Chapter 10
Prophetic Proliferations: Making Peace in Unity State, 2005–2013
If the lack of peace was due to moral impurity, peace-making authority could be established through the power to purify. The post-Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) period saw a proliferation of Nuer prophets in Unity State who offered purity and peace. These prophets remade cultural archives, evoking memories that connected priests to prophets, but also introducing a priestly role for the prophets. This creative remaking of the cultural archive was a creative refusal against the hakuma project that claim spiritual pollution was no longer a concern. As the hakuma was akin to the divine in that it claimed impunity for their own arbitrary violence, prophets asserted their own divine authority as a way to push back against the hakuma. It was divine authorities who demonstrated the main confidence and ability to try to restrain the hakuma, and they gained popular support, especially among the armed youth, for their willingness to confront hakuma power.
This chapter discusses other prophets but focuses on Nyachol – a new Nuer prophetess of MAANI. The chapter describes her seizure by MAANI, her struggles to gain recognition, her popularity with the youth of Mayendit and Ler Counties (Unity State), and her growing resistance to the hakuma of the day including through creatively remaking culture to refuse the logics of the hakuma and the persistence of the feud. Her rejection of the hakuma was selective; she did not oppose the hakuma in itself but its arbitrary violence. As discussed in Chapter 12, she still used the government-shaped customary law, and she also supported formal schooling and some politicians, such as the leader of the SPLA-IO and certain commissioners. At the same time, she was herself violent in seemingly arbitrary ways. She sanctioned armed resistance to the hakuma.
Nyachol’s authority to make peace and bring purity was central to her building of authority among the youth and over the chiefs. As Hutchinson and I have previously highlighted, her vision of peace against the neighbouring Dinka communities was ‘hot’ and demanded violent revenge.
1 Sharon Hutchinson and Naomi Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy: Nuer Struggles with Uncertainty in South Sudan’, American Ethnologist 42:3 (2015): 415–30. Yet, her vision of a ‘cool’ peace among the Nuer was just as important. She re-created a priestly power for the prophets in order to re-establish the spiritual consequences of armed conflict and provide quasi-judicial punitive measures through reasserting the realities of
nueer (spiritual pollution), including after killing. She could detect
nueer on people and warned of its deadly consequences. She then offered to provide solutions to these deadly dilemmas including through judicial accountability for killing. Nyachol also actively sought to make the
government subject to
nueer and, therefore, capable of being limited and purified by divine authorities. Nyachol insisted that Nuer government officials still faced
nueer after killing even if the killing was part of their government duty; the
hakuma was not beyond moral laws, nor was it immune from the consequences of arbitrary violence. She asserted that all actions of the
hakuma by Nuer officials still fell within these moral spheres and limits.
***
It was early 2013. The night before we had stayed in the iron-sheet-surrounded commissioner’s compound in Mayendit (an administrative headquarters in Unity State). We had slept in tents in front of the soldiers’ tukals. Behind were a couple of small latrines that doubled as showers. At the entrance to the compound sat various broken-down cars to supply parts to the remaining moving vehicles. Among them sat one Land Cruiser now covered in bullet holes. This Land Cruiser had not yet been harvested for its parts as its ownership remained politically contested. The Land Cruiser had belonged to the commissioner of Rumbek North (Lakes State). There had been tensions between Rumbek North and Mayendit Countries over the boundaries of their counties and over episodes of lethal cattle raiding. In 2012, UNMISS had decided to try to organise peace talks between the two commissioners. However, UNMISS apparently had failed to warn the Mayendit County Commissioner of their efforts and so escorted the Rumbek North Commissioner to Mayendit without an invitation from their host. Their unexpected appearance was immediately tense.
After initial hesitation, the Mayendit Commissioner invited the Rumbek North Commissioner into his office to talk. The bodyguards of the two commissioners remained outside. They were both nervous at their proximity; they and their brothers had recently been involved in violent conflict against each other. There had been no attempt at judicial peace or reconciliation; a feud remained between them and both sides were intensely aware that the other had an obligation to revenge against them.
