Chapter 8
For Peace or Payment? The Baany e Biith and the Logics of Peace-making in Gogrial, 2005–2020
People in Gogrial resisted the authority of their
hakuma in various ways, from comedy to theological doctrine.
1 Naomi Pendle, ‘Commanders, Classrooms, Cows and Churches: Accountability and the Construction of a South Sudanese Elite’, in Wale Adebanwi and Roger Orock (eds), Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (University of Michigan Press 2021). This chapter focuses on how
baany e biith after 2005 wrestled with new challenges to maintain their authority and their control over peace despite new national configurations of power. The chapter opens by considering how the proliferation of peace meetings further pushed the power of the
baany e biith to being sacred and not divine, in that it was hedged in by custom and did not include actual power to decide.
De Waal has argued that, by this period, politics in South Sudan was marketised and monetised in that people traded political loyalty for money and demanded a share of the political market through rent-seeking rebellions. De Waal discusses this in relation to elite politics, but baany e biith in Gogrial also had new exposure to and opportunities to receive money in exchange for blessings, curses, loyalties and making peace. Senior politicians from Warrap State would seek to buy curses or blessings of powerful baany e biith with cash and expensive material items (such as cars). This has brought matters of money into the politics of the cosmos.
At the same time, people in Gogrial have not simply accepted these logics of power but have pushed back against the monetisation of politics and have contested the ability of money to secure legitimate power. Money and its exchange have different meanings in different contexts.
2 Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1976). In Gogrial, people have creatively refused monetised politics by remaking culture, and evoking and enforcing the limits of money in relation to divine authority. They have done this through contesting the power and legitimacy of those
baany e biith who receive reciprocal payments for their services, and suggesting that the purity of the priesthood has to be maintained through distance from reciprocal exchange.
A significant part of the baany e biith’s power, and means for them to uphold peace, has been the power to kill with impunity through cursing. Baany e biith have often threatened such killing against anyone who broke the peace in order to uphold peace. Yet, recently, certain baany e biith have been accused of accepting money to kill through their curse. They have been negatively named – baany e biith nak koc – ‘spear masters who kill people’. Many in Gogrial argue that these baany e biith now have polluted blood and that this, in turn, will prevent their own children’s survival. Ideas of pollution that baany e biith have used in the past to enforce peace and warn of the dangers of post-peace killing, have now been creatively reshaped to highlight how baany e biith are themselves hedged in by pollution when they are motivated by money to kill.
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On Sunday mornings when I was in the village in 2011, I would usually walk the twenty minutes to sit on the cut-branch benches that made up the rows of the church beneath the tree. A man would beat a drum rhythmically for hours to call people to church, and by mid-morning the choir would also join the music-making. There was never a priest at the church, but always a local, polygamous Catechist dressed in his white gown. Another regular attender at the church was a tall man, always dressed in striking red, who would sit on one of the frontmost benches. He was one of the most powerful baany e biith in the area. He clearly saw no contradictions between his continued priesthood, its cosmologies and his church attendance, and his ease in bridging such potential contradicts appeared to exude authority and confidence. Baany e biith remained part of everyday life in Gogrial. One evening when we tried to count the number of beny e bith in the payam where we were staying, that had a population of about 15,000, we could name a dozen baany e biith with varying different functions.
At the same time, as discussed in the previous chapter, the post-CPA period did bring new cosmological complexities, including new divine-like powers from the hakuma and new manifestations of MABIORDIT, and this brought dilemmas for baany e biith. The priestly role of the baany e biith in peace and purity was particularly challenged. After Wunlit, the role of the baany e biith appeared to be, potentially, only ceremonial and sacred, and not divine. They had to maintain the relevance of the institution of the bany e bith itself.
The post-CPA autochthonous hakuma also brought new dynamics to bany e bith contestations for power. This was partly as some baany e biith in Gogrial were now brothers and close relatives of some of the highest members of the hakuma in Kuajok and in Juba. It was unclear and contested how these connections to the militarily powerful would influence the hierarchies of power among baany e biith. While baany e biith claimed to build authority through spiritual powers that were discrete from militarised might, it was ambiguous whether close connections to military and monetary power would necessarily be immaterial.
The
baany e biith preserved their priestly authority both through interpretations of events that uphold the priesthood.
Baany e biith have interpretated rivalry with other cosmic powers, including the
hakuma, not as external rivalries but as rivalries between different
baany e biith,
3 As Mawson illustrated in the 1980s, while these priests are prolific, it is only a few baany e biith who rise to significant authority through rivalry: Andrew Mawson, ‘The Triumph of Life: Political Dispute and Religious Ceremonial Among the Agar Dinka of the Southern Sudan’ (PhD diss., Darwin College, 1989); Godfrey Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Clarendon Press, 1961). reserving the power of the institution. Plus, they have creatively remade culture to assert their authority over money and a monetised
hakuma. De Waal has claimed that, by the post-CPA era, politics in Southern Sudan had become marketised in that political loyalties had been commodified and could be traded for money.
4 Alex de Waal, ‘When Kleptocracy Becomes Insolvent: Brute Causes of the Civil War in South Sudan’, African Affairs 113:452 (2014): 347–369. Politics became about monetary profits and political alliances were realigned at the speed of a marketplace transaction. De Waal, citing Nyaba, traces this monetarised politics of the SPLA to the 1980s when food rations were sold with impunity.
5 Peter Adwok Nyaba, The Politics of Liberation in South Sudan: An Insider’s View (Fountain Publishers, 1997), page 55. After the CPA, increasing
hakuma leaders funded
bany e bith loyalties and interventions. It was as if the money of the
hakuma could also buy divine favour.
However, many people and
baany e biith in Greater Gogrial have pushed back against the purchase of divine power. Monetary exchanges always have a variety of values and symbolic meanings.
6 Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1976). Depending on how money is understood, its exchange can entrench kinship or hierarchy as much as market-style relations.
7 David Graeber, ‘On the Moral Grounds of Economic Relations: A Maussian Approach’ (Open Anthropology Cooperative Press, 2010). Graeber argues that there are various different moral logics that govern gifts and exchange, including of money. Exchange is based on equivalence and an expectation of reciprocity. There are also incidences when gifts are not reciprocal and instead are connected to social hierarchies and orders.
8 Ibid. In Gogrial, moral discourses have tried to limit the ability of money to be exchanged for divine favour, and instead interpret its legitimate exchange as a sign of reverence and recognition of cosmic hierarchies.
Baany e biith and the proliferation of local peace meetings
For over a decade after the CPA, conflict and peace proliferated in Gogrial, as discussed in the previous chapters. Chiefs were active in contesting government power throughout this period, both by refusing to attend the chiefs’ meetings and by giving critical speeches when they did attend. Yet, peace meetings amounted to ways for government to carefully re-craft peace-making norms and rituals, and to demand authority over peace and war, life and death.
A handful of baany e biith were consistently invited to the peace meetings in Gogrial. They were often given the chance to speak and to sacrifice a white bull. The government’s invitation of the baany e biith and their performance of symbolic acts included the baany e biith in those authorities recognised by government.
However, their inclusion can be seen as continuous with previous patterns in which their authority was dulled. Like at Wunlit, their role seemed scripted by the government. Their time to talk and sacrifice was dictated, and their sacrifice was prescribed. Their power over peace was again hedged in as sacred and symbolic, and was not allowed the discretion of being divine. As earlier noted, ‘[t]o be “sacred”, in contrast [to being divine], is to be set apart, hedged about by customs and taboos’.
9 David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (HAU Books, 2017), page 8. The sacred roles of the
baany e biith at peace meetings paused their decision-making power.
Historically the
baany e biith’s role in peace had partly been to make it meaningful by threatening deadly curses if peace was broken. They had divine power to enforce peace. Now it was often the government that threatened violence if peace was violated. As one chief explained, ‘anyone who restarts the conflict will now be killed by government’.
10 Chief from Twic, Ajiep Peace Conference, 20 April 2020. The lethal threat of the curse of the
baany e biith was not needed.
Furthermore, the quietening of the dead and the lack of compensation in the new logics of peace-making made peace morally ambiguous. Therefore, it was morally and spiritually unclear if
baany e biith should be sanctioning such peace. Those
baany e biith who did participate in these peace meetings made themselves vulnerable to moral critique. The moral ambiguity of peace meant that many
baany e biith were not involved in these peace meetings; they were either not invited or they refused to attend. Those who did attend were accused of being paid by the government to attend.
11 Interview, Gogrial East, 2018. They were seen as a group of
baany e biith who were relying on proximity to the
hakuma to remake their authority, and that this would bring access to wealth and power.