Journalism without signature: News and rumor from South Sudan

The argument

I describe the journalism I discuss here as journalism without signature. This term builds from Das’s (2006) conception of words without signature to capture the social life of everyday stories shared in secrecy or what seems to emanate from a crowd, which I interpret here as the community of writers dispersed throughout the Nile Valley in a post-war context. This term captures the spectrum of experience and forms of communication through which my interlocutors engaged with and exchanged information while using pseudonyms and anonymity in their deterritorialized practice of national representation. The cross-border geography obscured signature as their voices became detached from an individual agent to index a broader critical perspective towards post-independence governance. The authority of the news they shared emanated from their shared perspectives and the mission of the media agency rather than from the author. As this practice is the product of anxieties about government surveillance, it is more than anonymous reporting but an intentional way to both protect and amplify the unnamed voice of the author. Journalism without signature generates a transnational geography of concern that has transformed what an earlier generation of South Sudanese journalists called liberation journalism. ¹ By contrast, Journalism without Signature is not associated with the authority of particular figures and their experiences of oppression in Sudan but rather with the South Sudanese writers who returned to South Sudan to participate in the nation-building project only to have their voices suppressed by the newly independent government even as they empathized with the challenges that that government faced.

Historians of media and newspapers in West Africa, Newell (2013) and Hasty (2005), have demonstrated how colonial west African newspapers played a crucial role in forming a domain of critique and complaint within which authors could position themselves in relation to intersections of power and knowledge. Since mass-mediated public discourse was an import, participation in it was a strategic decision on the part of educated Ghanaians to circumvent ‘traditional political authority’ and to craft ‘a new social identity as African elites’ who could position themselves discursively in proximity to colonial officials, and thereby more readily inherit authority over the state after independence (Hasty, 2005). Newell has shown how using pseudonyms, generic names, initials and anonymity enabled African writers to resist colonial constructions of African identity by concealing their identity from influential community figures of traditional authority and from the colonial state which had shaped the classificatory logic in which ethnic identity was conflated with political perspective. Their creative anonymity became the conduit to express political perspectives, interests, and affiliations that rebuffed the expectations attached to the ethnic community embedded in their names.

In the immediate postcolonial context, newspapers were meant to foster unity and loyalty to a common cause by publicizing progressive activities and optimistic pronouncements. Criticism, by contrast, ‘was considered regressive, divisive, and neocolonial’ (Hasty, 2005: 34). Although not focused on the strategic use of anonymity, Hasty reminds us that Ghanaian journalists navigated this complex terrain of postcolonial criticism by both ‘disguising their prescribed identities in the course of investigations’ but also ‘re-inscribing their politics in the fashioning of oppositional exposés’ (p. 122). Journalism without signature is not an exclusively contemporary phenomenon but is rooted in these colonial and immediately postcolonial journalistic strategies. However, in the period that has followed independence, the dynamic between the hegemonic aspirations of the national elites and the independent press engendered new strategies of how one might express disappointment with the morally and politically impregnable project of post-independence national unity.

The anthropology of news and journalism has focused on the fundamental role of newspapers in cultural meaning-making and about what news means and does across multiple cultural contexts (Bird, 2009). Ethnographic attention to the project of media consumption has provided insight into the role of mass media in broader nation-building projects, and in the formation of ideas about gender and family that produce and reproduce national communities (Abu-Lughod and Carter, 2004).

Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) has drawn attention to how anthropology is methodologically drawn to what she calls ‘newsroom-centricity’, or what Boyer (2013: 2) calls the ‘office-based screen worker’ in the search for its easily observable and containerized cultural formations. Through this lens, the primary site of news production is the professional newsroom forged alongside the practice and ‘idea of professional culture with distinct work practices’. In order to make legible the practice of African newsmakers writing amidst crisis and the threat of crisis, one also has to account for the informal channels of information exchange in which conjecture about the relationships between political elites is not simply rumor but the substance of geopolitical speculation and analysis in which one may position oneself as a compelling and consequential voice in outsized diplomatic processes that feel both beyond one’s control and directly impactful on one’s day-to-day life. Wahl-Jorgensen (2013) insists that we must come to terms with the flexible realities of contemporary news production as it takes place in digital space, is largely decentralized and reliant on transient labor ties to multiple locations.

