In the 1990s, many Southern Sudanese churches were experiencing new support and authority. For example, to the east of the Nile in Bor (where the SPLA’s first mutiny took place and that was home to much of the SPLA leadership) there was a massive growth in the Episcopal Church of Sudan (ECS).
1 Jesse A. Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan (Baylor Press, 2018); Mark Nikkel, Dinka Christianity: The Origins and Development of Christianity among the Dinka of Sudan with Special Reference to the Songs of Dinka Christians (Paulines Publications, 2001), page 242. For church historian Zink, a key moment in the history of the church in the 1990s was the isolation of Southern Sudanese church leaders from the international church hierarchy. In Bor, this resulted in the minimum requirement for conversion no longer being a school-based education, but instead the burning of
jak (spirits).
2 Ibid. Many Southern Sudanese had been converted in the Ethiopian refugee camps, and their closing in the early 1990s brought evangelists back to Southern Sudan and the sudden growth of the church.
3 Christopher Tounsel, ‘Khartoum Goliath: SPLM/SPLA Update and Martial Theology during the Second Sudanese Civil War’, Journal of Africana Religions 4:2 (2016): 129–153.For some, the church brought new dilemmas. Hutchinson has highlighted how, among the Nuer, the church failed to provide spiritual and moral solutions to pollution.
4 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), pages 323–334. In contrast, Zink attributes Christian conversations to the failure of other religious beliefs to respond to the newly catastrophic nature of war, suggesting that the church best redressed their wartime social predicament.
5 Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe. Christian aid organisations also brought much aid to Southern Sudan. Some of this aid was channelled through local churches,
6 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, page 347. building their authority.
The 1990s also brought new opportunities for church leaders to assert their role in national politics. Two massive events reshaped the SPLA at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s: in 1989, General Omer al-Bashir took power in Sudan, with his party’s stronger, more exclusively Islamic agenda; and in 1991 the Marxist regime in Ethiopia, which had supported the SPLA, fell. The SPLA needed new international backing and this could now include anti-Islamists in the USA. The SPLA-church relations warmed.
7 Tounsel, ‘Khartoum Goliath’. This shifting international politics forced the resolution of the 1980s dilemma about how churches in Southern Sudan should relate to the SPLA.
8 Bradbury et al., Local Peace Processes in Sudan, page 37. The early Marxist ideology and Soviet support for the SPLA had minimised SPLA sympathy for the church.
9 Wheeler, ‘Finding Meaning Amid the Chaos’, page 56. At the same time, despite the SPLA’s formal Marxist affinities, the SPLA operated with affinity to the church and many commanders in the SPLA were loyal church attendees. The camps in Ethiopia in the 1980s included both a model tending towards Marxist fighting units and also churches that provided aid and education. These were particularly influential over the 12,000 boys who had trekked to Ethiopia, many of whom were educated in Christian schools in the Ethiopian camps and who were then baptised. Their own long journeys and the comparison with biblical narratives gave them a way to understand their struggles.
It was in the late 1980s context of growing SPLA demands on the church that tensions arose between SPLA leader John Garang and the ecumenical Sudan Council of Churches. Garang convened a meeting with Bishop Paride Taban (Catholic Church) and Bishop Nathaniel Garang (ECS Church), and the New Sudan Council of Churches was formed as a result in 1989. This new body agreed to follow SPLA politics and include ‘New Sudan’ in its name, but the NSCC was explicit that it did not want to be the spiritual wing of the SPLA.
10 Bradbury et al., Local Peace Processes in Sudan, page 37.Later, church leaders would highlight that the church (as in ‘a broadly ecumenical Christian church’) ‘was the only institution that remained on the ground with the people’.
11 Ashworth and Ryan, ‘“One Nation from Every Tribe, Tongue, and People”’, page 47. This was explicitly contrasted with the absence of the government, the UN and secular NGOs and in the apparent context of the erosion of the authority of local chiefs ‘by young “comrades” with guns’.
12 Ibid., page 47.By the mid-1990s, tensions still remained between the church and the SPLM/A. The SPLM/A accused the NSCC of being controlled by the Sudan Council of Churches and, therefore, failing to mobilise support and be active in favour of the SPLA’s proclaimed liberation struggle. The church was accused of blocking SPLA recruitment and harbouring deserters; it was accused of being divided along ethnic lines and failing to be able to reconcile. The church also publicised abuses carried out by the SPLA.
13 Tounsel, ‘Khartoum Goliath’. In turn, the church was frustrated that its role in the liberation struggle was not recognised and that its attempt to be neutral was not understood. The church also highlighted that church workers had been harassed and even killed for their faith. At the same time, the SPLM were grateful for the NSCC’s role in international advocacy.
On 11 October 1996, it was finally decided that a dialogue should be held between the SPLM and the NSCC. This was carried out the following July in Kejiko (Yei County). This was part of the series of conferences and workshops held by the SPLM after 1994 as it sought to comply with international pressure to democratise the movement. The vision statements of the NSCC and SPLA were similar – although the NSCC’s was to preserve the ‘spiritual and moral welfares of the people’ and the SPLA’s was to ‘wage a just war for liberation’. The statement ‘Here We Stand United in Action for Peace’ was a slogan used to draw the church and SPLM together. The dialogue recognised the ‘desperate need to reconcile the different ethnic, political and military groupings in Sudan’, and the church was encouraged to have a role in reconciliation.
This gave the church a broad, SPLA-backed mandate to engage in peace-making. This could be justified along biblical lines. It also gave opportunities for the church to assert itself as capable of wielding peace-making authority long associated with divine authorities in Southern Sudan. By taking on the role of peace and reconciliation, churches could assert their role as akin to figures such as the kuar muon and baany e biith, and use this as an opportunity to not only rebuild relationships with the SPLA but also to establish authority among Southern Sudanese.