Chapter 1
Priestly peace and the Divinity of the Gun: The Coming of Government in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
The coming of foreign traders, slavers and hakuma to the Bilnyang and connected rivers in the mid-nineteenth century brought new contestations to the cosmic polity. The form of the first contestations by the hakuma were contestations of spectacular, arbitrary violence and, in response, divine South Sudanese authorities attempted to contest the hakuma’s tacit claims of divinity and impunity. This chapter provides an account of how South Sudanese histories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century portray governments’ claims to be able to kill with impunity as equivalent to a claim to be divine. Histories near the Bilnyang Rivers also emphasise how local divine authorities challenged government impunity.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries opened up Southern Sudan to large-scale foreign trade including in slaves and ivory. Equipped with guns, these new foreigners and hakuma could inflict lethal and devastating violence with apparent impunity. From the last years of the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Egyptian government came to control South Sudan and asserted their power through violent patrols and through the legal formalisation of their ability to kill with impunity. These new experiences of death and impunity brought new cosmological, moral and political uncertainties. It was easy to interpret foreign and government actions as claims to be god-like as they claimed the right to kill arbitrarily.
At the same time, people ‘creatively refused’ hakuma’s claims to be able to kill with impunity by remaking culture and asserting the power of divine leaders to hold the divine-like government to account. This chapter draws on the example of Nuer prophet Kolang Ket to illustrate how new forms of powers were negotiated and displayed that ultimately allowed peace to still be possible and that allowed the government’s impunity and divinity to be challenged.
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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw foreign governments and traders, and their Southern Sudanese colleagues, bring new experiences of gunpower to Southern Sudan. The latter had centuries of experience of international movement and political and economic engagement.
1 Douglas Johnson, South Sudan: A New History for a New Nation (Ohio University Press, 2016). Yet, foreign traders and governments had been limited in their movement to Southern Sudan by the conundrum of the matted papyrus blocks of the
Sudd
that blocked the river routes south
. The first foreign expeditions to break through the Sudd marshes took place in 1840–41 in the context of significant capital investment that was eager to profit from the growing demand in Egyptian and European metropoles for goods including ivory and slaves.
2 Cherry Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: History of Chiefship, Community and State (James Currey, 2013), page 18.By the 1850s, traders were establishing small trading centres (
zeribas – literally ‘enclosures’)
along waterways in Southern Sudan, and people found along the banks of the Nile were the first to encounter these foreign incursions.
3 John W. Burton, ‘When the North Winds Blow: A Note on Small Towns and Social Transformation in the Nilotic Sudan’, African Studies Review 31:3 (1988): 49–60, pages 50–51. These trading posts allowed foreign merchants to raid or negotiate for ivory and slaves. From the outset, these traders used excessive force to support their demands.
4 Richard Gray, A History of The Southern Sudan 1839–1889 (Oxford University Press, 1961), page 47. They relied on the power of the gun to capture slaves and ivory, or to bargain for local support for these ventures.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Bilnyang and surrounding river systems became central to
hakuma activity in what is now South Sudan; these rivers were the
hakuma access point to the whole of western Southern Sudan. By the mid-1850s, merchant ships from Khartoum had entered the Bahr el Ghazal River – the river to the west of the Bahr el Jebel section of the Nile – which started to open up
hakuma access to the west. From this time, slavers started transactions and raids within the surrounding population.
5 Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa: Three Years’ Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of Central Africa, From 1868 to 1871, Volume 1 (Harper, 1874), page 38. By the 1860s, explorers and entrepreneurial traders were starting to look west and south-west for new sources of ivory and other goods.
6 Ibid., page 29. Zeribas were established on the ironstone plateau that spreads out across south-western Southern Sudan and that quickly became known as the Bahr el Ghazal region (referencing the river which connected this region to the Nile and made exports possible).