One useful anthropological frame to make sense of these informal routes of information exchange is what Peterson (2009) has called ‘phantom epistemologies’, or ways of understanding and analysis that may exceed empirical verification. Phantom epistemologies nevertheless capture certain ‘sociopolitical truths’ built from ‘anecdotal data . . . that may not satisfy the demands of empirical social science’ (p. 39). With this framework, utterances of geopolitical speculation (whether verifiable or not) become indices of how people make sense of their broader national and transnational circumstances, which are so deeply circumscribed by the heroes of liberation struggles and of postcolonial African independence whose egalitarian political projects seem to place them beyond reproach.

Rao (2010: 2) defined journalists ethnographically as ‘professionals dealing in information’, which is useful for understanding how people with or without formal training may be engaged in journalistic practice. Pedelty (2020[1995]) found that, while reporters of war stories are not simply the ‘mythical watchdogs’ they imagine themselves to be, they nevertheless play a ‘relatively small role in the creative process of discovery, analysis and representation’ of news-making, and are instead ‘conduits’ for the ‘institutions, authoritative sources, practices, and ideologies’ that precede them, and come to frame how we make sense of the issues that become the stuff of news. Rao’s (2010) study of journalism in India frames its attention to news-making in the contemporary neoliberal environment where commercialization, powerful corporate interests and the desire to create fame and a sense of importance have centered money-making, rather than political propaganda, to guide postcolonial news-making. Commercialization, she argues, has also increased the latitude of political reporting and rendered newspapers ‘independent of political financing’ (p. 6). Through her attention to the expansion of the vernacular press, Rao was also thinking about the strategies of the news-making figures who represented the national contexts in which they are implicated, such individuals both ‘take advantage of and feed’ the localization of newspapers and politics. Bishara’s (2013) study of how Palestinian journalists contribute to the production of US news on Palestine is able to clarify how reporters in such contexts remained invested in politics, despite the broader neoliberal milieu in which they operate. What is noteworthy is that journalists in contexts like Palestine and, in this case, South Sudan, must navigate a constellation in which governance liberation, resistance and sovereignty intertwine with narratives about those political formations. Such journalists, Bishara would argue, are less likely to represent political and diplomatic issues as a ‘reified body of knowledge set apart from their lives’ (p. 7). This study of South Sudanese journalists is therefore a contribution to how writers balance the multiple dimensions of postcolonial news-making: vigilance towards governmental accountability, experiences of displacement, suppression and detention, as well as sympathy for the target of one’s expository polemical writing.

Paying ethnographic attention to the strategies of the African newsmakers who represent their own contexts complicates the analysis of the spectator–sufferer relationship by collapsing the distance between event and representation. When one focuses on the repertoire of knowledge and strategies deployed by African journalists themselves, it becomes incumbent to ask how the dynamics of compassion and witnessing from visiting Western journalists representing distant places for Western audiences (Hoskins and O’Loughlin, 2010) are transformed when media representation is itself embedded in postwar trauma and the threat of more violence.

Background and methodology

As the second Sudanese civil war came to a close in the early 2000s, Sudan had an exceptionally restrictive media ecosystem that had been the most free under civilian leadership rather than any of the successive military regimes. The print media served as a platform for political parties and, under the government of Omar al-Bashir, had led the Revolutionary Command Council to dismiss journalists and ban their publications, reducing their number from the former total of 55 daily or weekly newspapers and magazines. ² Al-Bashir’s (2003) announcement of the formation of the National Press Council (NPC) in 2003 signaled an effort to relieve media surveillance and censorship. This was followed by the formation of the Interim National Constitution, which provided for freedom of expression, dissemination of information, and unprejudiced access to the press.

