Cherry Leonardi. Dealing With Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: James Currey, 2013. xvi + 253 pp. Map. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $80.00, £45.00. Cloth.

Abstract

Cherry Leonardi. Dealing With Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.: James Currey, 2013. xvi + 253 pp. Map. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $80.00, I45.00. Cloth.Recent journalistic accounts of conflicts in the new state of South Sudan have tended to interpret them as between the age-old antagonistic of the Dinka and the Nuer. An earlier and influential generation of anthropologists and Africanists (notably E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Godfrey Lienhardt) described the southern Sudanese region as one of leaderless stateless societies. More recent historians' accounts have seen tribes and chiefs as inventions of colonial rule, with imagined myths of identity and creation. Many have argued that local chiefs have existed at least since the colonial era-but were they in reality the representatives of local groups or of the central government? Accounts of the southern Sudanese independence movements have described the changing relationships between the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLM/A) and those who were seen, or saw themselves, as local chiefs. The complex and contradictory nature of political power in southern Sudan exemplifies and perhaps even exceeds that of the rest of Africa. Anyone seeking to understand this complexity, rather than applying any of these old cliches, will now have to start with Leonardi's important and sophisticated book.It is perhaps not an easy read for those who know nothing of earlier literature on the region, and journalists or students with little knowledge of South Sudan might do better to start with more straightforward works such as Douglas Johnson's The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (James Currey, 2012). But Leonardi's book will for a long time be central to any deeper understanding of political structures in the newest African country. She traces the twentieth-century history of political leadership in the region in a comprehensive, theoretically sophisticated, and empirically detailed manner that has not been attempted before by the many historians and anthropologists who have written about South Sudan.The work is based on three urban centers-Juba, Yei, and Rumbek- which were at the heart of post-1900 regional political developments such as military slavery, colonialism, and nationalism. The author's qualitative research in the area and archival knowledge provide a detailed account of how state-or statelike-structures were created on the ground in a remarkably unwelcoming environment. …