Reviewed by: Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan by Christopher Tounsel Kwaku Nti Tounsel, Christopher. Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. The title of this book happens to be an abstraction of the essence of South Sudan rooted in its being one of the areas in the northeastern corner of the African [End Page 222] continent with credible claims to earliest associations with Christianity. Furthermore, the profuseness of biblical invocations prior to and through the independence of this modern African nation as the focus of this book cast it in the mode of religiously infused historical genealogy political thought. Christopher Tounsel argues that the recent recurrent biblical invocations represent iterations in a longer history of a genre of nationalism steeped in religion. This historical trajectory had seen South Sudanese thinkers use Christian thought and theology as seedbeds on which racial identity obtained potent spiritual power. Relatedly, therefore, the Bible provided the language for resistance, definitions of friends and enemies, "and script for political and often seditious action in … quest for self-determination and sovereignty" (3). According to Tounsel, this approach and the verve that pushed it invariably succeeded in blurring "the lines between secular and sacred in the genealogy of the nation's political thought" (4). Hence, Chosen Peoples is a "spiritual chronicle" that explores the ways in which a deep Christian outlook, modes of organization, and theology informed the ideological framework of modern South Sudan. The secular–sacred dynamic in this context became indispensable when the erstwhile larger Sudan, especially, from the Mahdist era in the late nineteenth century couched for itself a long and resolute history of Islamization policies meant to fashion the country as an Islamic state. Consequently, the tension and animosity that these official policies unleashed knew no bounds particularly because of the presence of a significant population of non-Muslims. These troubling beginnings intensified as the mode of unifying the state for the government meant an extension of Arabism and Islam to its southern reaches, which had experienced extensive Christian missionary activities during the colonial era. Consequently, as the government pursued a systematic takeover of mission schools, abrogation of Sunday as a weekly holiday, and limitation of missionary work, life for Christians as well as Christian workers became intolerably precarious. The consequent culture of resistance and the requisite communal identity formation were all expressed in biblical lexicon that applied spiritual critiques against the Arab other. In this resistance culture among southern Sudanese, then, race (blackness) and religion (Christianity) assumed dominant identities in distinguishing "themselves from an enemy that was often framed as Arab and Muslim" (4). In this sense, then, rather than separating race and religion as coexisting factors, Tounsel casts theology as a crucible in which racial differences [End Page 223] and behaviors acquire definition. Akin to this view, "Southerners envisioned themselves as a chosen people destined for liberation while Arabs and Muslims were likened to oppressors in the biblical traditions of Babylon, Egypt, and the Philistines" (4). This overarching theological theme, hardly an exclusive creation of the clergy, became the work of a tapestry of groups that included politicians, soldiers, students, and refugees. Yet, the complexity of the South Sudan situation further unraveled in paradoxical aftermaths. Given that ethnicity superseded race as the politically salient and notable identifier in South Sudan after the second civil war in 2005 and a rapprochement with the traditional northern enemy, Tounsel upholds that conflict "as a violent referendum on the strengths and limitations of deploying race, religion, and ethnicity as instruments in the construction of a pluralistic democracy" (4). Again, he observes that despite gaining the promised land of independence, a deep ethnic conflict, subsequently, became a menace to the religiously envisioned nation. Tounsel equally draws insightful linkages and connections among the South Sudan situation and analogous scenarios in South Africa and the United States with respect to the theologizing of racial oppression. In all these discussions, Tounsel throws in a caveat not "to perpetuate the general conceptual division of Sudan into Arab Muslim north and a Black, Christian, and indigenous theistic south" (8) because according to him, the identifiers Arab, Africa, and Black "are...