Importantly, from this chapter we see both that, from the outset, the hakuma was experienced as incredibly and brutally violent, and also that the hakuma’s behaviour as it entered the communities around the Bilnyang meant that people equated the hakuma with the divine. The hakuma interrupted peace not only because new political economies impacted institutions of peace-making, but also because the violence of the hakuma made peace with the hakuma itself more difficult. Histories told of the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the Bilnyang are histories of the first foreign hakuma using guns and asymmetrical military might to conduct arbitrary violence and brutal killings while claiming impunity. The port of Meshra-el-Rek and this access to the west of Southern Sudan made the Bilnyang central to the power of the hakuma in the Southern Sudan. This included both foreign traders and slavers using arbitrary violence in raids to capture resources. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Anglo-Egyptian government captured control of this area but still asserted power through predatory raids on villages and displays of their military might. They also legalised their impunity. Graeber argues that such arbitrary violence with impunity is a claim to be akin to a god. South Sudanese, who observed these early, violent hakuma, also compared them to the gods. Early divine authorities, like the hakuma, killed arbitrarily with impunity.
At the same time, the hakuma’s claims were not unchallenged. Cosmic powers were reconfigured and reasserted to challenge the hakuma’s claims of impunity. The story of Kolang Ket’s seizure illustrates cosmic reconfigurations after the coming of the hakuma. In many ways, the emergence of the prophetic idiom can be seen as part of the re-creation of culture and cosmologies to creatively refuse assertions by the hakuma of its power to kill with impunity. Prophets emerged as a centralising authority, but an authority that was often symbolically subservient to the existing cosmic hierarchies of the kuar muon and baany e biith. The story of Kolang Ket’s posthumous revenge against the government official that killed him also showed how divinities were contesting government claims to be able to kill with impunity. Yet, these divine contestations were far from necessarily non-violent and, in this case, involved a fatal elephant attack. For this book, it is important to recognise the late nineteenth and early twentieth century experiences of the potential violence of both the hakuma and divine authorities that contested the hakuma.