In this book I use ‘the Bilnyang and connected rivers’ (or ‘river system’) to denote the mingled network of rivers surrounded by a permanent
toc (swampy grazing land) that runs between contemporary Warrap and Unity States, on the western edge of the Sudd – the low lying, flat clay plains of the north-eastern third of contemporary South Sudan. In the 1950s, Howell described the river systems around the Bilnyang as ‘innumerable water courses joining in a series of large lakes’.
1 Report by Winder on a trek from Mopair to Khor Bilnyang as part of the Jonglei Investigation Team, Sudan Archive Durham, SAD.541/2/18-23. I use ‘the Bilnyang and connected rivers’ to refer to an area of water that is connected but not known by a common, single name. For the Dinka communities to the west, the area is better known as the generic term
toc and not by these rivers’ names. For the Nuer to the east, the name ‘Bilnyang’ is most commonly used for the stretch of the river as it runs through parts of contemporary Mayendit and Koch Counties; it takes on other names in other communities. The Bilnyang and surrounding river systems largely run from north to south, parallel to (but much further west of) the large Bahr el Jebel stream of the Nile, and run into the Bahr el Ghazal River to the north.
2 Some rivers in the system are fed from the Bahr el Jebel (a section of the White Nile), such as the Cier River, and others have no Nile water but are fed from the rivers coming through what are now Lakes and Warrap States, and initially from the Nile-Congo divide (Report by Winder on a trek from Mopair to Khor Bilnyang as part of the Jonglei Investigation Team, Sudan Archive Durham, SAD.541/2/18-23). They intersect and mingle as they flow north. For example, at Beeng, in what is now Mayendit County, the four rivers of the Rel, Gah, Nyathar and Thologat flow together in a lake about half a mile wide. The Bilnyang River itself starts near the boundary between contemporary Koch and Mayendit Counties. Cot-Jiok connects Mayendit and Koch Counties. The Reang and the Nyony join here and eventually flow north-west as the Bilnyang (SAD.541.2. 21) as a source for discussion and re-writing with a researcher from Mayendit). To the north, the Jur River coming from the west and through Wau is a dominant feature.~
Map 1. South Sudan states according to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005) (Base map data source: OpenStreetMap; © MAPgra_x 2022; Cartography: Jillian Luff of mapgrafix.com).
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Map 2. Warrap and Unity States according to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005) (Base map data source: OpenStreetMap; Cartography: Jillian Luff of mapgrafix.com).
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Figure 1. Photograph of part of the Bilnyang and connected rivers taken from a helicopter en route from Rumbek (Lakes State) to Koch (Unity State), October 2022 (Naomi Ruth Pendle).
The book focuses on communities tied together by rivers and
toc in order to push against an ethno-centric lens. Despite the commonplace academic rejection of ethnic essentialism or ethnicity as a cause of conflict,
3 de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent’; Johnson, ‘Briefing’; Thomas, South Sudan. much research on South Sudan has still had an ethnically defined focus. Cormack implicitly challenged the focus on ethnicity by focusing on place and not ethnic identity.
4 Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial’. This book follows this example and intentionally takes the step of drawing simultaneously on research from neighbouring Nuer- and Dinka-speaking communities who, in common, make use of the Bilnyang and connected rivers, including for dry-season cattle grazing.
5 Report by Winder on a trek from Mopair to Khor Bilnyang as part of the Jonglei Investigation Team, Sudan Archive Durham, SAD.541/2/18-23. The grass in these rivers – known as ‘
buar’ in Nuer and ‘
apac’ in Dinka – is rich for grazing and draws communities together. These river systems are also jointly central to the cosmological histories of the region. Kolang Ket – one of the earliest
guan kuoth (Nuer prophets) – was seized while fishing in these waters (as described in Chapter 1).
Baany e biith are also associated through these waters, including through the struggle of Longar (as also described in Chapter 1).
Regions discussed in this book are famous in the anthropological record, with Evans-Pritchard and Hutchinson writing on the Nuer, and Lienhardt and Jok on the Dinka.
6 Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer; Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Clarendon, 1961); Paul Philip Howell, Manual of Nuer Law (Oxford University Press, 1954); Jok Madut Jok, ‘The Political History of South Sudan’, in Timothy McKulka (ed.), A Shared Struggle: The People and Cultures of South Sudan (Kingdom of Denmark/Government of South Sudan/UN, 2013): 85–144; Andrew Mawson, ‘The Triumph of Life’; Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas; Johnson, Nuer Prophets. While the Nuer and Dinka are famous in anthropology, the Bilnyang River system is not.
