It was August 2013. As usual, I walked to the market in the early morning to sit inside one of the tea huts and drink a strong morning coffee. That morning the tea huts were fuller and conversation was more animated. The evening before, the commissioner had literally been chased out of Mayendit County by the youth. Many young men, including close followers of Nyachol, had finally had enough of the commissioner’s disclosure of their movements and planned raids to the Tonj East Commissioner. They hoped for a commissioner to help their internal security and not to side with the perceived enemy. The previous evening they had gone to the county headquarters and demanded that the commissioner leave. At gunpoint they had physically chased him the length of the night’s walk from the county headquarters to the northern border of the county. The commissioner had been a personal friend of the then Governor Taban Deng and had his support. Yet this friendship offered him no protection in this moment of local anger.
Nyachol supported the armed removal of the commissioner. She also supported raids against those in Tonj East. Her vision of peace was a vision that included violence against parts of the hakuma that she perceived as in violation of moral and spiritual norms. The commissioner rejected her authority and she rejected his vision of a hakuma that promoted peace through intra-government talks across Nuer-Dinka lines.
A few weeks later a new, locally popular, commissioner was appointed. Despite the impossibility of accessing his county by car at that time of the year, he opted to walk from Bentiu to his county to take on his new posting immediately. I was staying in Rubkuany, one of the most northerly villages in Mayendit. It would be here that he was officially welcomed into the county. The market streets were lined with people celebrating the coming of the new commissioner. He had been a commander in the area in the 1990s and was trusted for his experience in security provision and for his willingness to prioritise local security. The evening after his arrival he welcomed me to join him for dinner. It was dark but we found our way to his makeshift camp on the edge of the village. He sat on a white plastic chair at the end of a long table. His supporters sat around feasting on a bull that had been slaughtered earlier that day. People came up in an almost constant flow to greet him and congratulate him. We talked a little as he had spent some time since the CPA learning English in Uganda, and he was eager to practise. He encouraged me to drink soda and to eat the feast. The next morning, at dawn, they would walk to visit Nyachol. I was invited to join them. He had prioritised seeing Nyachol before he even completed the journey to the county headquarters.
The next morning, I was quickly reminded that, unlike me, the new commissioner had decades of experience of marching through the sticky, muddy soils of the clay flood plains. His soldiers also seemed well-practised in the art. I was not a soldier and quickly fell to the back of the large movement of people and soldiers towards Nyachol. Every soldier who overtook me smiled with a knowing but welcoming smile of greeting.
By the time I reached Nyachol’s luak, the commissioner was already inside with her and deep in conversation. Outside, the commissioner’s soldiers were celebrating with the youth that followed Nyachol. The drum was beating. Four large bulls were tethered to posts in the midst of the crowd. They were gifts to Nyachol from the new commissioner. Nyachol had already pledged to sacrifice one of her bulls to MAANI to bless the commissioner’s appointment. The new era of local government promised a different relationship with Nyachol, yet it did not lessen Nyachol’s attempts to re-create nueer or to remake the dangers of nueer even for government officials.