The way the war was fought evoked logics that made it unending. Combatants on either side implemented and experienced extreme levels of lethal force and some people were even subjected to extra-lethal killings.
1 By ‘extra-lethal’ killings I mean physical violence against a person’s body that goes beyond what is necessary to cause death. It is talking about acts such as crucifixion and bodily mutilation that result in death. It was not just the speed and scale of lethal violence that was shocking, but also the patterns of violence that were employed. Homes were burnt, children were killed, and thousands of people were chased into the swamps, followed by the pounding, lethal blasts of the gun. Pro-government fighters not only killed children but also mutilated their bodies as the means of slaying these infants.
2 African Union Commission of Inquiry, Final Report.Revenge clearly did not explain all motivations and sometimes it was a thin veil over personal ambitions. Yet, the need to justify the violence and the discussions of the dead highlight the continued resonance of revenge. For example, in 2018, during the mobilisation of the
gojam in Koch, the government county commissioner used the history of the prophets to justify the moral and spiritual obligation of the youth to fight and seek revenge against the entire Dok community of Ler. In his speeches to mobilise people to attack, he recited histories of Kolang Ket (discussed in this book’s opening chapters) whose death in 1925 was perpetrated by a Nuer government official from Ler near the port of Adok. In 2018, the commissioner asked the
gojam to attack IO areas around Ler as a way to take revenge for Kolang’s death nearly a century before.
3 Observation and subsequent conversations among the Jagei, April and May 2018. Although this was an attack in the national war between the government and SPLA-IO, for those fighting it was best justified as a feud amid prophetic histories. At the same time, for those who fought, their superior weaponry allowed them to return with significant loots of cattle and property.