This blog by Martina Santschi and CSRF focusses on the critical importance of bride price for resilience and economic security in crisis-affected South Sudan and calls for a better informed and more conflict-sensitive engagement of aid actors on bride price in agro-pastoral communities. As such, the blog is relevant for aid actors who engage in livelihood and resilience support, economic development as well as support to returnees, refugees, and IDPs.
Families and communities in South Sudan apply various strategies to cope with crises, including economic hardship, insecurity, disease, and erratic weather patterns further exacerbated by climate change. Even though these resilience strategies are essential for the survival of many in times of hardship, expatriate aid workers often do not know them, or perceive them as negative in relation to human rights violations and communal violence.
Against the backdrop of aid cuts in a context of high humanitarian needs and the increasing emphasis of the aid sector on resilience strengthening, this blog aims to shed light on one of these resilience strategies, which is perceived as controversial by some expatriate aid actors—bride price. The blog provides a more nuanced picture of this strategy and suggests recommendations on how aid actors can avoid weakening and instead strengthen mechanisms around bride price.
Introduction
This blog focusses on one important but often underrated resilience mechanism: Bride price. Bride price livestock can help reallocate and diversify livestock assets in agro-pastoral communities during times of harvest failure or other forms of crises. Despite its important economic role, bride price and its related social practices, often come under scrutiny by external aid actors on the grounds of human rights violations. Besides bride price, other resilience mechanisms exist. Some are linked to the broader category of communal social protection that reallocates assets to poorer members of families and communities, while others relate, for example, to reducing the risk of harvest failure by farming in different locations, and building dikes and hafirs. The CSRF and other scholars have published on the communal social protection phenomenon.[1]
The protracted economic and security crises as well as the climate change induced unprecedented flooding and drought are affecting different parts of South Sudan. As a result, they are negatively undermining resilience strategies. Many families and communities have lost livestock and other assets, and therefore have less to share with or relocate to others affected by these crises. This blog builds on research in South Sudan, particularly among Dinka speakers in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal[2], but key strategies mechanisms described here also exist in other agro-pastoral communities across South Sudan.
Bride price payment: An important but contested mechanism
In present-day South Sudan, bride price payments, often in the form of livestock, take place in most marriages in agro-pastoral communities, with a prevalence also in urban contexts. Bride price constitutes not only as a cultural practice but is also linked to essential social and economic security mechanisms. On the one hand, marriage and bride price payments establish and strengthen kinship ties between families and communities, while onthe other hand, they reallocate livestock – an essential economic asset – within communities and allow to keep livestock spread in different cattle camps, thus reducing the risk of losing them. If all livestock is kept in one location, a single event, such as a fight, a cattle raid, or the outbreak of a disease, can decimate the entire herd.
The practice of bride price payments comes under criticism by sections of South Sudanese and international activists alike in relation to women’s human rights. This criticism relates to the fact that some women are forced into early or unwanted marriages due to bride price payments. Moreover, South Sudanese and international media recurrently cover cases of young women subjected to violence by male family members who are discontented with the young women’s partner choices. Young women who refuse to get married to a groom chosen by the family or get pregnant by a partner whom her family rejects may also face violence.[3] Activists also stress that bride price can prevent women from getting divorced from abusive husbands when relatives refuse to pay back the bride price to the husbands’ families.
The pressure on young men to pay bride price is too linked to violence and insecurity in South Sudan. Ideally, young men would receive support from relatives and friends to get enough livestock to cover the bride price. Some young men who do not own enough livestock for bride price acquire it through cattle theft or cattle raiding. Notably, recurrent cattle raiding escalates into intra- and inter-communal fighting in different parts of South Sudan. In the past, aid actors tended to mainly associate localised violence with cattle raiding, revenge killing, and fighting over pasture and other resources. However, as the CSRF illustrated in different publications, political and military interests importantly contribute to localised violence across South Sudan.[4]
Bride price as a strategy to reallocate and diversify assets
Particularly for the first marriage, grooms often receive support from their relatives and friends to pay bridewealth to the bride’s family. The bride price is negotiated between male members of the two families involved. Once the families have agreed on the price, part of the livestock is transferred to the bride’s family, where it is then allocated to family members of the bride, including parents, uncles, and other relatives beyond the core family unit. As a result, marriages and bride price connect the extended families of the groom and the bride socially and economically.
Through bride price payments livestock is reallocated within clans and communities, and between communities if couples originate from different communities. This reallocation is shaped mainly by the number of daughters a family has. Thus, through marriage and bride price also an impoverished family with many daughters has a chance to increase the size of its herd.[5] As such, bride price can increase the economic security of impoverished families. Part of the livestock of the bride price is often used to pay bride price for sons who want to get married. Some cattle are kept to increase the herd while a few heads of cattle may be sold, for example, for food or medical treatment during times of crisis.
