Reading: Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship'

There's been a bit of a delay in posting while I carefully lower my expectations of colonialist morality (I'd thought they were pretty low already, actually, but it seems I was being unduly optimistic). The first reason for this is Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. So far it's excellent and should probably be mandatory reading for anyone who's the slightest bit interested in European imperialism.

The second reason is Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan' (2007, Africa, 77: 4, pp.535-558). Let's kick off with some anecdotes:

"Without any preliminary enquiry, the sheikh was seized and severely beaten, the Officer himself taking a leading part in belabouring the unfortunate man on the head, back or legs, indiscriminately. Having been thus treated he was ordered to show where the game was to be found." (p.544)

When Belgian soldiers arrived in the early 20th century, many local people ran and hid in local caves. Awate, wife of the local rain chief, went out with her child to confront the Belgians. Possibly she believed that a female negotiator would be more likely to be treated peacefully. She was held hostage for a while, but her husband negotiated her release. She went back to her community with a dead child and both hands amputated. It's not clear why the Belgians did this (p.545).

Lasu was a chief from the early twentieth century who is still famous in the area today for his courage and 'stubbornness' (this apparently means his commitment to resisting the demands of the colonial authorities). Leonardi interviewed a Headman about the outcome of one altercation between Lasu and the authorities (although it's not clear what the cause of the disagreement). The Headman reported that "when the French [Belgians] came they were beating Lasu, and they smeared his face with honey and burnt it with fire, but still he persevered." (p.545)

Taking that into consideration- Leonardi's essay is mainly about some modern-day local politics involving the question of what it means to be a chief in Southern Sudan. Chiefs have been criticised by some observers who would prefer a form of local government which is more democratic and/or more sympathetic to values like women's rights (p.538, 553). They've also been criticised on the basis that they're an artefact of colonialism (since the person who colonials decide must be the 'chief of the local natives' is rarely the person who actually held the leading political position before the colonials showed up, and since the chiefs generally strive to pass their office on to their descendants, the upshot is that the lineages which are currently politically powerful are quite different to those who were politically powerful in the time pre-colonial period) (p.536). In addition, many chiefs have played some role in assisting the SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement) in torturing political opponents (e.g. by allowing their own houses to be used as torture chambers) (p.535, 543).

But, as Leonardi points out, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. The role of chiefs, in general, has been to mediate between ordinary villagers and whichever set of people are currently in charge of Sudanese government (the latter being referred by villagers as the gela- the word used to mean 'white people', but now it also encompasses anyone associated with military, uniforms, offices etc. It sounds like generally it also implies 'urban person', but the rural SPLM guerrillas are referred to as 'the gela of the bush'. See p.540-1).

Basically, the ideal chief is often emically seen as someone who may not be able to make the gela go away, or convince them to stop enforcing hated policies, but who is at least able to reduce the amount of direct contact between the gela and the villagers (and hence reduce the amount of direct violence that the former are able to inflict on the latter). For example, chiefs may offer to personally collect food from villagers for SPLM troops, and then invite local SPLM leaders to dinner at their own house. As one interviewee explained to Leonardi, "if they [SPLM] came to you for food, you quickly collected the food from the people and gave it to them while they are seated with you, because if they entered the village, they would do damages, raping, robbing" (p.542).

But this direct contact with the gela is a double-edged sword for chiefs. On the one hand, it can sometimes bring them privileges, like the ability to take (limited) control of local politics and pass political office on to their sons. On the other hand, chiefs have often been assaulted or even killed by the gela. Also, even if local people agree in an abstract sense that their chief is a necessary buffer between themselves and the gela, they are unlikely to bear massively warm feelings towards the person who interacts with the gela so much, and who's personally responsible for collecting taxes and telling people that their sons have just been conscripted into the gela army (p.543).

This leads to a situation where the person who winds up being chief is often someone who was previously a pretty low-status figure. The pre-colonial political establishment figures were reluctant to sign up for a job which meant risking torture, so the responsibility gets passed on to someone lower-status (p.545). It sounds as though a similar process has been seen with Kenyan Kipsigis chiefs (p.548). Theoretically, this new chief can then establish their own hereditary lineage of political leaders- although in practice, their descendants are often reluctant to accept the job, since they've seen first hand how much danger it puts people in (p.546).

It sounds like at the time when Leonardi was interviewing, the level of violence had dropped down from where it had been a few years previously, and refugees were starting to return to their homes. This led to tension involving people who felt like the current 'chiefs' had served their purpose as a short-term emergency buffer against the SPLM, and so the village could return to being led by the descendants of older ruling lineages (lineages founded by a previous generation of chiefs). Others argued that the current chiefs deserved to keep their positions, since their power had been 'bought in blood'. One elderly woman offered a challenge to anyone who wanted to claim the leadership role for themselves: "Count out your dead people who were slaughtered, through whom the chiefship was obtained! Count your dead ones, your blood poured!" (p.546). Leonardi refers to this as a conflict between "blood descent or blood poured" (p.548) as models of political succession.

(Oh, and while we're on the topic- Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, has just been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. It sounds like he's unlikely to actually get prosecuted in the near future. He's also a candidate in the presidential election that's been scheduled for this year- planned as Sudan's first democratic election with multiple parties participating for nine years.)