South Sudan's Azande during colonialism, war, and displacement: an ethnography of rupture and rejuvenation

Braak, Bruno Jim (2026)

Book (monograph)

South Sudan’s Azande during colonialism, war, and displacement revisits a people long frozen in time by E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classical anthropology. Its ethnographic research draws on archival sources and hundreds of interviews with chiefs, bureaucrats, former combatants, refugees, and stayees, beginning in a hopeful, post-independence South Sudan and continuing through war and displacement to Uganda. The book traces how colonialism, wars, and mass displacement have fractured Azande society, while also laying the ground for cultural renewal, historical consciousness, and even the reinstatement of an Azande kingdom. Yet the Azande’s cultural renaissance may also bear the seeds of renewed conflict. 

• Azande
• South Sudan
• Civil war
• Displacement
• Anthropology

• All authors: Braak, Bruno Jim
• Date: 2026
• Pages: 1 - 304
• Publisher: Leiden: Leiden University Press (LUP)
• ISBN (print): 9789087284800
• ISBN (electronic): 9789400605213
• Note: This book writes conflict, confusion, and the search for continuity into the historical ethnography of the South Sudanese Zande.