In the years that immediately followed the independence of South Sudan from Sudan in 2011, the domestic media landscape was rife with repression. The new government was particularly sensitive to criticism as another civil war erupted in 2013, just two years after independence. The descent into violence brought the monitoring of the global North and myriad sanctions regimes and arms embargoes from the US, the EU, and the UN. In 2014, Amnesty International and HRW (Human Rights Watch) published a report that claimed that South Sudanese journalists had become targets for detainment, harassment, and intimidation by domestic security forces. In 2020, HRW published yet another report, What Crime Was I Paying For? This document highlighted the multiple forms of intimidation perpetrated by South Sudan’s National Security Service (NSS) to suppress and silence South Sudanese journalists throughout the region. What was new in 2020, therefore, were the transnational proportions of this surveillance apparatus that had monitored the activity of journalists who had fled to neighboring Kenya and Uganda.

The ethnographic data that informs this article was collected during successive trips to Juba, Nairobi, and Khartoum from 2013–2020 through semi-structured and life history interviews with South Sudanese journalists throughout the region from a range of the largest South Sudanese ethnic communities – Dinka, Nuer, Shilluk, and Equatorian groups. ³ The ethnographic data was drawn from representative examples of how South Sudanese writers are producing and exchanging news, and the unpublished geopolitical conjecture that exists alongside it. Long-term engagement with the writers whom I interviewed enabled me to observe their border-crossing routes as writers traveled back and forth from Khartoum, Juba, Nairobi, and Kampala as they responded to pressures of displacement and the transnational family lives created as a result. Aside from well-known figures such as those whom I have mentioned above, I have intentionally obscured all names and exact locations in this article. Reading and discussing the news with my interlocutors was a significant element of our conversations. Engaging with my interlocutors ‘as co-constructors of knowledge’ was an intentional practice (Wamunyu and Wahutu 2019). We discussed their articles and those written by their colleagues. When we shared physical newspapers, they tended to circulate in informal settings beyond the hands of their original buyer through the collective hands of everyone sitting with that person as they read. As the newspaper moved, knowledge derived from personal relationships, past experiences, rumor and speculation from the crowd, embellished news stories that we read together.

I focus on two exclusively online sources, Radio Tamazuj and Wajuma News. These two outlets are representative of the national and supra-national news coverage of South Sudan written by local journalists in South Sudan, Kenya, and Uganda. While radio is statistically the most widespread source of news, news radio has also tended to be an amalgam of state-run programming sponsored by the international aid industry, such as Voice of America or Eye Radio.

Radio Tamazuj (RT) is an online news source that has eschewed signature as a key dimension of journalistic practice. There are no names of the editorial staff, nor is there a listed location or contact information for their offices. The name, Tamazūj, is an Arabic word for intermingling that points to the organization’s catalyzing mission: to attend to the hybridity of its original area of focus, the communities along the new border between Sudan and South Sudan. Radio Tamazuj represents a concerted effort to deploy anonymity as a strategy as they write about issues and events in a context shaped by the difficulty of formulating a critical stance towards a government at the dawn of its political independence. Like Tamazūj, the name Wajuma also carried an intentional message about the geographical scope of its news coverage as both regional and national. Wajuma was not a word but an acronym, constituted by the first two letters from the three major cities in South Sudan; Wau, Juba, and Malakal.

I link these more normative types of media sources to the geopolitical conjecture that was shared with me in conversation with journalists. As I interviewed South Sudanese writers throughout East Africa, the thread that continually emerged was attention to what they argued was an unequal relationship between two regional Heads of State, President Salva Kiir of South Sudan and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. I became interested in why this relationship was so important for so many across the region and, as it continued to emerge, it became clearer how this conjecture, while lacking empirical evidence, nevertheless drew on real and imaginative geopolitical and personal histories between these two political leaders.

