National Archives

I spent a couple of days last week in the National Archives, a two-storey building on the outskirts of Juba, down a jarring, rutted road and flanked by tea stalls and mechanic workshops. In each of its dozen or so rooms, boxes reach the ceiling, each labeled by state and district and filled with an array of fragile, torn, and tea-stained documents stretching from the 1920s, through independence, to the 1970s. Most of the early files are correspondence between about 20 British administrators who effectively ran the southern half of the Sudan, as it was at known when part of the British empire.

Some of the documentation is dull, letters back and forth about chiefs who have died, and meetings that need to take place. One box was a tattered police log, detailing several interviews with witnesses who saw a car roll backwards into a river, and even included a diagram of the incident. Or correspondence among administrators concerned about the rise of "poisoning" cases. 

But most is gold dust when trying to understand South Sudan today. About four or five of the administrators were keen anthropologists and sociologists and spent a great deal of time trying to understand the culture of the tribes who lived in the country they were administering.

Several wrote lengthy theses detailing the “traditions” of the Nuer and Dinka (the two main tribes in S Sudan), many of which are still in practice today. Bride wealth, where a potential husband must pay a number of cattle for a wife, and ghost marriages, where a woman is married to a dead man and all her subsequent children take the dead man’s name.

However, I put traditions in quotations because there’s a debate over whether it was the very act of documenting these practices that turned them into tradition. Not to mention a push by British colonialist to have tribes standardize their practices to make it easier for a court system to adjudicate.

For example, most “crimes”, or sleights to a family’s honour, were compensated with cattle.  According to BA Lewis, a young, and super enthusiastic administrator in Jonglei State in the 1940s, the Nuer demanded 16 cattle as compensation for a murder; for the fracture of a bone; thigh, arm or leg: 6 cattle; loss of an eye: 4 cattle; getting a girl pregnant: 3 cattle; getting a married woman pregnant: 6 cattle.  But not all tribes valued the same crime with the same number of cattle, and even among the different tribes of the Nuer, the number of cattle varied. And so administrators held several meetings with chiefs and tribal elders (no women present of course) to standardise these practices, and such was their efforts that in 1943, even the Dinka, the dominant tribe in South Sudan, decided to adopt all Nuer tradition. This included handing over all children in a marriage to a husband in a divorce. Up until that time, Dinka women were able to keep their children. This is a hugely charged issued in South Sudan today, as women fear divorce because they do not want to lose their children.  Cattle must also be returned.

One large box was dedicated to the Akobo Girls School, run by the formidable Wilma Kats, who in 1948, at the age of 28, was sent by the Reformed Church in America to Sudan. The documents are dated between 1961 and 1963 and detail her correspondence with the state ministry of education, including a reprimand from the ministry for “forgetting” that female teachers get paid less than male teachers, and several letters arguing for the construction of new dorms for the girls. In one correspondence, she responds to a letter sent to her by a teacher, so incensed by an argument he had had with another teacher, that he threatens to resign his post as religious teacher. Ms Kats responds with diplomacy and tact. “We have heard quite enough on this subject. You will not be resigning. I expect to see you in class on Monday.” In another letter to the state ministry, she asks for a truck to take the children on a picnic.

But the best find: two letters. One from Ms Kats to a Col Deng, commander of the Darfur brigade, scolding him for writing a love letter to a student, and the other, the letter itself, with its childish handwriting exhorting the student to tell him how she feels, and its sign off “my heart looking for  you”.

I can’t find that much about Ms Kats online, except that after Sudan’s independence, she was sent to Ethiopia but returned to the States after a few years, and died in 1980.

What a fascinating story she would have had to tell though.  

Starting with the BBC

This week, I had my first informal, but official meeting about my new job. I haven’t yet signed a contract yet, but decisions need to be made about the project, and so I was called in. It was really the first time someone had sat down and explained, in detail rather than abstract, the design of the project. And I’m excited!

