LIFE IS PRICKLY. NARRATING HISTORY, BELONGING, AND COMMON PLACE IN BOR, SOUTH

A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

by Brendan R. Tuttle January 2014

Examining Committee Members:

Dr. Paul Garrett, Advisory Chair, Dr. Mindie Lazarus-Black, Department of Anthropology Dr. Marilyn Silberfein, Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University Dr. Heather Sharkey, External Member, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania

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ABSTRACT

An ethnography based on research carried out between 2009 and 2010 in the vicinity of

Bor Town, the capital of , in what was then Southern Sudan, this dissertation is primarily concerned with people’s reflections on making agreements with one another during a period when the nature of belonging was being publically discussed and redefined. It examines historical narratives and discussions about how people ought to relate to the past and to each other in the changed circumstances following the formal cessation of hostilities between the

Government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in 2005. This dissertation departs from much of the literature on Southern Sudan by focusing on the common place, the nature of promises and ordinary talk, as opposed to state failure and armed conflict.

After 21 years of multiple and overlapping conflicts in Sudan, a Comprehensive Peace

Agreement (CPA) was signed in January of 2005. The agreement stipulated national elections during a six-year Interim Period, at the end of which, the people of Southern Sudan were to hold a referendum on self-determination to decide whether to remain united with Sudan or to secede.

This dissertation examines questions where were on many people’s minds during Sudan’s national elections and the run-up to the referendum, a time when questions of history, belonging, and place were very salient.

The dissertation begins with a discussion of jokes and other narratives in order to sketch out some popular attitudes toward speech, responsibility and commitments. Most of the body of

ii the dissertation is concerned with everyday talk about the past and with sketching out the background necessary to understand the stakes at play in discussions about citizenship and the definition of a South Sudanese citizen: Did it depend upon one’s genealogy or one’s place of birth, or one’s commitments to a particular place, or their having simply suffered there with others?

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for my parents and my brother, Barrett, and Madit

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fieldwork in Bor (2009-2010) and archival research in were made possible by financial support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. The

Department of Anthropology at Temple University and Temple University’s Center for the

Humanities provided financial and other support.

I owe much to the help of many friends. I thank Majur Aguto for bringing me to Bor and

Madit Jol Makuei for being a friend, constant companion and source of ideas.

I am more fortunate than I can acknowledge for Paul Garrett’s unfailing patience, care and encouragement, careful attention, humor, and continual prodding; I’m grateful to him for always having my best interests in mind and for his example, and for much else. I owe my greatest debts to my committee and readers, Paul Garrett, Marilyn Silberfein, Heather Sharkey, and Mindie Lazarus-Black—all read multiple drafts and helped me to formulate the ideas presented here and gave generously of their time, guidance, knowledge and insight.

I thank Marilyn Silberfein for making the writing process fun and for many discussions and comparisons with other settings and for much else. My gratitude goes to Heather Sharkey not only for showing confidence in the potential of this work, but also, among all else that she did, for many excellent suggestions. I thank Mindie Lazarus-Black for keeping me going and for much critical support.

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I am also grateful to John Mccall and David Sutton, who introduced me to anthropology, and Sydney White, Juris Milestone, Judith Goode, Patricia Hansell, and Muriel Kirkpatrick. I have benefited from the advice, encouragement, emails, and help of Ali B. Ali-Dinar, Anne

Bartlett, Richard and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Douglas Johnson, Jay Spaulding, Benaiah Yongo-

Bure, and all of the members of the Sudan Studies Association. And Daniel Beaumont. And

Gordon Witty. And finally, although I have never met her, I feel very grateful to Bambi

Schieffelin for providing “a model of what a mentor should be.”

From the beginning of my interest in Southern Sudan I have received advice and assistance from Dr. Aleer M. Yol, Machuei Mabil, John Tot, Ayuen Ajok, Garang , and many others. I am especially grateful to Benjamin Abeny Gai Mayen, Mandela (Gai-Manoon)

A.P. Mel, Alak Jacob Gai, Ayol Gai-Manoon, and Majur Aguto for organizing for my travel to and stay in Southern Sudan. In , Diing Char Nhial, especially, and Yar Gai, Ayen

Garang, and Yar Garang generously welcomed me into their home. For housing me in Bor

Town, I thank Nyicak and Guala, specifically Mac Lual Mac and the late Kuol Ajak. He will be missed. For making me welcome, I thank Peter Pac Alier Agot and Ator. I am grateful to Biong for hospitality and guidance and a thousand other things.

