Chapter 2
Sacred Authority and Judicial Peace: Peace-making during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium
When the Anglo-Egyptian Government of Sudan moved beyond violent occupation and tried to establish their administration, cosmic contestations took new forms. The
hakuma no longer only asserted its authority through spectacular violence and impunity identical to that of divinities, but also by making sacred previous divine authorities and their powers to make peace. By the 1920s and 1930s, the
hakuma was no longer dominated by foreign slavers and traders, or even violent patrols by the Anglo-Egyptian government; instead, the Anglo-Egyptian government had started to try to bring administrative order to the region. At the same time, these government officials still represented continuities with foreign-backed, gun-dominated power, spatially mapped on to previous geographies of power.
1 Cherry Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan: History of Chiefship, Community and State (James Currey, 2013).The government from the 1920s tried to capture into law and legal institutions peace and the priestly peace-makers. ‘To be “sacred”, in contrast [to being divine], is to be set apart, hedged about by customs and taboos’.
2 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 8. The government now sought to not kill divine authorities, but to hedge them in through legal institutions and the customary law. As the ultimate maker and arbitrator of the law, the
hakuma sought to rest above these hedged-in divine authorities. The
hakuma displayed its power over the law both through its standardisation and through the
hakuma’s insistence that judicial redress be sought and that feuds be solved through the courts. This allowed the cosmic politics to be concealed in claims of criminality and legal technicalities.
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Figure 2. A chief, an elder and a court clerk sit at the front of a chiefs’ court hearing in Gogrial East County, Warrap State, May 2010 (Naomi Ruth Pendle).
This chapter describes the making of the legal nature of peace in South Sudan during the first half of the twentieth century. It also links this to the limiting of the power of other, non-government divine authorities by making them sacred. Among the Nuer and Dinka, priests (kuar muon among the Nuer and baany e biith among the Dinka) relied on notions of feuding and ‘pollution’ to create systems in which purity and, therefore, peace could be possible. They also heavily relied on cattle for compensation and sacrifice. The wars, violence and diseases that came with foreign hakuma resulted in the depletion of cattle and new dilemmas in peace-making. When the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan Government sought to administer the communities around the Bilnyang and connected rivers, they demanded the non-government violence be seen not as a political conflict but as a crime against the state. The government had a new legal vision of conflict and peace.
Although the Sudan government projected an image of conflicts as criminal (and a legal violation) and not political, law is always a form of politics and can be used as an instrument of the ruling class and also as a form of ideological power.
3 Edward Palmer Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Back Act (London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2013 [1975]). By the 1920s, law had already long been a cornerstone of British strategies to govern their empire.
4 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 1996). Massoud has highlighted that, in the Sudans, law has been used by successive governments as a way to maintain power.
5 Mark Fathi Massoud, Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013). ‘As an agent of a state’s long-term policy, the rule of law can be used to win the tacit consent of the governed in a way that posing a credible threat of force may not’.
6 Ibid., page 48. At the same time, ‘law is never just an instrument, a tool available to political elites to use as they wish. It has its own rules, actors, and practices, along with the need to maintain some semblance of justice if it is to appear legitimate’.
7 Sally Engle Merry, ‘The Rule of Law and Authoritarian Rule: Legal Politics in Sudan’, Law and Social Inquiry 41:2 (2016), page 468. Massoud describes how, by creating courts, the government created a space where people could air grievances which allowed the regime to present itself as a moderate, legitimate authority.
8 Massoud, Law’s Fragile State, page 45. At the same time, these spaces did provide opportunities for government power to be confronted and subverted.
9 Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan. The Condominium era is remembered by those living near the Bilnyang as having captured into hakuma-backed law previous ideas of peace that revolved around compensation and justice for the deceased. This legal peace drew on cultural archives and resonated with existing ideas of peace. Yet, subtle changes in rituals and meanings shifted power over peace to the hakuma while entrenching its legal nature.
