With the excuse of peace-making or maintaining law, the government continued to claim the right to kill with impunity. The hakuma was no longer to be imagined as a party in the conflict but was instead, through the courts, able to naturalise itself as beyond legal and moral sanction and capable of making this order. Individuals and tribal groups were forced to negotiate peace, but government violence was not a violation of peace and so not the focus of peace discussions.
The courts ordered compensation. Yet, sometimes this compensation was not enough. Cattle compensation was standardised. As Hutchinson has previously highlighted, this prevented flexibility in blood wealth that was historically needed to ensure that blood wealth was adequate for bride wealth to allow the marriage of a posthumous wife.
1 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas; Pendle, ‘“The Dead are Just to Drink From”’. The government also often demanded cattle from among the blood wealth, reducing that available for bride wealth.
2 Pendle, ‘“The Dead are Just to Drink From”’. Therefore, a family, even if there was compensation, might still not be willing to split the bone and accept peace if the demands of their dead could not be met through marriage. Often, at best, compensation would only delay revenge to the next generation.
3 Sharon Hutchinson and Naomi Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy and Prophecy: Nuer Struggles with Uncertainty in South Sudan’, American Ethnologist 42:3 (2015): 415–430.At the same time, aggrieved families were now bound by threat of government force to accept compensation. The government issued violent, punitive measures against those who broke the blanket government peace. Those who engaged in violent conflict were also confronted with government violence. The government tried to criminalise those who inflicted conflict. At the same time, government actions were often interpreted not as those of a neutral force but as part of the cycles of revenge. The government was sometimes seen as taking sides in a feud. For example, Kolang Ket interpreted government actions as siding with the Dinka when they tried to stop raids from his area.
4 Johnson, Nuer prophets. The government did not always succeed in establishing itself as a neutral actor.
Yet, government enforcement of peace via violence was not uncontested. When I was researching near Tonj, one famous example of early Condominium attempts to make peace was often recited. The story goes that some of the first British officials in the area set up a court in an area now known as Madol. It was a court in the grazing lands around the rivers and that met intermittently to solve cases between the Luac Dinka and the Haak Nuer. The first Luac Dinka found guilty in Madol had raided and killed a Haak Nuer man. His sentence was to be hanged from a tree in Madol. His home community objected.
5 Interview with Dinka elder, Makuac (Warrap State), 11 March 2013 (in Dinka) in Pendle, ‘Contesting the Militarization of the Places Where they Met’.At the time, there was one tree in the area suitable to carry out a hanging. The night before the man was due to be hanged, the bany e bith is said to have cursed this tree. By the morning the tree had died and withered and a hanging there became impossible. The execution later took place in Wau.