2 Conversations in Mayendit County and Rumbek North County, April 2013. As the commissioners spoke inside, fighting started outside between the bodyguards. As would happen in 2016 in the Presidential Palace in Juba, the heavily armed nature of the bodyguards meant that fatalities were fast and dramatic. The Rumbek North Commissioner himself ran out to help and was nearly shot. He was only able to return safely to Rumbek North in the escorted car of the Mayendit Commissioner. A year later, the Rumbek North Commissioner was still demanding his Land Cruiser back. The Mayendit Commissioner neither refused nor delivered it. In early 2013, the Land Cruiser sat there as a quiet witness to the continued violence of life in the post-CPA South Sudan.
Having spent one night on the Mayendit Commissioner’s compound, that next morning we headed north along the red murram road that traced a thin line over the swamps.
3 Jan Bachmann, Naomi Pendle and Leben Moro, ‘The Longue Durée of Short-lived Infrastructure – Roads and State Authority in South Sudan’, Geoforum 133 (2022). After another hour’s driving, we finally turned off the murram road at the small market across the road from the MiirNyal football pitch and a broken-down lorry. The road then travelled to the left, passing the
payam’s grass-fenced compound and circles of
tukals. Vague tyre marks showed a route on into the village, past thin rows of trees that barely concealed the sweeping grasslands beyond. An older man gave us directions and pointed further on to beyond the edge of the village and into those grasslands of the
toc of the Bilnyang where the cows were feasting. In the dry months, from October until April, the swampy lands in this western part of Mayendit dry out until the ground is black, baked, hard clay. The earth cracks as it dries, etching across the ground elaborate, endless patterns. Our car increasingly struggled as we passed over the sun-dried swamp bed. Littered with tufts of grass, the wheels repeatedly got stuck between these small obstacles and needed the engine’s strength to move over them.
As the bumping car chugged to less than the speed of a walk, three boys caught up with the pace of the bouncing vehicle. Their hands were a sticky orange from the palm fruits they were cutting up with spearheads. They continued to chew as they approached us. The palm fruits are their morning feast and a staple diet for many children in the long, dry, hungry season. They did not introduce themselves explicitly as envoys of the prophetess but came to us with a clear message. They promised to lead us to near the prophetess’s luak. They made it clear that the car could not come near the luak and that when they instructed us, we must leave the car and get out to walk. We agreed.
The positioning of Nyachol’s
luak was an explicit act of resistance to the violence of the
hakuma. The
luak sat conspicuously on the western edge of the permanent settlements of Mayendit County (and the eastern edge of the Bilnyang and connected rivers and swamps). This village (Thor) had been raided and burnt during a 2010 raid by youths from Greater Tonj, across the
toc of these rivers. They had killed children and women, re-creating Thor as a dangerous place to live and prompting total displacement from the village. The youth that carried out these attacks were not formally part of the Southern Sudan government, but they were understood by people in Mayendit as
hakuma in a broad sense.
4 Interviews in Dablual and Mirmir, 2013. In the 1980s and 1990s, the cattle keeping youth of Warrap State had been absorbed into the sphere of the
hakuma through their use as local defence forces.
5 Luka Biong Deng Kuol, ‘Dinka Youth in Civil War: Between Cattle, Community and Government’, in Victoria Brereton (ed.), ‘Informal Armies: Community Defence Groups in South Sudan’s Civil War’ (Saferworld, 2017); Nicki Kindersley and Joseph Diing Majok, Monetized Livelihoods and Militarized Labour in South Sudan’s Borderlands (Rift Valley Institute, 2019); Naomi Pendle, ‘“They Are Now Community Police”: Negotiating the Boundaries and Nature of the Government in South Sudan through the Identity of Militarised Cattle-Keepers’. International Journal of Minority and Group Rights 22:3 (2015): 410–434. While their subordination to the
hakuma was contested,
6 Pendle, ‘“They Are Now Community Police”’. they were often still seen as part of the sphere of the
hakuma. Plus, as senior government members were from the region, people in Mayendit assumed that the attack came with the consent of people in the
hakuma. At the same time, people in Mayendit (Unity State) were not only fearful of the hakuma in Warrap State; they also increasingly feared their own hakuma. At a national level, the leaders of Warrap and Unity State were at peace and ruling together in Juba. Local government officials in Unity State were appointed by the governor who was appointed by the national president. Therefore, local government officials primarily kept their job through the will of the Juba leadership and not the community. The commissioner of the time had returned cattle to Warrap State after a raid by the Mayendit youth, and people in Mayendit feared this was indicative of him not supporting their needs and security.
