Ethnic Violence as Politics—December 2013 Massacre

One of the ironies of postcolonial violence is that former colonial subjects often turn upon their own fellow citizens, after obtaining independence and sovereignty, to perpetrate brutal acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide as a way of seizing and monopolizing government power, rejecting diversity, and silencing dissent. The eruption of ethnic violence in South Sudan after independence exemplifies this irony of history. These acts of postcolonial violence are rooted in an alien discourse and logic of “modernity” imposed by successive British and “Arab” colonial regimes of truth. As a result, the peoples of South Sudan today find themselves imprisoned in a condition of “double consciousness” similar to other peoples of African descent in the West and under European colonial rule as described by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon.