The protracted nature of the conflict, and Wunlit and the CPA’s failure to end violence, brought cosmological conundrums. Firstly, this continued violence needed to be understood. Secondly, if conflict and unsettlement were the new social order, there was a need to understand if there was still space for purity and peace.
During the war years, some people in the
hakuma had claimed that wars of the
hakuma did not produce spiritual pollution. This was part of a broader claim of
hakuma impunity. As Hutchinson has documented, Riek Machar had tried to persuade people that deaths cause by violence during these wars should not be understood as causing pollution or spiritual consequences. Hutchinson describes how, in effect, the SPLA leadership was arguing that a
koor kume (a government war) had no spiritual ramifications and did not cause pollution.
1 Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (University of California Press, 1996), page 108.The
hakuma’s claim of a lack of pollution from wartime killing was contested. One popular explanation for the post-2005 continuity of war and insecurity was the spiritual impurity. The explanation suggested that war had brought such intolerable levels of spiritual pollution (
nueer) as people from the community committed acts of violence that violated normal moral boundaries including killing brothers, children and women.
2 Interview with male elders and young men, Mayendit and Ler, August 2013; interviews with chiefs in Koch, April 2018. This was moral impurity that either was too large for priests to solve or that had not been solvable because of priests’ distance from the battlefield. The pollution was so extreme that it pervaded whole clans and communities.
Many people in Koch, including elders from the family of Kolang Ket, have suggested that this pervading spiritual contamination was forcing MAANI’s absence and the possibility of peace and purity. Nuer prophets often excluded from their
luak individuals who were polluted. Their own divinities cannot tolerate the pollution brought by this moral impurity, and they only allow people to spend time close to them and in their
luak when compensation has been paid and rituals of reconciliation completed. Therefore, divine authorities are set apart from pollution. In this interpretation of the ongoing, post-CPA violence, MAANI was excluded from coming to rescue people because of the pollution rife across the land. MAANI could not dwell in such a space of pollution. One solution would be to seek judicial peace through cattle compensation and rituals that could restore purity.
3 Interviews with chiefs in Koch, April 2018. This explanation clearly linked ongoing armed conflict to the preceding decades of war, and highlighted the need for justice that would allow purity.