I cannot possibly list all of the many people who have generously helped me in Southern

Sudan, but I must mention at least a few. I would particularly like to thank Mabior Makuei

Mabior. I am privileged to have benefited from his encouragement, good humor, and intellect. I must thank Deng Dekuek and M.G. Ajak for the title of this dissertation. I also thank Mamer

Alier Riak, Maker Ayom Mabior, Aciek Anyeth Mabior, Ateny Pec Ariik, Jok Manyang Jok,

Ateny Agot Ayom, Chol Benson, Ayuen Panchol Ajang, Mayen, Yar (Mary), Isaiah Ngok

Ayom, Ayor Adehok Maluth, Atongdit Ajok, Angeer Ajak, Riak Deng Mabior, Mayom Pandak,

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Alier Michael, Ayuen Kuch Amiot, Dhieu Dau (David Cry) and MC Valient Jam (and the puotpuot community), Ayuen Magot Buol, Simon Akena, Hussain Mac Ayuel, Dau Deng

Malual, Abraham Diu, Mabior Arok, Maker Chol Madol, David Diing Magot, Romeo Riak

Ajang, Angang Ngong, Chol Michael, John Jol Buol, Chiengkou, Aboi, Gai Korwel Dhal, Mabil

Jongkor Chol, Aciek Kual, Majer Mac, Deng Kuat, Majak Alith Majak, Kuk Alat Kuk Kor,

Mawut Garang Ajak, Philip Awow Lek, Abany Ahok Gai, Lual Bol Yuot, Fatinadit Atier,

Anoon Akol Chiengkou, Sam Ayuen, Paul Nhial, Osman Flus, Ateny Pec Ariik, Panchol Maciek

Deng, Kuat Afar, and many, many others who have provided more kinds of support and encouragement than I can name. Their welcome and hospitality is why I always return.

I thank MaryBeth Chrostowsky for her company, insight, and expertise in Bor Town.

Brooke Bocast, Zoe Cormack, Christian Doll, Diane Garbow, Qingyan Ma, Abdel Karim

Mohammad, and Juan Luis Rodriguez Aponte—all, knowingly or not, contributed to this project.

I could not have completed this dissertation without the love, confidence, and support of my parents and brother. Finally, Reilly Wilson added to my education in more ways that I can acknowledge. For her, it is probably impossible for me to adequately express my love and gratitude.

While none of these people is responsible for its errors or shortcomings, all share credit for whatever is good in this dissertation.

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NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY

Dinka (Thuɔŋjäŋ) is Western Nilotic language of the Nilo-Saharan family with more than four and a half million speakers. Bor Dinka (Thuɔŋbor) is a distinct dialect within this group of mutually intelligible language varieties generally referred to by outsiders simply as Dinka.1

Whatever small ability in Bor Dinka I managed to acquire would not have been possible without the generosity of my teachers. I must specifically thank Madit Jol, Reverend Daniel Garang

Ayuen, Ayuen Ajok, and Mamer Alier.

I have generally followed the alphabet and spelling conventions developed by the

Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL). Since SIL’s alphabet is based on the International

Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and I have not tried to transcribe tones, most of the characters I use to

represent Bor Dinka speech do not require special clarification, with the exception of the

“breathy vowels” (indicated by an umlaut: ä ë ɛ̈ ï ö ɔ̈ ),th and c, , dh, nh, and ny. Characters

followed by h (th, dh, and nh) represent dentalized consonants. Ny is a palatal nasal [ɲ], as in

canyon. C is a voiced palatal stop, pronounced like the ch in church.

Glossary of a few common terms

akuma Usually translated “government,” this term derives from an root referring to the bureaucratic sphere with its particular order and control.