7 One example can be found in Howell, Manual of Nuer Law. P. P. Howell was a British government official who became part of the team researching the likely impact of building a canal in Jonglei State (to the south-east). He went to the region of the Bilnyang in the 1950s to ‘discover what happened to the spill of water from the left bank of the Bahr el Jebel and the waters of a number of rivers which, rising on the Nile-Congo Divide were largely lost in the marshes’.
8 Report by Winder on a trek from Mopair to Khor Bilnyang as part of the Jonglei Investigation Team, Sudan Archive Durham, SAD.541/2/18-23). At the time he wrote:
It was an area of great importance to the local Nuer and Dinka tribesmen for dry weather grazing but it had never been traversed by any government official up to then, and probably has not been visited again since – it was a completely blank space on the map.
9 Ibid. This river system, despites its import to surrounding communities, continues to be largely absent from maps and written accounts of South Sudan that have been made by foreign administrators. The challenges of navigating these rivers make them useless for trade and for global economic interests.
Many communities that have economic, social and cosmological connections to these rivers do not live immediately adjacent to them, but have permanent homes days of walking away on higher, drier land, in towns such as Ler, Koch, Mayendit, Gogrial, Lietnhom, Luonyaker and Warrap. Communities across this wide expanse in contemporary central Warrap and Unity States are the focus of this book. The region is important for peace studies as it has long been significant for national politics. From the mid-nineteenth century, it was an important site for the advance of foreign governments and traders. From the 1860s, Meshra-el-Rek, to the north of the Bilnyang River itself, was a notorious transit point and
zara’ib (Ar. ‘enclosures’, sing.
zeriba) for ivory and slaves, and was a gateway from the Nile to the whole of Bahr el Ghazal (then the whole of the west of what is now South Sudan).
10 Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial’, page 64; G. E. Wickens, ‘Dr. G. Schweinfurth’s Journeys in the Sudan’, Kew Bulletin 27:1 (1972): 129–146; C. H. Page, ‘Inland Water Navigation of the Sudan’, Sudan Notes and Records 2:4 (1919): 293–306. Decades later, during the Condominium rule, these rivers and swamps became administrative boundaries between districts and, at some points, provinces.
11 For an important and excellent discussion of borders in these areas, see Zoe Cormack, ‘Borders are Galaxies: Interpreting Contestations over Local Administrative Boundaries in South Sudan’, Africa 86:3 (2016): 504–527. Administrative districts separated out Dinka-speaking Gogrial to the west and the Nuer-speaking Western Nuer to the east. Now to the west of the rivers are Gogrial East, Gogrial West, Tonj North Counties (Warrap State) and to the east the counties of Mayendit, Ler, Koch and Mayom (Unity State). In the 1930s, colonial administrators prioritised what they saw as a ‘modern’ territorial-based identity, ignoring the importance of movement and relationships,
12 Cormack, ‘Borders are Galaxies’, page 508. and the reality that rivers could be meeting points and not just boundaries. Between Nuer and Dinka speakers, they hardened boundaries and territorial units, and assumed ethnic homogeneity in each district.
The region is pivotal to contemporary national politics as it is the homeland of South Sudan’s most powerful, contemporary
hakuma leaders. South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, and Vice President and sometimes armed opposition leader, Riek Machar are from Warrap and Unity State respectively. In the 1970s oil was found between these rivers and the Bahr el Jebel, in what became Unity State. Armed forces of governments, eager to secure access to oil wealth, made this an epicentre of the conflict. In every decade since the 1980s, this region has seen extreme violent conflict where children have been killed, civilians have been targeted and extreme hunger has resulted. Governments have acted with brutal, arbitrary violence and with impunity.
13 Luka Biong Deng, ‘The Sudan Famine of 1998’. IDS Bulletin (Institute of Development Studies, 1984); Georgette Gagnon and John Ryle, ‘Report of an Investigation into Oil Development in Western Upper Nile’ (Canadian Auto Workers Union; Steelworkers Humanity Fund; Simons Foundation; United Church of Canada, Division of World Outreach; World Vision Canada, 2001); Human Rights Council, Report of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, A/HRC/40/69, 25 February – 22 March 2019; Wheeler and Muscati, ‘“They Burnt It All”’. This context of conflict also gave rise to the military and political leadership of Salva Kiir and Riek Machar. In addition, since 2016 and the demise of rival leaders, Warrap State has arguably also been home to South Sudan’s de facto three most powerful figures (including the president and the two leaders of the most coordinated and well-armed forces in Juba), linking the region even more intimately with national politics.