The tragedy that is South Sudan and warring elite

For years, I thought South Sudan was a victim society. History has a wicked way of dealing some people a cruel hand. Bad topography is one. Another is simply having bad neighbours – predatory and malevolent neighbours. Yet another is the cruelty of being colonised – internally, or eternally. A greedy and myopic elite can be the final straw. But dynamics internal to a people can also do them in. Taken together, a combination of these factors can lead to damnation. That’s what I believe is South Sudan’s curse. Everything – including the proverbial kitchen sink – has been thrown at South Sudan. It’s a tragedy that the elite in South Sudan can’t stop digging although it’s already in a deep hole.

One of the arguments made by the colonial empires was that the so-called natives lacked sovereignty of reason. That people who were not white – defined as “the other” – lacked faculties of the mind required for self-governance. By the way, that’s the genesis of international law – as a legal justification to occupy and take territories occupied by “natives” in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. These lands were terra nullius – no man’s land. This Eurocentric worldview held that non-whites were subhuman and that it was the duty of the white man – predestination, or white man’s burden – to raise backward peoples to full humanity. This was one rationale for the colonisation and “salvation” of the native, the heathen, the pagan, the savage, the kaffir.