Diffuse educational pathways in southern sudan

These arguments are most visible in places where there was very little systemization of formal school education through the colonial period.Footnote ⁵ We focus here on southern Sudan (today South Sudan after independence in 2011). Before, during, and after the colonial conquest of Sudan by the British and their rule under an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium from the capital city of Khartoum from 1898 to 1956, people sought out a variety of forms of training and schooling, in various places, taking up a variety of skill sets and powerful knowledge for rapidly changing times.

This lack of systematized educational provision means that most histories of education of southern Sudan focus on the (under)development of missionary and then state school provision. This developmental critique rightly exposes a history of colonial and postcolonial education that has been characterized by strategic neglect and deliberate disruption. This created a piecemeal, incohesive school system marked by educational inequality and that truly aimed to create compliance and fear of authority rather than empowerment or development.Footnote ⁶ But this focus on formal educational systems means that histories of education in southern Sudan are centered either on tensions between missionary- and administrator-led schooling during colonial rule; or on the (re)construction of educational systems after repeated civil wars from the 1960s to the present.Footnote ⁷ This developmental critique is often driven by the idea that universal basic education fundamentally has a peacemaking function, and that a collective curriculum could build societal cohesion and peaceful development. This deficit model still drives most education research in South Sudan today, highlighting the impacts in terms of lack of human capital; failures in provision, curriculum development, and policy; and the personal risks teachers face.Footnote ⁸

The second main subject in education historiography in this war-torn ex-colony is the rebellious secondary school and university student, who often appears in biographical studies. Because education systems have been so narrowly constructed by colonial administrators and then closely restricted by wars, histories of modern education often end up being studies of the early student careers of today’s mostly PhD-holding, mostly military-trained statesmen. Histories of student leadership commonly are narratives charting the emergence of nationalist leaders from the formal school system, and often serve as backdrops to the array of autobiographies the leaders write themselves.Footnote ⁹ In these autobiographies, getting access to formal school education (and often, getting expelled for political organizing) is a key part of trajectories to leadership; to quote the famous aphorism of Dr. John Garang de Mabior, rebel leader of the second Sudanese civil war from 1983 to 2005, these leaders used both “the gun and the pen” to fight for liberation.Footnote ¹⁰

The gun and the pen do not have equal weight in histories of post-colonial conflict. South Sudan, like many other such nations (such as Angola, Korea, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Liberia), has a militarized political historiography that rarely engages with educational organization as not just a civic good destroyed by war but as a tool in conflict. Here we work to re-center histories of education in postcolonial conflicts to bridge this civil-military, “pen”-“gun” divide. This will help us avoid reproducing histories of only “the education of (anti-colonial) elites.”Footnote ¹¹

This article is part of a new wave of research since 2018 that has criticized developmentalist approaches to education studies in the Sudans.Footnote ¹² This has included new work exploring the inequalities created by educational access, especially from the 2000s onward, and how education access has been a tool of patronage and counterinsurgency.Footnote ¹³ Exploring the history of the idea of education in post/colonial spaces, we argue, opens new ground in emerging research on post/colonial histories of class formation, patronage, civic cultures, and political theory, taking up Andrew Epstein’s question of “what it means to be an educated person.”Footnote ¹⁴ This article therefore argues for approaching histories of colonialism and modern states through new histories of political thought and praxis, investigating how ideas of power, leadership, and modernity were theorized and propagated within education systems through and after colonization.Footnote ¹⁵

Researching educational histories beyond the institution

The missing history of education beyond the schoolroom, especially during long civil wars for the second half of the twentieth century, was the initial driver of our research partnership over 2019-2022. We aimed to tackle the above theoretical questions at the same time as uncovering what we hoped would be a treasure trove of archival and oral historical evidence. Historical education research in Africa has been dominated by established mission and state archives, which focus on classrooms and textbooks. We reviewed key mission and government archives, including the Catholic Comboni Mission in Rome and the newly established South Sudan National Archives in Juba, which we use here. We then took a two-pronged methodological approach.

