This book focuses on the period since the 1980s. However, it starts with popular histories from the last century and a half that are an important part of the cultural archive that South Sudanese draw on to justify or contest the legitimacy of violence. This first section of the book focuses on early experiences of the hakuma as these were key decades that shaped South Sudanese understanding of what the hakuma was, why it was often god-like, how it could claim impunity and how it fitted in to the cosmic polity.
The first chapter describes the coming of the hakuma in the nineteenth century and how their physical violence and implicit claims of impunity meant that they were divine. The chapter also describes how priests and other local authorities were able to carefully re-craft rituals and divine power, including through new free divinities, prophets and a dramatic elephant killing, to contest hakuma claims to be able to kill with impunity. The second chapter discusses the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government’s entrenching of legal logics of peace. This amounted to a new form of cosmic contestation in which the hakuma challenged divine authorities, not through spectacular violence, but by making them sacred by hedging them into legal institutions. The chapter highlights how the specific details of this peace reduced the divine to the sacred, entrenched government impunity and challenged the ability of peace to satisfy the demands of the dead. Divine authorities often became subordinate to hakuma-ordained laws.
The second section of the book turns to the more contemporary making of war and peace with discussion of the 1960s and 1970s, but with a more detailed focus on the period since the 1980s. Chapters oscillate between describing, on the one hand, the realities of hakuma violence against communities, including the way that hakuma coded their violence as legitimate through peace, and, on the other hand, the ways that the hakuma’s violence and impunity was contested. Chapter 3 discusses how the baany e biith shared with other Southerners an opposition to the Sudan government’s development agenda, before describing the wars of the 1960s and 1972 Addis Ababa Peace Agreement. It illustrates how this brought new experiences of South Sudanese hakuma and new negotiations of the hakuma’s capture by moral authorities of their home communities. It ends by describing the collapse of the agreement, the 1980s to 2000s wars and the wartime violence and cosmic consequences. The chapter describes how priests pushed back against hakuma attempts to make wartime killing devoid of spiritual consequences by creatively refashioning their role and cosmological ideas. Chapter 4 describes the Wunlit Peace Meeting – an archetypal example of the ‘local turn’ in peace-making whereby international actors championed ‘local’ forms of peace-making. It explores its role in easing tensions and conflict, and engaging with divine authorities, but it argues that Wunlit ultimately failed to build an inclusive peace based on the norms within the cultural archive. Wunlit did not provide justice through compensation, and diminished the power of some divine authorities by hedging them in through the imposition of new peace-making rituals.
Chapter 5 focuses on South Sudan’s 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The chapter argues that, for those in the communities near the Bilnyang and connected river systems, the CPA was mysterious, foreign and incomprehensible, but that it still had serious consequences for people in these rural South Sudanese communities through the way it performed power. The CPA involved significant ruptures in government-citizen power relations, including through land and local government reforms, and political leaders and diplomats drew on national and international cultural archives to make claims to have powers for such reforms. Chapter 6 describes escalations of violence in Warrap State after the CPA as a result of having an autochthonous hakuma alongside changing ideas of land, property, resources and cattle ownership. People in the hakuma both needed to be ‘sons of the soil’ to claim autochthonous rights, and be distinct as members of the divine hakuma. Those mobilising violence re-crafted the cultural archive and evoked ideas of revenge to drive conflict. The divinity MABIORDIT then seized a man and offered a combined militarised and divine means to push back against the government. Having described the proliferation of conflict, Chapter 7 focuses on the proliferation of peace meetings in Gogrial. It critically reflects both on their number and their inability to solve the feud. The peace meetings were also used to recode the violence of MABIORDIT as illegitimate and worthy of an arbitrary violent response from government. Chapter 9 then explores how the Dinka priests – the baany e biith – have had their legitimacy challenged by their proximity to markets and money. People have highlighted that baany e biith themselves potentially cannot curse and kill with impunity if they accept money for violence. These logics culturally refused the political marketplace. Chapters 9 and 10 turn to the Nuer-speaking communities to the east of these rivers. These chapters describe the cosmological crisis brought by the years of war, and then how the proliferation of prophets has sought to respond to such a crisis. Peace-making became an important part of the prophetic role, and prophets drew on the cultural archive to present their new peace-making power as continuous with previous peace-makers.
Opening the final section of the book, Chapter 11 introduces the wars in South Sudan since 2013, and argues for the prevalence of revenge in giving meaning to these armed conflicts. The wars and peace-making since 2013 have reconfigured the power of the hakuma and, within a decade, had centralised the politico-military power of the South Sudan government in the hands of a small cadre from Warrap State. At the same time, the war for most of those who fought it was not about centralising power. Among both government and armed opposition groups, South Sudanese drew on the cultural archive to frame a moral imperative to mobilise around ideas of revenge. This was revenge for events in December 2013, revenge for events in the 1990s and even revenge for events in the 1920s. Chapter 11 ends by highlighting how the internationally backed comprehensive peace processes failed to offer a peace that made sense if the meaning of war was of revenge. Chapter 12 then discusses the post-2013 power of the Nuer prophets. It shows how they were sometimes silenced in light of large-scale government violence, but how some prophets still built authority through peace-making. Repeatedly prophetic power was built through the prophetic power to demand a limit to the violence of the hakuma, through their own power to kill via the curse, and because of a continued concern with the dangers of the pollution of nueer. The chapter draws on examples from the Prophetess Nyachol and Prophet Gatluak, and gives an account of the emergence of Geng Mut Liah Wal as a prophet of TILING. Chapter 13 turns to the post-2013 era in Warrap State. It highlights how the growing power of the Warrap State cadre further exaggerated the dangers of having national leaders who were locally autochthonous. It describes how both war and peace often seem arbitrary and subject to marketplace logics, and also how priests continued to try to make a more meaningful peace. It draws on examples from Mayen Jur (on the Unity-Warrap states border) and from Greater Tonj.
Chapter 14 turns to the church in South Sudan. Baany e biith and prophets have maintained authority to make peace and contest arbitrary government violence. Yet, their rituals and morals can promote exclusive post-peace communities. The church has often promoted more inclusive communities through its moral and ritual expectations. The social separation of the church from armed young men has sometimes made it harder for it to assert its peace-making powers, and the demand for forgiveness has prompted some to suggest that church-made peace is immoral. At the same time, its proximity to the educated class of the hakuma has given the church power and this has sometimes been used to encourage more inclusive communities. In this chapter I draw on an example of a public debate over a wartime burial of enemy spies.