Simon Simonse
Simon Simonse (1943) is a semi-retired Dutch anthropologist living in Nairobi and Amsterdam currently working on unprocessed ethnographic material that he collected in the 1980s in South Sudan: the Memoirs of the Lokoya Chief Lolik (1898-1988) and on the Yakanye Cult among the Bari (1875-1925). He makes use of his residence in Kenya to study the structure of the age-set leadership among the Maa-speaking peoples with the aim of making a comparison with the structure of kingship among the culturally related Lotuho-speaking peoples analysed in his Kings of Disaster.
Simonse has a doctorate from the Free University of Amsterdam for his dissertation on scapegoat kings in South Sudan. After his doctoral degree from Leiden he was a student of Claude Lévi-Strauss in his Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale for one year (1969-1970) and of René Girard in Stanford University for half a year (1992).
Simonse’s earlier career was in the field of education. Taking off as a secondary school teacher in the D.R. Congo, he taught social anthropology in Makerere University (Kampala), in a College for Social Work in Amsterdam and in the University of Juba, South Sudan. In Indonesia, he was as a research supervisor for social sciences staff in the Universitas Sriwijaya in Palembang and in Japan a visiting fellow in the Museum of Ethnology in Osaka. He returned to Africa to set up a trauma programme for South Sudanese refugees in Uganda (for TPO, Transcultural Psychosocial Organization).
The common denominator of most of his work since 1993 is conflict transformation with the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa as geographical focus. He was a UN staff in Rwanda during the three years following the genocide. As a consultant (LARJOUR consultancy) Simonse carried out assignments in Uganda and South Sudan for a variety of organisations.
In 2000 Pax Christi Netherlands employed Simonse as full-time senior advisor. Highlights of his work were:
-the coordination of a programme of people-to-people peacebuilding in the context the context of the civil war in South Sudan.
- the establishment of a regional civil society network in support of the United Nations Programme of Action on Small Arms. This included the organization of a series of international conferences on the level of Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa and the supervision a four year pilot project on community-based arms control in Karamoja (Uganda).
-a range of efforts to promote dialogue and consensus between stakeholders (church-leaders, civil society groups, armed groups, government) in the elaboration of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in South Sudan (2005).
-the Juba peace talks between the Government of Uganda and Lord’s Resistance Army (2002-2007); later monopolized by UN and a variety of European and African state actors.
- efforts to engage the ADF-NALU (Allied Democratic Forces- National Army for the Liberation of Uganda) in talks with the Ugandan Government, in collaboration with MONUC (2009-11); suspended when the parties did not comply with the agreed confidence building measures - demobilization of combatants vs. release of ADF detainees.
In 2008 Simonse retired as a Pax Christi staff but continued working as a consultant serving a variety of initiatives and NGOs, among them:
- accompanying the ‘Support Group for Inclusive Governance’, in Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan.
-facilitation of peace talks between Democratic Movement/South Sudan Defence Army (SSDM/A), led by David Yau Yau and the Government of South Sudan resulting in an agreement in May 2014.