Between June and August 2019, a South Sudanese NGO had chartered over eighty planes to land food at the Thonyor airstrip on these SPLA-IO controlled islands near Ler. A new food-aid warheouse had been built in January 2019 and now there was a rush to fill it with adequate food to prevent extreme hunger. Each day that a plane was scheduled to land, people would gather around the small strip of dusty soil where the plane would land. Logisticians of the NGO were there to coordinate the plane’s landing and to formally receive the food. They would also organise a sizeable team of local labour that would be paid to move the food from the aircraft to the warehouse. Demand for that minimal work prompted people to swarm the airstrip before the plane’s arrival. Despite the scale of the operation, the South Sudanese had no car in Thonyor and the muddy nature of the land during the rains prevented a car from being useful.
Geng Mut was a school headteacher and nutrition assistant for this large South Sudanese NGO in Thonyor. He was also an officer in the swelling ranks of the SPLA-IO. In 2019, Geng fell seriously ill. His family repeatedly took him to the clinic to diagnose and treat his sickness. People in the clinic could not work out the cause of his sickness and had little hope for his survival. His brothers still carried him between home and the clinic to receive injections in hope that they would help.
In June 2019, while Geng was still ill, Gatluak Gatkuoth came to visit Thonyor. With his followers in tow, he walked around Thonyor singing. Many goats were also killed. In the midst of the excitement about Gatluak’s visit, Geng jumped up from his bed and ran to grab the spear and dang of his late uncle, Nyuon Liah Wal. Having been unable to walk unaided a few moments before, Geng joined the dancing around Gatluak.
Before his death in 2008, Nyuon Liah Wal was a prophet and seized by the divinity TILING, who had FIRST seized Nyuon’s father (and Geng’s grandfather), Liah Wal Reath in the 1930s. The divinity TILING first appeared near Ler when Liah Wal had eaten dog meat – a food considered unnatural and usually expected to cause death. Liah did not die but announced himself seized by a divinity. The chief opposed his seizure and the government briefly arrested Liah, but it was the chief who ended up being removed from his position. TILING quickly grew in popularity and Liah ended the practice of eating dog meat. TILING focused on sacrifices and dances to invoke good crops, and the bumper harvest of 1937 was credited to him.
1 Douglas Johnson, Nuer Prophets: A History of Prophecy from the Upper Nile in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Clarendon Press, 1994), page 276. By the time of Liah Wal’s death, TILING was established as one of the most powerful western Nuer divinities, and Liah a correspondingly powerful prophet.
In grabbing his uncle’s spear, Geng evoked a century-old history and claimed to have also been seized by TILING. On seeing Geng and Nyuon’s spear, Gatluak opened up the crowd. Those drumming for Gatluak started drumming a new song, ‘as if inspired by kuoth’ (spirit). To the sound of this drum, Geng started dancing on one leg, replicating the dance performed by Liah and Nyuon. At this, Gatluak and the crowd started to proclaim him as seized by TILING.
Gatluak then came to stay in Geng’s home to perform a series of sacrifices of bulls and goats in order to evoke TILING to come. After this, Geng was taken to the swamps to test if TILING had seized him. TILING has always been able to safely call a certain type of long, black snake (thol). Geng’s ability to do this confirmed his seizure.
TILING through Geng immediately sought to appeal to the armed youth of the
gojam. Since the 1990s, commanders around the Bilnyang, including Riek Machar, had discouraged scarification.
2 Naomi Pendle, ‘“They Are Now Community Police”: Negotiating the Boundaries and Nature of the Government in South Sudan through the Identity of Militarised Cattle-Keepers’, International Journal of Minority and Group Rights 22:3 (2015): 410–434. Scarification had been associated with initiation into age groups who could participate in conflict. Yet, relying on the youth’s military support, the SPLA, including Machar at the time, opposed scarification as it undermined the unity of the youth, causing divisions between those who were and who were not scarred. As Geng had attended school and become literate, there was less of an expectation to be initiated. Yet, the
gojam were the main supporters of the prophets and TILING also needed to appeal to this constituency. Gatluak carried out Geng’s initiation, and about ninety other young men also joined Geng to be scarred at this time.
