Another way that autochthonous members of the
hakuma have claimed to be both distinct and members is to assert their power over war and peace by remaking moral norms and patterns of violence in intra-Gogrial conflict. Juba-based politicians have solicited new patterns of violence that have incited larger-scale conflict. Government elites have often tried to remake norms of revenge in order to encourage conflict. If there was a grievance, leaders ‘used it to lure people into a hot fight’.
1 Elder and retired military leader, 20 April 2018, Ajiep. Some senior Juba-based politicians have encouraged the killing of women and children knowing that this will cause a feud that will be particularly hard to settle.
2 Naomi Pendle, ‘Competing Authorities and Norms of Restraint: Governing Community-embedded Armed Groups in South Sudan, International Interactions 47:5 (2021): 873–897. While men could be given a second chance at life through a posthumous marriage, women could not gain such a second chance through marriage and so their death could not be compensated in the same way, and their families’ hearts could not easily be cooled. These repertoires of violence had previously been used in Gogrial by the
hakuma and against enemies in government wars. By encouraging new patterns of violence by the local armed youth, politicians were reconfiguring moral and cosmological norms, and boundaries with the
hakuma.‘Today is very different because people fight as if there won’t be peace in future and the war is also fuelled by the unknown source. That is why we are accusing the government in this fight between Apuk and Aguok’.
3 Interview with Chief A, Ajiep Kuach (Gogrial), 20 April 2018. As conflicts ‘originated in urban lands’ and are entangled with politics, they are harder to solve.
4 Interview with Chief C, Ajiep Kuach (Gogrial), 20 April 2018. These new patterns of violence fostered an unending war. They also helped the autochthonous elite set themselves apart through conjuring displays of extreme violence.
This remaking of revenge and an endless war relied on keeping alive the social significance of the dead. Revenge was necessary as the dead had to be appeased by seeking justice for their deaths. As discussed in the previous chapter, the CPA document itself ignored the dead who had been killed by the government and gave the government immunity. However, in the realities of politics and conflict in the communities in Greater Gogrial, politicians were still inciting the importance of the dead in order to build exclusive communities. It was not that these politicians created these norms and cosmological understandings from nothing. Their intricate knowledge of local cosmologies and their politics allowed them to re-craft these norms to incite violence and create these longer-term dispositions to conflict.
At the same time, chiefs used the dead to contest the violence of government. For example, the three children of a chief from Gogrial East were violently killed in 2017 – a son in class seven, and three-year-old and five-year-old daughters. The children’s mother was from the opposing side in the conflict. After their deaths, the chief refused to bury their bodies as he wanted government officials to see what was happening. He pointed to tyre tracks near their bodies to suggest government figures had been involved. Only NGOs and government officials have cars in Gogrial.
In not burying his children, the chief intentionally evoked horror through the dead. It was not that these children were socially silenced. When I asked the chief if his son would have a posthumous wife, he said that he would when his age-mates married. Girls are not compensated after death with husbands. Yet, not burying their bodies was a horrifying normative violation that the chief could use to symbolise and memorialise the other horrifying violations of the conflict.