many - left a piece of his heart there." The post was dedicated to "Our Lady of Mercy", the sanctuary of Savona. In this context, Bernhardt noted that - unlike in other missions - there was a great influx of women. Hence, the station was extended by a mission of the Comboni Sisters in 1936. One of the sisters recalled it as "a beautiful mission, in lovely scenery, nature seems to make everything flourish: we had good, abundant harvests, plants fruits, flowers, colours etc." In 1953, there were four Comboni sisters from Italy in Deim Zubeir. The preeminent scholar of anthropology and linguistics in the area became Comboni Father Stefano Santandrea, who served in the Deim Zubeir mission from 1948 to 1955 after twenty years in Wau. While travelling outside the station by bicycle, especially to tend to people with lepers, he researched and published numerous articles in academic journals as well as a multitude of monographic books, most prominently his attempt of "A Tribal History of the Western Bahr El Ghazal". In the early 1950s, Santandrea counted a population of some 500 in the settlement and its neighbourhood with a variety of ethnic affiliations that merged through common inter-marriage. As Sikainga puts it: "In this frontier zone, ethnic label fluctuated in response to changing social and political circumstances." Likewise, O'Fahey stresses with special regard to the Dar Fertit area that "the simplistic perception of the Sudan as a static mosaic of tribes each immutably living within its own little world is a travesty of the dynamic reality." The British governor of Bahr El Ghazal, Thomas Richard Hornby Owen, observed during a visit to Deim Zubeir in the early 1950s "increased drunkenness, particularly among government officials and employees". One of the pioneers of modern civilian politics in Southern Sudan, Faustino Roro, was born in Deim Zubeir in 1923. During the early 1940s he co-founded the Southern Sudan Social and Political Association, based in Juba. During his studies of political science in the early 1950s at the American University in Cairo he wrote a number of articles on Southern Sudan for the Egyptian Gazette and is therefore also regarded as a pioneer of South(ern) Sudanese journalism. According to South Sudanese historian Kuyok Abol Kuyok, he played a decisive role as a member of Buth Diu's Liberal Party in drafting principles for demanding Federalism, which has been a key issue ever since.