First, we set out to conduct a wide range of oral historical interviews with subjects who were both teachers and students between 1956 and 2005, a period including roughly thirty-nine years of civil war. We ran three phases of consultations, working in the midst of deep crises of educational leadership and waves of university strike actions in both South Sudan and the UK, and within a timeline that ensured we maintained safe and ethical standards that depended on the provision of COVID-19 vaccine access in South Sudan. In each of these consultations, we focused on a network-led “snowball” method, tracing students and teachers who worked and studied through the civil wars, including within the militaries and internal “liberated territories.” We slowly gathered photographs, memories, stories, and songs from around a hundred South Sudanese men and women, the oldest of whom began their educational journeys in the 1940s.

Second, we sought out surviving historical education documentation by the Anya-Nya rebel forces during the first civil war, taking place circa 1955-1972, as well as similar archival stashes of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and Movement (SPLA/M) rebel group from the 1983-2005 civil war that we suspected still existed. In our interviews, we asked for copies of self-created publications and textbooks. We sought to record the military education and drills that were integrated into rebel school life in the 1990s and 2000s. Finally, in 2022, we traced surviving archives of SPLA/M educational plans and draft versions of curricula since the late 1990s—initially thought lost by their authors—at the Maridi Teacher Training Institute in Western Equatoria.

In this article, we draw on interviews with those educated under colonial Condominium rule and during the rise of the Anya-Nya rebellion. Our material allowed us to explore a wider history of education since roughly the 1850s through stories and work histories of these elderly people’s parents and grandparents, cross-referenced with the archival documents in the South Sudan National Archives and the Comboni Mission Archives in Rome. The article takes up South Sudanese debates over the nature and purpose of modern education that have been ongoing since the late nineteenth century; and it traces these conversations through the rise of anti-colonial organization in the 1940s and into the Anya-Nya guerrilla wars and refugee camps in the 1960s.

This article first turns back to the 1850s to 1910s, exploring the knowledge and skills needed to work within (and challenge) the commercial slaving and trading systems arriving over these sixty years, a period that also included three different armed invasions from the north and southeast. Then, with the establishment of British local administration under Condominium rule beginning in the late 1920s, we trace emerging layers of governmental, military, and technical education overseen by colonial and then southern Sudanese and Sudanese agents over the next forty years, through the formal independence of Sudan in 1955 and during the start of the Anya-Nya rebel insurgency in the south.Footnote ¹⁶

This approach scraps the current periodization of education history in Sudan and South Sudan. Like many postcolonial African countries, most education literature in southern Sudan has identified the arrival of mission education as the beginning of education in the south, coinciding with the creation of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium colonial government in 1898 after the British re-invasion of Sudan. In our view, this is an artificial marker of the beginning of education history in southern Sudan, as it foreshortens the precolonial era and draws a bright (and colonial) line around what is considered education. Our much wider chronological lens allows us to see the development of (complex and competing) models of useful and powerful knowledge. We start to unpack South Sudanese debates over time on the evolving idea of what education is and what it can do, both for its subject and to society: What is a qualified modern leader? What does one need to know to navigate postcolonial states and insurgency against them?

Getting educated during the violent establishment of colonial authority

Southern Sudan was subjected to the fragmented and often-violent authority of successive Ottoman, Mahdiyya, British, and northern Sudanese commercial and administrative orders over the 1830s to 1900s. During this time these authorities built a trade network and raided forts, docks, and waystations that cut into both old and new political communities in the south.Footnote ¹⁷ These sultanates, trading empires, kingdoms, and acephalous political communities cut across today’s borders; from the 1900s to the 1920s they were “pacified” in a series of military clashes and agreements with colonial forces, including the Belgian, French, and British armies, including village-burning campaigns and aerial bombardment.Footnote ¹⁸ Imperial policy in this period was to administer as little as possible, coercively recruiting porters and soldiers and training a few drivers and technicians from the population, demanding tax in labor and cattle in order to fund the creation of the police stations and road infrastructure that enabled militarized modern rule.Footnote ¹⁹ The few missionary posts that were opened—at the White Nile trading ports of Gondokoro, Kaka, and Holy Cross in the 1850s and’60s—mostly did not have schools, and the mission stations barely functioned until the mid-1920s.Footnote ²⁰ But navigating this rapidly changing political landscape required all sorts of new education and expertise.