Journalism and its Other

Amahl Bishara’s (2013) ethnography of Palestinian journalists during the second Intifada and its aftermath analyzed practices of news-making ‘in circumstances shaped by geopolitical hierarchies and outright military conflict’. By centering the epistemic labor of journalists implicated in the conflict they were covering, Bishara’s work has encouraged a ‘reexamination of objectivity and distance as key values’ in the production of news (p. 3). Bishara focused on the social domain that surrounds news production and the embodied experience that evading violence engenders. She coined a number of terms, which help us understand how Palestinian journalists have been positioned as epistemic others, unfit for objective report, or, how one might study the news in relief, by accounting for the social world that surrounds news production but is nevertheless left out of published stories, as well as the skills of proximity engendered by the knowledge journalists gain as they evade violence and the threat of violence.

As I spoke with South Sudanese writers in Sudan, South Sudan, and Kenya, one particular geopolitical speculation seemed to always come to the fore – stories and opinions about the relationship between Presidents Salva Kiir of South Sudan and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. In conversations with journalists, in literature written by South Sudanese thinkers, and in the diplomatic memoir of the end of the second Sudanese civil war, there seemed to be a collective concern with the significance of the relationship in which Museveni leads and Salva Kiir follows. I came to wonder why South Sudanese thinkers were so concerned with Museveni and the role of the Ugandan government and its military in its national politics? This ubiquity rendered stories about the two presidents as elements of the news in relief, the photographic negative of the knowledge and speculation that does not appear in published journalism. As South Sudan seems again on the brink of civil war in 2025, Yoweri Museveni and the Ugandan army have again appeared at the center stage of the geopolitical arena. While an actual hierarchy may or may not exist, this was nevertheless an epistemologically significant dynamic that pointed to a characteristic of post-independence circumstances. What was at stake was not simply gossip about two heads of state but how journalists were expressing their concern over how South Sudan had not effectively won its political autonomy upon secession but had simply traded its position of subservience to one dominant government in Sudan, for another, in Uganda.

The substance of journalism without signature

One of the most surprising findings from Wahutu’s (2018) analysis of coverage of the Darfur conflict in African media fields was that the ethnic conflict frame, so often cited as the product of an uninformed and lazy Western journalistic practice, was also prevalent throughout African media. In addition to crime, civil war, and genocide, the use of the ethnic conflict frame, Wahutu argued ‘was seen as a necessary tool in creating and highlighting a shared kinship between the journalists, their audience and victims’ of the violence (p. 57). The ethnic conflict frame was, therefore, a way ‘to domesticate the news’ with helpful ways for news-consumers to understand the protagonists and belligerents of military conflict (p. 59). I suggest that, in this case, the rumor about these two heads of state was another method of domesticating the news wherein a shared frame of concern might emerge when the journalists are not writing about distant conflict elsewhere but attempting to make sense of geopolitical antagonisms at home.

This rumor demonstrates more about feelings of frustration with cross-border cooperation, trade relationships, and diplomacy with Uganda, than of any empirically verifiable evidence of conspiracy. In an interview about regional geopolitics in Nairobi, South Sudanese political leader and former journalist Peter Adwok Nyaba insisted to me that ‘Yoweri Museveni is the real president of South Sudan’. In his writing on the political crises facing South Sudan, Nyaba has described Museveni as a ‘regional super president auxiliary to Kiir’ (Nyaba, 2019: 174). Nyaba’s assertion extended Museveni’s influence beyond South Sudan to a broader regional lens, which was critical of Museveni’s transnational aspirations. While many believe that Museveni may have played a role in the death of Dr John Garang, an additional feature of this rumor is that the devastating helicopter crash was one piece of a broader effort not only to relieve South Sudan of its visionary leader but also, with Dr John Garang out of the way, the rumor contends, Museveni could diplomatically outmaneuver any other president of the region. In Khartoum, a Comboni College professor from South Sudan insisted that ‘Kiir cannot take any step without Museven’i.’ To emphasize his point, he posed a rhetorical question-and-answer statement, ‘people used to say: who is ruling South Sudan? Museveni!’ This South Sudanese professor who was employed in Sudan, like Peter Nyaba, asserted their interpretation of this relationship as grounded in the facts of public discourse, he insisted their uneven relationship was a matter of public discourse, ‘even he (Kiir) said this in one of his speeches. Uganda is everything.’. Irrespective of the content or context of this speech, it evidenced for James, Kiir’s extra-territorial commitments that strengthened a geopolitically toxic relationship.

