As described at the end of Chapter 5, the CPA and subsequent laws changed rights over land and labour, cementing neo-customary access to these resources through community membership. For members of the hakuma to mobilise rights to land and labour for themselves they both needed communities to be increasingly bounded and static, and also for them to themselves be clear members of these communities.
By 2005, the social autochthony of those in the hakuma was not necessarily a given. Leaders of SPLA born in Warrap State had gained their leadership experience at a spatial and social distance from their home communities. They built their power through service in national armies or rebel armies that often involved them fighting wars and commanding forces far from their homelands. Some also received education in schools, universities and military academies around Sudan and the world. The lack of schools that could offer a higher level of education in Warrap State throughout most of the twentieth century meant that distance from rural or home areas was a necessary pre-condition of higher levels of school education and thus access to the hakuma. From the 1980s and the start of the SPLA, many leaders from Warrap State fought or commanded in the state and surrounding areas. Yet, they still were often perceived as much as part of the hakuma as the home communities.
Douglas has argued that, when governments of nations rely on centralising authority, this involves confronting powerful autonomous lineages and their claims over land. Governments have attacked cults of the dead to undermine the lineage system.
1 Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford University Press: 2004). However, in South Sudan in the post-CPA and Land Act context, members of the
hakuma in their home areas have made claims over land by asserting lineages, using cattle to establish authority, and keeping alive the ancestors who allow such claims. Therefore, from 2005, these
hakuma leaders needed to reassert their membership of these communities to access land and labour.
In their home areas, Southern Sudanese in the
hakuma have competed with each other over land through autochthonous claims. In Warrap State, a few
hakuma gazetted large farms through claims of autochthony. Yet, for most in Warrap State, both in the
hakuma and not in the
hakuma, claims over livestock grazing rights have been more politically prominent.
The Land Act’s ideas of discrete ownership and discrete boundaries around land contested previous ideas of land ownership and usage,
2 Zoe Cormack, ‘Borders are Galaxies: Interpreting Contestations over Local Administrative Boundaries in South Sudan’, Africa 86:3 (2016), 504–527. and many people in the
hakuma from Warrap State invested their new government- and oil-produced wealth in cattle that they kept in the grazing lands of Warrap State. Therefore, they needed to establish their rights to graze, often through claims of autochthony. New notions of exclusive land rights created uncertainties about whether certain communities had the right to exclude others from the grazing land, despite the lack of precedent for such exclusion. In Greater Gogrial, for example, access for those in Gogrial West County to one of the largest
toc (grazing) areas
involved them moving through Gogrial East County. This allowed those in Gogrial East to claim exclusive rights to the
toc and attempt to control or prevent access. People were explicit that state borders and new land rights had brought conflict. ‘We had been living in harmony all those years, without borders’.
3 Elder and retired military leader, 20 April 2018, Ajiep. Fluidity of movement and a lack of borders had not only been important for annual grazing but also for safety.
Furthermore, after the CPA, the state boundaries across Southern Sudan were re-arranged and divided. Around the time of the 2005 CPA, the country was re-divided into ten states and multiple counties within each of these states. The east of the Bilnyang and connected rivers fell into Unity State and the west fell into Warrap State. Former districts were sub-divided into counties. For example, in the counties around the Bilnyang, Gogrial West County was separated from Gogrial East County (Warrap State), and Koch, Leer and Mayendit counties were separated (Unity State). Through notions of communal land tenure, administrative boundaries could also be claimed as demarcating land rights. Therefore, the politics of administration quickly became entangled with the politics of land.
In addition to the entrenched salience of autochthony, the ambiguity of the CPA and Land Act also made military might more salient. The ambiguous nature of the CPA and Land Act, such as what constituted a ‘community’, made these legal changes unclear, and left space for these uncertainties to primarily be resolved through military might. Scholarship has highlighted that many of these struggles were between those who claimed rights through autochthony and those who claimed rights through national citizenship and the new territorial identity of Southern Sudan. National legislation was ambiguous, and this ambiguity provided an opportunity for those in the
hakuma to exploit and grab land.
4 Cherry Leonardi, Leben Moro, Martina Santschi and Deborah Isser, Local Justice in South Sudan (Rift Valley Institute, 2010). Instead, in Warrap State, competing autochthonous claims have often resulted in armed conflict as the different parties assert their claims.
People in the
hakuma also demanded labour. This labour was partly for private enterprises such as their farms and for care of their large herds. It also became increasingly clear that power in Juba would be best secured through armed forces that were loyal to individual commanders and not governed through the SPLA structures. On taking the leadership of the SPLM/A, Kiir had to tackle the reality that the SPLA hierarchies had been shaped by Garang through the 1980s and 1990s to support the security of Garang’s leadership. Garang had developed a loyal cadre of educated, militarily astute leaders who now dominated the higher echelons of the SPLM/A. These ‘Garang boys’ had supported Kiir’s leadership selection. Their choice was encouraged by the need for a quick appointment at a time when the CPA looked fragile. Kiir’s long-term leadership required him to reshape the power within the SPLA and challenge the assumption that the ‘Garang boys’ would remain ‘king-makers’. In the short-term, this was achieved through the overnight absorption of the South Sudan Defence Force (SSDF) into the SPLA in the 2006 Juba Declaration. However, this left Kiir reliant on the support of its leader, Paulino Matip. Therefore, for Kiir and other leaders in the
hakuma, there was an appetite to develop a new cadre of strong, loyal, military forces. From 2012, commanders from Bahr el Ghazal started recruiting, sometimes forcefully, forces from their home communities.
5 Luka Biong Deng Kuol, ‘Dinka Youth in Civil War: Between Cattle, Community and Government’, in ‘Informal Armies: Community Defence Groups in South Sudan’s Civil War’ (Saferworld, 2017); Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok, Monetized Livelihoods and Militarized Labour in South Sudan’s Borderlands (Rift Valley Institute, 2019); Naomi Pendle, ‘“They Are Now Community Police”: Negotiating the Boundaries and Nature of the Government in South Sudan through the Identity of Militarised Cattle-Keepers’, International Journal of Minority and Group Rights 22:3 (2015): 410–434. Chiefs sometimes resisted attempts to recruit the most able
titweng (armed cattle guards), but home communities repeatedly proved a good source of more obedient militarised labour.
6 Ibid. Government figures have often drawn on ideas of autochthony, and have claimed common interest with other ‘sons of the soil’, in order to make demands over this militarised labour.