Over the past four decades, most South Sudanese people have begun buying staple foods rather than eating self-grown grains and tubers. This is part of a wider move towards markets, closely connected to South Sudan’s first encounters with modernity in the nineteenth century, as well as the conflicts and mass displacements of the past fifty years. This move has deeply affected food systems, diminishing the availability of indigenous grains and impoverishing many people’s diets. South…
Entries by Deng Kuol
In this piece, Deng Kuol explains the significance of grains for his pastoralist Ngok Dinka community—more commonly associated with cattle—in the borderland region of Abyei. To illustrate this, Deng describes the efforts made by his mother to preserve access to a socially valued variety of sorghum—ruath—by travelling into military occupied areas of Abyei while her family was displaced outside their home areas. The story illustrates how, for the Dinka community in South Sudan, grains are…