Various forms of military, linguistic, and technical skills and knowledge were needed by African and foreign commercial and military authorities, and by their armies and private offices. Most visible throughout the 1800s is the work of translators and interpreters, trained and hired to facilitate communication between the authorities and traders of the Bari, Zande, and Shilluk and their Ottoman and British counterparts.Footnote ²¹ More broadly, specialists, who included hunters and ironworkers, medics and midwives, rainmakers and various spiritual authorities, had of course long genealogies of training and apprenticeship and worked widely.Footnote ²² Many workers, often prisoners of war, largely acquired military and diplomatic skills through on-the-job training and apprenticeship. In 1905 a “technical school” for carpentry, reading, and writing was set up in Wau. Its first forty-seven pupils were mostly Zande and “Jebelawi” (Equatorian refugees from Mahdiyya and Condominium wars farther south), and some “tokens of submission” such as Rumba, the son of Zande chief Rikita and government hostage after the famous Zande leader Yambio’s defeat.Footnote ²³ By 1911 the Catholic brother Consolaro had nicknamed this school the “princes’ college” because it had about eighteen such “tribute” sons like Rumba as students. At around the same time, Rok Rec, later the famous chief of the Aliam Toc section of the Agar Dinka, was captured at eight years old by a British patrol in a retributive village-burning campaign on the River Naam, and was traded between various armed British and Sudanese commanders, through which he obtained work as a police interpreter and then prison sergeant in Wau in the first British administration system in the 1920s.Footnote ²⁴ Similar notes on early military education are scattered through colonial paperwork; Mohammed Murgan, originally from Bari lands near Juba, had obtained literacy skills and military experience as a bulkamin (quartermaster sergeant) in British armies in the 1910s and 1920s, becoming “quite enlightened” in his wide reading; by 1955 he was a storekeeper and political agitator in Malakal.Footnote ²⁵

This is the already existing educative context for the arrival of mission school systems in the 1920s. These schools were established at the same time as the expansion of local military training: by 1925 British officers were formally recruiting military forces locally, not just hiring “irregulars.”Footnote ²⁶ In 1922 Wau’s technical school was competing against the “miserable army school,” the local bishop noting that “several pupils have deserted it to join ours.”Footnote ²⁷ Histories of Sudanese education have focused on the establishment of primary and secondary school institutions, but actually most of the schools set up were “bush” (elementary village) schools.Footnote ²⁸ These bush schools were generally co-educational and much more numerous. Politician Kosti Manibe remembers people of all ages, men and women and young children, attending bush schools, depending on their interest in literacy and their work obligations outside of school.Footnote ²⁹ Bush schools were often far from mission stations, and some offered not much more than vernacular literacy instruction: “If one passes from writing on the ground, that is when one is given a book and paper and a pencil.”Footnote ³⁰ In some bush schools, though, local histories and geographies were taught, and these schools replicated quickly.Footnote ³¹ Stanislaus Paysama, a southern Darfurian captured by slavers around 1904, was freed and settled in Wau, where he obtained literacy in a bush school and then himself taught in bush schools around Wau from 1921 to 1926.Footnote ³² While there were only about four hundred pupils in “formal” schools by 1920, there was a much wider circuit of bush schooling.Footnote ³³

