As described in Chapter 10, the post-CPA period saw the seizure of new Nuer prophets among the communities to the east of the Bilnyang. These prophets repeatedly drew on the cultural archive and evoked histories of previous Nuer prophets. By 2013, there were two significant, active prophets in central Unity State, in Ler and Mayendit Counties. Nyachol, who claimed to have been seized by MAANI, was residing in a large luak in the borderlands between Ler and Mayendit County. Another prophet – Gatluak Gatkuoth – was residing near Ler. Notably, there was still no prophet in Koch and no prophet of MAANI recognised by people in Koch. MAANI’s absence was as striking as the others’ presence.
The wars after 2013 challenged the power of the Nuer prophets in three ways. Firstly, the superior, asymmetrical military power of the government was so overwhelming that it threated to display the impossibility of restraint and make the hakuma as the supreme god-like being. Secondly, the SPLA-IO’s formation of the gojam from the armed cattle guard proliferated guns and hakuma power, potentially bringing a plurality of little deities with the power to kill with impunity. Thirdly, the scale of death and killing threated to diminish the significance of nueer.
Government power
Repetitive displays of superior military power in the post-2013 wars appeared to place the
hakuma at the top of the cosmic polity, silencing divine competitors. After 2013, the scale of violence perpetrated by the warring parties again challenged the prophets and their claims to power. Like the communities among whom they lived, the prophets had also to struggle to gain any foothold to push back against militarised forces whose violence was seemingly arbitrary. Prophets themselves have not been safe, and the large-scale displays of military might from government undermined the divine’s ability to claim power of equivalence. As one
kuaar muon (Nuer priest) described in 2018, ‘The power of the gun has silenced everybody, including divinities’.
1 Kuaar muon from Lang, Jagei, Bentiu PoC, Sector 2, July 2018.For example, in 2014, during early government raids on Ler and Mayendit, many people brought their belongings to Nyachol’s luak in anticipation that her divine authority over the luak would provide protection to the items even against government attacks. Someone informed government soldiers of the hoard, and they attacked the luak within a few days. They were even said to have brought a large truck to fill up with all the possessions that had been gathered together in the luak. Nyachol’s luak offered no protection.
However, some accounts of Nyachol’s brute power still abounded. In 2014, as government forces moved south, her armed youth were said to have stopped them from moving off the road and into rural areas to the west. Rumour has it that Nyachol’s supporters even managed to capture a government tank.
In a different example, the 2015 government offensives on Ler dramatically reduced the authority of Gatluak Gatkuoth, another Nuer prophet who had been seized in the post-CPA period. Based in the SPLA-IO areas near Ler, Gatluak had a reputation for the protection of cattle. When people near Ler realised that government offensives were approaching, many chose to place their cattle with Gatluak’s herd while they fled further into the swamps and islands. However, his divine powers of protection could not resist the pro-government forces. The attackers took all his cattle and all of those that he had been entrusted to protect. Gatluak himself ended up fleeing far away from Ler to the safer town of Nyal (Panyijar County) much further south.
Just over a year later, in June 2016, Gatluak returned by canoe from Nyal (southern Unity State) to the island of Kok, a then SPLA-IO-controlled area near Ler. When he arrived back to his area near Ler, he waited in the canoe for a goat to be found to sacrifice to him. He was attempting to be consistent with the cultural archive that suggested that prophets should not step onto new soil until an animal is sacrificed in recognition of their authority and to ensure there is a peaceful relationship. However, in 2016, no animal was immediately brought to Gatluak. Livestock were few and far between, and so an animal to sacrifice was hard to find. His failure to protect those herds and his flight to Nyal had weakened his authority and people did not fear him with the urgency he previously commanded. He had to wait in the canoe for three days before a goat was brought. His claims of divine authority had been trumped and undermined by the more successful claims of supranatural authority by the hakuma.
Despite Gatluak’s failure to protect, his authority was not fully lost. Within a year, he had resumed significant authority and almost instantly re-acquired wealth in cattle, partly as people started to bring cattle to him to petition him for help. In interviews, descriptions of his wealth were used to demonstrate that he still had power. Over the following years he remained a prominent local authority figure around Ler and was often consulted on illness, floods, conflict and other uncertainties.
