A decade ago, I spent more months than originally desired living in the bush of Sudan’s remote and war-torn Blue Nile state with SPLA-N rebels from the Uduk tribe, whose 20,000 odd members had found themselves stranded, by an accident of British imperial cartography, within an Arab Muslim state they despised. It was a strange and formative experience for a young journalist who had only recently left graduate studies at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology — an institution whose ethos, as a result of the apostolic succession unique to the discipline, derived from the foundational texts on Sudan’s tribal culture and political order written by British Social Anthropology’s 20th century giants.
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