1 “Dinka” is an exonym that has since become a widely used ethnic category referring comprehensively to Thuɔŋjäng-speakers. There is a great deal of regional and generational variation within Thuɔŋjäŋ. That many people refer to the language spoken near Bor with a different term both illustrates the false picture of homogeneity given by the term “Dinka” as well as how the historical importance of Bor Town as a regional center has registered enough to give a particular variety its name.

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In Southern Sudan, it refers to a bundle of practices related to government courts and punishment in contrast to rural domains of “home.” baai Usually translated “home” or “village,” this term is commonly used to refer to inhabited rural areas to imply a sense of community in contrast to the domain of akuma. boma Term for the smallest unit of local government under SPLM/GoSS administration dhien A cattle herding group or a cattle hearth. Jonglei State A term referring to a territorial division of southern Sudan and used in the vicinity of Bor Town (the capital of Jonglei State) to refer to the town plat. kɔc pan tok “People of one dwelling-place;” a term used to refer to relatives or to imply a sense of community. mac thok “Cooking hearth;” more expansively used to refer to relatives by virtue of their shared descent from a single woman. panjieng “People country;” a term used in contrast to the domain of akuma. payam Intermediate unit of local government between the county and boma wut A cattle village

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

page ABSTRACT ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY ...... viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... x LIST OF FIGURES ...... xi LIST OF ACRONYMS ...... xii STUDY AREA ...... xiii INTRODUCTION ...... xiv

CHAPTER 1. “TYING SPEECH” AND JOKES ...... 1 2. HEAVINESS ...... 32 3. EVOLUTION OF RULE ...... 57 4. A FISHERMAN’S HISTORY ...... 90 5. FATINADIT ...... 155 6. HUSAIN MAC ...... 160 7. THIS LAND WILL FINISH US...... 194 8. MABIOR MAKUEI...... 231 9. OBLIGATIONS AND OBJECTS ...... 246 10. LIFE IS PRICKLY ...... 281 WORKS CITED ...... 297

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. A boat named "servant of people." ...... 23

Figure 2. Captain Grant leaving Karagwe ...... 36

Figure 3. Looc Miir...... 41

Figure 4. adolcɛrec ...... 48

Figure 5. Britannia and King Theodore II ...... 68

Figure 6. Bor Town, major roads...... 92

Figure 7. Mading Bor...... 122

Figure 8. Bor payams and bomas...... 142

Figure 9. Fish bundle (detail)...... 144

Figure 10. SPLM/A party poster, “… equality… diversity…” ...... 149

Figure 11. NCP party poster...... 149

Figure 12. Pïïr tueeŋ de alɛ Mïäk yennëkë ë mane! ...... 149

Figure 13. Fisherman at Bor Town’s north port fish market ...... 155

Figure 14. Colonial Bor Town, numbered...... 162

Figure 15. Bor, 1870s...... 168

Figure 16. The old town in the rows of neem trees ...... 203

Figure 17. Schematic representation of Mabior’s narrative ...... 273

Figure 18. Majer...... 283

Figure 19. Isaiah's diagram of a Dinka marriage...... 306

Figure 20. Kakuma Refugee Assistance Project...... 308

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LIST OF ACRONYMS

CMA Civil/Military Administrator CPA Comprehensive Peace Agreement GoNU Government of National Unity GoS Government of Sudan GoSS Government of Southern Sudan LWF/DWS Lutheran World Federation/Department for World Service MP Member of Parliament NCP National Congress Party NGO Non-Governmental Organization SPLM/A Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees UNMIS United Nations Mission in Sudan WFP World Food Program

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STUDY AREA

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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation is a study of people’s efforts to create a sense of agency and normalcy in

uncertain circumstances. It is based on ethnographic research carried out between 2009 and

2010 in the vicinity of Bor Town, the capital of Jonglei State, .2 Since the 1880s, the Bor region has intermittently made front-page headlines in international newspapers, first as an area of colonial interest, later because of Sudan’s long-running wars. The image of Southern

Sudan produced since the 1880s—as a place whose people “were incapable of meeting the challenges of the modern world” (Johnson 1981:40-41)—has changed little: from the picture of an inaccessible swamp inhabited by archetypal savages in nineteenth-century exploration literature through early twentieth-century depictions of its subject population as “an intractable problem that impeded the peaceful establishment and efficient running of a new colonial administration” (Johnson 1981:508) to sporadic accounts of a war-torn region of refugees and victims of systematic violence during the 1980s and ‘90s.

