This is a response to the article; “Can the Nuer tribe reform or overthrow the Government of South Sudan?”, whose central flaw was reducing the country’s structural political crisis to an ethnic question, reproducing a colonial explanatory model that obscures power, political economy, and elite responsibility.
Ethnic groups do not challenge modern states; political movements, military coalitions, and elite networks in specific historical and institutional contexts, contest them. Describing the SPLM/SPLA-IO or SSIM/SSIA as “Nuer” is therefore a misnomer. By the same logic, one could label the SPLA/SPLM a “Dinka” movement, which is equally inaccurate.
These formations arose as political and revolutionary responses to exclusion and domination, not as ethnic collectives acting out of inherent hostility. Ethnicity in these conflicts appeared to have been incentivized, not as a causal driver of violence.
Historically, Sudan’s and South Sudan’s wars have been within and between revolutionary formations, not “tribal wars”. The SPLA/SPLM–SSIM/SSIA conflict of 1991–2002/3 was a rupture inside a liberation movement. The post-2013 conflict reflected the militarization of a failed post-liberation state, captured by a few elite factions from multiple communities, including the Nuer and the Dinka. Political marginalization of the Nuer predates independence and stems from a colonial genealogy of domination, resistance, and containment.
During the Turko-Egyptian rule (1821–1885), the Upper Nile region endured slave raiding, forced labor, and resource plunder. The Nuer resisted these intrusions, defending communal autonomy and indigenous authority. Colonial administrators later dismissed this resistance as “anarchy,” transforming political agency into justification for repression. Under the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium (1899–1956), punitive pacification campaigns dismantled indigenous governance, suppressed local leaders, and imposed coercive administrative control.
Resistance by communities such as the Aliab Dinka followed the same logic of anti-colonial opposition, rather than ethnic antagonism. Colonial state-building relied on divide-and-rule, criminalizing autonomy and governing through force, rather than consent. Sudan’s independence in 1956 reproduced these structures. Political and economic marginalization persisted, reinforcing mistrust of the state.
Between 1972 and 1983, many Nuer remained outside formal institutions, not from apathy, but from historical domination. This marginalization did not preclude national engagement, as demonstrated by the decisive Nuer support to the SPLA/SPLM at its formation in Bilpam in 1983.
Following the 2010 elections, armed resistance emerged in Jonglei, led by Gen George Athor Deng (Dinka) and Gen David Yau Yau (Murle), both citing electoral fraud and political exclusion. These rebellions illustrated that opposition to the Southern Sudan state was driven by grievances over legitimacy and governance, not ethnic identity.
The independence in 2011 promised a rupture but instead reproduced continuity. The Nuer incorporation into the post-liberation state occurred largely through the security sector, producing an ambivalent inclusion that relied upon, yet distrusted them. This contradiction culminated in purges and mass violence after December 2013, revealing a deeper constitutional failure: a state governing diversity through suspicion and militarized force rather than negotiation and law.
The article’s selective historical analogies, the Herero, the Mau Mau, the Lakota, and the Zulu, were misleading because they frame resistance as a warning against political transformation rather than interrogating structural and institutional dynamics. There is no serious analysis of the war economy: oil revenues, arms flows, regional militaries, and international interests. Elites across ethnic lines benefit from prolonged instability.
By ethicizing the conflict, responsibility is shifted away from ruling coalitions and external actors, fragmenting political consciousness and normalizing collective punishment.
A decolonial reading must reject ethnic reductionism. The core crisis is not Nuer power or Dinka dominance, but the failure of the post-liberation state, militarized politics, and the convergence of internal and external interests around managed instability.
South Sudan requires a second liberation, peaceful, institutional, and constitutional, aimed at building a federal, plural, and negotiated state in which no community fears its government. Until then, South Sudan remains independent in form, but imperial in practice.
The writer, Gatkuoth Lok Gatwich, is a PhD candidate in Social Transformation (Governance) at Tangaza University, Nairobi, Kenya. He can be reached via email: dietlok7@gmail.com
The views expressed in ‘opinion’ articles published by Radio Tamazuj are solely those of the writer. The veracity of any claims made is the responsibility of the author, not Radio Tamazuj.