The first primary schools were constructed in the 1920s within this much wider world of trade education and modern technical expertise—a world of waged interpreters, medical dressers, dockworkers and sawmill workers, truck mechanics—and much older Sudanese systems of medical education, blacksmithing, cattle herding and veterinary medicine. Students who fell out of classes at the Wau technical school went on to teach spoken English in army barracks.Footnote ³⁴ Brendan Tuttle has recently written a biographical profile of Solomon Col Adol, the first game ranger at Bor in 1941, who had an early education herding in cattle camps in eastern Bor before entering the mission school at Malek in 1926 and then teaching at the Bor bush school that opened in 1933, serving mostly families of retired soldiers and ex-slaves in the small town.Footnote ³⁵ Janet Lo Liyong’s parents received a similar education in the early 1920s: her mother, Christina Kamala, worked as a teacher after bush schooling in Yei, and her father became a medical assistant.Footnote ³⁶

This colonial wealth in military, linguistic, administrative, and mechanical knowledge created colorful careers before the real growth of British colonial administration in the 1930s. Abuol Nhial, from the Parak clan of the Dinka Athoic section, went to school in the inaugural years of the Malek and then Yoanyang missions before leaving to work as a timekeeper in the administrative office in Malakal in 1934, where he allegedly embezzled funds and headed to Khartoum. He then left Sudan via Kassala into Abyssinia, where he apparently worked for the Italians in Eritrea before enlisting with the King’s African Rifles. He was discharged in 1942, after which he volunteered as a gaffer (foreman) at Tel el Kebir in Egypt, probably in its massive wartime depots and workshops, and then joined the Royal Navy as an English, Italian, Swahili, Arabic, and Dinka grade 2 interpreter, ending up in Palestine and the Trans-Jordanian Frontier Force. According to a British security document in the South Sudan National Archives tracing Abuol’s career, he was discharged in 1948, and headed back to Bor, “where he arrived broke wearing a fashionable lounge suit on 14/5/48.”Footnote ³⁷

Getting education and defining authority in the late colonial period

Like many rural and peripheral areas of empire in Africa, colonial administration in southern Sudan was threadbare yet highly militarized until the 1930s, focused primarily on the extraction of sufficient revenues and food supplies from residents to sustain colonial control of the region. By the late 1930s, British colonial policy in southern Sudan still sharply restricted access to English-language and post-primary education. But by the early 1940s, the demand for cheap local administrative labor forced a reversal.Footnote ³⁸ From 1929 onward, attempts at increasing taxation and organizing the new authorities established to collect this taxation in the form of labor, cash, and food all needed literate imperial workers.

Histories of formal state schooling strongly focus on this period, marked by the opening of three intermediate schools that by 1933 were fed by thirty-three boys’ and eleven girls’ elementary schools, still only a total student body of around three thousand among a population of roughly two million people in the south. Classroom buildings were only erected permanently in the late 1930s (and, in Bahr el Ghazal, in the late 1940s).Footnote ³⁹ The first southern secondary school opened in Atar in 1948, eight years before Sudan won independence from British rule.Footnote ⁴⁰ Bush schools steadily grew; according to available records, there were 263 bush schools with a total of at least 7,500 students in 1932, growing to over 11,500 bush school students by 1948. From interviews we know that these schools were taught in dozens of local languages and by the schools’ own graduates, and that they reflected their teachers’ own didactic interests in literacy and local history.

It is still possible to compile oral histories of this period through interviews with elderly graduates of these bush schools in South Sudan. The narratives we collected show how engagement with these systems of formal modern education and literacy involved conversations over the purpose and possible uses of this worldly governmental education. These discussions shaped, and were shaped by, wider dynamics in southern Sudanese anti-colonial and political thought and organizing over this period. Literacy and governmental knowledge obtained through colonial employment and schooling provided the tools for an industry of petition- and letter-writing seeking to both bend and gain access to colonial administrative power. In the South Sudan National Archives’ holdings, these letters were written and circulated from the 1930s onward by court clerks, port workers, soldiers and police at army stations, and mission groundskeepers.Footnote ⁴¹

