In order to push-back against the hakuma, Nyachol relied on asserting her divinity. It was only with the divine power of MAANI that Nyachol would resist the hakuma. As the hakuma was god-like, divine power allowed her to be part of the cosmic politics and push back. To assert this divine authority, Nyachol evoked various cultural archives.
At the time of her seizure, Nyachol had initially become very ill. She had even attended a local clinic and had been warned that her sickness was going to leave her infertile. She was already married with children. The clinic could not heal the sickness and she became increasingly immobile, infirm and seemingly mad. It was only then that people started to recognise MAANI in her. They sacrificed a bull to MAANI and the illness waned. People started to accept that she had been seized by MAANI. This equation of illness with seizure draws on long cultural archives of the seizures of previous prophets.
Nyachol drew on and remade other expressions of religious orthodoxy in the cultural archive to claim authority. Early on after Nyachol’s claimed seizure by MAANI, she travelled from Mayendit to the luak of the late Kolang Ket and Nyaruac Kolang in Limpout (Koch County) to sacrifice multiple bulls at the luak of the former prophets of MAANI. While Nyaruac had died forty years earlier, her family continued to assert their authority as regulators of prophetic activity in these lands between the Nile and the Bilnyang River system. However, the family of Kolang Ket and Nyaruac Kolang refused to accept that Nyachol had been seized by MAANI and doubted her authority. They were especially sceptical as she only had a link by marriage to the clan of Kolang and Nyaruac. This family are still waiting for MAANI to seize another member of their family.
After Nyachol’s rejection by the family of Kolang Ket, she returned to Mayendit and to her home village of Thor. While she drew on claims of custom and continuity with Nyaruac, she was forced to challenge the assumption that divinities belonged to certain clans. In many ways, her seizure by MAANI, despite not being from Kolang’s clan, re-crafted a more inclusive or democratic vision of the divinity in that it was not limited to clan history. Instead, Nyachol championed a much wider vision of a Nuer identity, an identity that echoed a growing political resistance to the government of the day.