Despite the asymmetrical military power of the
hakuma, the prophets challenged the
hakuma’s implicit god-like claims by pushing back against the immunity of the gun and the
hakuma’s demand for war. They used their growing association with peace-making to demand peace, even when forces of the government and armed opposition were demanding war. The prophets sought to assert their divine power through their own command of peace even in the midst of war. In this way, the gun becomes entangled in spiritual and normative struggles that can temper the impunity.
1 Sharon Hutchinson and Naomi Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy: Nuer Struggles with Uncertainty in South Sudan’, American Ethnologist 42:3 (2015): 415–430, page 425. The following example illustrates the prophets’ ongoing authority to demand peace
Prophetic peace and the gojam in Tochriak
After large-scale government offensives into southern Unity State, people fled away from the main towns such as Ler to islands of highlands in the swamps to the east. These previously almost empty fishing islands quickly became bustling settlements of thousands of people where humanitarian aid was delivered. A presence in the form of a local system of governance was created by SPLA-IO forces among these communities.
In early 2018, a man defected from the government army in Ler to the SPLA-IO in these nearby islands. His defection brought much excitement as he brought with him to Tochriak island a PKM (a machine gun). Among the SPLA-IO, guns and ammunition were in desperately short supply. The commissioner claimed the defector and gun into his service as part of his coordination of the local SPLA-IO. However, the gojam of the defector’s clan also wanted the man and his gun to be under their control and not directly under the control of the county-wide SPLA-IO government.
The commissioner released the defector and his gun to return to his clan, claiming that he released the gun to prevent conflict with the defector’s clan.
2 Commissioner, Tochriak (Ler County, Unity State), early 2018. However, a rival clan feared that this amounted to the commissioner favouring the defector’s clan at a time of significant intra-clan tension. The commissioner was not seen as a detached government figure, but a member of his home community using the power of the
hakuma to rain favour. Therefore, tensions between two
gojam groups from different clans grew. The other clan was angry when the commissioner allowed the gun and man to be part of the other clan’s
gojam; they feared that the PKM could also be used in intra-
gojam conflict and not just against the government’s forces.
One day the gojam of the two clans happened to meet on the path to Thonjor. One gojam opened fire. The man who had defected ran, but one of his clan members was shot dead. Fighting broke out between the two groups. Large groups of gojam quickly mobilised and fighting rapidly escalated across the area. The commissioner quickly became involved to try to separate the parties, but he was seen as partisan. For the armed opposition, this clan fighting threatened to undermine their anti-government efforts. The father of the man who was killed also demanded that there not be revenge for his death, but not everyone would listen.
Nuer prophet Gatluak Gatkuoth stepped in to make peace by insisting on the recognition of nueer. Like Nyachol, as discussed in Chapter 10, Gatluak invoked and remade the cultural archive to stop the fighting by insisting that Nuer, even when associated with the hakuma was subject to nueer. Gatluak insisted that the gojam, with guns from the hakuma of the SPLA-IO, were subject to nueer. The context of large-scale killings and the pervading presence of nueer did not mean that for this specific killing it was immaterial. Alternatively, Gatluak cited the cultural archive to highlight the continuity of nueer and the consequences of the killing of this man. Although the gun could kill him, it was not without spiritual and moral consequences and restraint; there was not impunity.
Initially, Gatluak consulted the two groups separately. As the killing of the man had caused nueer, the two parties could not safely meet. Despite his humiliation in 2014–15, by 2018 he had built-up sizeable support again, as demonstrated through the remaking of his new, large herd comprised of gifts to thank him for his help. Once he had spoken to each party, then Gatluak oversaw the slaughter of two bulls and the drinking of the bile by each group. The slaughter of these two bulls allowed them to peacefully come into proximity with each other.
Gatluak then counselled the warring parties. He said ‘you are fighting over what you don’t know. These guns we have been working so hard to get. We have been working hard to get as many guns as we can from Ler’. He suggested that they should turn their focus on their war with the government, and discouraged them from fighting each other. Eventually people agreed, a bull was killed and all were invited to jump over it. Gatluak warned that the blood of the bull was not a joke as the blood of the bull is the same colour as their blood. The sacrifice evoked the cultural archive, but he also used the blood of the bull as a material reminder of their own mortality. The threat was explicit that whoever broke the peace and reopened the feud would also have his blood spilt. The prophet was able to threaten with his power to kill through the curse in order to provide a sanction against ending the peace. It was also agreed that compensation would be exchanged when the war had ended. Peace was still judicial and could be remade through this compliance with the Nuer laws.
A later event was interpreted by the clans as affirming Gatluak’s power to enforce peace though the power to kill by the curse with impunity. Initially, even though Gatluak had tried to make peace, some people’s hearts were still bitter and they were cautious about whether peace had been finally settled. A man from one of the clans was shot by an unknown gunman. Many of his kin interpreted this as an act of the feud and blamed the SPLA-IO local authorities for allowing it. On a Sunday soon after their kinsman was shot, two brothers went to church for prayers. The commissioner and commander were there. During the service, one of these brothers took out a gun to shoot the commissioner and division commander. His brother saw him before he could fire and grabbed the gun. As he grabbed the gun, his brother accidentally shot him in the leg. Many in these clans interpreted his failure to shoot in revenge and the injury to his brother as proof of the power of Gatluak’s curse to protect the peace.
Gatluak has not just been involved in demanding an end to feuds but also in asserting the repertoires of violence that are acceptable during conflict and that make peace more possible. In July 2019, a revenge attack took place on a nutrition nurse who was working for a South Sudanese NGO. He had finished his day’s work and returned home to his tukal to work on the day’s reports. He was inside the tukal with one friend when a group of men came to his home intending to kill him in revenge for a previous killing in their own family. One of the group set fire to the rear of the tukal while the others stood in front of the door. One of the men had a PKM and started to shower the tukal with bullets. The tukal quickly caught fire and so the men inside were forced to flee. The nurse’s friend had a gun and tried to exit the tukal while shooting. In this moment, he was killed. Somehow, in that commotion, the nurse managed to escape through the tukal door and to disappear among the high crops. By this stage, neighbours heard the shooting and approached to help. The attackers fled without a chance to pursue the nurse.
The commissioner quickly became involved to quieten the situation. His particular concern was the form of violence used. While revenge killings were not unusual, tukals were not normally burnt during family feuds. This was particularly dangerous as more people could easily be killed in such fires. With higher death tolls and possible deaths of women and children, peace would be harder to make. A senior commander from the SPLA-IO was called in to demand an end to the burning of homes. The commissioner also asked for Gatluak’s support. Gatluak came and publicly condemned the burning of the tukal. He also interpreted the survival of the nurse of indicative of the moral problems with burning tukals. Killing was not morally unbounded, even with fires and guns, and so people might well be protected from attacks, even when their protection seems impossible, if the violence used violates the rules and norms of revenge.