Another interlocutor in Khartoum worked in local NGOs, and occasionally wrote freelance articles on digital news platforms. She reflected on South Sudan’s past and present to explain that:

our problem was never just Omar al-Bashir (the former president of Sudan), from the beginning there were lies and mistakes . . . The worst thing is the influence of Uganda. We bring milk, fish, and mango from Uganda. Our kids go to Uganda to learn, and yet look at that bad English! The [Ugandan] shilling was below the SSP (South Sudanese Pound), now it is above. Uganda can’t leave South Sudan in peace.

Her comments represented how a range of thinkers understood Museveni’s influence as an impediment to the cultivation of South Sudan’s political and economic autonomy so that it might decrease its reliance on, for example, importing Ugandan foodstuffs, labor, or its education system. Specifically, her reference to poor Ugandan English indexed her frustration with the alleged but undelivered benefits of South Sudan’s relationship with Uganda, in particular, and East Africa generally. On one level, the frustrations were a form of news content in which, by virtue of these informal and speculative declarations, writers might resolve what they experienced and analyzed as the perpetual unevenness that characterized South Sudan’s transnational relationships.

The knowledge of political history and contemporary geopolitics required to manufacture and reproduce this narrative demonstrates the dynamics of the news in relief, or the phantom epistemologies that are the invisible backdrop to the published news. These unverifiable speculations were not an inert dimension of news-making but an active skill of proximity in which writers investigated the root causes of geopolitical hierarchies, analyzed the diplomatic events and issues that characterized their circumstances of post-independence sovereignty, and expressed their dissatisfaction with the political decision making of governmental leaders who once came to power as revolutionaries.

Denying one’s signature

Journalism without signature is distinct from publishing news stories without bylines because it is an intentional practice that accounts for individual safety and how one navigates one’s own ethnic identity in a political context where ethnicity is highly politicized and at the heart of the circumstances about which one is reporting. An award-winning investigative journalist from South Sudan had written and recorded documentaries on some of the most sensitive and politicized issues facing the new country, including mass sexual atrocities committed by SPLM/A soldiers against women and girls, and widespread famine and thirst caused by climate disaster. She is a well-known and visible journalist who, when I interviewed her, acknowledged that her ‘country is a bit fragile regarding media reports’ there are ‘some red zones, no-go zones’, that may trigger immediate scrutiny by the media authority. She counted herself ‘lucky to have had a chance to go to those zones, covering the floods’ in ‘the northern part of my country’, which had led to widespread famine. The trade-off, however, was that ‘of course, once we go to the no-go zones, we’ll be considered as an opposition.’ This sensitivity to media reporting did not deter her from covering the issues she felt to be the most pressing. ‘Whatever sensitive story’ she encounters, committed to the reproduction of crisis, she will ‘write against the interests’. As if speaking back to the security officials who may scrutinize her reports, she emphasized that ‘as long as it’s accurate, balanced, you have nothing on me.’ She explained to me, as if addressing her real and imagined interrogators, ‘I’ll keep moving ahead.’