In the 1860s, Meshra-el-Rek (Ar. ‘landing place in the land of the Rek [i.e. Rek Dinka]’), or ‘port Rek’,
7 Ibid., page 35. next to the Bilnyang River, became a regular landing point for operations into the Bahr el Ghazal region. Meshra-el-Rek was a landing point on a collection of small islands on a lake. This was the furthest point to the south into the Bahr el Ghazal region that could be navigated by water. The cluster of islands of Meshra-el-Rek were no more than four miles across and merchants created a small series of encampments of merchants, as well as
zeribas including a large
zeriba for cattle. Maps labelled it the south-westerly ‘route to the interior’.
8 Ibid., page 37, map.For the latter half of the nineteenth century, Meshra-el-Rek became a crucial port for trade and foreign power in the south, and a key centre of the
hakuma.
9 Romolo Gessi, Seven Years in the Soudan (Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1892) cited in Burton, ‘When the North Winds Blow’, page 51. Zeribas were established across Bahr el Ghazal and down to the Congo watershed. Wau quickly became a significant
zeriba. Yet, the goods and slaves collected at these multiple stations all had to be marched or carried to Meshra-el-Rek in order to be exported up the Nile. There were often dozens of merchants’ boats docked at Meshra-el-Rek, delivering supplies for the
zeribas or carrying back items to sell in Khartoum and abroad.
10 John Tinné, ‘A Communication from Mr. Tinné Relative to the Dutch Ladies’ Expedition from Khartùm up the River Bahr-el-Ghazal, Commencing 26th February, at a Point on the White Nile’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of London 8:1 (1863–64): 12–18.Those communities living around and reliant on the Bilnyang Rivers were immediately aware of Meshra-el-Rek and the associated power of the
hakuma. Their soldiers had hundreds of guns, as well as larger, less portable weapons.
11 Gessi, Seven Years in the Soudan, page 105. Dinka communities to the west and south, between Meshra-el-Rek and other
zeribas, saw supplies for the
zeribas, and then slaves, cattle and other goods being marched through their land to access the port. Foreign descriptions of journeys made it clear that they passed through the grazing lands to the east of what became Gogrial.
12 Ibid. These caravans of merchandise were carried and guarded by hundreds of men into Bahr el Ghazal and were a visible display of the gun-powered might of these merchants.
The lack of extensive, permanent dry land between the Bilnyang Rivers and Bahr el Jebel to the east meant that no
zeribas were established to the east in what is now southern Unity State. However, the lack of
zeribas among the Nuer (who lived to the east, on the far side of the Bilnyang and connected rivers) did not mean that they were shielded from the change brought by foreign traders and
hakuma. There were raids for ivory and slaves into the western Nuer, and in the Bilnyang River systems, they saw the
hakuma close-up. Nuer would move their cattle into the grazing lands which hosted the sizeable Meshra-el-Rek port. While the swamps and river system are vast and can act as a barrier to movement, in the dry season the port would be less than a day’s walk even from more permanent Nuer settlements and would have been known. Plus, neighbouring, Dinka-speaking communities, with whom they married and grazed together, all hosted
zeribas. As discussed below, a few Nuer individuals even acquired guns, highlighting their contact with and knowledge of the
hakuma. It is inconceivable that the
hakuma in Meshra-el-Rek was not known by the Nuer, and such a claim ignores the significance of these grazing lands.
13 Johnson’s Nuer Prophets focuses on the east of the Nile. His account of the history of Nuer prophets to the west plays down their awareness of and interaction with the hakuma in the 1800s.The
hakuma of Meshra-el-Rek was violent. Traders operating from Meshra-el-Rek became notorious for killing dozens of people.
14 ‘Itinerary of the Bahr el Ghazal River’, in Count Gleichen (ed.), The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: A Compendium Prepared by Officers of the Sudan Government, Volume 1 (London: Harrison and Sons for HMSO, 1905). With the power of the gun, they were able to kill large numbers without reprisals. They appeared to be able to kill with impunity; no-one had the power to hold them to account. For those living in the Bilnyang, the
government clearly carried out extreme arbitrary violence.