This chapter also draws out the cosmic politics at play through the example of Nuer prophet Nyaruac Kolang and Dinka Chief Giir Thiik; these examples illustrated how the hakuma hedged them in and made them sacred via their incorporation in legal institutions. When Nyaruac’s family finally agreed to become a chiefly family, Nyaruac became blind. This is interpreted as a physical demonstration of her declining spiritual power because of the merging of both government and divine power. Giir Thiik’s power appeared to increase with his merging of the power of the bany e bith with that of the government chief. Yet, stories of Giir Thiik’s willingness to be beheaded by government echo the stories of the previous chapter when Kolang Ket was willing to be beheaded by a kuaar muon. However, in the account of Giir Thiik, ultimate submission is to government.
While demanding legal and non-violent peace among South Sudanese, the hakuma continued to inflict violence. Violent patrols were becoming less frequent, but the government still insisted on death sentences to stop conflict. Baany e biith continued to push back against such government powers to kill with impunity. However, the mid-twentieth century is remembered as a time of growing hakuma authority and their often successful attempts at limiting (if not destroying) the powers of the previously divine.
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Killing and being killed in times of conflict prompts various moral and ontological uncertainties that need to be understood and resolved if peace is made. Spiritual pollution was a central key framing in the way that killing was understood. Among the Nuer,
nueer was (and still often is) a potentially lethal pollution that arises after transgression of divinely sanctioned prohibitions, such as killing.
10 Edward Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford University Press, 1956): 293–294; Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), pages 106–107; Sharon Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to eat”: Rethinking Pollution States among the Nuer of Sudan’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62:4 (1992): 490–504. The anthropologist Sharon Hutchinson defines
nueer as a pollution that distinguishes between flows of blood and food that are culturally defined as negative, death-ridden and anomalous from others deemed to be properly mediated, positive and life promoting.
11 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, page 107; Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to Eat”’; Evans-Pritchard refers to nueer as ‘a grave sin’: Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, page 129. Therefore, killing did not only have consequences for the deceased and their family, but it also left the killer polluted and in need of the restoration of purity.
After killing, killers among the Nuer and Dinka would seek the help of priests (kuar muon among the Nuer and baany e biith among the Dinka) to allow the restoration of a state of purity. This would bring the priests into the peace-making role, and would make public who had carried out the killing. This also placed the priest in a position to coordinate peace-making with the aggrieved family.
In the Bilnyang, in the nineteenth century, cattle were central to priest-led peace-making. Cattle were key both for compensation and for sacrifice. Cattle compensation was necessary among Nuer and Dinka as it allowed the acquisition of a wife for the deceased. Wives were married after the exchange of bride wealth and this bride wealth was made up of contributions from family and friends, as well as from the husband himself. If the man had died, his contribution to his new wife came from the cattle paid in compensation. Posthumous marriage was important as it provided children and a lineage for the deceased. A relative would biologically father children with the wife for the deceased, allowing the deceased’s legal paternity to continue and allowing his name to be securely carried into posterity.
12 Francis Mading Deng, Customary Law in the Modern World: The Crossfire of Sudan’s War of Identities (Routledge, 2010), page 131; Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Clarendon Press, 1961), page 25; Naomi Pendle, ‘“The Dead Are Just to Drink From”: Recycling Ideas of Revenge among the Western Dinka, South Sudan’. Africa 88:1 (2018): 99–121. Failure to secure children for the deceased risked moral and spiritual condemnation for his relatives, and their unwillingness to make peace with the killer. Conversely, securing a wife and children for the deceased gave the dead a continued social presence and continuity despite death.
Cattle sacrifice was then needed as part of the completion of compensation payments. As Evans-Pritchard and Hutchinson have documented, cattle were needed in this process due to their equivalence to people.
13 Edward Evans-Pritchard, ‘The Sacrificial Role of Cattle among the Nuer’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 23:3 (1953): 181–198; Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas. After the exchange of compensation, priests would perform rituals that included the sacrifice of an ox to end the feud. Feuding Dinka families would witness the sacrifice of a young ox (
muɔr adɔɔr or ‘ox of peace’, or
muɔr de yuom or ‘ox of splitting’: literally, ‘ox of the bone’)
to bring an end to the feud.