When I asked how she navigated this fragile media domain, she responded, ‘I’m a tomboy.’ At first, I took this position as a counterexample to the writers who may be more reticent about inserting their subjective selves into their work, leary of how their ethnicity, gender, or geographic belonging might affect how they appear on the political spectrum. For this journalist, being a so-called tomboy indexed a position of confident vigilance that was an homage to a mentor of hers when she joined a radio station first in Wau in Western Bahr el-Ghazal and then moved to Juba. Despite her confidence, self-identity nevertheless presented challenges. She was someone whose name preceded her as a well-known journalist in her own right, and whose father was also within a trusted circle with the national president. The significance of her family name had intensified her sense of being scrutinized because ‘people start discriminating. They prefer journalists from this ethnic group or that one, even journalists themselves they also start categorizing.’ These journalists might say, ‘ if you’re from this region. Okay, you’re for us. But, if you’re from that region, no, we don’t like those people.’ These mundane forms of prejudice began to affect her working conditions when her boss denied her annual leave. First, they interpreted what she called being a tomboy as ‘becoming too strong-headed because you’re getting a lot of awards.’ And when that explanation did not hold, ‘then they started saying it was because my Dad is Nilote that I am Nilote and behave arrogantly like someone who is Dinka.’ These ethnicity-coded presumptions led to her ‘having more insecurity of being next to people. So I began to be careful about who I was going to be around. Sometimes when I go, I deny myself even, that I’m not [me] but a lady who looks like me.’ She did not experience the imperative to conceal her identity evenly throughout her reporting ventures. This sense of anxiety was particularly acute within Juba, but ‘outside of Juba, it’s normal. I find myself more.’ She recounted feeling like she was constantly evading obstacles that someone had put in the way of her reporting, whether attempted character defamation or ‘the security or whatever, they try to trap me’. To avoid scrutiny, she had devised a pseudonym, ‘I just say Grace because Grace is a Latin name, Grace, her name is Grace John, I use a surname of a family and they don’t seem to get it very often.’

For her, journalism without signature was a strategic choice. Rather than leaning into the privilege and protection that may be afforded to her because of her family name and her father’s ethnic group, whenever someone ‘approached [her], [she was] suspicious of that person’. Whether real or imagined, what followed her was a sense of her political affiliations and interests being associated with her ethnicity and that feeling was particularly acute in Juba. Perhaps one day, ‘this one will come and flirt.’ On another occasion, ‘one will come on Thursday, another will follow me here and there.’ Whenever someone ‘approaches you, then that tells you OK, I should deny myself.’ As Newell demonstrated in the colonial context, anonymity was a strategy to find a way around colonial knowledge and authority that linked ethnicity to one’s inclusion in the political domain. In South Sudan today, the use of pseudonyms and experiments with anonymity has continued to be a strategy to confuse and militate against the over-simplifying and intolerant gaze of the postcolonial state. The ethnographic examples I offer here reveal how both the use of pseudonyms and anonymity can become a strategy to navigate reporting on an event in which one’s own identity is politicized. It also highlights how journalism without signature can loosen one’s attachments to particular performances of gender in addition to ethnicity and territory.

The structure of the news in relief

Aside from individual choice, the structure of access to information and the government’s response to critical journalism has also shaped the media field in South Sudan. The Radio Tamazuj website emerged in the immediate aftermath of South Sudan’s secession, and has operated since 2012. It has since expanded its reach beyond the borderlands, focusing on South Sudan while paying attention to the broader region. According to one of its writers, the mission of Radio Tamazuj prioritized ‘South Sudanese interests, so we go wherever South Sudanese go.’ Its programming offers news articles in both English and the Arabic language as well as a daily Arabic language podcast that offers multiple registers of Arabic to be legible to those members of the South Sudanese audience who may not be fluent in the formal registers of mass media Arabic. While they rejected individual signature, its broadcasts in what they referred to as simplified Arabic were nevertheless features of their skills of proximity in which they remained invested in the broader project of nation-building and the proliferation of a mass media lingua franca.

In Juba in 2017, I was reading articles on the Radio Tamazuj website at the Juba University internet cafe. Suddenly, an error message appeared. I presumed this was an issue with the internet connection. As I looked around at the screens of my fellow cafe-goers, no one else had experienced any interruption. It appeared that only the website for Radio Tamazuj had failed to load. I would later learn that the Ministry of Information had blocked national internet access to Radio Tamazuj. Minister of Information Michael Makuei claimed that this decision was in retaliation to how the site’s reporters had disseminated information that the Ministry considered hostile to the government. If they are in conflict with us, he argued, ‘then we have the authority to close them.’ ⁴ Here, the minister’s decision to ‘close’ the site indexed the antagonistic relationship between the website and the government. What was, for them, fair reporting in the name of government accountability was slanderous to the government of South Sudan and the challenges it faced as it struggled to both end its post-independence civil war and maintain the essential function of government.