People living around the Bilnyang Rivers did not only experience the brutality of force at Meshra-el-Rek, but also negotiated and purchased alliances. Traders realised that its security could be served by alliances with local authority figures. As Leonardi has highlighted, across Southern Sudan, the Southern Sudanese authorities did not only fight against but also often cooperated with these foreign forces.
15 Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan, page 21. The public authorities were often given support from traders, including gifts of guns, in exchange for their supply to
zeribas.
16 Gray, A History of the Southern Sudan, page 56. In the diaries of an 1863 expedition to find the western affluent of the Nile, the following account was given of merchant-local relations:
The origin and system of these merchants are different here from the White Nile [describing populations to the east of the Bahr-el-Jebel]. A man comes into a village, sets himself down, and begins by buying ivory and making friends with the negroes, promises to protect them if they will take the ivory to the ships in the Mishra [Meshra-el-Rek], and he either remains himself or leaves a vakeel [agent or representative]. He builds a house, surrounds it with palisades, and, by degrees becoming master of the village, then proceeds to attack a neighbouring hostile village, and, having guns, of course they conquer. That village he attaches to the first, and so on till he had a good many villages, when he forces the negroes of the whole to furnish
doura for his soldiers or fighting men, and they submit.
17 Ibid., 16.For example, one foreign botanist staying at Meshra-el-Rek described a powerful local woman – ‘Shol’ (probably Achol) – that traders had befriended in order to prevent her threatening the Meshra-el-Rek and the water-route to this port.
18 Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, page 39. Through cooperation with foreigners, she amassed large amounts of foreign jewellery as well as a herd of 30,000 head of cattle. Guns were also given as gifts of appreciation to cooperative local figures. In Gogrial, when chiefs were later appointed by the British, they were selected on the basis of either having divine power or having had previous experience with the slave traders and having acquired authority through gun ownership.
19 Interview with key informant in Gogrial about chief’s history, May 2022.While the force and behaviour of different foreigners was often indistinguishable for Southern Sudanese, there were significant armed conflicts between foreign
hakuma themselves
. In 1878, Gessi Pasha (then governor of the region in the Ottoman-Egyptian administration) violently fought slave dealers in Bahr el Ghazal. He aspired to establish (albeit through violence) a ‘good and just government’, ‘to restore the confidence of natives in foreign authorities and to make trade legitimate’.
20 Frank Lupton and Malcolm Lupton, ‘Mr. Frank Lupton’s (Lupton Bey) Geographical Observations in the Bahr-el-Ghazal Region: With Introductory Remarks by Malcolm Lupton’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 6:5 (1884): 245–255. Seeing the illegitimacy and inhumanity in these foreign traders, he claimed to seek a new form of foreign rule. On Gessi’s death in 1881, Frank Lupton became governor. Lupton had six companies of regular troops, but he also relied on the slaves of former slave dealers that were armed with double-barrelled guns.
21 Ibid., page 246. The continuities of arms and military labour blurred together different factions of the
hakuma. The late nineteenth century’s new displays of violence by the hakuma prompted ontological and cosmological puzzles about the nature of this new power, and the hakuma’s place in the cosmological hierarchies. They also bought new dilemmas about how to make peace. Could peace really be made with the hakuma when its power was so excessively and violently asymmetrical?
As Graeber has described, authorities can ‘make themselves the equivalent of gods – arbitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality – through the use of arbitrary violence’.
22 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 81. This equation of divinity and arbitrary violence resonated with Nuer and Dinka cosmologies. For example, Aiwel Longar is remembered as the first
bany e bith. Accounts of the origins of his priestly authority involved Longar killing people with a fishing spear as they tried to cross the water to safety.
23 Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Clarendon, 1961), page 173. Idioms surrounding the Nuer prophets, as well as the Nuer and Dinka priests (
kuar muon and
baany e biith respectively), also point to their ability to curse people to death without punishment because of their divine authority. Therefore, the
governments’ repeated claims to be able to kill with impunity associated them with the morals and powers of the divine.