Chapter 3
Regulating the Proliferation of Divine Power: Wars 1980s–2000s
Chapter 3 is a fast introduction to the wars of the 1960s and 1980s–2000s that were fought by Southern rebels against the Sudan government. The chapter provides a brief introduction to this time when the hakuma (the broad government/socio-political sphere, including foreign traders and slavers) went to war with itself, and describes the involvement in these wars by people around the Bilnyang. The chapter then moves on to explore the implications of the wars for the cosmic polity and answers this question largely by focusing on western Dinka. The 1960s and particularly the 1980s and 2000s saw new scales of physical violence and new patterns of violence with more people wielding lethal weapons. This has implications for the power and ability of divine authorities. Yet, the real story of this period is the continued attention and legitimacy of the divine authorities despite the divine claims of the hakuma. New free divinities and baany e biith creatively refused their irrelevance through the refashioning and reapplication of cultural and cosmological norms. At the same time, cosmic politics continued between these divine authorities, as well as with government.
The chapter starts by highlighting how, in these communities, baany e biith actively refused the Sudan government’s developmentalist agenda, politically aligning with some of the frustrations that caused Anya-Nya rebellion against the Sudan government beginning in the 1960s, before which there were protests in the 1950s. The Sudan government was reluctant to admit that the Anya-Nya were active and that the war had come to Bahr el Ghazal (the north-western third of Southern Sudan including to the west of Bilnyang) and they coded Anya-Nya violence as criminal to dismiss their claims of war. However, the rebels drew on moral norms around revenge to contest the government’s ability to violently and lethally enforce the law with impunity. When peace was made in 1972, Anya-Nya forces were absorbed into government, and this placed people from the clans of the baany e biith in government in Wau. There was ambiguity over whether these authorities were still caught in cosmological hierarchies of the villages. Divinely seized authorities creatively remade rituals to assert the continued authority of Nhialic (the supreme creator God) over those officials in the town.
The 1980s–2000s provided an even larger conundrum in cosmic politics. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebellion against the Sudan government from 1983 brought a proliferation of guns and the threat of their potential to kill with impunity. These guns democratised divine-like powers by giving so many people the power to kill and to implicitly claim impunity. However, existing divine authorities continued to contest impunity and the associated impossibilities of peace even as the war continued. These decades also saw new interpretative labour from the hakuma about the existence of pollution in government wars, and the connected relevance of the priesthoods. At the same time, norms around the priesthood were creatively remade to assert their continued relevance and centrality.
The chapter finishes with a reflection on the proliferation of new free divinities during these war years. This includes discussion of MABIORDIT and MAGOTDIT who provided new divine protection. Despite the vivid displays of the guns’ powers, people sought out divine help and protection, creatively remaking understandings of the divine to better fit contemporary social groupings and militarised demands. At the same time, while MABIORDIT and MAGOTDIT asserted themselves as part of existing cosmic hierarchies, their inclusivity of those beyond the bany e bith clans, and their exclusive focus on the cattle camp, remade cultures to resemble the new political focus on the military power of the cattle camp. These free divinities had the potential to challenge the power of the baany e biith. The priests used an eclectic variety of strategies to co-opt and contest divine-like powers to absorb new free divinities into existing cosmic hierarchies.