Over the course of South Sudan’s 2013–2018 civil war, government censorship had compelled writers for Radio Tamazuj to leave South Sudan and operate clandestinely, within East Africa, beyond the state’s territorial borders. Radio Tamazuj was necessarily in conflict with the state but playing the role of a critical and vigilant journalist who was committed to government accountability. Its cross-border focus and its response to censorship were responses to a structure of journalistic suppression engendered by a government sensitive to criticism as it tried to carry out its basic functions amidst ongoing war and global scrutiny. The picture that emerged from my interviews with Radio Tamazuj writers was of a cross-border network of writers whose experiences had collapsed the distance between sufferer and reporter. The problem of government accountability was therefore not an element in a reified body of knowledge distant from their lives, but they had become proximate to the very forms of suppression on which they reported.

It was in a neighboring country that I eventually connected with a journalist who identified himself as one of the founding writers for Radio Tamazuj. At first, he was only comfortable meeting in second-story cafes in semi-concealed corners where he would see who was entering and exiting without being seen himself. For him, an attack on one of their writers had heightened their security concerns. As such, he could neither tell me their office location nor how many staff members they employed. If I wanted to go deeper into their operations, I would have to go through the Holland-based Free Press Unlimited (FPU), an organization committed to the protection of journalists globally.

As Radio Tamazuj publishes without identifying information, his knowledge of the publication’s activity and the geopolitical events it covered conferred a journalistic authority. At the time, he was studying towards a graduate degree in International Relations and his career as a journalist was a means for him to put his skills to work even before entering the job market. The pressure and fear that accompanied the imperative to stay hidden from the government were the acceptable, although difficult, conditions from which they published stories that he insisted had had a positive effect. ‘There were some South Sudanese caught in Libya, so they wrote a story that prompted the government to send a delegation to investigate what was going on there.’ He was at once an unforgiving critic of the government and deeply invested in a journalistic practice that could transform it. As a graduate student, he was a resource-poor intellectual, who Rao (2010) might argue, was leveraging his media network and journalistic skill to arrange a professional life for himself. His emplacement in the neoliberal world order, however, did not belie his distrust of South Sudanese political elites throughout the region. The overbearing influence of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni on transnational regional geopolitics was, of course, a major dimension of this vigilant stance. Rather than focus on the lack of infrastructure and social services, which may lead to widespread unrest, he explained, the war the government of South Sudan continued to wage against itself distracted and disempowered the masses. It was their responsibility as journalists to clarify how the geopolitical relationships that had taken shape after independence were elite decisions that lacked popular consent rather than being derived from the will of the everyday citizen.

The journalist without signature

Radio Tamazuj covered the story of a South Sudanese writer who had written a story that had elicited a response from the National Security Service, the government’s security organ that notoriously detains its critics without cause or due process. This writer had been arrested, detained, and tortured in prison in Juba after he had written an article in Arabic, which was critical of the government’s relationship with the branch of the SPLM/A in the Nuba Mountains, the SPLM-N (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North). He argued that the government of South Sudan ought to focus on meeting the needs of its new citizens rather than continuing to support its allies who had remained in Sudan after the South’s secession. He insisted that the SPLM should shift its focus towards its constituents rather than towards those who continued the struggle against the Sudanese government from the Nuba mountains and Blue Nile. He had grown up in Khartoum and, like many South Sudanese living in the city, traveled to Juba for the first time after its independence. Once he was released from detention in Juba, a New York-based human rights group, Non-Violence International, had assisted him out of Juba into Uganda and then finally back to Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan.

In 2011, he returned to Juba, hoping to put the surveillance skills he had learned in military college to use as his contribution to building the new nation. The civil war in South Sudan and his experience of journalistic expression had forced him out as a refugee once again. As I accompanied him on his day-to-day movements throughout the city, it became clear how the evasion of surveillance and commitment to a critical-vigilant position vis-a-vis one’s government can lead one to write, edit, and produce news while walking city streets and carrying out everyday life activities. As anthropologists of news-making have insisted, the centralized newsroom was not the exclusive location where large-scale geopolitical events and issues could become the object of analysis and criticism.

