In a review in Sudan Studies, Joanna Oyediran discusses Liz Hodgkin’s “insightful and entertaining”Letters from Isohe – a perspicacious account, she says, of “a heroic effort to keep a secondary school functioning in a country where getting anything done is a headache.”
As a teacher, writes Oyediran, Hodgkin had privileged access to young people’s thoughts about their society,” “In their debates, plays, and written work there is a focus on community violence and the authoritarian tendencies of their elders,” she writes. In his diary, one student records such an incident: “when people refuse to come to a meeting, the Chief of Isohe sends police to collect people in the village to come for meeting by force.”
Isohe may be physically isolated, writes Oyediran, but it is vulnerable to broader regional dynamics, such as the impact of the plummetting value of the South Sudan Pound and a shutdown in oil production. Hodgkin, she says, records how school administrators, teachers and students adapted to running a school with barely any resources.
In Isohe, writes Oyediran,“Domestic violence, forced marriages and sexual exploitation of female students, are prevalent.”. These include the practice of giving girl-children as compensation in legal settlements. Hodgkin, she says, “does not over-romanticize life in this beautiful village in the mountains. Time and again, she returns to the violence. Corporal punishment… fights between students… an incident involving a student and a teacher… fighting between members of different ethnic groups, armed robbery, cattle-raiding…. And elsewhere in South Sudan [this is in 2017], a full-blown civil war.” “Isohe and its two schools constitute a place of refuge and hope,” Oyediran concludes. “When Liz Hodgkin returns six years later she discovers that the secondary school is three times the size. When civil war came to Equatoria, some young people chose education at St. Augustine’s over joining the militias.”
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