Education under early colonial rule therefore required a wide array of instruction in various technologies related to colonial governance, along with core southern Sudanese knowledge and skills. Edward Momo remembered being taken to learn from “some prominent people who were good at certain skills in the village” as “part of education,” and particularly enjoying learning from the local blacksmith.Footnote ⁴² Southern Sudan has many stories from the 1930s onward about when different communities realized the possibilities of new skills. For example, Severino Fuli’s autobiography of his life as a political activist recounts a 1934 case where a woman called Kide killed her husband in a fit of madness, after which her paternal uncle was put on trial in her place and sentenced to prison; however, when the British district commissioner came to Opari in January 1935 to review cases, one of Kide’s brothers, Sosipatro Kenyi—who was studying at Okuru Intermediate School—appealed to him specifically in English (translated to the crowd by a colonial staff interpreter). The English DC immediately acquitted the uncle. In February, school enrollment boomed; an English-language administrative education was suddenly a valuable item to get in Opari.Footnote ⁴³ It also depended what education was on offer and whether that was what parents wanted their children to know. In Catholic-run primary schools, for example, the curriculum included extensive training in digging ditches, making bricks and tiles, and cutting timber, which matched and extended domestic instruction in how to make nets, dig fields, build granaries, build hunting traps, and so on.Footnote ⁴⁴ For lazy children, the school was a useful way of drilling very similar types of practical, disciplining knowledge into them.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Yei, where colonial administrative systems had been relatively well established since the 1920s, bush schools were actively built by residents in a model similar to the self-help systems among the Luo and Kikuyu, specifically to provide the useful tool of literacy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Elsewhere, especially where colonial administration was still pursuing punitive armed campaigns into the late 1920s, this formal education was generally considered a waste of a young person’s important time; in Nuer and Dinka communities, this necessitated a quota system where each chief had to provide twelve children at the district commissioner’s order each school year.Footnote ⁴⁷

This is fertile ground for histories not just of education and anti-colonial organizing, but also of political thought. The process of navigating and choosing educational options in this increasingly wide terrain fostered a conversation about what skills (literary, administrative, religious, medical, military) might be required to master the modern future, and what new forms of authority were being created by these new skills. Ideas of how best to resist and mitigate the diverse impacts of conquest and colonialism shaped discussions about the purpose of different types of learning. The debate between the parents of our interviewee David Tombe over what form of colonial education to provide him summarizes the spiritual, secular, and military pathways to authority that opened in this period of colonialism. David wanted to pursue a job in the colonial administration or agricultural project office, but his father wanted him to go to the military college to gain the skills needed to continue the family struggle against the successor to the Ottoman and Mahdiyya regimes. David remembered:

David’s mother, however, eventually won this battle over the most useful (and safest) specialty for him, and so David went to the seminary for his education, becoming a Catholic priest.

This much wider array of educative pathways—including (where it was accessible) boys’ formal, civil schooling in English, but also regional seminaries, military schools, technical training in sawmills, at river ports, in hospitals and clinics—also arrived at the same time as other colonial buildings and institutions, not least in the form of prisons and a taxation system. For colonial administrators and some of their subjects, all of these various new colonial sites were useful primarily for discipline; in 1938 the Equatoria governor noted that “the true object of education is to enable the community to adapt its whole life in the best possible way to meet the conditions under which that life has inevitably to be lived.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Some parents therefore saw schools and prisons as roughly similar options for recalcitrant teens. In 1948 one Stephen Bilal wrote to the Equatoria governor asking for his “uneducated” son Michael to be sent to Kober Prison in Khartoum, where “boys are trained well as prisoners but after several years he can come out an artisan who can maintain himself and respect people whom are higher and older than himself.” Unfortunately for Stephen, he was told Kober was “already full and there is a long waiting list of young persons for admission,” and that he should apprentice Michael “to a strong master.”Footnote ⁵⁰ School administrative files in the archives in Juba record many teachers’ often violent punishments of students for infractions via beatings or detention; after strikes over teachers’ racism and a lack of food in 1960, several students were sentenced to multiple years’ imprisonment.Footnote ⁵¹