14 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. Before the cow died, priests would speak to the cow about why they must die – cows cannot die for no reason.
15 Interview with local government official in Gogrial East County, May 2022. They would also speak over the cow threats of curses if anyone broke the peace and reignited the feud.
The power of compensation and cattle sacrifice to resolve feuds and bring peace was challenged in various ways by the coming of foreign powers. Firstly, foreign powers and their guns radically changed the nature of conflict. As discussed in the previous chapter, foreign traders and governments created a network of supporters to allow them to operate in the region. This created new divisions between those working for government and those not. At the same time, these overlapped with pre-existing ideas of identities. People fought new wars with new types of weapons. They also fought with and against different groupings.
Secondly, the shifting distribution of cattle created a class that was too poor to make peace, as we see in the example of Kolang Ket in Chapter 1. The coming of foreign hakuma brought new livestock diseases, and changed cattle ownership and socio-economic classes which threatened to undermine the use of cattle compensation to make peace. The poverty brought by raids, but also by new disease outbreaks, exaggerated the inability of the poor to have enough cattle to pay compensation and to make peace.
For example, from the late 1880s, rinderpest spread quickly into Southern Sudan, killing vast numbers of cattle.
16 John A. Rowe and Kjell Hødnebø, ‘Rinderpest in the Sudan 1888–1890: The Mystery of the Missing Panzootic’, Sudanic Africa 5 (1994): 149–78. The 1888–89 drought forced cattle, as well as wild game, to congregate at fewer water sources, spreading the disease quicker.
17 Douglas Johnson, ‘The Great Famine in the Sudan’, in Douglas Johnson and David Anderson (eds), Ecology of Survival: Case Studies from Northeast African History (Lester Crook Academic, 1988): 63–64. In eastern Sudan, the devastation from rinderpest brought new myths and changing lifestyles.
18 B. A. Lewis, The Murle – Red Chiefs and Black Commoners (Oxford University Press, 1972), pages 85, 186. Among the Nuer, people described to Evans-Pritchard that, as a result of rinderpest, they reduced their herd sizes. The period before rinderpest became known as ‘the life of the cattle’, indicating the significance of their loss.
19 Edward Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (Clarendon Press, 1940), page 66. South Sudanese were creative in introducing quarantine methods to keep cattle safe, yet cattle still died in large numbers.
20 Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, page 66; Johnson, ‘The Great Famine in the Sudan’, pages 63–64.Periods of deadly human disease also resulted in greater demands on a family’s cattle, preventing their use for peace-making compensation. After the death of male family members, especially those who did not have male children, there was an expectation that surviving family members would use their families’ herd to marry a wife for the deceased in order to produce children in their name and, hence, their social continuity after death. In periods of epidemics, when deaths were high, this put a significant strain on cattle to be used for marriage, bringing further poverty to the family. Smallpox was prevalent in Southern Sudan at the time.
21 Ahmed Bayoumi, ‘The History and Traditional Treatment of Smallpox in the Sudan’, Journal of Eastern African Research and Development 6:1 (1976): 1–10. While there were long histories of smallpox in the Sudan, the lack of movement between the south and the trading hubs of the north meant that Southern populations had relatively little exposure and a lack of immunity.
22 Ibid., page 7. Failed inoculation schemes used by slavers and traders were exacerbating its spread. When disease spread through a family and brought significant death, the living faced a large burden in having to use their cattle to marry for the deceased.
These new experiences of cattle-less poverty made it very difficult for the poorest people to make peace. When fights occurred, revenge became increasingly the only option to avoid killing having happened with impunity. Therefore, at the time of the Anglo-Egyptian Government establishing its authority in communities surrounding the Bilnyang and connected rivers, priests were grappling with dilemmas about how to make peace possible when cattle were in decline and peace relied on cows.