For many people in the communities around the Bilnyang, the peace of the church is itself arbitrary and not compliant with the logics of peace in the cultural archive. For many, this means that the peace of the church is meaningless, rejected or even violent. Three significant problems were often cited: firstly, the demand for forgiveness is seen as immoral; secondly, the church is part of an educated sphere and discrete from most people who implement violence around the Bilnyang; thirdly, the temporalities of the church for breaking the peace of the church were too long-term.
Forgiveness
The SSCC, as well as international and local church leaders, have constantly offered forgiveness as the solution to conflict and a means to peace.
1 Archbishop Justin Bada Arama speaking to the Anglican Communion News Service, September 2018. In the South Sudan Council of Churches Action Plan for Peace Vision 2023, the document asserts: ‘There is a long history in South Sudan of using healing and reconciliation tools to build relationships where past actions have damaged social cohesion, and of communal apologies, public forgiveness, and reconciliation, often led or supported by the Church’. Wunlit is often still cited as the archetypal example of peace negotiations that can be offered by a church leadership. In Gogrial, the ECS has been active in preaching forgiveness. For example, after trainings in Kuajok in April and May 2015, ‘Peace Mobilisers’ for the Committee for National Healing, Peace and Reconciliation conducted thirty-nine
payam consultations in Warrap State. People expressed grievances that they were told would be contributed to the national agenda. Forgiveness was encouraged.
For those living around the Bilnyang, the church’s demand for forgiveness was often cited as part of the problem with church peace. It was problematic as it did not offer a judicial peace in which obligations to the dead are upheld. In his frustration with discussion of the 2018 Ajiep Peace Conference in Gogrial, one chief critically equated this peace meeting with the peace of the church.
This peace meeting should not just like peace-making in the church. What about huge loss to the victims? How will their children be fed? Better you judge the issue first and exchange the cows if you really want peace. The leaders are just saying peace.
2 Chief from Gogrial East, speech at Ajiep Peace Conference, 20 April 2018.Church leaders’ demand for forgiveness after conflict in the Bilnyang is asking for a revolutionary re-conception of peace, of the relations between the governed and the
hakuma and of life after death itself
. Forgiveness is presented as an ‘ideal type’,
3 Anna Macdonald, ‘Transitional Justice and Political Economies of Survival in Post-conflict Northern Uganda’, Development and Change 48:2 (2017): 286–311, page 299. – an ideal type that feels far from morally inappropriate for many, and that can often be accused of creating an ugly disregard for the dead.
4 Interviews with people in Gogrial, 2019; interview with people in Juba, March 2020. To forgive your brother’s killer implies that you have authority to forgive for your dead brother. Alternatively, people have shown ongoing concern to provide a wife (through compensation) for the dead to give them as ongoing social life through their children (as discussed in earlier chapters). Chiefs in Gogrial and prophets in Mayendit and Ler have built their authority on being able to protect and evolve a system of judicial peace despite contradictory demands from other warring parties. The church’s focus on forgiveness, and not compensation or revenge for the dead, appears to have left the dead forgotten.
Forgiveness is feared as it could condemn the deceased to a final death and remain morally unpalatable.
5 Conversation with researcher from Ler, Nairobi, 2019.South Sudanese church leaders have themselves recognised the complexity of forgiveness.
6 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. Yet, biblical forgiveness is not without sacrifice. In the Old Testament, biblical sacrifice was used to rid people of pollution from wrong against God and the community that could harm the whole community.
7 Mary Douglas, Jacob’s Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford University Press, 2004). Jesus explicitly equates his death with the death of a sacrificial animal. In so doing, the sacrifice for healing no longer comes from an animal but from God himself who alone can offer a once-and-for-all healing. Yet, this healing is bound up with alternative ideas of immortality that do not give the dead a second chance at life through a posthumous wife. Immortality is instead based on faith in Christ’s sacrifice. Without a belief in Christ’s divinity and the cost of his sacrifice, the demand for forgiveness becomes empty.
Another problem with forgiveness is that it has been used towards hakuma impunity. Some church leaders highlight that forgiveness does not necessarily equate with a lack of punishment. Yet, in South Sudan, church leaders have often praised hakuma leaders for forgiving each other and reconciling. This reiterates the hakuma’s ability to act with impunity as they can just be forgiven. Ironically, as the church seeks to build its power over peace, they end up also supporting the god-like nature of the hakuma. As one long-time South Sudanese observer noted,
Absolutely horrible. I know exactly, because I saw it many times, what this kind of South Sudanese peace and reconciliation will look like, a big fat platform for people already in power to tell people with none that it’s over and done with and they better just forgive. No one should have any trust in these two people who do not even take on any accountability for what they have done, let alone apologise, when they join ‘as brothers’ for the New York Times.
8 Skye Wheeler, Facebook, 7 June 2016.Leaders of the
hakuma have often explicitly sought forgiveness from each other and from their citizens. For example, in November 2018, President Kiir said on Machar’s return to Juba, ‘Dr. Riek Machar and I and all the opposition leaders who signed the agreement have forgiven each other. We have consciously decided to move this country forward’.
9 Salva Kiir quote in Radio Tamazuj, ‘Kiir: “I and Machar have forgiven each other”’, 1 November 2018, https://radiotamazuj.org/en/news/article/kiir-i-and-machar-have-forgiven-each-other, accessed 11 December 2022.Across the country, after this reunion between Kiir and Machar, there were further peace rallies that brought together government and IO elites. Speaking at one such rally in Malakal in December 2018, the government’s deputy governor said,
I greet my brother from the IO who joined us in Malakal after so long an absence. My special greetings go to you, our citizens, here in the POC. Before I proceed, I would like to ask for forgiveness from you, my people. If I am forgiven, I can then speak freely.
