British forces fought in the 1880s and 1890s to control Sudan, and an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium government to rule Sudan was formed in 1899. From the end of the nineteenth century, during this regime, the impunity of the government was formalised.
1 Major Earl Winterton in United Kingdom, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, Volume 113 (1919), Columns 2362–2372; Captain William Ormsby-Gore in United Kingdom, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th Series, Volume 121 (1919), Columns 746–752. By 1901, Meshra-el-Rek, as well as Wau, Tonj and Shambe, had been occupied by Sudanese troops under British officers.
2 Robert O. Collins, The Land Beyond the Rivers: The Southern Sudan, 1898–1918 (Yale University Press, 1971), page 81. As Leonardi has discussed, the new towns under Condominium rule, mapped on top of the
zeribas, blurred further differences between the old and new
hakuma.
3 Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan. The Anglo-Egyptian government continued to invest in Meshra-el-Rek, including through telegraph wires and the building of a new access channel.
4 Burton, ‘When the North Winds Blow’, page 54; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Meshra el Rek. 1:250000 series maps; Sheet 65-P. 1925 SAD.211/2.In the subsequent decades of Anglo-Egyptian rule, there would be a more extensive commitment to systematically govern the Sudan. For those living around Meshra-el-Rek, the new
hakuma, like the old, was dominantly visible through their raids of livestock, their killing of people and their displays of violence.
5 Douglas Johnson, Empire and the Nuer: Sources on the Pacification of the Southern Sudan, 1898–1930 (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2016), page xxx. ‘Administration required the display of force by government and practical demonstrations of submission and obedience from subject peoples and their leaders’.
6 Ibid., page xxxi. Across Southern Sudan, these displays of military might included violent patrols against civilians. They also included more symbolic violence, such as the bombing of the burial mound of the Nuer prophet Ngundeng in 1927.
Many of the displays of Anglo-Egyptian government were specifically against leaders who claimed authority from divine powers. The legacy of the anti-foreigner Mahidiyya in Sudan and the defeat of General Gordon and other European powers provided justification for government suspicion of religious authorities. The realisation of government power often became equated with the military defeat of a divine authority figure. For example, as Cormack’s work highlights, it was not until the 1920s that the government established a permanent presence in Gogrial. Initially they were preoccupied by the defeat of the prophet of Ariathdit; they feared his rapidly acquired and widespread popularity.
7 Zoe Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial: Landscape, History and Memory in South Sudan’ (PhD diss., Durham University, 2014); Martina Santschi, ‘Encountering and “Capturing” Hakuma: Negotiating Statehood and Authority in Northern Bahr-El-Ghazal State, South Sudan’ (PhD diss., University of Bern, 2013): 48–50. Major Titherington had led the patrols against Ariathdit and became the region’s first Condominium government administrator in 1922.
8 Sudan Intelligence Report of April 1922 as discussed by Cormack: Cormack, The Making and Remaking of Gogrial, page 69. These patrols were armed and violent, relying on the power of the gun to challenge the power that built on claims about the invisible.
While busy suppressing divine authority figures, the government was itself becoming quasi divine. Its violence was arbitrary and, therefore, amounted to a claim to be all-powerful, beyond restraint and akin to a divinity.
9 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 81. For example, government patrols against whole villages and communities were often driven by collective punishment or government plans to move communities – reasons that did not justify such excessive violence in Nuer and Dinka moral worlds. Like divinities, they were claiming a legitimate ability to be able to ‘step outside the confines of the human, and return to rain favour of destruction, with arbitrariness and impunity’.
10 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 7.The Anglo-Egyptian government also legally formalised claims to impunity. As early as 1899, the Sudan government entrenched in the Sudan Penal Code the government’s impunity under the law. As the government relied on local officials, the expectation of government impunity demanded an alternative moral, legal and spiritual framework for these agents of government. Hutchinson highlights that this gave rise to the question of whether there were different spiritual consequences for Nuer when violence was carried out in the line of government duty.
11 Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), page 108. This distinction was at the heart of the government rule as it allowed local chiefs to wield these quasi-divine government powers.