South Sudanese Intellectuals Have Fallen Short to Match the Critical Demands of Our Time (Part 1)

The learned are out of their home: The intellectual courage of our most learned South Sudanese has fallen short to match the demands of our time

By Thiik Mou Giir, Melbourne, Australia

Wednesday, June 30, 2021 (PW) — The intellectual courage of our most learned South Sudanese has fallen short to match the demands of our time.  As a result, the majority of South Sudanese learned have become the spoilers of our own African cultures and traditions. 

Alexander Pope wrote: “A little learning is a dangerous thing”. As far as our collective situation is concerned, it is fitting to say, “Too much learning of South Sudanese is a dangerous thing”. 

The more our South Sudanese learn, the more they ruin our cultures and traditions, leaving our people, those who have never been in schools, wondering, “What is wrong with these people?”

It is true, those who have never been to school are the true custodians of our cultures and traditions.  Go further back one hundred years, one thousand years, or even four thousand years, and you will find them doing the same thing – making and keeping our African cultures and traditions. 

Their purpose of doing what they did was to set us up to be civil, strong, and great people. They lived in the same Nile Valley over thousands of years, along with our other brothers and sisters, the Ancient Egyptians, who produced the first world’s civilization. 

Our ancestors were not doing anything else but setting us up to contribute to world’s civilization.  This was doomed not to happen.

The Africans taught the Europeans and the Arabs civilization and Africans have not received anything in return but scorn.  The fact that we were set up by our ancestors to become great people made us become the target of numerous attacks by other people. 

Having taught the Arabs, the Europeans, and others, they then turned around, kidnapped, raped, killed, and enslaved our people.  That done, they wiped out our history.  Then, they came to us to trick us into thinking that they were, and they are the ones who have something to teach us: good schooling and the true way to heaven. 

We believe them; the learned among us believe them, without any doubt.  White people, Arabs and many more, whom we know were, and still are, enslaving and mistreating our people in Africa as well as in diaspora today, have been the ones who had been providing education to our people.

We have great trust in the kind of education they are giving us; the learned among us believed and will continue to believe in them and ask no questions. 

However, little do the learned among us know that what would come out from such education is not purely to our own good.  They seem not to know that this kind of education has been and will continue to be a catalyst for our cultures and traditions to be wiped out. 

Furthermore, they appear not to know that this kind of education would make our people not to agree on anything.  When people disagree, especially in our tribal, social context, it leads to violence in the society and in the communities as this is now the case.  Violence will continue to be constant, no break, no peace.

If the learned are unable to create their own education, we will end up as nothing but a people who have been brainwashed and are now brainwashing our own people.  The kind of “Education” that is currently available to our people is synonymous to “brainwashing”. 

They go hand in hand until some learned, someday, begin to say, “Wait a minute!  What is this dangerous thing in the kind of education we have been receiving from other people?  We are not buying into this, and we are not buying into that, anymore.”

Until this happens, there seems to be no hope to overcome the poison that have been going into our minds for so long.

Thiik Mou Giir, Bachelor Degree in Education from the University of Alexandria, Egypt; Post Graduate Diploma, from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He can be reached via his email contact: thiik_giir@hotmail.com

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