Violence, ethnicity and political consolidation in south Sudan: A history of the Dinka and their relations with their neighbors

This dissertation focuses on a history of the Nilotic Dinka of the Southern Sudan and integrates their experience into the wider literature of ancient, medieval and modern Sudanese historiography. Working from approximately three hundred oral interviews, published sources and theoretical interpretation, this study represents the first to combine the histories of each of the approximately twenty-three regional Dinka groups as one large ethnic unit. It traces the migration of this ancient culture and speech community from its Nubian homeland in the Gezira into the Southern Sudan and fits these movements into the wider scholarship of eastern African Nilotic history.;The Dinka socioeconomic and political system emerged as the dominant and expanding ethnic system in the Southern Sudan because they possessed a superior breed of hump-backed cattle and dhurra grain. This expansion however, came abruptly to a halt towards the latter eighteenth century with the intrusion of Baggara slave raiders. By 1821 the first of three subsequent colonialist regimes took control of the Dinka homeland. With each stage in the colonial experience Dinka society became restructured, politically and economically. Through the colonial Egyptian and Mahdist periods the Dinka began a phase of military and then political centralization. By the time of the third colonial power in Sudan, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, there existed two Dinka proto-states.;Throughout the British colonial period in the South administrators introduced secular leadership and justice and encouraged the emergence of a new Western-educated Southern elite. When the British divided the Sudan into two it revived earlier Southern nationalist sentiments born from the devastation of the nineteenth century slave raids and depredations of their land. However, in 1947 during independence talks the British reunified the Sudan and bestowed power on a group of Northern Muslim elites. Soon thereafter civil war erupted.;The post-colonial period has witnessed two of Africa's longest civil wars (1955-1972 and 1983-present). The second conflict has been spearheaded by the Dinka organization the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and Army. In 1994 a new "nation within a nation" called New Sudan emerged within the war zones of the South. This new administrative structure introduced a democratic apparatus into the Southern Sudan and while the North/South war continues, intra-Southern strife, virulent since the 1970s, has begun to decline.