The general questions that researchers have posed for themselves mainly relate the hows and whys of dramatic violence, its root causes, principle antagonists, and chronologies. Most recently these questions have turned on whether Sudan’s and South Sudan’s wars have ended, whether they are failed states, and, if so, whether either can be considered a “successfully failed

2 The semiautonomous Southern Sudan became the Republic of South Sudan on 9 July 2011. The people commonly identified as Dinka refer to themselves as Jieng (people). I will echo the Jieng idiom and use the phrase “Bor people,” after the phrase kɔc Bor, to refer to the residents of the floodplains fanning out eastward across the Upper plains from Bor Town along the Bahr al-Jebel (a tributary of the ) who are the subject of this dissertation.

xiv state” (Prunier and Gisselquist 2003). Framing our questions in terms of the root causes of violence risks pathologizing South Sudanese (youth, especially) by understanding them only through “the lens of violence” (Kelly 2008:356); and this danger has not always been avoided

(for an extended critique of violence as a framing device see Leopold 2005). Following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005, accounts of escalating violence and mass killings in Jonglei State have usually ascribed the region’s problems to a “culture of violence” involving cycles of cattle raiding and revenge, inflated bride-prices and Murle infertility (see Rolandsen and Breidlid 2012 for a critical overview of this literature).

I do not attempt to answer these kinds of questions about the causes of violence. The reason is partially because Sudan’s civil wars were not created by the people I met there (though, many eventually did take part, more often in an effort to defend their homes and families than to settle old scores). But mainly the reason is that my theoretical concerns have more to do with the ways in which people’s efforts to cope with violence are continuous with daily life: how people put up impediments to violence by making promises to one another and creating a sense of the ordinary in their everyday lives.

Scholarship on collective belonging in South Sudan has tended to focus on links between homeland attachments and the emergence of “ethnic fiefdoms” in settings marked by wider instability, the reorganization of local governance, and resource competition (Schomerus and

Allen 2010). My point is not to challenge this scholarship, much of which is cited below; nor is my aim to provide another analysis of the root causes of Southern Sudan’s wars. (Douglas H.

Johnson has masterfully reviewed this literature in The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars

(2003). As his title indicates, Sudan’s wars have been multiple and their causes and consequences cannot be adequately understood without considering Sudan’s changing place

xv within networks that have spanned large parts of the globe.) I think that there is room for anthropologists to make a contribution, and a need for the particular attention to small-scale social relations, coherence, moral codes and attachments and systems of knowledge which anthropologists bring to their subject matter. My aim is to draw attention to experiences of place and belonging that have often been neglected by a focus on violence which risks exaggerating the importance of participation in armed conflict, ethnic division, and abstract images of patrilineal affinity. Indeed, while violence and ethnic division dominated much of what was written about Jonglei state in 2009 and ‘10, many people living there talked about things that were much less dramatic: the price of lumber and cement, marriages, children, their families, tedium and frustration. I have tried to present these practices as I encountered them in Bor country, meaningful, nurtured and taken seriously—rather than as simply the products of resistance or invented traditions. For many Southerners, abstract claims to land, belonging, and authority were rooted much more in the practical responsibilities of daily life to family and neighbors, than in participation in armed conflict or, even, descent (ethnicity).

Most of the people I spoke to in Bor talked about their collective identities in ways that often de-emphasized descent, focusing instead on common history and shared commitments to building stable, predictable lives with their neighbors. Tim Allen and David Turton (1996:13) dealt with this point in talking about return migration and how the problem of creating durable communities of attachments to places and other people is in large part a problem of restoring responsibility and accountability, one of the most difficult things to repair after a prolonged war.

“If the resources and political will are forthcoming” roads and buildings can be rebuilt, shops can be repaired and fields cleared and replanted, Allen and Turton write (1996:13-14). “But those things which really make social life viable are hard … to pin down: little gifts, the sharing of

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knowledge about soils and plants, the acceptance of hierarchies and moral codes, the recognition

of avoidance customs, a sense of duty, a network of debts, consensus about how to settle

squabbles, understanding the distinction between flirting and harassing, or between teasing and

abusing, a common experience of the spirit world”—all aspects of that process by which culture

is continually produced, through practices with their own histories and modes of reproduction.

