Alongside these national interventions, church leaders in the communities around the Bilnyang also tried to assert their divine authority to demand peace. Often explicitly evoking the success of Wunlit and their role in this process, church leaders worked with local government authorities or got NGO funding to convene and host peace meetings between communities. This came during a period of significant intra-church competition, and church leaders also struggled to make peace meaningful to the competing cosmic ontologies and understandings of peace in these Nuer and Dinka communities.
Intra-church competition
In the 2010s, churches were changing in the lands of the Bilnyang. In Gogrial, the post- Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) period had intensified inter-denominational competition and challenged the Catholic monopolies on Christianity in the region that dated to the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium era eighty years earlier. In the 1980s, as discussed above, young men were recruited into the SPLA from Nuer and Dinka areas around the Bilnyang and sent to Ethiopia for training. In Ethiopia, the influence of figures like Anglican Bishop Nathaniel Garang Anyieth, resulted in the conversion to Christianity of tens of thousands of young men, especially from Dinka areas.
1 Zink, Christianity and Catastrophe in South Sudan. They joined the Episcopalian Church (part of the Anglican Communion) and were discipled by the church leaders while in the refugee and training camps. When the SPLA was forced out of Ethiopia in the 1990s, some of these young converts returned to Gogrial as Episcopalian evangelists.
2 For a more detailed discussion of Christianity in refugee camps in Ethiopia, see ibid. By the 2010s, these early evangelists had risen to the leadership of a sizeable church and many had been appointed as bishops in the ECS church, giving them the authority to ordain clergy. In contrast to the Catholic Church whose priests were often recruited abroad, the Anglican church offered a local and more present clergy. On a weekly basis in rural areas, the Catholic Church was still dominantly led by catechists, with Mass only being offered by visiting priests a few times a year.
From 2009, the ECS Bishop of Wau was himself originating from Gogrial. As the bishop established his authority, he drew on cultural archives around priestly and political power. Bishop Moses was from the same village as President Kiir and from the family of one of the longest serving chiefs in Gogrial – Nyal Chan. The bishop’s training in the SPLA’s child soldier army (the Red Army) and his connections to Kiir gave him authority through the
hakuma. His links to Nyal Chan connected him to histories of government and divine authority in Gogrial. As a bishop, he presented a different interpretation of authority and was able to build on and revise these previous connections with power and the divine. Personal histories of church leaders that allow connections to cultural archives of divinity have been key in building authority, as Zink records in his history of the church in Jonglei State.
3 Ibid.The closeness of the ECS leadership to the people was further strengthened through the proliferation of new dioceses from 2015. As discussed, in 2015 Kiir increased the administrative states of South Sudan from ten to twenty-eight. Shortly afterwards, and in the run-up to the selection of a new ECS Primate to lead the South Sudan Anglican church from Juba, the ECS also started to proliferate its dioceses. The Diocese of Wau became eight dioceses and, therefore, eight bishops could be appointed. The ECS church could now offer to the people of Gogrial a unique, unprecedented closeness to the clergy.
At the same time, the Catholic Church remained dominant in much of Gogrial. The government elite from Gogrial still largely attended Catholic Churches in Wau, Kuajok and Juba. They had been educated at the Catholic schools in Gogrial decades before and many had continued to attend church through the years of war. Kiir himself has been explicit about his close mentorship by some Catholic priests. This leadership support for the Catholic Church helped maintain its popularity in Gogrial. Furthermore, to an extent, the distance of the Catholic Church from the people helped keep them divine by adding a layer of power and mysticism to the clergy. The fact that the ECS leadership were autochthonous allowed them to understand the cosmic battles but, like the
hakuma, it became hard to set themselves apart. Many discussions about why people doubted the church in Gogrial did not highlight their distance, but events during their proximity, such as when Catholic clergy visited the village and sourced ‘holy water’ from the local borehole.
4 Discussions in Gogrial, May 2022. Government leaders even used church construction in their home villages to try to build authority among these constituents.
5 Naomi Pendle, ‘Commanders, Classrooms, Cows and Churches: Accountability and the Construction of a South Sudanese Elite’, in Wale Adebanwi and Roger Orock (eds), Elites and the Politics of Accountability in Africa (Michigan University Press, 2021). For example, in a market village in Gogrial one government leader significantly funded and organised the erection of a large church building. For years, the church had met under a large tree near the market and the home of the paramount chief. The politician had first promised to build the large, brick church building after the CPA was signed. He promised to raise funds among Catholics in Juba in order to build this church back at home. After years of promises, he eventually produced the initial funding for a fence to demarcate the land. Then, by November 2015, the church itself was erected. The politician had managed to raise funds for cement and iron sheets. The members of the church also gave their labour and time to make and fire the bricks that would be used for its walls. The church was massive and a rival in size to the Cathedral in Wau, the centre of the Diocese. After its construction, one friend commented: ‘Now our village is a city’.
6 Ibid. However, by 2022, the unfinished church was already falling into disrepair, with the iron sheets often pulled apart in times of strong winds.
There was also church competition in Koch, Ler and Mayendit to the east of the Bilnyang. This took a different shape partly because of different patterns of community migration. As people came and went and found new places of safety, old churches were remade and new churches appeared. For example, the first Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Church in Tochriak only emerged when people came to Tochriak from the SDA Church in the Bentiu Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites.
7 Interview with evangelist in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Tochriak, 20 April 2020. The temporary urbanisation in the Bentiu PoCs was introducing new religious ideas. While new churches were established, old churches were challenged. The scale of the conflict that hit Ler and Mayendit meant that more established churches saw this as a period of decline and uncertainty. ‘Due to the wars, the people are tempted not to believe in their God but to believe in earthly things’.
8 Presbyterian Church Elder, Tochriak, April 2020.