Ever since power struggles within the Sudan People's Liberation Army split the movement into two warring factions in August 1991, rural Nuer and Dinka communities of the South have been grappling with a deepening regional subculture of ethnicized violence. This article describes political factors that have prolonged this bitter conflict into the present and have contributed to the post-1991 polarization and militarization of Dinka and Nuer ethnic identities. Drawing on parallel field research conducted in Dinka and Nuer regions of South Sudan during 1998 and 1999, the authors show how ordinary civilians have been struggling to understand and cope with this new “war of the [southern] educated [elite].” Among the major themes addressed are: (1) the rapid unraveling of regional codes of warfare ethics since 1991; (2) the transformation of previous patterns of interethnic competition over scarce economic resources into politicized programs of ethnicized violence; (3) mounting public despair over the seeming unwillingness of John Garang and Riek Machar to compromise their personal ambitions for the greater unity of the South; and (4) recent peace initiatives made by Dinka and Nuer chiefs, which have succeeded in reducing interethnic violence, despite the continuing intransigence of some military leaders.

In their recent review of my book, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990, Jean Davison and Kinuthia Macharia take me to task on several issues, in particular that I only included women in my study, that I blamed Kikuyu men for victimizing women in a “patriarchal” system, and that I used exclusively economic explanations, called “reductionism,” in analyzing causes of historical changes. These allegations misrepresent this work seriously in my view; moreover, the review seems to be based on partial knowledge of the book, since most of its content is not addressed. A responsible review usually begins by telling potential readers what the book does. Since this one did not, I would like to rectify matters by doing so, while addressing the allegations made. The book is a study of the evolution of the dried staples trade in the Nairobi area, a trade carried out at the retail level almost exclusively by women. It focuses particularly on beans, a women's crop, using the evolution of, and policies toward, beans in Kenya as a template for what happened to women under colonialism in particular. To avoid gender bias and set this trade in context I did a large census of seventeen Nairobi area markets covering the whole trading population (some six thousand traders) and a smaller sample of over a thousand traders, of whom one-third were men. Brief marital histories were obtained from that sample, as well as trading histories. Lastly, I had a very small sample from whom life histories were solicited; these were only staples traders and all were women, as befits a study of staples traders. All of this was supplemented by extensive archival and secondary source research.