South Sudan: Violence, Photography and the Iconography of Cattle Camps

Some years ago a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford asked me to look at a photograph taken in South Sudan in the early 1950s. Several South Sudanese men were shown standing on an open plain. They were wearing little in the way of clothing. But on the edge of the frame, resting on the ground, were several small piles of white cloth. The curator wanted to know what I thought the cloth piles were.

Had the photographer decided that his subjects would look better without their cotton shifts or jellabeyas? He would certainly not be the first, or last, outsider to decide that 'authentic' Nilotic South Sudanese should not wear a garment associated with Muslim northern Sudan.

One can see a similar ethos at work in a 1910^[1] image from the Pitt's C.G. Seligman collection. The black and white photograph is titled "Gok Dinka Men". The description reads, in part: "Gok Dinka men living around Talodi. Three of the men are wearing Arab-style headgear, and possibly holding removed tunics in their hands, showing the cultural influence of surrounding Muslim groups near Talodi."

At work in the text is the idea of how 'Gok Dinka' should appear. Rather than acknowledging the transfer of material goods and clothing between Arabs and Gok Dinka, the description reinforces the idea that the "headgear" and "removed tunics" are evidence of cultural contamination. Did the photographer ask the men to remove the offending articles?

More than a century later, many outsiders continue to represent peoples of South Sudan in a particular way, one that celebrates characteristics that are seen (by foreigners) as favourable. As ever, the elements left out of a photograph can be revealing.

In the case of the region's Nilotic-speaking people, the many and varied sections, clans and sub-clans of the Nuer and Dinka, the world has come to expect them to have a certain appearance: to be tall, partially clothed, standing amid livestock (preferably long-horned cattle), and either inanimate, looking into the middle distance with a blank expression, or captured mid-flight in a leaping dance.

They should be young and physically beautiful. You will not see photographs of misshapen or handicapped Dinka, the 'Macheks' and 'Nyanacheks' (the names given to male and female infants, respectively, who are born with physical defects). The name means either "gift of God" or "freak of nature." There is a tendency to soften the meaning of a term when translating for a foreigner.

Nor will you see the wizened old women whose job it is to gather up cattle manure for drying. Their reproductive years over and their strength waning, these women have a tenuous existence in the cattle camp hierarchy.

In recent years, this disconnect between the curated photographic image and reality could be seen in the base camp of the United Nations in South Sudan's capital, Juba. Hanging from the exteriors of portable housing units were blown-up photographs of telegenic South Sudanese in pastoral scenes, as if the international staffers needed to be reminded who the recipients of their mission were.

Every peacekeeper and foreign NGO worker is a photographer, and the cattle camp is the most important 'get.' South Sudanese gatekeepers -- local politicians, the military -- play on this western fixation. Some years ago the Canadian head of the UN base in Rumbek was convinced that he was the first UN staffer to ever be 'allowed' into a local cattle camp.

References

1. ^{^} 1910 (southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk)