The new autochthonous Southern Sudan government leadership brought a new relationship for the
baany e biith to the cosmic politics of Gogrial. As chiefs of Gogrial had often been from clans of
baany e biith and associated with their power, when the government forced chiefs to send children to school, they sent the sons of the
baany e biith. Many educated sons went on to fight in the Anya-Nya forces and the SPLA, and now were part of the
hakuma, claiming the divine-like power of the state over Southern Sudan. Many of the
hakuma from Warrap were also relationally connected to powerful
baany e biith. Some figures who entered the government offices in Juba remained mindful of their long knowledge of the potential powers of the
baany e biith. As the new Southern government brought new rivalries in the South, politicians called on
baany e biith to bless them to gain or keep positions of power. Politicians gave
baany e biith money and gifts in advance, and then further gifts and money when power was retained. They sometimes flew them to Juba and elaborately hosted them there.
1 Interview with man in Gogrial, June 2018, in Dinka.In many ways, the ability of this new elite class to draw on the power of the baany e biith built on the inclusive, not exclusive, nature of the institution. Writing in the 1950s, Lienhardt wrote:
The masters of the fishing-spear do represent an inclusiveness in the Dinka political system, in that anyone who succeeds in attaching himself to one of them makes himself sure of help through prayers and invocations. Individual strangers, therefore, may seek out masters of the fishing-spear if they want protection, and ‘praise their heads’ with gifts and songs.
2 Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience; Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), page 211.People in Gogrial still describe more powerful bany e bith experiences as coming from those who are far away, as if the social distance creates power. Therefore, even if ‘strangers’, and even when government elites created themselves as an elite class of strangers, the powers of the baany e biith were still accessible to the elites.
In interviews in Gogrial East after the CPA, people described how the bany e bith clan of Paghol had become particularly associated with powers to secure jobs for government officials. They had historically had powers to help with protecting and finding cattle. Cattle are wealth. Government jobs are now also associated with wealth. So, the bany e bith powers had been remade to assert power in this new political economy. This reshaping of their limits of power overlapped with many people from Paghol having government jobs in Kuajok (the capital of Warrap State) and in Juba. This creative remaking of culture could be seen as subsuming the powers of the baany e biith to the powers of mammon. At the same time, it was also a creative refusal of a secular interpretation of a monetised political world.