Military Kinship, Inc.: patronage, inter-ethnic marriages and social classes in South Sudan

Abstract

This article analyses marital practices in South Sudan’s second civil war and its aftermath. It focuses on inter-ethnic kinship military ties sealed through the patronage of marriage and through inter-ethnic marriages. It argues that the marriage market became part of the broader circuit of predation by different armed groups. Inter-ethnic marriages varied between different ethnic groups and served different goals. They were symptomatic of changing and deteriorating ethnic dynamics within the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and with the local population. Ordinary civilians attempted to resist increased inequalities on the marriage market, used by the military elite as a tool for class consolidation.

[Parenté Militaire, Inc. : patronage, mariages inter-ethniques et classes sociales au Soudan du Sud.] Cet article analyse les pratiques matrimoniales durant la seconde guerre civile au Sud Soudan. Il se concentre sur les liens de parenté inter-ethniques de type militaire scellés par le parrainage de mariages. Il défend la thèse selon laquelle le marché matrimonial est devenu partie intégrante du circuit de prédation dominé par les différents groupes armés. Les mariages inter-ethniques variaient selon les groupes ethniques et remplissaient des objectifs différents. Ils étaient symptomatiques de dynamiques ethniques changeantes et détériorées dans le SPLA, et avec les populations locales. Tandis que certains civils essayaient de résister aux inégalités accrues sur le marché matrimonial, l’élite militaire s’en servit pour consolider sa domination de classe.

Mots-clés:

• guerre
• Soudan du Sud
• ethnicité
• économie
• classes sociales
• mariage
• femmes

Keywords:

• war
• South Sudan
• ethnicity
• economy
• social classes
• marriage
• women

Acknowledgements

For comments and assistance on earlier drafts I thank Douglas H. Johnson, Cherry Leonardi, Henri Médard, the anonymous reviewers and the editors.

Note on contributor

Clémence Pinaud holds a PhD in History from the Sorbonne University (Paris 1). Prior to joining Indiana University, she was a post-doctoral fellow at New York University Shanghai, and a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California Berkeley's Center for African Studies and Department of Political Science. She has undertaken research in the Philippines, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and South Sudan, and has also worked for various international aid agencies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. More than 300 field interviews were carried out continuously from January 2009 to December 2010 in South Sudan for doctoral research, and then in the summer of 2014 and in the period October 2015 to February 2016. These interviews focused mostly on the period of the war and were semi-directed. Women and men from various ethnic groups, different age-groups and various backgrounds were interviewed in Central and Eastern Equatoria States (Juba, Yei, Lanya, Morobo, and Nimule, and Torit), in Bor (Jonglei State), Malakal (Upper Nile State), Rumbek (Lakes State), Wau (Bahr El Ghazal State), Aweil, Awada and Aroyo (Northern Bahr El Ghazal), Bentiu town, Bentiu ‘Protection of Civilians’ (POC) camp, Koch, and Ding-Ding (Unity). Given the prevalence of displacement during the second civil war, some respondents interviewed in Juba were from Jonglei or from Lakes State, for example. Respondents interviewed in Bentiu POC also came from all over Unity State. In addition, the author directed a survey on gender issues for UN agencies in 2010, targeting 2500 respondents.

2. For more on my theoretical framework regarding the concept of class, see Pinaud 2014. Here I follow the definition of class as conceptualised by Larry Diamond: ‘a category encompassing those who have similar economic motivation because they have similar economic opportunities, even if class consciousness, class solidarity, or class action do not exist. A class may be considered socially dominant if it owns or controls the most productive assets, appropriates the bulk of the most valued consumption opportunities, and commands a sufficient monopoly over the means of coercion and legitimation to sustain politically this cumulative socio-economic pre-eminence. Necessarily, the members of such a class will have “controlling positions in the dominant institutions of society”. They will also have high degrees of class consciousness and social coherence – constituting in the Marxian sense a “class for itself” – as this is a precondition for the class action necessary to preserve and extend class domination. Finally, following in the tradition of both Marx and Mosca, the transmission of this status across generations will be seen as a particular mark of the consolidation of class domination’ (Diamond 1987, 569).

3. See Johnson 2003 for a discussion of the history of ethnic identities among Nilotic people (Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, Anuak), illustrating that these groups were not particularly unusual, and that they shared strong ties (through intermarriages, adoptions, and the adoption of Dinka names and religious shrines) in the nineteenth century, until the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium's British administrators sought to recreate tribal structures to implement the colonial system of devolution and separated them in the 1920s, and exaggerated ethnic divisions.

4. The interviews cited in this article are listed by date below in the references section, after the publications.

5. The 2010 survey, coordinated by the author for the UN agencies named in the survey report, produced the following results: bridewealth prices had increased in 2010 by 64% since 1983 and by 44% since the end of the war in 2005 (SSCCSE et al. 2010).

6. The German federally-owned enterprise GTZ recorded that from 2005 to 2008, cattle and livestock prices doubled, although cattle prices varied depending on the time, and on the colour/race/health/age/sex of the cow.

7. Hutchinson (1996, 82–83) noted a similar rebound in bridewealth prices after the first civil war.

8. This is not to say that all clans in Equatoria had the same bridewealth practices or formed a homogeneous group. For example, the Madi and the Kuku traditionally granted much importance to marriage presents, which were not cattle but symbols of wealth, while the Zande received spears and could be already engaged at birth (Driberg 1932, 413; E. E. Evans-Pritchard 1970).

9. For more details on these schemes and on their reinvestment, see Twijnstra 2014, Pinaud 2014, and De Waal 2014.

10. The notion of ‘prebendalism’ was adapted by Richard Joseph in 1987 in his book Democracy and prebendal politics in Nigeria: the rise and fall of the Second Republic, from a concept developed by Max Weber in Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology (1978). ‘Prebendalism’ refers to the allocation of political and administrative office as political reward, without anticipation of actual bureaucratic performance but for appropriation of a financial rent.