To make peace through courts and local meetings, the District Commissioners needed to appoint chiefs who both had authority and respected government.
1 Cherry Leonardi, Leben Moro, Martina Santschi and Deborah Isser, Local Justice in South Sudan (London: Rift Valley Institute, 2010); Leonardi, Dealing with Government in South Sudan. Colonial governments have been accused of secularising authority by replacing divine authority figures with secular figures. However, around the Bilnyang and connected rivers, divine authorities, especially
baany e biith, but also Nuer prophets, were appointed as chiefs.
In Gogrial, District Commissioner Titherington appointed chiefs among the Rek based on what he described as ‘ancestral claims to respect’.
2 G. W. Titherington, ‘The Riak Dinka of Bahe El Ghazal Province’, Sudan Notes and Records 10 (1927): 159–209’, page 165. These ancestral claims were not discrete from the clans of the
baany e biith. The government found that the dominant public authorities that upheld the normative order were spiritual authorities, such as the
baany e biith. Therefore, despite their suspicions of the
baany e biith, they could not be ignored.
3 Cormack, ‘The Making and Remaking of Gogrial’, page 74.For instance, the government appointed Giir Thiik as chief of the Apuk Dinka; he went on to be a powerful chief for decades. In recent interviews about Giir Thiik’s appointment, various reasons are given for his selection.
4 Interview with elder from Pathuon East (Gogrial East, Warrap State), Yiikador, April 2012 (in Dinka); interview with grandson of Giir Thiik, Luonyaker (Gogrial East, Warrap State), May 2012 (in Dinka). The District Commissioner was apparently impressed by a local welfare system that Giir Thiik had instigated. Giir Thiik led a
wun mieth – a cattle camp of milk – that allowed people who had no milk to drink milk from his herd on the condition that they also contributed to the herd’s care. At the same time, part of the reason for Giir Thiik’s large herd was his divine authority and the power of his clan. Giir Thiik was from a clan of
baany e biith and he held significant divine powers himself. He is still remembered as a
bany e bith and not just a chief. The neighbouring chiefdoms also saw the appointment of
baany e biith or close relatives of
baany e biith as chiefs. The chiefs appointed under Giir Thiik were also all from ‘bitter’ (spiritually powerful) families with the exception of one sub-chief who had worked closely with and been armed by the slave traders.
The appointment of Giir Thiik as a government chief elevated his own power and that of his clan. The practice of the chiefdom being passed down within the family allowed the capture of this power within the clan, just as the divine powers of the baany e biith were a preserve of the clan. The chiefdom gave this clan the backing not only of divinity but also, now, the power of the gun and the force of the government.
In the western Nuer, in the 1920s, the first District Commissioner (Fergusson) recognised the prophets’ authority.
5 Ibid. Describing the Prophet of Teng, based in Ler, Fergusson said: ‘His word is absolute law and it is indeed fortunate that we have been lucky enough to make a favourable impression on him’.
6 As quoted by Johnson, Nuer Prophets, page 260. This recognition meant that many of the earliest chiefs in the western Nuer were prophets or others with divine sources of authority. Yet, as discussed in the previous chapter, Nuer opposition to government prompted suspicion and suppression of some prophets.
At the same time, for decades, the government ignored the most powerful prophetess in Western Nuer District. Following Kolang Ket’s death in 1925, his daughter, Nyaruac Kolang, was seized by MAANI. As she was a woman, when the Condominium government sought pre-existing authority figures, they overlooked Nyaruac.
7 Johnson, Nuer Prophets. Johnson attributes her superior divine power to her ability to be separated from and ignored by the powers of government.
8 Ibid.For government chiefs, Nyaruac’s detachment from the chiefs’ court system was a problem. Those facing punishment from the chiefs’ courts would run to Nyaruac for sanctuary and protection. The government chiefs feared Nyaruac and so did not pursue those accused into the sanctuary offered by Nyaruac. In the nineteenth century, the power of the gun had offered impunity and sanctuary from divine law (in the case of Kolang and Jiath); in the early twentieth century the power of the divinity was now offering impunity and sanctuary from government law and the gun.
The government chief in the area persistently insisted that Nyaruac and her family take the chieftaincy to end this effective impunity. Nyaruac rejected the offer of government power for a long time. She feared that if the powers of MAANI were merged with that of government, they would be too powerful to ever separate. Nyaruac finally allowed her prophetic family to be given the government chiefdom and her brother became chief.
