Introduction

Part I starts with these older histories of violent peace and cosmic competitions as these histories are still remade and retold; they reach forward into contemporary political imaginaries. These histories inform what people see as politically possible, morally acceptable and cosmologically sensible. Popular histories can be disruptive of divisive and authoritarian power structures,2 Naomi Oppenheim, ‘Popular History in the Black British Press: Edward Scobie’s Tropic and Flamingo, 1960–64’, Immigrants & Minorities 37:3 (2019): 136–162. as well as entrenching them. Either way, these histories inform people’s archives of moral knowledge.3 Wendy James, The Listening Ebony: Moral Knowledge, Religion and Power among the Uduk of Sudan (Clarendon, 1988). Wendy James used the concepts of ‘cultural archive’ and ‘repository of knowledge’ to explain the reuse of meanings and histories among the Uduk in Sudan as they tried to find meaning amid armed conflict and extreme violence. The past is both consciously represented and also contained in a cultural deposit or ‘archive’ of unremembered events from distant pasts that are visible in ‘habitual ritual action’ as well as in language.4 The idea of a ‘cultural archive’ draws on Foucault’s work. There is flexibility in la parole but stability in la langue. This archive creates a basis for validation and ‘constitutes the foundations of a moral world’.5 James, The Listening Ebony, page 6.

The first two chapters are largely based on histories told to me in the era after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, as well as drawing on archival sources and relevant literature. In these chapters, I do not focus on how these accounts were being used after 2005, but the accounts of this oral, popular historical archive itself. At the same time, as much as they tell us about the nineteenth century, they also provide insights into the cultural archive and moral world in this post-2005 period. The repetitive focus on impunity, government violence and continued divine authority may be as much a reflection of cosmic politics in the 2000s and 2010s as it is of such politics in the 1800s. For example, many of my interviews about prophetic activity took place between 2013 and 2018. At this time (as later chapters show), people were again confronting hakuma displays of killing with impunity, and shifting political economies that left them cow-less and less capable of peace. The retelling of these histories tells us as much about priorities of South Sudanese in the 2010s, as it does about their priorities a century before. Yet, this makes these histories no less valuable. These chapters are crucial not only as they locate contemporary struggles in longer-term patterns of violence and resistance in South Sudan, but also because they highlight their contemporary, everyday prominence in the contemporary collective imagination.

When I was in South Sudan, I would often end the day interviewing informally in the marketplace while drinking tea. This section is largely based on what I describe as ‘marketplace histories’. In the post-CPA era, rural markets could be found scattered across South Sudan. These small, rural markets would often have a few dozen shops constructed from some assortment of iron sheets, plastic sheets, poles, grass and bamboo. Some shops would sell small bags of tea, sugar, salt, sweets and other essentials. Other shops would serve sweet tea. In Juba, these tea shops would provide a range of coffees, teas and spices. In many rural markets, only black tea and piles of sugar were available. These tea shops were spaces where people gathered, sat for hours, and conducted their everyday analysis of what was happening around them. Therefore, marketplace histories are popular histories in a specific context. For example, the context was one of oral, not written, histories and it was a gendered space; women rarely drank in these spaces, even if those who made the tea were usually old women. Some of these histories were from local experts – people that I was guided to as they were locally seen as authorities on how things really had been. Yet, in these accounts, whenever possible, I privilege marketplace histories as a way to notice popular understandings and common sources for moral validation. Marketplace histories are important as they help us see which histories were still living in common political discussions, and which political imaginaries in relation to peace were still prevalent.

Part I has two chapters. The first highlights the length of struggles against violent hakuma to contest the hakuma’s ability to kill with impunity. From the mid-nineteenth century, foreign traders and governments carried out seemingly arbitrary and deadly violence, and the extreme force of the gun made them appear to be able to do this with impunity. Divine authorities before them had been able to kill with impunity with the power of the curse, and now governments were killing with impunity through the power of the gun. In this way, the government was like a divinity. Yet, religious leaders played a key role in contesting the legitimacy and ability of government’s claims to be able to kill with impunity. In Graeber’s terms, they ‘creatively refused’6 David Graeber, ‘Culture as Creative Refusal’, Cambridge Anthropology 31:2 (2013): 1–19. cultures of the hakuma and remade cultures to resist and to make government accountable.

The second chapter is an account of how divine powers to make peace became entangled with the law during the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium governments. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ political and economic changes undermined local religious authorities’ ability to make peace; they had relied on cattle for compensation and sacrifice, and cattle economies were changing fast. Peace-making had relied on framing conflict as feuding, with this allowing compensation to peacefully resolve the feud. The chapter discusses how the incorporation of compensation into law recoded conflict as a crime and an illegal act. Yet, it also entrenched the centrality of compensation in peace-making. At the same time, the making of compensation into a legal requirement subordinated divine authorities to the government, made the divine ‘sacred’ and reduced some of compensation’s peace-making potential.

Together these two chapters provide an important account of the ‘cultural archive’ that shapes South Sudanese understandings of peace. Histories of the hakuma’s assertions of power, and subsequent remaking of cultures to refuse, have fashioned these archives; the archive is far from a collection of ahistoric memories and cultures. In addition, we see that the hakuma’s assertions of power took two dominant forms. The hakuma’s excessive violence displayed their ability to kill without accountability and so with impunity. At the same time, they undermined divine authorities by hedging them in with the law and making them sacred.