Up until now, the most I’ve known is that it’s about getting girls into school, using radio. I’ve had all sorts of ideas about the ways in which that could happen, mostly based on other Media Action programmes which use a combination of radio dramas, call-in shows and public service announcements to deliver behaviour change messages.  But this, my project, is so much cooler than that!

We will train 10 reporters, 1 from each of South Sudan’s 10 states, and embed them in a school for a couple days a week. Each reporter will follow a couple of students and their families; teachers, members of the PTA (yep, parent-teacher associations are a big thing here) and also families who do not send their girls to school, or girls who have dropped out for what ever reason, and do a weekly documentary. Think The Archers set in a South Sudanese school, or for podcast listeners, This South Sudanese School Life. I will be in charge of recruiting our trainees, working with them to develop story and programme ideas and chasing them to make sure it all gets done on time. I imagine I will be spending a lot of time travelling to visit our schools and to make sure our reporters aren’t using their mates as fake students (not unheard of here).

I have been doing a lot of reading about girls education and schools. From the outside, it appears that the basic challenge is convincing families that it’s worth investing in their daughters’ education, that an educated woman has more value than an uneducated one. In terms of dowry, one girl can be worth between 500 SSP and 5,000 (4SSP =$1), depending on the family, the state, and the education etc.. Usually this payment is made in cattle. 

But it’s not that simple. The average South Sudanese family lives a subsistence life. Daughters and cattle are their only assets.  And school costs money; for uniforms, for shoes, for books and school fees. Many families cannot afford to invest for the long term, and prefer to cash in their investment when it stars to mature (ok, I’ve obviously been thinking about my investments too much).  But the point is, they can get a substantial amount of cattle for a young, uneducated girl, some of which can help to pay for their sons’ marriages.  

There is another aspect that I did not know too much about. School is not a particularly safe place for girls. The journey to school, often sometimes two hours each way, can be dangerous. It’s common for girls to be “carried off”, by men looking to either find a wife, or just have sex. This risk of “early pregnancy”, results in a community-imposed fine on the man who raped the girl, or maybe he will marry her. Once a girl is pregnant, it’s likely she’ll drop out of school.  In discussions with girls in some of the schools, researchers found that while most girls did want to attend school, they also wanted to get married, move out of the family home, and have their own independence and have a family. No difference really from the West then.

Some girls admitted to trading sex for homework help, and some girls started affairs with older men or became prostitutes to earn extra money so they could buy mobile phones and “nice” things.

So, I guess you have to look at it from a family’s perspective.  If we use my investment analogy, we’re often encouraging families to put their most valued asset in a high risk fund with a poor manager (teachers are paid so little, many don’t show up for work, let alone pay attention to learning outcomes or behaviour of school girls).

So as my country manager said to me today. We know education of girls is a good thing, but why is it good for these families? How do we show them that it’s worth sending a girl to school?

Good questions. I think the government should just make it mandatory and fine parents who pull their daughters out of school before the age of 18. But then I’d be out of a job!

Jonglei: From basket weaving to conflict

This is a photo taken by a friend who is in Jonglei, South Sudan’s largest and most remote state, on the border with Ethiopia. I was supposed to be there with her, we had planned to spend a week over Easter together, but UNESCO, in a brilliant display of UN inefficiency, failed to get me on a UN humanitarian flight. Yes UNESCO, a UN agency, was unable to get me on a UN flight!

To be fair they did try, and it is a bureaucratic procedure. To get on the flight you have to be a humanitarian worker, or, you have to have a letter of introduction from an NGO. I am still a consultant, not staff, so I need a letter, but UNESCO’s country director said he was more than happy to write one as I had pitched them the idea of testing our manual (the one I’m writing ) on a women’s group in Akobo, one of the more remote and conflict ridden parts of the state. I had even offered to pay my own airfare. UNHAS, the UN Humanitarian Air Service, may carry NGOs and charities to remote areas, but it is certainly NOT a charity. For a 90- minute flight on an eight-seater plane, you pay US $200 each way. In fact, the airline had threaten to suspend operations in South Sudan if it did not get the funding it needed: US $3.5m a month.  

