As the NSCC became the visible broker of peace at Wunlit, the
kuar muon and
baany e biith power was reshaped through ritual. Many leaders at Wunlit were practicing Christians, but the everyday spiritual life of villages and cattle camps in the region was controlled by figures such as the
kuar muon, the
baany e biith and the Nuer prophets.
1 Ryle et al., What Happened at Wunlit? page 80. Churches have been divided on their relationships with these divine authorities and some have challenged their legitimacy and power. Yet, the NSCC invited to Wunlit a significant number of
kuar muon and
baany e biith. Wunlit also recognised the symbolic value of cattle sacrifice,
2 Ibid. ignoring some churches who had prohibited such sacrifices.
They opened proceedings by slaughtering a white bull; ‘bitter’
kuar muon and
baany e biith were among the first to address the conference on its opening day.
In many ways, the conference appeared to recognise and restore the authority of
kuar muon and
baany e biith. As Deborah Yier Jany, in interviews for a recent oral history report described, ‘[t]hough it was organised by the New Sudan Council of Churches, the council acknowledged the importance of traditional spiritual leaders in the peace process’.
3 Ibid., page 81. A common discourse was that the previous decades of wars had withered the authority of these religious leaders, and that their authority needed to be rebuilt. Bradbury, Ryle, Medley and Sansculotte-Greenidge even suggest that the conference enhanced the moral authority of the
baany e biith and the
kuar muon.
4 Ibid., page 46.Furthermore, Wunlit and its preparatory meetings included various animal sacrifices, conducted by these Nuer and Dinka priests, and Lowrey vividly records many of them.
5 Ibid., page 13. For example:
In Thiet with Dinka chiefs hosting Nuer Chiefs … twice bulls were sacrificed, flipped on their backs, four men holding their legs, a knife slitting the throat, geyser of blood spirting from the aorta, and each of us stepping across the slain bull, proclaiming in action that the conflict of the past was being cut from us all and the peace was beginning.
6 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.Oral histories collected by researchers at the Rift Valley Institute (RVI) also provide detailed accounts of Nuer and Dinka priests sacrificing white bulls at Wunlit.
7 Ryle et al., What Happened at Wunlit? pages 66–78. As recorded by RVI researchers, Executive Chief Gabriel Kuol Duoth described how
[t]he white bull means that all the spiritual leaders were united … The white bull was killed so as our hearts could be as white as the color of the white bull. The Dinka called it dhoor, meaning peace. They said let it make our hearts
dhoor, or peaceful’.
8 Ibid., page 69.Chief Yoal Dabun Dhoar described the threat that ‘whoever will do anything wrong will have his blood pour out like the blood of the white bull’.
9 Ibid.In Kane’s nuanced and ritual-focused account of Wunlit, he argues that these rituals were used as a means of wielding power against the SPLA as they were able to draw on power claims by God.
10 Ross Kane, ‘Ritual Formation of Peaceful Publics: Sacrifice and Syncretism in South Sudan (1991–2005)’, Journal of Religion in Africa 44 (2014): 386–410. Drawing on Bell’s observations that rituals set up hierarchical schemes, he argues that the bovine rituals of Wunlit re-created groups of people and chiefs who had political power against military leaders. According to Kane, this challenged the ethnicised politics of the armed groups and created new pathways to peace.
11 Ibid.However, the rituals of Wunlit were not only challenging the unlimited power of the SPLA and other armed groups. They also played into the competition between church leaders and the priests of the kuar muon and baany e biith. In reality, in the end and over time, Wunlit limited the peace-making power of these Nuer and Dinka priests.
Firstly, the
kuar muon and
baany e biith were pushed towards being sacred and not divine. In their work on kingship, Graeber and Sahlins make an important distinction between the ‘divine’ and the ‘sacred’. For them ‘sacred kingship’ is a ‘means of containing sovereign power in space’.
12 Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, page 4. To be ‘sacred’ is to be set apart in a way that highlights the transcendent nature, but that also hedges you in with customs and taboos. In making a king sacred, the king is ultimately controlled. Wunlit was full of references to the importance of these priests, just as the chiefs’ courts during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium had given chiefs legal authority. At the same time, Wunlit expected specific tasks of them and restrained them through these ‘customs’.
13 Discussion with bany e bith, Gogrial, January 2013; discussion with bany e bith, Maper (Lakes State), July 2012. The
kuar muon and
baany e biith were given a scripted role in a process that was initiated and planned by church leaders.
Rituals were also remade by the Wunlit leaders in a way that indicated that the
kuar muon,
baany e biith and all others present had to accept peace. At the opening of Wunlit, a white bull was killed, apparently following the custom in Dinka and Nuer that the killing of a bull or ox makes peace.
14 Bradbury et al., Local Peace Processes in Sudan, page 13. However, the animal was usually only killed at the end of peace meetings, or after the feud is settled in the court, to cement peace and threaten curses against anyone who restarts the conflict.
15 Interview during peace meeting in Warrap Town (Tonj North County, Warrap State), February 2022. The killing of the bull at the opening and not closing of Wunlit forced participants to engage in a ritual that suggested that peace had been realised before discussions even took place. As one chief remarked, as the white bull had been slaughtered they had all agreed to peace and they might as well have left immediately (before discussions) and gone home. Nuer chief Isaac Magok said: ‘Now we have slaughtered a bull and washed our hands in the same calabash. All these things are over by the law of Wunlit.’
16 Julie Flint, ‘Consolidating the Process’ (unpublished, Christian Aid, 2001), page 25, quoted in Bradbury et al., Local Peace Processes in Sudan, page 47. The power of the chiefs to debate whether there should be peace had been ended by the demands of the meeting’s agenda and rituals.