Moreover, bride price allows families to diversify livestock – a mobile asset -through different mechanisms.[6] First, not all livestock is transferred around wedding days. Instead, grooms’ families continue to owe livestock to the brides’ families. This practice has different implications. On the one hand, it keeps the economic, and through this also the social, dimension of the relationship between the two extended families alive. More importantly, it allows the families of the brides to keep assets in the form of livestock with the grooms’ families, which they can recall in times of crisis and need. As one respondent stated in 2007, in Aweil East, livestock is like cash in different bank accounts. Thus, in practice, through marriage and bride price, families of brides owe livestock from other families that are spread across different cattle camps, and at times even different counties and states in South Sudan. This diversification of livestock assets reduces the risk of loss through a single event such as a raid, theft, disease, including climate change hazards such as flooding or drought.
Secondly, relatives and friends who support a groom by contributing livestock for his marriage, can, at a later stage, also ask the groom to return the livestock for their own marriage or other needs. Thus, individuals who have donated livestock to bride price also diversify their assets through their contribution. Accordingly, marriage and bride price create a network of debts and assets in livestock that connects many individuals and families and allows them to diversify livestock assets and to recall it back during times of crisis.
Besides this, livestock is often reallocated to more vulnerable community members through a variety of mechanisms, including community support practices managed by local authorities, including chiefs, chief courts, and elders.[7] Livestock temporarily loaned allows, for example, to access milk for children or to buy food. Families that recover from hardship are expected to later repay the loaned cow.
Climate change induces protracted flooding and drought, as well as insecurity affecting larger areas, undermine bride price as a resilience strategy as it is likely that families and communities lose livestock even if it is spread across different cattle camps.
Recommendations:
When it comes to bride price, aid workers tend to focus on the critical gender, human rights and conflict dimensions and ignore the essential role of bride price, especially its role in reallocating and diversifying livestock.
- Considering the essential economic role of bride price in resilience and livelihood support activities not to undermine the mechanism but ideally to strengthen it by supporting livestock keeping through, for example, vaccination campaigns and veterinary services.
- Providing humanitarian aid to save lives, while strengthening community resilience by supporting agriculture and livestock keeping for communities to enable them to feed themselves and cater for their vulnerable members.
- Recognising and accepting that some of the local norms and practices of community support may conflict with rules of aid organisations when it comes to the reallocation of assets, including livestock or aid. Local norms build on established societal practices that efficiently and effectively identify and support poorer and more vulnerable community members. A close collaboration with local NGO partners and local authorities helps to mitigate instances of conflicting norms and practices.
- Ensuring that aid actors do not adopt or even perpetrate too simplistic narratives around “traditional forms” of localised violence that focus on bride price as source of conflict, ignoring political and military influences. Instead, working with well-informed conflict analysis and strengthening local conflict resolution mechanisms.
In view of the aid cuts, local resilience strategies and mechanisms become even more important and it is essential that aid actors do not undermine them. Bride price is one strategy which tends to be overlooked and perceived negatively particularly by international aid actors, yet, it is an essential economic and social mechanisms when it comes to diversifying livestock assets.
[1] For example, Otim, David, Ranga Gworo and Gaya Raddadi 2024: Enhancing community-based social protection for sustainable use of aid in South Sudan: Guidance for conflict and context-sensitive aid. CSRF. Harragin, Simon and Chol Changat Chol 1999: The Southern Sudan Vulnerability Study. Save the Children. Kim, Jeeyon 2020: The currency of connections: Why Do Social Connections Matter for Household Resilience in South Sudan?
[2] For example, Santschi, Martina 2016: Encountering and capturing hakuma. Negotiating statehood authority in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal South Sudan. Doctoral dissertation. University of Bern.
[3] For example, Mabor, William Sunday 2020: South Sudan Family Allegedly Kills Woman Who Refused Forced Marriage. Voice of Africa. Radio Tamazuj 2024: South Sudan: Father kills daughter over forced marriage. Oppenheim, Maya 2019: Girl beaten to death by brothers for refusing to marry man who offered family 40 cows. Independent.
[4] CSRF and WFP 2020: Adjusting Terminology for Organised Violence in South Sudan.
[5] As wealthy families and clans tends to have more wives and daughters and tend to receive higher bride price when daughters get married, they receive more livestock through marriage. But they also must pay higher bride price for their sons’ marriages. Thus, in short between wealthier families, higher bride prices tend to be exchanged. Yet, as of wealthy and poorer families are socially and economically connected, they are part of the same marriage system.
[6] Dr. Luka Biong Deng explore different dimensions of the diversification of livestock in the following article. Deng, Luka Biong 2009: Livelihood diversification and civil war: Dinka communities in Sudan’s civil war. LJournal of Eastern African Studies, 4(3), 381-399. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2010.517406
[7] For example, Pendle, Naomi 2023 : Law and famine: Learning from hunger courts in South Sudan. https://www.csrf-southsudan.org/repository/law-and-famine- learning-from-the-hunger-courts-in-south-sudan