9 Naomi Pendle, ‘Contesting the Militarization of the Places Where They Met: The Landscapes of the Western Nuer and Dinka (South Sudan)’. Journal of Eastern African Studies 11:1 (2017): 64–85.At the same time, the merging of the powers of the divine with the powers of the
hakuma did threaten to reduce their power. This is partly as it reduced divine power to the sacred. In their
Divine Kings, Graeber and Shahlins argue that reducing a divine authority figure (such as a king) to being ‘sacred’ restrains sovereign power in space by limiting his total power to being present in certain times and spaces.
10 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 4. As divine authorities become sacred, they become more limited in their ability to carry out arbitrary violence with impunity, reducing them from divine, sovereign actors to those who are merely sacred.
The Sudan government through indirect rule contained the divine authorities that it appointed within broader, government-initiated institutions that hedged in the divine through remade customs and taboos, as well as the rhythms of the legal system. As chiefs, the baany e biith and Nuer prophets had to implement the law as sanctioned by government. Ultimately, the hakuma, and not their own divine power to curse, backed up their rulings. So, they were subsumed within the legal systems, and their divine powers were clipped; any increase in power was dependent on their guns and the government.
South Sudanese in these communities saw this merging of government and divine powers in such terms. Among the Nuer, people understood that the eventual merging of divine and government powers in the family of Nyaruac limited her divine powers and, ultimately, reduced her powers overall. Soon after her brother became chief, Nyaruac became blind. The confluence of events meant that her blindness was widely understood as representative of her loss of power and knowledge to the logics of government rule.
11 Interview with elder from Koch, Bentiu PoC, 2018.Dinka also recognised the potential loss of power through proximity to government
. Another story is still sometimes told about Giir Thiik’s appointment as chief. The District Commissioner apparently asked if anyone among the Apuk was willing to be beheaded in exchange for their son being given the chiefdom. Giir Thiik apparently volunteered. His demonstrated bravery and respect of government prompted the government to appoint him chief instead of beheading him.
12 Interview with chief, Ajiep Kuac, 20 April 2018. This account of Giir Thiik’s appointment resembles but reconfigures the story of Kolang Ket’s divine blessing as retold in the previous chapter. In the story of Kolang Ket, while Kolang had toyed with seeking protection and remaking the moral order through men empowered by the gun, he eventually submits to the
kuaar muon and existing hierarchies of cosmic authority by offering himself to be beheaded by a
kuaar muon. This results in the latter
blessing Kolang and him being seized by the divinity MAANI. The people of the Apuk graze their cattle near the rivers of the Bilnyang and, over the four decades between Kolang’s seizure and Giir Thiik’s appointment as chief, they would have heard Kolang’s story. In retelling this story of Giir Thiik’s willingness to be beheaded, people have seen the resonance of submission to authority through the personal sacrifice of offering oneself to be beheaded. Yet, for Giir Thiik forty years later, his ultimate submission was to the power of the
hakuma and not to the cosmic hierarchies of his priesthood. This difference is highlighted in the retelling of such a similar tale.
The appointment of baany e biith as chiefs restrained their powers to the space and procedures of the courts, making them sacred and less divine. For example, baany e biith who became chiefs did not usually themselves threaten curses to enforce truth-telling. Instead, the courts would often send parties to other baany e biith who were not chiefs in order for them to evoke truth-telling. For example, Giir Thiik would send parties to Muordit Dhel – a relative and a bany e bith – if people needed to swear oaths or participate in blood sacrifices. Plus, their demands and conditions of peace were increasingly subsumed within expectations of the customary law, and their power was reliant on government appointment.
Government also now provided the sanction behind the law. Historically, the
baany e biith had not needed the power of the gun to enforce their rulings and uphold moral norms. They had direct powers to curse and other means of inflicting punishment. For example, one
bany e bith in what is now Tonj North is remembered for his power over bees. Deng Ngor was the
bany e bith of a cattle camp and even the bees in a hive in the cattle camp were said to obey his authority. Deng commanded the bees to stay peacefully with people and cattle in the camp. At the same time, he warned people that the bees would attack if anyone violated the rules and regulations of the camp. As people have since described, the bees were Deng’s ‘police’.
13 Interview with male elder 1, Gogrial, May 2019, in Dinka.