10 Government Deputy Governor of Malakal, Malakal POC Peace Celebration, 1 December 2018.The crowd was initially perplexed and quietly started discussing this, before the IO leadership prompted their reply of ‘yes’.
The church has demanded forgiveness and this often seemed to echo the demands of government. In April 2019, the Pope surprised politicians and observers by kissing the feet of Salva Kiir, Riek Machar and others during their visit to the Vatican. South Sudan’s leaders had been in Rome on an ‘ecumenical retreat’ hosted by the heads of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.
11 Inés San Martín, ‘From Conversion Therapy to Immigration, Church Draws Fire in Spain’, Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse (11 April 2019). In kissing their feet, the Pope upturned the system of the hierarchies of power. He used his authority to demand humility. At the same time, many South Sudanese were offended by the Pope’s actions. Nuer prophets in the last decade had remade their authority or justified the absence of the divine because of the polluted nature of the land after war and extreme acts of violence.
12 Discussions in Koch, 2018; interviews about Nyachol in Mayendit, 2013. This involved the divine physically excluding himself from those in government and those who killed. Here, instead, the Pope had welcomed them to his palace and shared intimacy with them through kissing their feet. Even the Pope’s forgiveness to some seemed abhorrent as acts of
hakuma violence had been against their families and not against the Pope. It was unclear why people should be forgiven and why the Pope had the right to forgive.
Recognising the concern with forgiveness, some clergy have been explicit that forgiveness does not include impunity. The SSCC stated that ‘forgiveness is not the same as impunity; accountability, particularly through restorative justice, can still be pursued’.
13 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. They argue that forgiveness can be conceptualised in a way that allows punishment and accountability while also allowing the more emotional response of forgiveness. Yet, in this interpretation of ‘forgiveness’, it is unclear if peace and not war will always follow. After all, as discussed throughout this book, much armed mobilisation happens in South Sudan to try to challenge the
hakuma’s impunity and establish restraint and accountability when it is absent.
A peace of the educated
The peace of the church is also seen as the peace of the educated. All churches near the Bilnyang and connected river systems have remained closely associated with the class of the educated. For example, many people in rural Gogrial only start attending church when they start attending school or if they are from a family with educated parents. Plus, church leaders across denominations in Gogrial and Ler often linked their own testimonies of Christian conversation to education. The ECS Bishop (now Archbishop) of Wau first learnt about Jesus and heard biblical teaching while at school in Ethiopian refugee camps in the 1980s. An evangelist at the SDA Church in Ler first learnt about Jesus from a classmate at school.
Catholic and Anglican churches have continued to prioritise education and run schools.
14 Deng, ‘A Word from the Diocesan Bishop of Wau’. Some interpret the written nature of the Bible as highlighting how Christianity is being primarily for the educated.
Also, the reason why the Bible was written and bought was for the educated people to use because they are the ones who respect its laws and regulations meanwhile those who are not educated do not respect it, they only respect the laws and regulations of the spear master.
15 Interview with man in Gogrial, June 2018, in Dinka.The extent to which the church in Gogrial and Ler is still seen as synonymous with education limits the church’s authority over those who implement violence. Many of those who are armed and mobilised to conflict are not formally educated. Parents around the Bilnyang still often divide the labour of their sons between those in the cattle camp and those in school. While there is movement between the two, sons often specialise over time.
16 Observations in Tonj, Gogrial, Ler and Mayendit from 2010-22. Those who go to the cattle camp have a reputation for being well trained in military labour and defence. It is often these young men who implement the armed conflicts of the community. However, as their time in the cattle camp usually excluded them from going to school, they usually see themselves as discrete from the sphere of formal education, which includes the church. The context loses influence and this dichotomy does become blurred, especially when cattle are kept closer to churches. For example, in 2017 and 2018, armed cattle keepers in SPLA-IO areas near Ler were attending the local Presbyterian Church, especially when they were given t-shirts for singing in the choir.
17 Interview with man from Ler, June 2019.The temporality of the curse
Another significant concern with the peace of the church is the power of the church to guarantee the peace. Baany e biith, kuar muon and Nuer prophets relied on the power of the curse to guarantee the peace; people could face spiritual pollution, illness and death if they reopened the feud. The power of the God of the churches was also capable of deadly punishment.
For example, after Salva Kiir’s visit to the Pope in Rome, he returned to South Sudan. On Kiir’s return, and while addressing Parliament, he shared: ‘I was shocked and trembled when His Holiness, the Pope, kissed our feet. It was a blessing and can be a curse if we play games with the lives of our people’.
18 Paul Samasumo, ‘Salva Kiir: I trembled when the Pope kissed our feet’, Vaticannews.va (16 May 2019), www.vaticannews.va/en/africa/news/2019-05/salva-kiir-i-trembled-when-the-pope-kissed-our-feet.html, accessed 19 October 2022. Kiir was explicit that God could also bring punishment if the peace was broken and there was no adherence to the boundaries of violence.
At the same time, people have discussed concern about the long-term temporalities of the curses of the Bible. As a man near Ler explained in 2019, ‘the Nuer prophets’ curse comes true immediately and this helps many people believe. However, the curse of God only comes true in the distant future, after we die. Only educated people believe this. Others want to experience the power of God now’.
Without the power of the curse of God having immediate implications, the church has often ended up working closely with the hakuma to guarantee peace. While church leaders often go to significant lengths to show that they are unarmed and un-militarised, they often still have to rely on hakuma support to make peace likely.