Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

This method of governance did not end with Sudanese independence in the 1950s. It did not end with South Sudan’s secession from Sudan in 2011. Rather, tribalism as an administrative practice and as the currency of political competition has endured and today been taken to its absurd extreme. Each of the major tribes in South Sudan has its own separate ministries in the government. Each has its separate militias. The army of the state is itself fragmented by tribal rivalries; various wings of the armed forces fought each other in the South Sudanese civil war that began in 2013, a conflict costing hundreds of thousands of civilian lives. As of this writing, a peace is in place, but tenuously. Wealth and power in South Sudan come to whomever can mobilize enough troops to terrorize a population. A new militia could arise and, if it intimidates enough people, earn its own slice of tribal homeland and its own perch in the government. If the United States, with hardly any surviving natives, can continue to be organized as a settler state, South Sudan can continue to be organized as a collection of native tribes, even with no settler presence.