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.