Among the politicians, the smart-suited lobbyists and occasional foreign diplomat, there were also senior bishops staying in the Radisson Blu Hotel in 2014 during the IGAD-led peace negotiations. In their long, purple robes, they could be spotted from afar. Church leaders were present throughout the peace negotiations. Almost all these senior church leaders had been educated and had lived abroad for extended periods, and their senior clerical status had given them opportunities to travel the world and to attend conferences. In contrast to the chiefs, whose authority had been dampened by being in Addis Ababa (see the Introduction), their authority, linked to a worldwide church, was nurtured in those hotel lobbies and conference rooms.
At a national level, church leaders continued to assert authority to demand peace. As discussed in Chapter 4, the church had a long history in the Sudans of being involved in peace-making. In the 1970s, international church bodies had mediated the Addis Ababa Peace Agreement between the Sudan government and Anya-Nya rebels. In the late 1990s, the church gained a reputation for their role in local peace initiatives, through meetings such as Wunlit. After fighting erupted in 2013, church leaders continued to demonstrate their authority and demanded peace.
From the outset of the conflict in December 2013, national church leaders in the South Sudan Council of Churches were vocal in demanding peace. In the days before conflict erupted on 15 December, church leaders had addressed the SPLM leadership meeting in the Nyakuron Centre in Juba to urge them to settle differences peacefully. Within two days of the conflict erupting in December 2013, the South Sudan Council of Churches (SSCC) had issued its first statement of many, calling for peace.
Church leaders repeatedly asserted their peace-making authority through assertions of neutrality. This was not only useful to establish them as potential mediators, but it also set them outside of the intra-
hakuma politics and, therefore, distinct from them. In 2014, IGAD had asked a cross-denominational group of church leaders to select representatives to participate in the talks. Instead, church leaders agreed to only act as observers to the talks. Also, in 2014, in IGAD’s push for inclusivity, representatives of civil society, just like chiefs, were invited to a symposium connected to the peace talks. The warring parties argued over whether they were adequately represented, politically, among these groups, despite them being meant to be independent voices.
1 Observations while in Addis Ababa, April and May 2014. At this time, Riek Machar complained about the lack of representation of the Presbyterian Church among the church leaders observing the talks. The Presbyterian Church has its largest congregations in Nuer areas that, at the time, were largely assumed to be aligned to the SPLA-IO. The church leaders themselves pushed back. They highlighted that the Presbyterian Church had been involved in the selection of the church observers at the talks. More bluntly, they also emphasised that the church was not subsumed within the polarising politics of the warring parties. Rebuked, Riek apologised to the church representatives.
2 Interview with senior church leader, Radison Blu Hotel, Addis Ababa, May 2014.Evoking cultural archives, some church leaders explicitly drew on prophetic idioms to claim the divine authority needed to contest the
hakuma’s war. Zink’s work in Bor has highlighted the importance of prophetic traditions to South Sudanese understandings of Christianity.
3 Jesse Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan (Baylor Press, 2018). In relation to the post-2013 conflict, church leaders described themselves as having been ‘appointed watchmen and women by divine authority’.
4 The Rt Rev. Peter Gail Lual Marrow, Chairman South Sudan Council of Churches, ‘A Statement From Kigali’ during church leaders’ retreat, Kigali, Rwanda, 1–7 July 2015. The South Sudan Council of Churches was interpreting the prophetic as the literal duty ‘to see and to speak’. Being prophetic was not simply about foreseeing the future, but about seeing and speaking truth to power. Their call was not just to bring an immediate peace but to take a broader prophetic stance against the
hakuma’s violent form of authority. Again, like the Nuer prophets and Nuer and Dinka priests, they were challenging the
hakuma’s ability to live beyond the moral order and without spiritual sanction. This church-leader recall of the prophetic resonated with the 1990s growth of the church through its perceived connection to existing idioms of the prophetic, as well as with the continued power of prophetic figures.
From the outset, national church leaders were critical of the warring parties; the SSCC was critical of the way government leaders waged war and were not committed to a real peace.
5 Ibid. Specific church leaders gained reputations for being incredibly vocal against the government. For example, Bishop Santo Loku Pio Doggale gained a reputation for publicly criticising the government. After the Equatorias entered the conflict in 2015, the church became even more critical, especially of the government itself. This reflected the significant authority of the church in the Equatorias. As the SSCC described itself, at this time, they went from being like guide dogs that ‘lead you away from trouble’ to watchdogs ‘that bark’.
6 Ibid. This speaking of truth to power was also visible from church leaders in Gogrial, Ler and the surrounding areas. Moses Deng had been appointed Bishop of Wau (covering Gogrial) in 2009. He was vocally in favour of peace and sometimes publicly critical of government. For example, in 2015 in an article of a Diocese magazine, Bishop Moses wrote:
The politicians are usually quick to divide the community but later on fail to unite them. This is how they behave and we don’t want our community to remain the same. Some of the politicians cause the war for personal interest, to gain the wealth and top position in the government.
7 Bishop Moses Deng, ‘A Word from the Diocesan Bishop of Wau: Renewal: Informing, Enlightening and Transforming Lives’ (Wau Diocesan newsletter, September 2015). This bishop has also spoken of the broad spiritual cost of the war:
We very much need to be healed from blind hatred and the ignorance of using violence to get our own way. What I would like to say to both President Kiir and Dr Riek Machar is that if you love our nation, you will make the necessary sacrifice to bring peace to it now. Continuing to fail and carry-on fighting shames us all, but to bring peace would be a great gift that would secure the future of South Sudan.
8 Ibid.The outspoken nature of the church leaders and the SSCC near the Bilnyang and across South Sudan is striking because of the lack of space for free speech by others. During these years of war, the South Sudan government was further limiting freedom of expression including through the arrest and disappearance of outspoken journalists and civil society leaders. Academics were being exiled for discussing political visions, and newspapers were often confiscated. In continuing to challenge government and its assumptions of impunity, church leaders represented the rarity of such.
As you drive through Juba, you are constantly attentive to the bustle of overtaking cars and swerving motorbikes. Your car traces a wiggled line along the wide, tarmac road as it avoids obstacles to stay safe. Occasionally, as you drive, you start to hear the distant sound of a multiplicity of sirens. These collective sirens demand that you pull over to the side of the road as a VIP zooms through the city. Every Sunday morning, through the years of the conflict, a collection of such cars rushed to various churches across Juba.
At the national level, the proximity to and not distance of the hakuma from the church gave it the political space to be prophetic. Leaders of the hakuma kept attending church as they feared the divine, or because they could use time at church to build their networks among other leaders or to rally support from their constituencies. Their presence in the church has made many critical of the church’s intimacy with the hakuma, but it did give it space to challenge the hakuma and to claim a superior divine power. For example, on one Sunday morning when President Kiir was attending a cathedral in Juba, the sermon was so critical that Kiir refused to attend church again for months afterwards.