Thirdly, the new
hakuma also needed to struggle to construct their distinctiveness in their home communities to support their claims of power and impunity. As Sahlins has repeatedly argued, native kings have to struggle to ‘assume the identity and sovereignty of exalted kings from elsewhere’ to show their distinction from those they rule.
1 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 5. Without such distinction, these ‘kings’ cannot claim to be different from those they govern, and therefore have no authority to rule over them. More than this, the histories of
hakuma in these areas, as this book narrates, has meant that the
hakuma is seen as god-like in that previous
hakuma have repeatedly claimed the ability to kill with impunity. Making oneself distinct and foreign is not easy, and it is even harder when claims over labour and land demand sameness, not distinction. To achieve claims over land and labour, the
hakuma needed to be able to make seemingly arbitrary requests beyond local expectations while also gaining voluntary support from people of their homes based on their own autochthony and ‘sameness’. Members of the
hakuma’s engagement with local norms and claims of autochthony threatened to entangle them with registers of accountability. Members of the
hakuma used various economic and social resources to establish their distinction and authority.
2 Jon Abbink and Tijo Salverda, The Anthropology of Elites: Power, Culture, and the Complexities of Distinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Chris Shore and Stephen Nugent, Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives (Routledge, 2002). A key way autochthonous
hakuma have sought to do this is through their assertion of control over peace and war, and the patterns of violence that are acceptable in war, even when they were at a spatial distance in Juba. The rest of the chapter focuses on conflicts in Gogrial to provide an example of how these contestations and ambiguities caused deadly violent conflict, and how ideas of a quasi-divine
hakuma were embedded in these contestations.