As an alumnus of the military college in Khartoum, he had not always identified as a journalist committed to holding his government accountable. It was his detention and torture, he reflected, that compelled him ‘to think twice’ about his role in the violence that the state carried out. As an alumnus of the military college in Khartoum, he had not always identified as a journalist committed to holding his government accountable. The article that had turned him into a target demanded that, rather than continue to act as if it was the armed rebellion it once was, the national government ought to redefine sovereignty responsibility through the frame outlined by Frances Deng rather than as a perpetual liberation war. While he was a critic of the governments in both Sudans, articles critical of the new government in the South written in Arabic tended to garner more attention because of the breadth of the audience they reach and because their stories are able to traverse the new national border. While English has become the language of South Sudan’s new political elite, the population literate in academic Arabic resident in South Sudan are still associated with the political–cultural antagonisms of the civil wars that led to the partition of the former Sudan. The popular term for these Arabic-speaking and Khartoum-based critics of the past was Khartoumers. He publishes his stories without identifying information about himself, his network of writers, or the multiple locations from which they put stories together.

While his political detention forged his new perspective, it had matured during his time in Uganda as a budding journalist. When he reflected on his life in Kampala, particularly his relationship with the Ugandan state and its police, he showed me an identification card with his press credentials of an affiliation with a Ugandan magazine, The Worker’s Eye. He showed me the card as he relayed a story from his time in Kampala. One evening, police had stopped him for a routine traffic violation. Typically, such an encounter with police would only end with a small bribe after the police officer exaggerated their reason for the temporary arrest, sometimes entering the vehicle’s backseat to coerce the driver privately into handing them cash. As an unofficial refugee living in Kampala, he did not have the proper identification documents. So, when the Ugandan officer asked for his identification, rather than handing him a passport or a driver’s license, he handed him the press credentials he was showing me. He described the shock on the officer’s face when he saw the card. Due to this document, he insisted, the officer left him alone. ‘They fear journalists in Uganda more than in Kenya or South Sudan, and they are freer.’ This was an empowering moment in which he could put his name and face behind his journalism. This experience stood in stark contrast to being targeted and silenced in Juba.

Despite the surveillance, the confidence he had cultivated in Uganda amplified his vigilant stance, and motivated his decision to start Wajuma News. The events and issues occurring in the northern cities of South Sudan, he insisted, were as important as what was happening in the national capital in the south. He hoped his role as the editor of this burgeoning news source would expand into a career, yet he balanced his journalistic vocation with his security concerns. His name did not appear on the website or in any of his articles. His lack of signature was the product of his ongoing belief that he remained a target of government surveillance as he balanced a critical eye toward irresponsible governance while fleeing the scrutiny of the security state.

Conclusion

The above analysis has highlighted journalism without signature as one significant strategy of how South Sudanese journalists represent and report on myriad formations of postwar conflict in which they are implicated. I have also highlighted how journalism without signature includes the production and exchange of speculation about the transnational elite relationships that begin and end the wars that shape their lives. This article expands existing literature on Africa’s media formation by not only exploring how African journalists in one context represent conflict in another, but how African journalists represent the postwar antagonisms that come to impinge on their own lives and writing. This research expands the challenge to the notion that objective distance is a fundamental dimension to journalistic practice by exploring how local journalists develop skills to navigate the sensitivities of proximity to violence and the threat of violence. This challenges the notion that scholarly attention to news-making about conflict in Africa is perpetually a question of the vindication of the image of Africa in Western media. I have argued that journalism without signature is rooted in the use of pseudonyms and anonymity in colonial African news-making. Writers sought agency over how their gendered and ethnic identities can be interpreted as isomorphic with their political affiliations and interests. It may come as no surprise that writers seek to hide or manipulate their identities to exert more control over how their audiences, their peers, and the national government interpret their journalism.