Cormack’s research in Gogrial has highlighted how conflicts over local boundaries are rooted in the existence of different border paradigms and attempts to resolve them – often violently.
1 Cormack, ‘Borders are Galaxies’. Governments have repeatedly mapped administrative units onto Dinka territorial sections, but these linear borders did not correlate with existing understandings of land. Over the last hundred years, however, there has been a gradual intermeshing of the ideas of government with these indigenous logics of territory, which has often caused tensions.
2 Cormack, ‘Borders are Galaxies’. To continue to contest rights over land, in Greater Gogrial, the dead were kept alive. People from Gogrial continued to visit the eastern parts of the toc to carry out ritual sacrifices to the dead who had been buried there decades before. At times it was so dangerous that only a few heavily armed young men would do this. However, it was through these ancestors that people claimed a connection to the soil and the rights over the land. The connection to the ancestors allowed local elders to assert control over the land. This was not always in contestation against the elites. Elites also sought to draw on these familial claims to lands for private herds and farms.
People also evoked and creatively remade notions of clan-based powers. A woman at a peace meeting described how, ‘[t]here is a bird called Agumut, which comes and sits on the peak of a house. It says this farm was for the forefathers of my clan. The person living there must relocate or face the danger of a curse’.
3 Woman leader from Kuac, speech Ajiep Peace Conference, 21 April 2018. Again, the continued power of ancestral claims and associated divine powers over land were evoked to counter other notions of property ownership.
However, this woman drew no distinction between claims based on the cultural archive and the powers of the
hakuma to claim land. During the 1980s and 1990s, the SPLA occupied various villages in Gogrial. Many soldiers who were stationed there died. For the woman, this gave the SPLA and the
hakuma the ability to claim this land as their ancestral land.
4 Ibid. Government claims over land were reinterpreted not as arising from peace agreements written in Kenya and laws written in Juba but instead, they were recaptured as consistent with property rights that gave social power to the dead.
5 Cherry Leonardi, ‘Paying “Buckets of Blood” for the Land: Moral Debates over Economy, War and State in Southern Sudan’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 49:2 (2011): 215–240.