Dissertations are often written in reverse, with introductions last, imposing an order on

ethnographic materials where everything fits and builds up to one’s conclusion. This is not how

things happen. What follows is something of an attempt to lay out some of the ideas that helped

me to make sense of my time in Southern Sudan after I had returned—it falls into three parts.

First, I will briefly contextualize this dissertation in light of some current research about

migration and belonging, partly in order to sketch out some of the questions I took with me to

Southern Sudan; second, I will indicate how my research fits thematically within the

contemporary ethnography of Southern Sudan; and third, I will outline the chapters of this

dissertation. Taking these things up in that order, I begin with a discussion of return migration,

the topic which originally led me to Southern Sudan.

Return migration

Like any other student of anthropology, I came to my research through my own set of relationships. Mine grew out of friendships with young men and women who had left the vicinity of Bor in the 1980s and gained refugee status in North America in the late 1990s. I am not only deeply indebted to my friends who tolerated my intrusions, but also to their families in

Southern Sudan and who welcomed me into their homes. In the late 1990s, Southern

Sudanese in the United States also provided an important lesson about the concept of

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globalization and the idea that because the world is connected everyone (and everyplace) is

uniformly linked and accessible. Many people in Kakuma, a in northwest ,

or even in Juba, in Southern Sudan, found it easier to communicate with people in Philadelphia

than with family in rural Jonglei State. In spite of their connectedness—their affective ties,

shared language, remittances, and frequent phone calls and videos—few of the young men and

women I knew in the United States had any concrete idea of what passed for ordinary life in their

natal villages in South Sudan.

I first went to Bor because I wanted to understand return migration. When I was there in

2009 and ’10, the town was a settlement of roughly forty thousand people. In 1991 Southern

military unity collapsed when the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) divided into warring

factions. During what came to be known as the ruɔ n capoth ‘season of the lone survivor’, almost the entire population fled the town when the region was laid to waste by SPLA-Nasir soldiers and irregulars. The Government of Sudan captured Bor town in 1992. Living nearby was risky.

, م) A few children stayed behind with elderly relatives in a district called Hai Salaam

“peace quarter”) at the edge of town, and earned a little money selling cigarettes to the soldiers stationed there.3 (By 2009, most people translated the toponym “surrendered place.”) It was only after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005 that people began to settle there in substantial numbers. After 2005, the town’s proximity to river and air transportation led it to be chosen by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

(UNHCR) as a repatriation way-station where displaced people gathered before moving on to rural areas. Many remained in Bor Town for protection from rural insecurity. When I arrived in

3 See Douglas Johnson’s (2003:145-6) discussion of “peace villages” which were part of a program to produce “a dependent and portable labour reserve who serve a double purpose: 1) to implement the government’s “pacification” programme through resettling and reclaiming territory formerly contested by the SPLA, and 2) to extend political and economic control over the resources of these groups through agricultural schemes owned and operated by interest groups currently represented in the army and government.”

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August of 2009, then, it was a place where almost the entire population had recently arrived—

and an ideal place in which to examine the processes by which people reconstructed their

communities by building “those things which really make social life viable.”

The end of the civil war in 2005 has led to the return of many displaced people to South

Sudan. For many returnees and their families, these “homecomings” have been marked by

“unsettling” experiences of unforeseen social distance (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004).

Indeed, people often used a metaphor drawn from the “prickly” receptions that homecomers

sometime received to described the hardships of everyday life in Bor—ciɛŋ acï lɔ nyathath ‘life is prickly’, dull and tasteless. (“When you go to someone’s home, and they do not tell you to leave but they don’t welcome you. You go to the house but no one greets you. No one says,

‘You sit here,’” one young man explained. “There is a relation but the relationship is dry. It is like bad posho [stale, buthuth ‘tasteless’]”.)

