The intra-
hakuma wars of the 1980s and 1990s brought a raft of potential social, moral and cosmological ruptures. This had the potential to challenge the power of the Nuer and Dinka priesthoods. Firstly, lethal force became more prolific. The 1980s brought the proliferation of guns in the communities near the Bilnyang. Young men travelled to Ethiopia to join the SPLA. Both the SPLA and GoS made use of proxy forces to support their own war efforts, which involved the warring parties arming young men who often were still living in their home communities. For example, the SPLA armed cattle herders from Gogrial and neighbouring SPLA control areas. These forces became known as the
titweng (an armed cattle guard).
1 Naomi Pendle, ‘“They Are Now Community Police”: Negotiating the Boundaries and Nature of the Government in South Sudan through the Identity of Militarised Cattle-Keepers’, International Journal of Minority and Group Rights 22:3 (2015): 410–434.In past decades, men had become like the gods through their acquisition of guns and their new powers to kill with impunity (Chapter 1). Now, many people were armed with guns and lethal power. A prominent concern was whether these new lethal powers were restrained and whether there could be accountability for killing with a gun. If the gun carried the potential to claim the divine-like character of killing with impunity, then the proliferation of gun ownership could be equated with the proliferation of the divine.
Secondly, a related question was a new ambiguity about purity. Hutchinson’s research among the Nuer was seminal and vivid in its descriptions of the new dilemmas faced by Nuer in relation to purity after killing. She describes how, by the early 1980s, Nuer were actively debating notions of
nueer pollution because of the brutality of the Anya-Nya wars.
2 Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), pages 106–108. In the east Nuer they were questioning whether
nueer only came about if the slain and the slayer were previously known to each other. Hutchinson describes how, during wars of the 1980s and 1990s, Nuer to the west of the Nile started equating bullets with lightning – ‘the deceased of both being thought to create a uniquely direct, spiritual linkage with divinity that could be cultivated through cattle sacrifice and, thereafter, effectively called upon in times of danger by surviving kin’.
3 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, pages 107–108. In the intra-Nuer wars of Unity State, further dilemmas arose as a result of Matip’s policy of forced recruitment in rural areas and from western Nuer students in schools in Khartoum. This meant that some of his fighters could end up fighting against their own brothers and kin. How pollution worked in such a context was unclear.
Parts of the
hakuma sought to construct an ontological and moral distinction between two types of war – wars of the
hakuma (
koor kume) and wars of the home. This would allow wars of the
hakuma to be governed by different moral logics and encourage a lack of restraint. In an interview with Hutchinson, Riek Machar (then Western Upper Nile zonal commander for the SPLA) said that he had tried to persuade people that deaths caused by violence during these wars should not be understood as causing pollution or spiritual consequences. Hutchinson describes how, in effect, the SPLA leadership was arguing that a
koor kume (a government war) should take precedence over the interrelations of combatants and their social and spiritual ramifications.
4 Ibid., page 108.Thirdly, the gun brought new ambiguity over the power of the priests to bring peace and end feuds when these conflicts included the use of guns. The gun’s spectacular power, including to kill, minimalised the displays of power by these priests. A central role of the priests was the remaking of purity and peace and, with such dramatic wars, it was unclear that this was still possible. Killing was on such a large scale, it was unclear if nueer could still be removed.