The rise of school protests and strikes over poor conditions and the racist maltreatment of students in the 1940s and ’50s must also be placed within wider and longer histories of civil disobedience, including strikes and tax evasion, dating back to the arrival of direct colonial administration in the 1900s.Footnote ⁵² We have reconstructed a longer timeline of strikes and protests from the South Sudan National Archives and Comboni Mission Archives, which has started to document a wider spread of strikes beyond the well-known incidents at Rumbek Senior Secondary School in 1951 and across many schools in 1960-61.Footnote ⁵³ With formal senior boys’ school education focused on gaining the skills for bookkeeping and clerking for the colonial authority, it is not surprising that these tools were tested in waves of petitions, strikes, and protests at elite schools like Rumbek. Less well documented are similar strikes at vocational and technical training centers. In 1943 ten young men from Isoke left Palotaka Teachers Training School on strike after sustained disciplinary problems and punishments that academic year—“an apparently frivolous reason,” according to their teachers.Footnote ⁵⁴ At Torit Technical School in July 1954, students organized against what they saw as the futility of their educational pathway: they “did not see any scope in the five years” of study completed at the school since they were not automatically employed by the government at the end of the course and they did not go to Khartoum for further study. On a visit conducted by the vicar apostolic, a group of students asked him “whom did the school belong to”; they petitioned the bishop to dismiss the headmaster, who had apparently been “calling them pygmies and people of the bush.” The bishop refused, after which students began a sustained strike.Footnote ⁵⁵ Schools were one of the main places where people were brought into close contact with the explicit racisms and exploitations of state authorities, and therefore where protest and resistance were articulated through the modern means of petition, appeal, complaint, and direct action.

Education systems within the anya-nya rebellion

Taking this wider view of education from the 1800s to the 1950s, therefore, highlights two main dynamics. First, it provides a holistic view of the multitude of modern civil, technical and military educational options that grew under colonial rule, and which became part of family conversations (like David Tombe’s) about children’s future careers and leadership paths in this modern world. Here we can see changing ideas about what southern Sudanese leadership and authority was needed and what skill sets it would require. Second, this wider view allows us to put schoolboy protests into context among a wide wave of resistance by a range of skilled and graduate workers in agricultural projects, the civil service, technical training sites, and the military, not least at the Nzara Agricultural Extension site in 1954 and with the mutiny of Equatoria Corps soldiers at Torit in 1955. These strikes and uprisings were repeatedly squashed by civil and military means, but they mark the beginning of southern Sudan’s slide into war.

The Sudanese officials who inherited the levers of government when Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule ended in 1956 increasingly used counterinsurgency-style military policing and collective punishment for these strikes and uprisings over the following decade, at the same time as paternalistic and often racist attempts were made to educate and (in their view) modernize southern citizens into their new nation. These processes—documented elsewhere in detail—created escalating disorder over the subsequent decade.Footnote ⁵⁶ This also created slippage between the categories of school student and rebel outlaw. In waves of school strikes across seminaries and primary and secondary schools from 1960 to 1963, students were detained for months, and strike leaders were sentenced to imprisonment for up to five years and subjected to lashings and beatings.Footnote ⁵⁷

