On Christopher Tounsel's Chosen Peoples

CHOSEN PEOPLES: CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN SOUTH SUDANBy Christopher Tounsel. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv + 205. Paper, $25.95. In July 2012, Christopher Tounsel was a PhD student doing research at the national archives in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, when the country celebrated independence. Exactly 1 year before, after a referendum that yielded a near-unanimous vote to secede, South Sudan withdrew from the Republic of Sudan. This secession followed a brutal civil war that had raged over half a century in two main rounds: from 1955 (the eve of British decolonization) to 1972 and again from 1983 to 2005. The latter year witnessed the signing of a treaty called the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the name of which proved far more aspirational than effective. In his introduction to Chosen Peoples, the book that grew from this doctoral research, Tounsel recalls how excited he was to be in South Sudan for this first anniversary of independence. He describes attending a commemorative service for the occasion in Juba's All Saints Cathedral, where he listened as the Acting Governor compared the biblical Joshua to leaders of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), the militant group that led the war and from whose ranks South Sudan's leaders emerged. Another speaker thanked God for the country's freedom while evoking the Israelites, their captivity, and their liberation from Egypt. Seated in the cathedral, Tounsel realized how impossible it would be “to divorce southern nationalism from biblical vocabulary” (3). If there was one moment when his research crystallized, this was it. Chosen Peoples investigates the role of Christian and biblical discourses in mobilizing armed resistance during the postcolonial Sudanese civil war and forging a fragile collective political identity in what became South Sudan. The book sets out to show how the Bible functioned as both a “lexicon” and a “script for political action,” which helped to make South Sudanese nationalism for many people “a spiritual chronicle” as much as a political one (4). At the same time, Christian theology offered a “bond that could unify disparate ethnicities” while affirming a Black identity to counter the ideological Arab identity of the northern Sudanese regime and its protagonists. As a work of intellectual history that examines the intertwining of political and religious discourses, Chosen Peoples contends that the Bible and Christianity came to function as “a vehicle for defining ‘us’ and ‘them’” for activists and leaders who struggled to advance the cause of southern Sudanese, and after 2011, South Sudanese, people (143). To appreciate what Chosen Peoples achieves relative to Sudanese and now South Sudanese history, readers must grasp basic elements of the region's nineteenth- and twentieth-century past. The review, therefore, begins by surveying pertinent features of imperialism, religious change, and regional division. The review then assesses how Chosen Peoples departs from church history and contributes to intellectual and military history through its examination of biblical discourses—evocations of David and Goliath, the land of Cush, the exodus of the Israelites, and so forth—which functioned as a “political technology” (115). The review concludes by suggesting how Tounsel's Chosen Peoples reflects the history of, and the scholarship on, both Christian and Muslim people in South Sudan and Sudan. The nineteenth century witnessed the assertion of Egyptian and later British imperialism in the Sudan. Conquests gave rise to two colonial regimes. These were a “Turco-Egyptian” regime, named to reflect the Ottoman origins of its military leaders, which lasted from approximately 1820 to the early 1880s, and a joint British-Egyptian regime, entailing an administrative partnership known as the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, which emerged in 1898 and endured, with Britain dominant, until 1956. The Turco-Egyptian era witnessed the acceleration of a slave trade that ravaged southern Sudanese populations, reconfigured regional economies, and set patterns of state-abetted violence. The Anglo-Egyptian era witnessed concerted state-led efforts to divide northern and southern populations administratively, culturally, and economically in ways that anticipated the rupture of 2011. Both periods set the stage against which Tounsel's book unfolds. Also critical to Tounsel's book was the spread of Christianity—a process that British colonial policies enabled. Since Tounsel does not survey this history in his book, readers wanting more background on early twentieth-century developments should look to works like Day of Devastation, Day of Contentment: The History of the Sudanese Church across 2000 Years, by Roland Warner, William Anderson, and Andrew Wheeler (Nairobi 2000). What may not be evident from a survey like this last one, however, is how Christian history in the Anglo-Egyptian era and after decolonization in 1956 bore a close relationship to policies towards, and developments among, Sudanese Muslims as well. For a study that focuses on this linked Christian-Muslim dynamic, readers can look to works like The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam by the journalist Eliza Griswold (New York, 2010). Meanwhile, for a nuanced study that examines how Christianity took firmer hold in the 1980s and 1990s, amidst the civil war and beyond, as a result of grassroots evangelism, readers should consult Jesse A. Zink's Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan (Waco 2018). Zink offers a historical, ethnographic, and missiological study that concentrates on Anglican culture among the Dinka against the context of war. The books by Tounsel and Zink complement each other by revealing different aspects of Christian culture amid wars, displacements, and their aftermaths. Once more, colonial policies set the foundations for the postcolonial history of both Sudanese Muslims and Christians. After 1898, British leaders took