Research about return migration has only recently come to constitute a substantial field of scholarly inquiry. The reason is not only that return migration has tended to fall at the margins of larger narratives of assimilation, diaspora, and transnationalism (Stefansson 2004); it also stems from what Laura Hammond calls the “repatriation = homecoming” model (1999:229), a framework that has the effect of fostering the idea that “going back” is an “unproblematic and natural” return to familiar ground. The perils of this model were recognized by scholars in the

1980s, when the neoliberal restructuring of many refugee-sending and -receiving states,

“combined with inadequate international assistance, meant that refugees were often viewed as a drain on the local economy” and a security risk (Allen and Morsink 1994:5; Brown 1992).

Scholars charged governments with placing limitations on refugee status in order to place a thousand little impediments in the way of people becoming fully integrated into their

xix surroundings, thereby encouraging repatriation; and assessments from both within and outside humanitarian organizations suggested that the promotion of repatriation “as the durable solution”

(Chimni 1999:1) by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had risked complicity in non-voluntary repatriation schemes that jeopardized refugees’ safety (Chimni

1999; Crisp 1985, Harrell-Bond 1986). Because the volume of publishable research generated by a topic tends to follow the institutional agendas that fund it, the emphasis placed on ensuring the voluntary character of repatriation has meant that the scholarship on return migration is largely a literature about the repatriation of refugees (Allen and Morsink 1994; Allen 1996;

Black and Koser 1999; Long and Oxfeld 2004; Markowitz and Stefansson 2004; Jansen and

Löfving 2009).

In 2008, I co-authored a paper with Mandela A.P. Mel, who was born not far from Bor

Town, about young people’s efforts to seek out, create and strengthen ties to their natal communities in Southern Sudan (Mel and Tuttle 2008). We wrote about the burden that student- debts placed on young refugees who did not have families to fall back on for support in the

United States. A few young men and women who gained refugee status in North America in the late 1990s went on to earn post-graduate degrees; some found work in offices, others found good paying jobs in the meat-packing and food-processing industry. All encountered barriers of and inequality, and many ended up struggling to make ends meet in low-paying service work. By 2008, many writers had begun to focus on the predatory ways that universities treated their students and how someone who wanted to enter into a career in a charitable organization or an NGO had to work for a year or two in an unpaid (or effectively unpaid) internship. We simply pointed out that there was a great deal of discussion in humanitarian circles about the promise embodied by “skills-transfer” projects designed to aid in the development of Southern

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Sudan with the help of US-educated returnees; but student loans, unpaid internships, and racism

effectively sealed young Sudanese migrants off from careers in charitable NGOs.4 Those young men and women that did manage to acquire the kinds of skills which could enable them to find jobs in Southern Sudan’s humanitarian sector, were generally so burdened by student loans that they were forced to seek employment elsewhere. In this respect, young arrivals from South

Sudan were not very different from the children of many working-class parents in the United

States.

By 2009-’10, when I arrived in Bor country, a number of the young men I knew in the

United States had resettled permanently in Southern Sudan. This topic was to have provided a kind of entrance into a study of return migration and feelings of belonging.5 I had planned to travel to Bor with a friend who had left there in 1984 and lived in a series of IDP and then refugee camps in Uganda until 2002, when he gained refugee status and traveled to the United

States. (After having lived in Bor for a few months I realized that the problems faced by returnees were not very different from those faced by everyone else.) As it turned out, we weren’t able to raise the money to get him there until several months after my arrival in Southern

Sudan. In the meantime his brother generously took time out of his studies at Makerere

University to meet me in Kampala and put me on a bus to Juba, where I was met by a friend of

4 Despite the aid and scholarships that many qualified for, and the shared apartments and budgets many relied on to make ends meet. This dissertation’s final chapter examines life in the United States. Mel and I (2008) focused on student debts in part because so much of the literature on young refugees has focused on the burden of remittances. While we acknowledged the importance of this literature, we argued that a focus on transnational ties often obscured the ways in which economic violence, racism, and other forms of inequality in the United States shaped the lives of recent arrivals. Indeed, paying one’s way through college often meant that a young person could not contribute to one’s family in Southern Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya, which added another painful burden to the stress of life in the US. By 2011, Mandela A.P. Mel had returned permanently to South Sudan, where he relied on the support of family and friends in Juba to get by until he was able to find a job. 5 Of course it isn’t surprising that many young men and women preferred not to chuck their families and loved ones to live in North America, where they had to struggle to make ends meet and a thousand reminders that being African they were unwelcome and not fully citizens. And while, admittedly, Southern Sudan is a difficult place to live, I began with this topic of return from North America because Americans tend to grow up with the belief that they live in the best country on earth. The idea that anybody would want to leave or prefer to live someplace else is practically incomprehensible.