These years are remembered—mostly in autobiographies and personal stories—as a time of crucial political education. By the early 1950s the process of Sudanization (replacing colonial with Sudanese staff, mostly from the much more extensive education systems in the north) had begun to make national racial, social, and religious hierarchies explicit and immediate. The late politician Clement Janda recalled the paternalism of new northern Sudanese teachers “saying ‘we have come to help you people’—we said go back, we don’t want your help.” Janda remembered the nationalization of Christian mission education in the late 1950s also as a process of radicalization. In December 1959 Loka school students, including Clement, returned from their vacation to find European mission teachers replaced with northern Sudanese teachers; this was swiftly followed by the Sudan military government changing the national day of rest to Friday, sparking the Sunday strikes in 1960.Footnote ⁵⁸ The switch from providing instruction in English to providing it in Arabic was seen as a further undermining of the purpose of education as a tool of power—if Kenyi of Okaru (above) had been taught in Madi or Arabic, he would not have been able to rescue his uncle from prison. Striking at schools was increasingly seen explicitly as anti-government action, and networks were built between schools; two weeks before the December 1962 exams at Nugent Intermediate School in Loka, Juba Commercial Secondary School students circulated a letter to all Loka students asking students to leave for Uganda to take up arms to liberate themselves from the northern “Arabs.” Because he was a school prefect, Janda was arrested in these 1962 strikes after around three days of organized striking, which involved a scout system for spotting teachers and students assembling in a defensive circle on the basketball court in front of the chapel to confront the headmaster and the police. On the fourth day students were loaded into trucks, ostensibly to take them home; one of Janda’s schoolmates, Jones Lukadi, remembered how the truck driver took them directly to the police station in Yei, where fifteen students were arrested and taken straight from there to the prison.Footnote ⁵⁹ Girls’ schools were also mobilizing. Agnes Lokudu recalled swearing oaths of loyalty to the rebel movement on the Bible as part of waves of strikes over 1963 and 1964. She was arrested (while head girl) for leading a strike but continued to distribute anti-government letters sent to her by southern teachers and scouts. Agnes escaped to Uganda with her fellow student Margaret Nyuon in 1964.Footnote ⁶⁰

The growing civil war thus directly involved (and broke) the limited formal educational provisions in the south by the time the war began in earnest in 1963. With missionary teachers expelled from the country in 1962, state attacks on school children and graduates escalated over 1963-1965. Formal education was seen as a weapon of insurgency, and closing schools was therefore a counterinsurgency strategy.Footnote ⁶¹ By 1963 regional armed groups started to organize under the collective name Anya-Nya, building an uprising that would only end with a peace deal in 1972. In most historical literature, formal educational institutions are understood to have either closed or been “removed” to Khartoum by 1964-1965, with most school students fleeing home or to Uganda or Congo. However, by dispensing with a false binary of informal versus formal education and an overfocus on school sites, we can see a much wider range of education that continues in this period, for both these dispersed students—whose educational journeys are only documented to date in a few autobiographies—and in bush schools within rebel-held territories. By 1973 the World Bank documented about two hundred bush schools serving twenty-five thousand children in Anya-Nya areas.Footnote ⁶²