pains to avoid offending Sudanese Muslim popular sensibilities, fearing the revival of something like the Mahdist movement: a jihadist, revolutionary, popular movement that had managed to trounce the Turco-Egyptian regime during the 1880s. British authorities feared that popular Muslim rage—if allowed to build up—could threaten and similarly topple the Anglo-Egyptian regime. They also feared the prospect of Islam spreading further among people who practiced local religions, especially in southern regions. In the early twentieth century, this Islamophobia informed British policies which aimed to separate northern, Muslim-majority parts of the Sudan territory from southern regions. British officials tried to limit or at least monitor contact, for example, by requiring northern Muslim traders to secure permits—like visas—to cross into southern zones. In some ways, they imagined the Sudanese North and South as separate countries—and made it not just possible, but arguably more likely, for southern Sudanese to imagine the same. To be clear, the British policy of thwarting Muslim expansion did not work. Christianity grew exponentially in the colonial and postcolonial periods, but so did Islam. Islam spread especially among soldiers and around bases (indeed, in towns like Juba), where military culture since the nineteenth century had been decidedly Muslim. Many South Sudanese families today count both Muslims and Christians among their relatives. Religious conversion remains, for many, a matter of living memory within families, suggesting how the history of religious change is a history in the making. This history should also remind us of the continuing importance of Islam and Muslim culture for many South Sudanese people as well. One could easily continue with a survey of colonial policies towards religion; these policies, after all, had far-reaching consequences that endure palpably now. For instance, despite the Islamophobia that often informed their decisions, British authorities in the first half of the twentieth century favored northern Muslims in other ways, such as by allocating most educational resources to them. Arabic-speaking, Muslim male elites in urban centers—especially around the capital of Khartoum—benefited most from the new system of government schools, which offered paths into government jobs. Opportunities for education and promotion in the military benefitted Muslim men as well. Meanwhile, the colonial state before 1956 ceded southern regions to military commanders, who were often arbitrarily brutal, while giving Catholic and Protestant missionaries (Europeans and Americans) latitude to run churches, schools, and clinics using their own funds. The state made Arabic the official language of the northern regions and used English for administration in southern regions. English also prevailed in mission schools, supplemented at elementary levels by certain regional languages, such as Dinka and Nuer. Together, these policies contributed to the unevenness of colonial development, the real divisions between the Sudanese “North” and “South,” and—most decisively in the long run for what Tounsel studies—the possibilities for missionary-mediated Christian expansion in southern regions. These policies contributed, too, to an accumulation of mutual mistrust and discontentment, which settled on many southern Sudanese men as decolonization approached. These grievances erupted in 1955 among soldiers, just months before Sudan became independent, with an event now remembered as the Torit Mutiny. Later identified as the spark that set off the war, this mutiny illuminated not just southerners' discontentment but also their fears over the limited access to power, relative to their northern counterparts, which threatened to shape the nation-state order to their disadvantage. Most historians have cited 1955 as the start of a “first” Sudanese civil war which continued until 1972 with the signing of a peace treaty known as the Addis Ababa Accord. The date is convenient; it helps to organize the history into comprehensible units. And yet, the historian Douglas H. Johnson (whose work has exerted a strong influence on all historians of South Sudan, including Tounsel) made a compelling case for recognizing not a clearly demarcated first war from 1955 (and a second war from 1983), but rather a series of civil wars which pre-dated the postcolonial conflict and occurred in Sudan within but also beyond southern regions. Johnson published his book on this subject, The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (note the plural!) (Bloomington 2003), too soon to see the ostensible end of the “second” war in 2005. Events since 2011 have only proven the continued utility of Johnson's model. For in fact, South Sudan's independence did not bring peace to vast numbers of South Sudanese people. On the contrary, war intensified internally from 2013, entailing destruction and ethnically targeted violence by state-backed, largely Dinka militias on a scale that has led scholars like Clémence Pinaud to call what happened a genocide. This post-2013 conflict provides further context for Chosen Peoples. Tounsel notes the influence of biblical narratives in the speeches and writings of competing South Sudanese leaders and factions and takes pains to stress that their Christian-inflected rhetoric did not always, or even primarily, serve as a discursive weapon deployed against Muslims. He develops these ideas most fully in Chapter 5, called “The Troubled Promised Land,” alluding to the Exodus story. The chapter's epigraph comes from a 2015 article that James Onge Aremo (one-time South Sudanese diplomat to Uganda) published in the Sudan Tribune. In this essay, Aremo lamented that South Sudan had become more of a land of “multiple graveyards” than a land of “milk and honey” (113). For years, international media outlets had described the Sudanese civil conflict in terms of binary divisions along North–South, Arab-African, and Muslim-Christian lines. For their part, experts stressed that rifts were more ragged and ostensible group solidarities more fractured than this Manichaean image