Around the Bilnyang, the CPA shifted peace-making in two ways – firstly through promoting a model of peace based on negotiation and not judicial norms, and secondly through the subsequent massive shifts in the cattle economy.
Judicial peace
For those living near the Bilnyang and connected river systems this impunity also further normalised a lack of judicial peace. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Wunlit Peace Agreement had already started to challenge the judicial nature of peace-making, and the lack of the application of consequences for those who kill. The CPA was presented as a rupture between times of war and a time of peace. Therefore, actors did not have to be punished and there was no continuity of judicial norms. Peace was agreed between political actors. Even more than this, the CPA’s long document claimed to have a legal authority and to create a whole new legal order. While such a claim was far-fetched in reality, it did again claim that peace could cut across previous predictable, judicial practices; and it left no social space for the dead. As the CPA ignored most living people in Southern Sudan, it also ignored the dead. As discussed in previous chapters, in the Bilnyang, a lack of impunity was partly asserted by peace and compensation addressing the demands of the dead. The CPA left the hearts of people in Southern Sudan still hot and hurting.
1 Interviews and focus groups in Gogrial in 2012; interviews in Panyijar in 2012; interviews and conversations in Mayendit in 2013. They had struggled to survive, had suffered injury and had grieved multiple deaths and had been unable ot provide for the dead. Therefore, there was a further sense of unsettlement and need for justice.
A new cattle class
In reality, the most significant change brought by the CPA to experiences of power around the Bilnyang was the creation of a new cattle class. The CPA made the government oil-rich, and also promoted the liberal vision of private ownership. Pinaud argues that this made a new ‘aristocracy’ of oil-rich elites in Southern Sudan as those in government and its military were able to acquire vast amounts of this oil wealth for personal use.
2 Clemence Pinaud, ‘South Sudan: Civil War, Predation and the Making of a Military Aristocracy’, African Affairs 113:451 (2014): 192–211. For the first time an elite, governing class also had significant, personal interests in resources of labour, land, oil and timber. Craze has argued: ‘It cannot be emphasized enough that the enrichment of a dominant class of elite military leaders was also the result of the immiseration and displacement of Southern Sudanese civilians, and the hollowing out of many forms of communitarian organization’.
3 Joshua Craze, Jérôme Tubiana and Claudio Gramizzi, ‘A State of Disunity: Conflict Dynamics in Unity State, South Sudan, 2013–15’ HSBA Working Paper 42 (Small Arms Survey, 2016).The new Juba-based elite from communities around the Bilnyang invested much of their new petro-wealth in large herds of cattle that they purchased. In communities around the Bilnyang, cattle ownership was a way to convert their economic power into local, political power: cattle have long given political authority.
4 Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Clarendon Press, 1961); Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996). Through their herds and the ability to gift cattle, this new elite could make themselves powerful in local marriage arrangements and in local political contests. These herds followed existing grazing patterns and moved through annual migratory routes alongside family herds. Yet, they increased the cattle in the
toc and the land needed for grazing. Kiir himself and his commanders from Gogrial used their oil money to buy thousands of cattle that were, at that time, kept in the grazing lands of Gogrial. Having brought Matip into government, his herds and those of his commanders were also kept to the east and north of the Bilnyang in Unity State.
These large, individually owned herds sat alongside and challenged previous norms of cattle ownership in which herds were owned by the family and across the generations. It was a revolution in control of property. In contrast to family cattle camps, these camps were guarded by individually selected titweng (armed cattle guards) known for their abilities and for their loyalty to the owner. They were paid for their service and were armed by their employer. They were private defence forces that could be bought with money. They broke away from the clan-based structure of cattle camps and shifted the governance of cattle to a more individualised, marketised system. Youth’s power because of military might was elevated and without the necessary restraint of chiefs. This is discussed further in later chapters.
As cattle were key for peace-making, via compensation and ritual sacrifice, changes in cattle ownership brought new questions about peace. Through cattle, elites also gained new powers to make peace and avoid spiritual consequences of slaying as their large herds meant that compensation could easily be paid and peace easily demanded. Chiefs have argued that compensation from large herds becomes meaningless as its payment carries no pain for the slayer,
5 Naomi Pendle, ‘“The Dead are Just to Drink From”: Recycling Ideas of Revenge among the Western Dinka, South Sudan’, Africa 88:1 (2018): 99–121. who can still meet the legal demands. It was not that elites themselves implemented violence, but it allowed them to expect aggressive behaviour of their herding youth to defend or expand their herds. Because of their excess cattle ownership, compensation was almost costless and elites or those from large camps effectively gained impunity.
At the same time, the purchase of cattle kept this part of the elites’ wealth within familiar registers of authority. Therefore, as much as purchased cattle were used by elites to assert authority, these cattle also brought them within the moral, legal and spiritual demands associated with cattle. Chiefs and divine authorities used elites’ visible cattle ownership to insist that they supported their families and upheld obligations to pay compensation that arose in the chiefs’ courts. Through their care of the elites’ cattle, local leaders had a small hook to insist that even the highest government elites were still subject to the moral boundaries of their home communities.
