By ๐ต๐๐๐๐ ๐ณ๐๐๐๐ ๐ป๐๐๐
People often say that words do not hurt, that โthey are just words.โ Among South Sudanese, this has never been our experience.
In our lives, language has always been dense with consequence. A blessing can feel like a roof over oneโs head. A curse can trail a family for years, even generations. A public apology can mend a fracture in a community; a public insult can split it open again. Our elders have never treated speech as decoration. To speak is to act.
The philosopher J. L. Austin once tried to capture this insight in a lecture hall in Oxford. In his book How to Do Things with Words, he argued that some utterances are not reports about the world but acts that change it. When someone says โI promise,โ โI apologize,โ or โI now pronounce you married,โ the saying is part of the doing. The sentence itself is an event, not a comment on an event.
Our own traditions discovered this long before Austin. A curse is feared because it is believed to do something in the world, not simply to describe a feeling. A marriage blessing is cherished because it is thought to confer protection, not only to note affection. A formal speech of reconciliation does not stand outside the conflict; it brings the conflict to a close. In this sense, South Sudanese oral culture has always practiced a kind of philosophy of language in its own idiom.
The trouble is that this old understanding of speech has collided with new machinery: Facebook, WhatsApp, X, TikTok, Clubhouse, YouTube, Telegram. These platforms have turned words into fast-moving particles. A phrase typed in haste can travel hundreds of miles in seconds. A voice note, recorded in anger, can be replayed in tea places and living rooms that the speaker will never visit. A short video can lodge itself in the imagination of a whole generation. The nature of speech has not changed, but its scale has.
In a country as fractured and fragile as South Sudan, this matters. A sentence can now travel farther than a bullet. More importantly, it can clear the road for the bullet before the gun is even raised.
Philosophers after Austin extended the question from the intimate scene of a promise or a wedding to the broad field of politics. Hannah Arendt, in her reflections on power and violence, argued that political life depends on our capacity to speak and act together. Power, for her, emerges when people join in a shared project. Violence appears when this shared world breaks down and when persuasion gives way to force. To put it simply, when words fail, batons and guns arrive.
That formula can be reversed. If speech can be a substitute for violence, speech can also be its advance guard. It can build the mental world in which violence seems reasonable, even inevitable.
Frantz Fanon, writing about colonial Algeria, described how dehumanizing language prepared the way for physical domination. The colonized were described as animals, as a lesser species, as a problem to be managed rather than a people to be heard. Once that vocabulary was established, the leap from word to blow, from slur to massacre, became shorter. For Fanon, the insult was never just an insult. It was a small rehearsal of conquest.
None of this belongs only to Europe or to colonial Algeria. It is painfully relevant to South Sudan.
Not every harsh sentence is an act of violence. People who have lost homes, relatives, and years of peace will shout. They will complain, accuse, and sometimes use language that is not gentle. Anger is not a crime. But there is a line, and we cross it more often than we admit.
Words become dangerous when they stop addressing other people as fellow human beings and begin to name them as objects, as dirt, as disease, as something less than โus.โ As Fanon saw, this is the moment when violence becomes not just possible but plausible. Once a group is treated in speech as outside the circle of humanity, the imagination adjusts. It becomes easier to contemplate harm, then to excuse it, then to applaud it.
Language also becomes dangerous when it does more than express anger, when it invites harm, praises it, or gently moves the listener to think of harm as normal. The wording may be poetic. It may wrap itself in the language of honor or protection. The vocabulary may never mention machetes or guns. Yet the direction is clear. The sentences lean forward.
In such moments, words do not merely describe a violent world. They help to create it. They supply the storyline in which later attacks will seem natural, even necessary.
Here social media is not neutral. It selects. It amplifies. The platforms that carry our speech are not moral agents. They do not know our history or our grief. They โknowโ only that sharp, emotional, repeated messages keep people staring at their screens. Their design rewards speed, outrage, and repetition, not reflection or repair.
