Two tribes

By D.H. | NAIROBI

FOR some observers of South Sudan’s current civil war, the most troubling aspect appears to have been the profligate use of the word “tribal” to describe the conflict. While soldiers from the country’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, went door-to-door in the capital, Juba, flushing out and executing members of the Nuer, the country’ second-biggest group, journalists reporting this were routinely accused of incitement. As tit-for-tat killings spread, academics and members of South Sudan’s diaspora upbraided correspondents for their irresponsibility and lack of nuance.

Jok Madut Jok, an academic and former minister in South Sudan’s government, wanted to know from foreign journalists what purpose it served “to say that these people died in the name of tribe”. A Kenyan writer, Nanjala Nyabola, argued in a polemical essay entitled “Why do Western media get African wrong?” that quoting the words of survivors, who often excoriated their persecutors in tribal terms, did a disservice. “Yes, this person says that Tribe X is responsible for issue Y, but are they just using that as shorthand for a more complex phenomenon, like the interrelationship between class, ethnicity and power?”

These criticisms can appear to be delivered from what Michela Wrong, a British writer on Africa, calls a "leisured place" divorced from journalism, which is more a "first draft of history and a scrappy affair."

Tribe or “the T-word”, as the cautious refer to it, can indeed have a pejorative colonial flavour, hinting at primitivity. Moreover, say complainers, describing the conflict as purely tribal plays into a lazy and false narrative of age-old tribal rivalries.

Yet some news organisations have been oversensitive in shying away from admitting the tribal aspect of the conflict in instances such as the recent bloodbath in the city of Bor, where members of the Nuer tribe furiously set about Dinkas. Readers and viewers surely want to know, at the most basic level, who is killing whom. At last count, more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, were said to have died. This is not to deny that the civil war was sparked by political differences transcending tribe at the top. Salva Kiir, the embattled president, who is a Dinka, has senior Nuers among his close allies, whereas his rival, Riek Machar, a Nuer, likewise has senior Dinkas in his fold, including members of the family of John Garang, who led the South Sudan movement until his death in 2005.

Those who shrink from calling the war tribal rightly point out that the grievances that instigated it were personal and political. But this can ignore the fact that there is no simple division between the tribal and political. Politics is tribal and the leaders of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, the only meaningful party, draw their legitimacy from their capacity to mobilise the population along ethnic lines.

Politics is the contest for control of the oil and aid money, whose abuse has upset all communities, and to use it in service of patronage networks based on tribe. What is sadly true is that, whatever its origins, the war has indubitably taken on a ferocious tribal hue.

An increasingly popular solution to the griping is for the promotion of African voices in telling the continent's stories. Part of the reason for this debate is the welcome arrival of many such voices on social media, where international coverage is mulled and dissected.

Patrick Gathara, a Kenyan writer and satirist, has a different take, implying that local news organisations should consider their own failure to set the agenda or report big African events satisfactorily. If the Western media, he asks, “get Africa wrong, just who gets it right?”