The silencing of the dead

As discussed in previous chapters, priests and prophets had actively sought to preserve the need for peace to satisfy the demands of the dead. They had entrenched the ability of cattle compensation to buy a posthumous wife for the dead. Through her children the dead could gain another chance of life and maintain their place in the family lineage. The demand of the dead for children kept the dead socially alive. Therefore, at Wunlit, the lack of compensation ignored the demands of the dead for children after death.

While neglecting the dead was a cosmological shift, this shift could have been used to imagine a much larger community that was not bound by clans and the local dead, and that, therefore, made peace more likely. Ancestors socially tie people to small socio-political units. The silencing of the dead and the ability to make peace without satisfying their demands asserted a new logic of peace that was built on a more inclusive community. This broader political community would have resonated with Christian ideas of identity and biblical challenges against tribal divisions that were often highlighted by church leadership in Sudan.

However, the attempt at Wunlit to silence the dead, to create a more inclusive community, failed on two accounts. Firstly, the larger community performed at Wunlit was still exclusive and ethnic. Wunlit unnecessarily reinforced the idea that a Nuer-Dinka division was politically and militarily salient. This was apparent through the underlying assumption of Wunlit that inter-ethnic reconciliation was necessary. Lowrey’s work and research focused on ‘ethnic and inter-ethnic’ conflicts. He saw these conflicts as a product of the Sudan government and SPLA making ‘strategic use of divide and rule modalities that tend to multiply the number of smaller conflicts underway’.4 Lowrey, ‘Passing the Peace … People to People’, page 12. After inter-Nuer fighting in late 1998, the Nuer chiefs were brought together to ‘heal their intra-ethnic wounds’ before being transported in shuttle flights by the NSCC to the Dinka-Nuer conference.5 Chiefs of Dinka and Nuer Stir Crowds, Emotions and Perform Rituals – Dinka-Nuer West Bank Peace and Reconciliation Conference (NSCC, 1999), www.sudanarchive.net/?a=d&d=SLPD19990220-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN%7ctxTI%7ctxAU-----------, accessed 13 December 2022. This fighting highlighted the fact that the conflict was not along ethnic lines.6 Johnson, The Root Causes. There was no need to pursue this ethnic framing. Chiefs during speeches at Wunlit explicitly suggested that peace needed to be made between the SPLA and the people, not the Nuer and the Dinka. Chiefs also questioned why the Nuer were being treated as if socially and politically homogenous.7 Dinka-Nuer West Bank Peace and Reconciliation Conference (NSCC, 1999) www.sudanarchive.net/?a=d&d=SLPD19990220-01&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN%7ctxTI%7ctxAU-----------, accessed 13 December 2022. This reinforcing of Nuer and Dinka identities had implications for how future wars and peace were understood. Wunlit was a missed opportunity to use the rituals of peace to frame a more inclusive identity capable of entrenching peace.

Secondly, the silencing of the dead did not bring more inclusive identities, and left ambiguity about how to respond to the dead. As discussed in later chapters, the dead continued to have social significance. Wunlit failed to overturn cosmological and normative social habits that gave continued social power to the dead. Part of this struggle was because the silencing of the dead was also at odds with the elevating of the power of the chiefs. Some chiefs at Wunlit were eager to control the younger generation. There was discussion of the armed cattle guard (the titweng) and the chiefs’ struggle to control this younger, armed generation. Years later, when people started to return from places of exile, chiefs were also challenged by the authority of the educated youth. The power of the chiefs rested in the preservation of the authority of elders which was connected to the continued social power of the dead. If people after death can still bring blessing and punishment, they must be treated justly until the end of their life.

The late 1990s were also a period of militarised power. Douglas has framed the existence of socially interventionist dead as a way for the ‘living old to impose their authority on the living young’.8 Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2004), page 189. This is because, in most contexts, the living old are closer to death. However, in the late 1990s in the areas of the Bilnyang and connected rivers, the living, armed young were closer to death. They were mobilised in such vast numbers into such deadly wars that young men were constantly confronted by the proximity of their own mortality. Therefore, they also had an interest in keeping alive the social power of the dead to demand compensation.

The failure of Wunlit to silence the dead meant that the demands of the dead still existed. Hearts were not cooled and bitterness between those who had been feuding remained.9 Focus group discussion with chiefs and elders, Gogrial, May 2012; interviews with youth, Mayendit, August 2013. Many people who attended or were represented at Wunlit would seek revenge for violence in the 1990s over the decades to come. Wunlit, at best, was an agreement to pause revenge for a generation, so the sons of the slain would eventually carry out violence. After the 2005 CPA, and as conflict increased with changes in the political economy, peace would quickly give way to a relationship of feud. The children of the late 1990s were among those who conducted door-to-door ethnic killings in Juba in December 2013. They cited unsolved grievances from the 1990s to encourage young men to carry out this violence.10 Interview, pro-government armed man, Juba 2013, via telephone.