The scarification of a large cohort of young men in 2019 marked a revolutionary moment in spiritual alliances and cosmological hierarchies. The
hakuma was consistently bringing predatory, deadly violence and, for many young men, the prophets offered a more consistent understanding and powerful source of protection. As discussed in Chapter 1, control of initiation was an important way in which the prophets asserted their control over the armed youth. The claims of MAANI and Kolang Ket to power in the late nineteenth century were intimately tied to the martial youth as Kolang Ket demanded that the next cohort of youth should not be initiated into a new age set until he returns from a journey, and another prophet was cursed to death when she failed to adhere to this instruction.
3 Jedeit J. Riek and Naomi Pendle, Speaking Truth to Power in South Sudan: Oral Histories of the Nuer Prophets (Rift Valley Institute, 2018). In 2019, over a century later, the prophets of Geng and Gatluak were remaking their authority over the youth by invoking these symbolic and bodily practices.
At the same time, the meaning was different and the cultural archive was remade. The 2019 initiations were not about asserting the power of one prophet over another, but about asserting the power of the prophets over the
hakuma. Firstly, in the western Nuer historically, the prophets were competitive and rivalrous.
4 Johnson, Nuer Prophets. Kolang Ket had cursed his main rival to death when she initiated youth without his permission. In contrast, in 2019, Gatluak supported Geng. Secondly, the
hakuma was now the main opposition. In order for Geng to have the power of the prophets he had to symbolically leave the group of the educated, who were associated with the broader sphere of the
hakuma, and submit to the authority of the home community. This came through scarification. Thirdly, the youth were now heavily armed and carried the divine-like power of the
hakuma through their guns. In their scarification, these young men still submitted to the divine power of the prophets. They sought to recognise in the prophets a power even greater than the guns of the government.
An immediate priority of TILING after his seizure of Geng was to establish compensation exchange and the settling of feuds through animal sacrifice in order to enforce a meaningful peace. As with Nyachol after her 2010 seizure, Geng quickly started hearing cases and settling feuds. From August 2019, TILING demanded that those who were feuding should come to him to make peace. At the same time, this was a significant remaking of the cultural archive to meet contemporary demand. Geng and the former prophets of TILING had not been associated with solving conflicts and bringing peace.
5 Interview with Nuer chief, Bentiu PoCs, 2018.For example, in August 2019, TILING heard a case between two families in one clan. In 2018, one man had shot another dead. The father of the deceased had initially discouraged revenge. In 2019, the brother of the deceased then killed the father of the killer. The father was an elderly trader and the killing left hearts hot for further revenge. Fearing revenge, the family of the brother who had taken revenge handed this brother over to the commissioner to be arrested. Geng ordered the SPLA-IO commissioner to bring him and other prisoners to him. This included those who had killed, as well as those who had committed other crimes. These prisoners have since remained in his luak in effective detention. He has warned them against committing further offences and has invited the warring parties to come to make peace. This power of Geng, including other those detained by the hakuma displays his authority in the hakuma-prophet relationship.
Following Nyachol’s previous attempts at SPLA-IO – government reconciliation, Geng also attempted to united the warring parties. In 2021, following the Revitalised Agreement on the Resolution of the Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS), new transitional government commissioners were appointed. On the 10 April 2021, Geng invited the government commissioner, commanders, gojam and IO forces to his luak for a day of reconciliation.
Nuer prophets have continued to struggle to create political space to end feuds and create peace. This is despite elites often seeking division in order to more easily mobilise fighting forces. At the same time, the peace promoted by these contemporary prophets in central Unity States has repeatedly focused on an exclusive, ethnic peace. Dominated by intra-Nuer fighting, the prophets’ peace-making activities have focused on intra-Nuer peace. Historically, the powers of the prophets were often to a broad range of people and not limited by ethnic lines. This was the case during the time of Nyaruac and as recently as Gatdeang’s rule in Mayom.
6 Riek and Pendle, Speaking Truth to Power; Johnson, Nuer Prophets; Hutchinson and Pendle, ‘Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy’. At the same time, new prophetic figures in Unity State have increasingly been explicit that a ‘cool’ peace is only possible with other Nuer.
7 Ibid. This is often a response to the lack of possibility of judicial redress for grievances, but it has re-created and reinforced identities that make elite interests into an easily mobilisable force.