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his named Majur Aguto who (delaying his own return to Makerere) introduced me to many

people and found me a place to stay in Bor. Majur was an in-law of my friend in the United

States; and while I was able to draw a sprawling kinship chart of several generations’ depth

which connected them, their friendship was based much more on relationships forged from

mutual aid and common experiences of movement. Majur greatly expanded the network of

people I had access to, without whom I would have learned much less about Bor country.

I think it is worth emphasizing the people in Bor defined their relatives by reference to

the commitments that they had made—their feelings of mutual responsibility and the desire to

create and maintain the kinds of ongoing relations upon which any community is ultimately

founded—if for no other reason than that Southern Sudanese societies are famous for having

patri-clans and lineages based on descent.

When people shared genealogical information with me they generally did not simply list

the names of their ancestors in strict lineal sequences—though most people could list eleven or

twelve male ancestors—but rather narrated stories about intergenerational movements,

successions, and loyalties and conflicts or divided relations as belonging to a father’s or a

mother’s “place.” These were accounts of the past in the mode of “storied knowledge,” in

Ingold’s phrase (2009): “To tell a story is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past,

bringing them to life in the vivid present of listeners as if they were going on here and now”

(2009:200). In Bor, people usually spoke of those whom they counted as their relatives most

generally by saying that they were “people of one dwelling-place” (kɔ c pan tok), and referred to themselves comprehensively as “Bor people” (kɔc Bor), describing different sorts of people geographically, as “those of such-and-such a place,” called “so-and-so.” Everyone also

market’)—and‘ ق) distinguished between Bor Town—popularly called “Jonglei State” or suk

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panjieng (lit., ‘people’s land’), a term referring to rural places where people could create a sense

of belonging that was more enduring and more secure than what “the state” or “the market”

offered.

Seasonality and place of kinship

This raises the issue of kinship. In CHAPTER ONE (page 60) I quote an excerpt from a matrimonial speech which contains the conventional order of talk about relatedness: a shared place, a way of speaking together (meaning how “we” come to agreements) and a name

(generally cast as a quotation from the speech of others), an image of commensality, an example of accompanying each other at a matrimonial discussion and a picture of exogamy—how “we shall all go together” as one group when one our daughters marry. (“We are the people of one place / this is how people should talk / and we are our people, which is called Jɔr / our food is one and we eat together / for instance, this small girl called Aja now’s going to Dɛ̈ r [to marry]…”). This order of talk ravels off from ordinary, unmarked, and day-to-day participation in other’s lives—working cooperatively, chatting, sharing meals, nurturing and caring for one another—and braids into “acts,” as Lambek (2011:3) terms those practices of kinship which “are not ongoing and continuous, not simply a matter of habit or having a feel for the game (Bourdieu

1977). Rather, acts stand out within the stream of practice as marked and often irreversible.”

Moving outward in genealogical space and time from the center of immediate and intimate relations where people and things circulate freely, to spheres of increasing distance calling for greater self-restraint; this scaling of relatedness, from the unmarked to the marked, evokes patterns of relating that resemble geographically mediated relational practices, which generally involve a similar slope of social and temporal distance and difference. Perhaps the

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simplest way to illustrate this would be to describe a few positions along an imaginary

continuum from the unmarked to the marked—after the way that people often spoke in the

abstract.

