“We need to fight tribalism collectively for sake of development”: Cleric in South Sudan

He emphasized, “We should be children of God and come together as one family of South Sudan.”

With at least sixty-four ethnic groups in South Sudan, tribalism is said to be one of the causes of conflict in the nine-year-old nation, which has witnessed ethnic clashes over the years.

Last year, Catholic Bishops in Sudan and South Sudan identified the “epidemic called tribalism or regionalism” as the main challenge of their sister countries and stated, “the politics of ethnicity, division and exclusion of others which often ends up in invocation of violence as a solution must come to an end.”

“Remember that a true person of God cannot discriminate people on the basis of tribe, race, gender, or religion. If anything, we Christians should be the ones to liberate our people from such virulent plague of tribalism,” the members of the Sudan Catholic Bishops' Conference (SCBC) emphasized.

On October 2, Bishop Eduardo Hiiboro Kussala of South Sudan’s Tombura-Yambio Diocese expressed his concerns about exclusive solidarity based on tribe in the East-Central African nation saying a section of the people of God is harboring “a very sharp sense of tribalism, ethnicity, negative ethnicity.”

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“We stigmatize certain ethnic communities as terrible and not good. Because individual people from certain tribes have made mistakes, we generalize and say it is the whole tribe,” Bishop Hiiboro said on the occasion of the International Day of Non-Violence marked October 2.

The South Sudanese Bishop encouraged his compatriots to “learn to appreciate all the different ethnic communities within our country,” making positive affirmations about their brothers and sisters from other tribes in their absence.