6 - Akut Kuei and Wartime Mobilisation

Summary

This educational work was intended to inspire action. This chapter explores what some of this work catalysed, including mobilising songs by the group Akut Kuei, whose work inspired many young men to return to fight in the SPLA, to men and women sharing war news, organising fundraising and practical help for the rebel efforts, and other (often unclear or uncertain) efforts towards resistance. Not all of this work was for the SPLA; many young men organised for southern militia groups working in Khartoum or were inspired to return to family villages to fight in local militias against predation from the Sudan government and SPLA forces alike. Others (men and women) joined the SPLA’s New Sudan Brigade, or the pan-Sudanese and pan-Africanist underground organisations of the African National Front and the National Democratic Alliance, among other small political parties and ‘spying’ work. This chapter explores people’s various aims and self-justifications alongside their accounts of this work, with a close eye on the epistemological and methodological questions of these retrospective accounts of subversion.