-rural cultural divide, the fear of modernisation not out of some sort of ideological conservatism, but palpable loss of culture. When you spend time in the urban centres, where people drop their traditional names, and traditional attire gives way to the proliferation of Manchester United and Arsenal t-shirts, you could be forgiven for seeing their point. (Let’s not at this point complicate the discussion further by discussing how a spearmaster ends up also wearing bootleg English Premier League merchandise.)

At the sub-national level, it’s obvious where shared identity lends itself to violence. In the intra- and inter-communal peacebuilding work in both Lakes and Jonglei-GPAA, we try to give space for shared identity to arise along different lines. Among the galweng leaders of the Dinka Agar, their intra-sectional identity as enforcers of physical security gave way to a shared trans-Agar identity as peaceful mediators of security through the akut de door (grassroots peace committees). In Jonglei-GPAA, there is further work to arrive at that level of solidarity, but just last week we saw an inter-communal group deliberating on the strategy for opening of roads between communities. This is part of the Inter-Communal Governance Structure processes. In both cases, the first step is not about some amorphous, disempowering notion of capacity development - it is about a reorientation of the existing capabilities and strength of leadership into non-violent channels.

Modernisation may be inevitable, but at a minimum we still have control over the tone of the process, and at present it’s often undignified. It’s undignified both because its proponents fail to mitigate against its most grotesque forms (especially with respect to the environment), and because those whom it is foisted upon are stripped of their dignity in the process.