Students are therefore not a separate category of actors or a full-time role: here, the label describes a part-time or potential role and also acts as an honorific to describe an individual’s potential for modern authority. The war forced many people not just into refugee camps but into lives on the road for the next eight years. After briefly studying at a relocated school in Khartoum, Joseph Abuk decided not to return after a school holiday at home in Juba, and instead joined an Anya-Nya camp before deciding to make a run for Uganda with four friends.Footnote ⁶³ Kosti Manibe was two years into Rumbek Senior Secondary School when it closed, and he was stuck in Lui until 1966, “totally lost in terms of what was next,” until he managed to get a lift into Uganda from Anya-Nya soldiers traveling to get medical supplies.Footnote ⁶⁴ Many graduates of bush schools, both men and women, from before and during the war, went on to both teach and rally others into action—including fighting or running supplies for the rebels. Agnes Lokudu wrote extensively about the southern political situation while at secondary school and then as a teacher in Uganda. Along with studying, mostly in Ugandan refugee schools (including at Bombo, then famous as a central refugee site for finding school places), students worked as scouts, supply runners, fundraisers, and recruiters. Some were recruited as soldiers, including through threats and abductions.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Sudan government intelligence paperwork in the Juba archives contains records tracking students crossing into southern Sudan to fight during the school holidays. The first police post to fall to the rebel army was reportedly captured by schoolboys on the Ethiopian border.Footnote ⁶⁶ Anya-Nya organizers and recruiters like David Dada, a former prison warden, Philip Yenkeji Yangazi Loro, and Simon Jada, a soldier and Torit mutineer, visited schools across Uganda. Many students also ran to Congo, and around sporadic schooling in camps, they organized supply lines into the south. While at school in Agoro in Uganda in 1969, Victor Wurda Tombe helped to provide salt and maize flour to visiting Anya-Nya fighters, taking wounded men to Kitgum hospital (“interfering with my studies”); by 1970 Victor was in Kampala for secondary school and ran medicine, supplies, and visiting foreign agents north to Arua, Kaya, and Morta, in coordination with Philip Yengkeji at Arua (Figure 1).Footnote ⁶⁷ Patrobus Sebit was in the second year of primary school in Ombasi (learning to write on the soil) when the war arrived, and after fleeing to Aba in Congo in 1964, he worked as a supply runner. “[The message leaders gave] was that there was gross injustice, and that therefore [the] people whose eyes were ‘open’ or enlightened, had to go to the bush.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Patrobus also helped to organize camp meetings where Anya-Nya politicians would give speeches and collect money and food.

Figure 1.

Wurda Tombe and General Emilio Tafeng’s secretary at Morta, 1969. Reproduced with permission from Wurda Tombe.

This is where we can begin to reconstruct the organization of the Anya-Nya territories’ bush schools. By 1966, some students who fled to Uganda and Congo were beginning to return to liberated areas to set up bush schools and teach in them. Ndole Ndoromo went to Congo in 1964 after Gulumbi elementary school was burned, but he returned to Yei in 1967 and started a school under Anya-Nya administration.Footnote ⁶⁹ The war precipitated the idea of school education for some residents: Tom Ohia Joseph, born in Bor and growing up in Lopit near Torit, “began to think about going to school” when his family cattle were stolen by the Anya-Nya. He attended Imegeje Primary School, run by Anya-Nya teachers “who had been taught during the missionaries’ time,” although “they were not so fast in teaching.”Footnote ⁷⁰ By early 1970, when Anya-Nya forces finally consolidated under Joseph Lagu’s leadership, the large rebel base at Owiny Ki Bul apparently had not just a primary school with curriculum supplies but also visiting lecturers from Makerere University in Kampala teaching management studies and administration courses.Footnote ⁷¹

Starting to reconstruct this history of education within a postcolonial civil war allows us to explore emerging ideas of what knowledge was needed for rebellion and for a post-liberation future. Interviewees reflected on what type of education people thought they needed to gain—in schools, in rebel camps, in refugee spaces—according to different aspirations: to survive and live safely, or (for some) to become leaders in the near future. Several interviewees, like David Tombe above, remember their parents expecting sons to take up arms in a long familial tradition of armed resistance to colonialism, as family leaders and good men. A combination of some education and military experience became a clear pathway to leadership and authority: Edward Momo recalled how he wanted to join the Anya-Nya because he didn’t want to be seen as a coward, and because he was “convinced beyond doubt that, if I joined the movement … we were going to become officers.” These ideas were encouraged by Anya-Nya recruiters who told Edward—at that time, a graduate of elementary school—that “we want people like you who are educated. When you go there, you’ll be promoted, you’ll be the officers. And you’ll be driving, you know, in Jeeps and so forth.” Instead, Edward’s mother and aunt gathered money to send him to Uganda to school, and Edward recalls deliberating over whether education “outside,” or experience “inside” was more important.Footnote ⁷² Talking about education gained and lost is thus a way to explore shifting ideas of what skills and knowledge are needed for new forms of authority.