conveyed. Chosen Peoples reflects these ambiguities. While contending, again, that Christian discourses offered “a vehicle for defining ‘us’ and ‘them’” (143), Tounsel shows that the “us” and the “them” were not always—or even primarily—Southern and Northern. He traces discursive battles that southerners waged against each other and in this way, reveals splits along factional and ethnic lines among contestants who were battling for power within South Sudan. Chosen Peoples focuses on Christian discourses but does not examine Christian institutions, beliefs, or worship practices. In this sense, and in contrast to Zink's study of Dinka Anglicans and Anglicanism (again, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan), one cannot call Chosen Peoples a work of church history per se. Instead, by scrutinizing the martial and discursive applications of Christian theology, Chosen Peoples contributes substantively to intellectual and military history and to the study of South Sudanese nationalism. Politicians and generals like John Garang, founder of the SPLA, and Salva Kiir, his successor as head of the SPLA who then became President of South Sudan in 2011, feature prominently in this analysis. Tounsel notes, for example, that Garang used the Good News Bible “as propaganda to support his creation of a New Sudan,” the precursor to what became South Sudan, while drawing from the book of Isaiah and likening southern Sudan to the biblical Cush (118). These references later inspired southern Sudanese nationalists to suggest Cush as a name for their country and to reference this ancient kingdom in its national anthem. Among the arguments that Tounsel advances regarding churches, two are especially striking. First, he suggests, church leaders—male clerics but also women like the nuns and lay workers who ran the Catholic radio station in Juba called Radio Bakhita—were “unable to seriously influence politicians and generals” (127), especially after 2013 when war broke out within South Sudan. Perhaps one could say that the Christian culture of the political classes was independent of churches, which neither endorsed nor sponsored the biblical invocations (or propaganda) of politicians and generals. Second, and despite idealistic claims that Christianity would unite southern Sudanese people, ecumenical tendencies within churches, among and between Protestants and Catholics, did not do so—at least not among the political and military leadership cadres. Christianity may have helped to provide some semblance of cultural or ideological cohesion during the second civil war, in opposition to northern Muslims, and to foster a sense that southerners were “God's people” (135). But Christianity's capacity to bind self-identified South Sudanese Christians together proved highly limited in practice once independence occurred. The fact that Christianity did not function as a social glue—that it did not lead to South Sudanese cohesion—should come as no surprise. One need only look to the centuries-long history of Sudanese Islam to see how limited a role Islam, too, has historically played in promoting solidarity among Sudanese Muslims. From reading Chosen Peoples, one can see many parallels with history-writing on Muslims in the region. For a start, the historical methodology that informs Tounsel's research is very similar to what one sees in the scholarship on Sudanese Islam. Notably, Tounsel used an extensive array of archival materials—including British colonial records and South Sudanese government documents—as well as the papers of Protestant and Catholic missions. He collected oral histories, too. He engaged in extensive and meticulous readings of newspaper articles, memoirs, and academic books and articles (as even a cursory look at his bibliography shows). While his sources are mostly in English, reflecting the dominance of English literacy in southern and now South Sudan, the kinds of sources he draws together suggest affinities with the scholarship on Sudanese Arabophone Muslim communities. Tounsel marshals his sources to present an intellectual history of southern and South Sudanese Christian thought of a kind that also recalls the historiography on Arabic Muslim thought and culture in Sudan, including the study of Sufism and Islamism. Many distinguished scholars (historians as well as anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists) have contributed to the development of Sudanese Muslim intellectual history. One could cite works by Abdullahi Gallab, Ali Salih Karrar, R.S. O'Fahey, Mark Sedgwick, W. J. Berridge, and more. Others have written in a more ethnographic mode about late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Sudanese Islamist thought and culture: here, one could name, for example, Karin Willemse and Noah Salomon. The scholarship on southern or South Sudanese Christian intellectual history, by contrast, has been less developed—a point that makes Tounsel's contribution more valuable. By focusing on Christian thought and political developments, Tounsel bridges a more missiological, church-history-centered body of scholarship on the one hand and the parallel scholarship on Sudanese Muslim political thought on the other. In sum, Chosen Peoples blends approaches from history, politics, and religious studies to explore the role of Christian rhetoric in shaping the project—the dream—of South Sudan. By showing how stories of the Bible seized imaginations and gave military leaders and thinkers a way of voicing aspirations and triumphs while addressing friends and foes, Christopher Tounsel presents a book that has a strong literary dimension. His book covers material that is often serious, sometimes downright grim, because of its connections to war. Nevertheless, Tounsel manages to convey a sense of optimism in the history he tells. The excitement that lifted him when he attended South Sudan's first anniversary events—including the commemorative service in Juba's cathedral—adds an element of hope to his narrative about the past, present, and potential future of South Sudan and its people

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