Jonglei State: The Barren Land!
5 min readBy Kur Wel Kur
I offered myself a liberty of saying many people in Jonglei State or in South Sudan know nothing about how jonglei, the name originated or what it(Jonglei) means! Apart from natives and foreigners misspelling or mispronouncing it, the name that rhymes with jungle stops many from considering its meaning and origin.
Though many can claim to know both its meaning and origin because of opinionated explanations they received from their parents, elders or teachers, it would do me no good if I cannot share one of the meanings. A meaning that’s coated with our tradition(sacreleging and adoring objects).
In an occasion, a senior member of my payam___payam is the second lowest of local government in South Sudan___ in Adelaide, stood in front of a community gathering. He started his remarks in his usual manner, peace in his soft voice. “(people of Jonglei), we’re strong and industrious, we can build a better and brighter State or a nation as a whole if we eliminate VIOLENCE!” He made his remarks in Octomber, 2010. I enjoyed his speech not how soothing his words sounded, but how he explained the name of our State, JONGLEI.
Jonglei is a partnership of two Dinka words, Jong and Lei; jong means an idol____in regards to idolatry____ and lei means foreign. He lectured the meaning to the attendees and asserted that workers of either Chevron(American oil company) or TOTAL (Franc_Belgium oil company)erected metallic poles in Dhiam-Dhiam (Ziam-Ziam) a Dinka’s area, so the locals named them Jonglei, foregn idol(god) because they(locals) understood not why they planted the poles and what the poles stood for! “Maybe their(Whites) god or something!” the locals pondered!
The name became to represent other things including the State, things like the cargo ship, which sailed from Khartoum___another Dinka’s words that became the name of North Sudan’s capital___through Mading (Bortown, the Jonglei’s capital) to Juba. The ship dropped sacks of ‘dura'(sorghum) in Bor town.
These, the meaning and origin of Jonglei. They could be other opinionated meanings like the rests or they could be the truely meaning and origin of our beloved State.
However, I allocated a small portion of this article to explaining the meaning and origin of our State name and the rest of the article in lumps must explain why the mighty Jonglei State is BARREN!
Geographically, Greater Upper Nile region bore Jonglei State so big portion of South Sudan’s economic blessing(untapped oil reserves) streams under Jonglei land, the endemic wildlife dotted our State and the agricultural lands patched Jonglei so technically Jonglei (suppose to) hands feed the whole nation if the violence ceases. And nothing BARREN in This!
However, the mother of tribes diversity { (6 tribes: Anyuak,Dinka, Jie,Murle and Nuer) with (11 counties: Akobo, Ayod, Bor, Duk, Fangak,Nyirol Pibor, Pigi, Pochalla, Twic East and Uror) }, gave herself to horrors of war, horrors such as death, poverty, famine and exodus of her children. So the agricultural lands become weeds farms and wildfires blaze our loam (soil) as it (fire) wishes.
Consequences of war
Death empties the land especially when the mortality rates exceed birth rates by thousand miles. No accurrate deaths recorded, but the deaths in the recent conflict must be in six digits number! Nevertheless, The UN documented the numbers, in exodus, people affected by war through famine(food shortages and poverty) and diseases.
The exodus:
” more than one million have been forced from their homes by ongoing conflict in South Sudan,” the UN says.
The conflict internally displaced 803,200 people and some 254,000 people raced in horrors into neighbouring countries, as per UN report on the 29th of March, 2014. Jonglei owns a big chunk of this statistics.
In addition, famine(food security), UN estimated 4.9 million people as in need of humanitarian assistance and out of this number, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs(OCHA) reported that 3.7 million people are in high risk, as per its report of March,2014. The latest is BBC report which used UN’s terms, BBC on the 25th of July,2014, reported the crisis as “catastrophic food insecurity” and UNICEF noted that 4 million could be affected in which 50,000 are children.
I consider Jonglei as barren land in the above senses; however, my heart bleeds in shock for learning that when the conflict peaked high in Greater Upper Nile Region(GUNR), and students with their teachers switched off the luxurious buttons of schooling and concentrated all their energies on how to revive and survive, students in Greater Barh el Ghazal and Greater Equatoria Regions, prepared and sat for their respective examinations. The school children from the conflict torn areas swamped around schools in those safe regions but no national arrangements for them! Call it sad or shame, all the same.
Untill, the politicians understand the voters’ lives, their politics will continue to kill.
In conclusion, the already conflict in Jonglei State with the status quo conflict that erupted in Juba, made Jonglei barren____that number of internally displaced people from Jonglei gave Jonglei the adjective(barren), that number of refugees in neighbouring countries from Jonglei made Jonglei barren, that unknown number of fallen Jonglei habitants branded her(Jonglei) with barren, that increasing number of children from Jonglei, vulnerable to diseases and malnutrition, covered Jonglei with barren____ and the list goes…
N/B: Khartoum is ‘portmanteau'(compound name) of two dinka words, Kiir(mispelled as khar), which means Niles; and Tuom means meet! The White Nile and Blue Nile meet in this place(capital) so the dinka called it Kiirtoum.Due to mispronouncing and misspelling with the desire to change names and historical facts of places, Arabs pronounced and spelled it as KHARTOUM!
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