Bill Lowrey, one of the instigators of Wunlit, had worked for ACROSS (Association of Christian Resource Organizations Serving Sudan) until 1993, before doing his PhD in the USA on traditional methods of conflict mediation,
1 William. O. Lowrey, ‘A Flicker of Hope in Sudan’, Sudan Open Archive, 1998. based on his 1994 involvement in a peace meeting to end the Lou-Jikany Nuer fight in eastern Southern Sudan at the request of Riek Machar. Lowrey was explicit in his recognition of the religious centrality in Nuer life.
2 Lowrey, ‘Passing the Peace … People to People’, page 11. In Lowrey’s doctoral thesis, he wrote: ‘At the heart of Nuer life and society is their religion. The basic beliefs and practice of Nuer traditional religion are woven into the fabric of culture along with the dominant motif of Spirit, or
kuoth (Evans Pritchard,
Nuer Religion 315)’.
3 Ibid., pages 11–12. He went on to describe how many Nuer are also now followers of the Christian faith, and that their belief system can be understood as layers of belief constructed with the basic layer being traditional religion and culture. This both legitimised the church’s role in peace and also encouraged Lowrey to include Nuer and Dinka religious figures in the peace negotiations.
Church leaders explicitly related Nuer and Dinka practice to Christian belief. For example, Lowrey described how a:
calabash of water was brought with sesame seed floating in the water. The seed represent new life. The calabash was passed and each person spit ritually into the gourd bow. This symbolized the joining of life fluids with one another. In addition, the fine spray spittle represents the coolest part of the tongue that can be the root of conflict or contribute to healing and peace. We all came forward and washed our hands in the water. Then we took water in our cupped hands and threw water as a sprinkling over each other. We were being sprinkled clean from the past sins and conflict and enabled to start anew to build the peace. The second libation was similar the next day. But this time there was no spitting or passing the calabash. The oldest Dinka chief walked around the circle with a young woman carrying the calabash. As he came to each person, he dipped the water and sprinkled water on the feet of each of us. This signified the cooling down from the heat of conflict and the preparation of our feet for the work of peace.
4 Chiefs of Dinka and Nuer Stir Crowds, Emotions and Perform Rituals – Dinka-Nuer West Bank Peace and Reconciliation Conference (NSCC, 1999), page 4, www.sudanarchive.net/?a=d&d=SLPD19990220-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN%7ctxTI%7ctxAU-----------, accessed 13 December 2022.Lowry explicitly interpreted this with reference to Isaiah’s description that ‘how beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring peace / good news’.
5 Lowrey, ‘Passing the Peace … People to People’, pages 4–5.The work of Lowrey and his colleagues, such as John Ashworth, was a classic expression of the early 1990s local turn in peace-building that was advocated by scholars such as Lederach. As Ashworth explains, in Southern Sudan the leaders at the local level had ‘the greatest stake in the outcome of a peace process as well as an intimate knowledge both of the community’s suffering and its resources’.
6 John Ashworth and Maura Ryan, ‘“One Nation from Every Tribe, Tongue, and People”: The Church and Strategic Peacebuilding in South Sudan’, Journal of Catholic Social Thought 10:1 (2013), page 52. According to Lederach, international churches (specifically the Catholic Church for Lederach) have a unique role to play as they operate at every level (from the local to international).
7 Ashworth and Ryan, ‘“One Nation from Every Tribe, Tongue and People”’. At the mid-level, the church’s role is described as one of civil society.
Lowrey described how people at Wunlit needed to reinstate rituals and truth-telling to build trust and make peace. For Lowrey, peace required the revitalisation of the Nuer culture and system of government.
8 Lowrey, ‘Passing the Peace … People to People’, page 16. In his thesis, he explicitly mentions that a limitation of his approach is that culture has undergone massive change after invasions, colonialism, central government power and Christian missionary activity. ‘There are consequences to the battering of the traditional’.
9 Ibid., page 19. Therefore, there was an awareness from Lowrey that the ‘tradition’ of Wunlit was not something static in the past, but something being remade as an instrument of peace-making. Scholars have explored how tradition and the boundaries between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ have been co-constituted.
10 Filip De Boeck, ‘Postcolonialism, Power and Identity: Local and Global Perspectives from Zaire’, in Richard Werbner and Terence Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (Zed Books, 1996); Corinne A. Kratz, ‘“We’ve Always Done It Like This… Except for a Few Details”: “Tradition” and “Innovation” in Okiek Ceremonies’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35:1 (1993): 30–65; Helene Maria Kyed and Lars Buur, ‘Introduction: Traditional Authority and Democratization in Africa’, in Lars Buur and Helene Maria Kyed (eds), State Recognition and Democratization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A New Dawn for Traditional Authorities? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 1–30; Carola Lentz, Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana (Edinburgh University Press, 2006); Rijk van Dijk and Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, ‘Introduction: The Domestication of Chieftaincy in Africa: From the Imposed to the Imagined’, in Emile van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and Rijk van Dijk (eds), African Chieftaincy in a New Socio-Political Landscape (Lit Verlag, 1999): 1–20. Recent scholarship has become more interested in how customary authority is reimagined, crafted and drawn upon within social orders.
11 De Boeck, ‘Postcolonialism’; Kratz, ‘“We Have Always Done It Like This”’; Kyed and Buur, ‘Introduction’; Lentz, ‘Ethnicity and the Making of History’; van Dijk and van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal, ‘Introduction’; Justin Willis, ‘Hukm: The Creolization of Authority in Condominium Sudan’, The Journal of African History 46:1 (2005): 29–50.At Wunlit authority, custom and ritual were remade. As we will see below, Wunlit marked a significant rupture in the logics of peace-making (for better and for worse). At the same time, for custom to carry authority it needs to convey a pretext of the continuity. The peace of Wunlit drew on symbols of peace from the
kuar muon and
baany e biith, including the ritual slaughter of the white bull
. The repetitive reference to tradition meant that Wunlit performed the peace as if it was a continuity; the reference to tradition created a veil of permanence and helped to naturalise and make acceptable the changes instigated. The partly illusionary sense that this new ‘creolisation’ of authority was familiar, helped people and pre-existing authorities accept it.
12 Willis uses these ideas to discuss Ali el Tom’s authority in the Sudan: Willis, ‘Hukm’.