What is Wrong with the Dinkas?
A customer ate and left without paying. The waiter behind his heels shouted ‘Sir, you have forgotten to pay.’ The customer returned and slapped the waiter in the face and continued walking off. The waiter ran to the owner of the restaurant to complain. The owner wasn’t helpful: “You know he is a Dinka, why did you ask him?”—Daniel Akech Thiong, via Lotueng Blog
By PaanLuel Wel.
A jilted young South Sudanese man in Australia is reported to have killed his ex-wife, a mother of four. A disillusioned South Sudanese man–reportedly a failed asylum seeker–is alleged to have knifed three people to death in Norway, a day before his scheduled deportation.
Well, these cases, like most reported ones in the past about our South Sudanese communities in the diaspora, are deplorable and alarming. But I think I should point something out here (though it is politically incorrect).
Most of these violent cases, if not all, are committed by the members of the Dinka community. This is something somebody somewhere should start thinking about. It is not about the stereotyped picture of the violent-prone cattle-herding Nilotic communities (Dinka, Nuer, Murle, Taposa etc) that I am alluding to; rather it is the frequency of these tragic cases.
More so, it is the unfortunate ways this mentality of resorting to violence to settle scores which, inasmuch as it might have been useful and relevant when dealing with the Arabs in the Sudan, has no place and should never have been exported to (and replicated in) settled nations—US, EU, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
What is wrong with the Dinkas?
Isn’t it a high time that the Dinka Community worldwide should stop burying their head in the sand of “South Sudanese in the Diaspora” has done this and that and start addressing the issue head-on as a DINKA PROBLEM?
And if indeed there is a way out of this (and there should be one, for they were not the sole victims of the civil war in the Sudan, others were equally affected), the community should embark on a soul-searching mission and confront the societal problem of ‘now’: violence in the name of male chauvinism.
The Dinka as a community should make a break with this tragic trend that has gone on for so long and spare the host communities/countries the pain and the terror they are subjected to and the shame it brings on the name of “South Sudan/ese”?
The environment–the culture and the setting–that produce such monsters, need a thorough tampering lest the whole Dinka community stands the risk of branding itself a ‘lawless and violent’ community wherein senseless might is mistaken for right.
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