A new demand for unending wars
The economically liberal regime of the CPA also brought changes to land, labour, resource and property rights that incentivised politico-economic elites to try to forge static, bounded territorial communities including through the making of unending wars and the impossibilities of peace.
6 David K. Deng, ‘“Land Belongs to the Community”: Demystifying the “Global Land Grab” in Southern Sudan’, LDPI Working Paper no. 4 (Land Deal Politics Initiative, 2011); Cherry Leonardi, Leben Moro, Martina Santschi and Deborah Isser, Local Justice in South Sudan (Rift Valley Institute, 2010); Nassem Bagayoko, ‘Introduction: Hybrid Security Governance in Africa’, IDS Bulletin 43:4 (2012): 1–13. Land is a major point in which authorities and citizens engage, and therefore land regimes have been important in constituting the political order.
7 Catherine Boone, ‘Land Regimes and the Structure of Politics: Patterns of Land-related Conflict’, Africa 83:1 (2013): 188–203. Condominium structures in Southern Sudan had long before tried to create rural districts that were comprised of homogenous ethnic or section groups that formed around imaginaries of shared kinship. As elsewhere in Africa, this often overwrote ‘pre-existing cultural diversity with new, officially imposed ethnic labels’.
8 Catherine Boone, ‘Sons of the Soil Conflict in Africa: Institutional Determinants of Ethnic Conflict Over Land’, World Development 96 (2017): 276–293, page 278. Over time, states have hardened their recognition of ethnic identities.
9 Sara Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).As the Southern Sudan government established itself in accordance with the CPA, in 2009 the Land Act was published. Land, according to the Act, included public, community and private land. The definition of community was vague, with communities being constructed around ideas of ethnicity, residence or interest. Globally, privatisation and the transferability of title was the ‘gold standard’ of good, liberal land reform for actors like the World Bank.
10 Catherine Boone, ‘Property and Constitutional Order: Land Tenure Reform and the Future of the African State’, African Affairs 106:425 (2007): 557–586. Yet, by the 2000s, neo-traditional African leaders, often in response to the inequities of privatisation, were advocating for communal rights.
11 Ibid. But communal land rights leave ambiguities over what kind of community has rights, how these rights should be enforced and what histories are salient.
12 Ibid., page 571. The CPA and subsequent land laws involved a formal recognition of neo-customary land tenure that evoke these Condominium-created ideas of territorial identity and sectional land ownership. At the same time, the meaning of these neo-customary rights changed and became more ambiguous as they were overlayed with new ideas about exclusive ownership. Sectional identities were entrenched as government recognised and enforced political statuses through land regimes. These neo-customary land tenure regimes did not reflect but did instead ‘produce and sustain ethnicity’,
13 Catherine Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa: Land Rights and the Structure of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2014), page 93. and made salient the state-recognised groupings.
14 Boone, ‘Sons of the Soil Conflict in Africa’, page 281. These regimes empowered local communities, via state-backed communal leaders, whose authority is rooted in kinship and ancestral custom. At the same time, the neo-customary was not the only land regime, with provisions in the land reforms for more government and private ownership. In practice, the new land regimes created new ambiguities over who had customary rights and what land tenure regimes applied.
In practice, the ambiguities over land empowered the state and local governments. While there were provisions for elections, in almost all of Southern Sudan throughout the post-CPA era, county commissioners and state governors were directly appointed by the national leadership. They were military as well as political figures. With land rights being ambiguous, it was this local military leadership who determined who had rights and who was recognised. The roles of state governor and county commissioner were powerful and crucial as the commissioner and governor de facto had the power to oversee which communities could claim which land.
These contestations were not just about access to wealth. Property relations over land and natural resources, as well as labour, produce relationships between individuals, communities and states.
15 Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa; Boone, ‘Property and Constitutional Order’. Boone argues that rural property regimes constitute the political order in that they ‘create relationships of political dependency and authority, define lines of social cooperation and cleavage, and segment territory into political jurisdictions’.
16 Boone, Property and Political Order in Africa, page 3. Communities feared governor appointments that could deprive them of access to land and resources, as well as this being indicative of their broader alienation from the state.
Neo-customary land claims also helped the remaking of the security arena. A large dynamic of the post-CPA context was the remaking of military power and, over the coming two decades, the withering of the power of the SPLA. The post-CPA Juba government increasingly built security forces that were loyal to the regime, as opposed to being an independent army. Salva Kiir supported members of his cadre to recruit new forces including forces recruited from specific geographic areas. Forces such as the Mathiang Anyoor are discussed in later chapters, such as Chapter 11. Neo-customary land regimes created large constituencies of beneficiaries to mobilise for political support.
17 Boone, ‘Sons of the Soil Conflict in Africa’, page 281. These constituencies, and their armed youth, could be used for support at the centre and in rural contestations.
Therefore, the Southern Sudanese leadership were claiming land and loyal military labour through shared sectional identities. Violence has always been a way to forge identities, and this has been demonstrated by the divisive wars of the 1990s and 2000s. Encouraging violations of norms of war and restraint was a way for leaders to encourage unending wars and deep divisions between communities, not only creating identities, but making them more bounded, static and long-lasting. This is discussed further in subsequent chapters.