Other than UNHAS, there are no other airlines, commercial, non-profit or governmental, that fly to Akobo. In the dry season, most locals walk wherever they need to go. In the wet season, they stay home.  With that in mind, I gave UNESCO more than a week’s notice about my trip to Jonglei.  


The first day after the country director directed someone to handle my booking, I heard nothing. Day 2, they were busy filling in the form. Day 3, they had realised it was an outdated form and were trying to get the updated one. I emailed my friend and asked her to send me the form she used, which I forward on to UNESCO. But the project officer is not convinced, and wants to wait for the email from UNHAS. Day 4, they have the right form (and yes, it’s the same one I sent them), but now they can’t find the country director to sign the form. It’s Friday. The flight leaves next Thursday, and the deadline for submission is Tuesday. They promise to get it signed and sent in on Monday. I find myself saying “Well, we can only do what we can do, and if I get on, great, but if not, then we have done our best.” I have no idea where this calm resignation has come from.

Monday arrives, and they still can’t find the director, but at least now they know he’s on a mission. What about his deputy? I ask. Surely there must be someone standing in for him while he’s away. There is, I am told, but no one knows where she is either.

On Tuesday, the day of deadline, they get the form signed, but the person handling my flight booking has a training day. I get a phone call that evening to say they had missed the deadline. “Oh well," I say, "thanks for trying.”  

And that’s why my friend is in Akobo, taking this cool photo and meeting with women and youth groups, and I am sitting here in Juba, moaning on my blog about UN inefficiency.

So the photo: My first thought when she sent it through was I love that woman's hat. The next, was to ask what they were making. The answer: rubbish bins.  The women are creating those baskets to put the town’s waste in, although they seem more for aesthetic reasons than environmental because once they are full, they just dump the contents in a landfill or burn it. What else did miss besides the cool basket weaving? Well, a family of scorpions, two snakes, endless games of gin rummy, and sweltering hot days with no aircon. 

But there's more to Jonglei and Akobo than scorpions and basket weaving. It is the most conflict prone state, with inter-communal fighting between tribes over cattle raiding and a renegade soldier, with backing from Sudan, trying to start a rebellion against the government. But it's more complicated than that. David Yau Yau, the rebel soldier  is a Murle, one of three tribes in Jonglei. He has been stirring up trouble in the state since 2010, when he lost parliamentary elections. The other two tribes are the Luo Nuer and the Dinka. The Dinka are the most populous tribe, and the most powerful. John Garang, who led the rebellion against Khartoum was a Dinka; the current president, Salva Kiir, is a Dinka. But the Nuer are equally strong. During the rebellion against Khartoum, the Nuer initially aligned with Garang, but then split because they objected to Garang's vision of  a united secular Sudan, rather than an independent South Sudan. They eventually reconciled, and the current vice president of South Sudan Riek Machar (who incidentally married a British aid worker in the late 1980s), is a Nuer. 

So there is animosity between all three tribes, and within each tribe, but real hatred towards the Murle. 

In 2011, over 1,000 people were killed in clashes between the Nuer and Murle, and tens of thousands were displaced. In early 2012, it's estimated up to 3,000 civilians were killed, again when Nuer youth marched on the Murle to avenge cattle raids. Almost all of those killed were women and children, as the men were able to run much faster into the bush, according to the UN.  

This year, there have again been clashes after Yau Yau's men attacked a group of South Sudanese soldiers accompanying Nuer cattle herders. All 11/14 soldiers were killed along with 100 civilians. As a result, the government sent more soldiers into Jonglei to wipe out the Murle, with Machar even exhorting his Nuer tribes to dig up their decommissioned weapons. Every few days, we see reports, mostly in the Sudan Tribune or from the UN, of civilians being killed and people being forced to flee their homes because of the fighting.  

Another impact of the conflict is that people cannot look after their crops if they are continuously fleeing the fighting, and with the dry season almost over, and World Food Programme flights unable to land during the rainy season, deaths in conflict may be outnumbered by deaths due to starvation.