After the attack in 2010, no one remained living in Thor. Despite local government promises that it was safe, no-one returned until 2012. When Nyachol built her
luak in Thor, she was one of the first to return. By positioning her
luak on the edge of Thor, Nyachol claimed she was contesting the construction of Thor as a place of danger by the
hakuma. She wanted to re-create it as a place of safety and a place that was made safe by the power of her divinity known as MAANI. Nyachol described how she had first been seized by MAANI after the government’s attack on Thor. This timing also demonstrated to people that MAANI’s coming to Nyachol was to allow her to push back against the violence of the
hakuma.
7 Interviews in Dablual and Mirmir, 2013.As instructed by our young escorts, we parked our large, white 4x4 vehicle a hundred metres away from Nyachol’s luak. The car was parked adjacent to a pile of other objects that appeared to be the disallowed possessions of other visitors to the prophetess. There were at least a dozen AK47s among items in the pile, as well as an assortment of clothes laid out on top of the spiky ends of the grass tufts. This was the invisible but explicit boundary of the space of the prophetess. Guns, cars and many clothes were excluded. She was creating a spatial boundary that omitted certain material objects and constructed a new materiality in proximity to her. She later described to me how manufactured clothes, items of technology and constructions of large roads were for her closely associated with the hakuma that she contested. She was creating a material space around herself in which these material goods were excluded.
Nyachol was creatively remaking culture to refuse materially the political vision of the hakuma. Within this constructed boundary of the luak, Nyachol was enacting a political vision that excluded the hakuma. The objects littered at a distance from her luak were symbolic of the broader powers of hakuma that were experienced by many in Mayendit for a century as predatory, violent and inherently uncertain. She offered a different political vision and a re-creation of an imagined, more certain time that could politically and materially exclude the hakuma. Nyachol was asserting that it was MAANI who could not tolerate these material objects of the hakuma. While this had not historically been part of the prophetic idiom, she was remaking culture as a way to politically contest the politics of the hakuma.
Nuer prophets seized by divinities in the post-CPA era, like the
baany e biith, were wrestling with their relationship to money, marketised politics and the new Juba elite. Politicians recognised the power of Nuer prophets, either because they shared their cosmological assumptions or because they saw the large numbers of armed youth that the prophets were capable of mobilising.
8 Interview with the Commissioner of Mayendit County, March 2013, Mayendit. Senior Nuer and Dinka politicians invited these prophets to Juba to champion their private interests, and they were often showered with monetary or expensive gifts. For example, a prophet in Panyijar had been given a Land Cruiser by President Kiir. The prophet had no money or skill to maintain it, so within a couple of weeks it became abandoned on the commissioner’s compound in Panyijar. Yet, the gift had been accepted. In contrast, Nyachol strictly separated herself from the money and power of the government. Nyachol was never offered a Land Cruiser but she did refuse to ride in a government Land Cruiser when offered by the commissioner.
At the same time, there were apparent contradictions in Nyachol’s boundaries with the
hakuma. She claimed authority based on continuity with the power of Kolang Ket. Her construction of isolation contrasted with memories of him. Kolang Ket’s authority had been intimately associated with his superior knowledge of the government through his travels to the north. Initially, before direct government violence against him, he also interacted peacefully with government. Nyaruac also ended up combining her powers with those of
hakuma by accepting the government chiefdom, as discussed in Chapter 2. There was clearly not a necessary opposition between the
hakuma and the prophets.
9 Douglas Johnson, Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Clarendon Press, 1994).Nyachol’s rejection of government was also contingent and not consistent. She praised Riek Machar, and mobilised support for him when he led the armed opposition. In later conversations, I asked the prophetess for permission to run a literacy programme in Thor. I had been teaching in the western Dinka, and formal education had become a default response to the situation. She agreed immediately and rebuked my surprise. She explained, ‘Thor used to have a school. It had a school before. It is not for me to stop the school. It will help rebuild Thor’. Schools and formal education were much newer than the
hakuma in the western Nuer, but they were still associated with the sphere of the
hakuma. She selectively interpreted history to allow her to accept them. In addition, she enforced the customary law and encouraged use of the chiefs’ courts. This was despite their association with
hakuma.
10 Naomi Pendle, ‘Politics, Prophets and Armed Mobilizations: Competition and Continuity over Registers of Authority in South Sudan’s Conflicts’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 14:1 (2020): 43–62.