The gojam
New assertions of divine-like power were not only manifest through government offensives, but also through the new guns and structures of authority in the armed opposition areas. From December 2013, in Ler, Mayendit and initially in Koch, there was widespread support for the armed opposition and emerging SPLA-IO, including from the armed cattle guard. As noted in the previous chapter, rom early 2014, the emerging SPLA-IO tried to co-opt the cattle guard and gave them the name ‘
gojam’, a term that vaguely references an Arabic word for army division. The
gojam started using army-like ranks.
2 Naomi Pendle, ‘Competing Authorities and Norms of Restraint: Governing Community-Embedded Armed Groups in South Sudan’, International Interactions 47:5 (2021): 873–897.In many ways, the armed cattle guard became part of the
hakuma when they became
gojam in that they became part of the armed forces of the formal armed opposition. In addition to their ranks, the SPLA-IO gave the
gojam guns, or sent them on journeys to points there they could be collected. In large meetings, the SPLA-IO commanders also gave instructions to the
gojam about conduct in battle and coordination with the more formal forces. When attacking the government, they were a joint force with SPLA-IO soldiers and were indistinguishable from this broad sphere of the
hakuma. However, the
gojam did not fall completely under SPLA-IO control. They remained attached to their communities and local public authorities, as opposed to the SPLA-IO army command.
3 Pendle, ‘Competing Authorities and Norms of Restraint’. There was still space for Nuer prophets to wrestle to demand authority over these
gojam. Without clear structures and hierarchies of order, the arming of the
gojam was potentially arming a plurality of minor deities, all with the power to kill with impunity through the guns they were given. Yet, the SPLA-IO, the prophets and other authority figures all sought to restrain them. Through restraining the
gojam’s use of the gun they would no longer be divine.
Nueer
As discussed in Chapters 2, 3 and 10, among the Nuer,
nueer is a potentially lethal pollution that arises after transgression of divinely sanctioned prohibitions, such as killing.
4 Edward Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford University Press, 1956), pages 293–294; Sharon Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State (University of California Press, 1996), pages 106–107; Sharon Hutchinson, ‘“Dangerous to Eat”: Rethinking Pollution States among the Nuer of Sudan’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 62:4 (1992): 490–504. During the post-CPA period, increasingly the Nuer prophets remoulded their function to include the detection and resolution of
nueer. Prophet authority increasingly was entangled with a recognition of
nueer. As previously described, Hutchinson has documented how the wars of the 1980s and 1990s challenged the existence of
nueer as leaders from the SPLA and anti-SPLA
hakuma questioned whether
nueer applied in wars of the
hakuma and whether
nueer was a consequence if the slain was unknown to the slayer.
5 Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas, page 108. The wars after 2013 involved the same figures in the
hakuma again demanding armed conflict, and often without restraint.
At the same time, soldiers remade cultural archives to make
nueer relevant and solvable. In the battles after 2013, it was not clear to the young men who fought that
nueer was irrelevant. Some soldiers give accounts of seeking battlefield cleansing from the dangers of
nueer. Soldiers narrated the problem of the lack of
kuar muon and prophets when the battles were raging. Therefore, to seek cleansing from
nueer they would drink water from spent bullet cases.
6 Interviews in Koch County, March 2019. Bitterness is a key aspect of the cultural archive’s resolution to
nueer. In the 1950s, Evans-Pritchard had written of a wild cucumber being used as an alternative sacrifice to an ox.
7 Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, page 128. Kurimoto argues that it is the bitterness of the cucumber that allows its equivalence to an ox and, specifically, the bile of the ox which would be drunk by the warring parties.
8 Eisei Kurimoto, ‘An Ethnography of “Bitterness”: Cucumber and Sacrifice Reconsidered’. Journal of Religion in Africa 22:1 (1992): 47–65. For the soldiers, the bitterness of the gun power equated with the bitterness of the bile of the ox to make this gun-power-water adequate.
9 Interviews in Koch County, March 2019. Yet, there was still ambiguity about the adequacy of this solution.
10 Ibid.A bigger challenge to the prophetic role in relation to the
nueer was a new concern that
nueer was beyond solution. The mass violence of the
hakuma meant that killing and death was common. People described how people no longer mourned.
11 Ibid. In such a situation,
nueer was everywhere and additional
nueer through additional killings made no difference when the dangers faced were already exponentially large. Therefore, people doubted if even the prophets had the power to ease the potential dangers of
nueer.