Chapter 12
Prophets Making Peace: Peace-making in Unity State, post-2013
This chapter describes how the armed conflicts in Unity State from 2013 to 2022 repeatedly placed the Nuer prophets in competition with the hakuma and the unrestrained, supranatural power of the gun. Repeatedly the militarised power of the hakuma ‘silenced’ other authorities, including the prophets. Some prophets failed to protect lives, cattle and property during government offensives. In a system of divine authority reliant on empirically observed displays of power, these military defeats weakened prophets. Plus, in areas of armed opposition control, the emergence of the gojam (armed youth associated with the SPLA-IO) brought new levels of gun ownership and new pluralities of divine powers to kill with impunity. Additionally, the wars challenged the significance of nueer and the prophetic power to find solution.
At the same time, the silencing of the prophets was understood in cosmic terms and was repeatedly temporary. Even during these years of brutal armed conflict, the prophets still actively sought to create and enforce limits on hakuma violence, demanding moral restraint and a lack of impunity. Accounts of when prophetic power did challenge the hakuma’s brute force were lauded and told for reassurance that the hakuma’s power could be bounded. Prophetic defeat was still understood in cosmic terms; the lack of power of the prophets was seen as the result of pollution and cosmic confusions, and not simply as their subordination to the power of the hakuma.
This chapter provides an account of the ‘silencing’ of the prophets by the wars of the hakuma, and the resilience of the prophetic power despite this silencing. Prophets restored their authority even after rejection, and new divinities seized prophets. Repeatedly prophetic power is built to demand a limit to the violence of the hakuma, to insist on the continued existence of nueer and demand peace. Prophets are able to do this through their divine power to kill through the curse. Even those empowered by the gun are not empowered to commit arbitrary violence with impunity; they are still subject to the dangers of nueer. Soldiers still feared nueer (spiritual impurity), drinking bitter water from the cases of spent shells when the bitter bile of an ox was absent. Prophetic authority comes through limiting the plurality of god-like power by limiting the impunity of the gun. When figures in the hakuma are seen as partisan, using government power to arbitrarily rain favour on their own clans and communities, prophets repeatedly gain authority through their ability to be more set apart. The chapter draws on examples from the Prophetess Nyachol and Prophet Gatluak. It also describes the wartime seizure of Geng Mut Liah Wal by TILING, a divinity whose seizure made Geng a powerful guan kuoth (prophet). These prophets all resided among communities to the east of the Bilnyang, in central Unity State.