People in Bor distinguish different parts of the landscape by combining names with the

term pan, which implies inhabited land and bilingual speakers translate as “country,” “village,”

in the sense of “abode”), “community,” or “home.” In everyday speech, “pan” really just) ”دار“ means everybody who lives in a particular place. For instance, anglophone Dinka-speakers generally glossed pan-dԑ n Biong as “their-community of Biong.” It is almost impossible to invoke this notion of community without also implying that the people of such-and-such a place share some sort of common ancestry. In everyday speech, the term was most commonly used to refer to a group organized around a single named ancestor—pan Aguto is “the family of

Aguto”—and translated as either “section,” “family,” or “clan,” according to its genealogical depth and the speaker’s footing—that is, how the act of using the term oriented the speaker toward others, aligning them with some and separating them from others.

Practices of “participation in one another’s existence” (Sahlins 2013)—co-residence, a shared respect for principles of conduct toward each other, commensality, as much as

“prickliness,” loss, and betrayal—provide flexible metaphors for kinship beyond the relations of

“one place,” an image of kinship as concentric circles of mutuality, not long lines of descent.

“Common residence implies that individuals share a similar perception of their position in society within an expanding system of kinship relations,” Burton wrote (1987:109); and in rural communities, people generally acted as though everyone they related to on a day to day basis was a relative. Indeed, this was one of the ways that Evans-Pritchard defined “kinship” (in contrast to “descent”) in Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer, as a way of viewing

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relationships between people in terms of the various links established by close cooperation and

mutual interdependence, which people generally phrased in terms of a “kinship idiom” (Evans-

Pritchard 1951).

The smallest divisions were usually spoken of in terms of a recent grandparent: the

“people of so-and-so,” an expression equivalent to “people of one dwelling” that anglophone

Dinka usually translated as “family.” The smallest named division is called mac thok or

“cooking hearth,” the image being of children eating around a common cooking pot, and can refer both to small groups claiming common descent from a single ancestral grandmother and, more expansively, to groups of this kind, running five or six generations in depth. “Mac thok” often have female eponyms. Here is an example from a middle-aged man named Dau Deng, one of the sons of Deng Malual Aleer Goi, the first paramount chief of Bor country under early

Anglo-Egyptian rule (who died at Simsima on 1 August 1946). In June 2010 I was talking to

Dau about something his father, Deng Malual, had done some eighty years earlier. Deng Malual was so wealthy and his wives and children were so numerous, Dau was telling me, that he had delegated his responsibilities to three senior wives.

“He had thirty-six wives, so he divided them into three groups to organize the work and make dowries simple.” There was his first wife, tiɛŋ dït ‘big wife’, Ayɛn Kor Alith, who was from Anyakuei; then Nyakuɛny Biar, from Nyarweng; then Awak Bior Ahuɛr from . “Three big wives and thirty-three little wives.” The big wives each managed a group of eleven junior wives, he said; “those big wives were little husbands. [Each] big wife divided everything—food, properties, and what and what—among the little ones, and they divided everything between the children. [Each] was responsible for eleven wives. [Deng] was very clever; [and that was why he was made] a paramount chief.” “Thirty-six, exactly? you’re just keeping the math simple,” I said. Dau laughed, “Thirty-something. There were so many. So you see: we name our families by ladies” [4June 2010; 8 June 2010, WS500238].

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Dau described a populous descent group of three mac thok (“little husbands”) and several generations’ depth with a famous founding ancestor in a capsule, a genealogical narrative condensed into the family of one elderly government chief, Deng Malual. Dau’s story was a kind of parable about an archetypal wundït ‘great father’—a man who had achieved an astonishingly successful male career by transforming himself into an apical ancestor while he was still alive.

Being “people of one dwelling-place” (kɔ c pan tok) is not established by mere proximity or descent, however. In present-day Bor country, as much as any dwelling-place will be identified with a few “owners of the land” (kɔc piny), most of its members are likely to spend much of their time someplace else. This pattern of moving while maintaining links to one’s country of origin illustrates the region’s heterogeneity of livelihood strategies. These distribute risks through the year and among individuals and are much older than the region’s living memory. The many networks that converge upon cattle villages and shrines on the plains cross-cut the region’s “ethnic divides” and combine genealogical, matrimonial, political, economic, and religious relations, joining conceptions of dwelling-places, belonging, and ownership. These focal points are constituted by the density of these ties and—since people generally formalized their relations through bridewealth exchanges and other marked, periodic gatherings, such as the rebuilding of shrines, animal sacrifices, and life-cycle rituals—valued for their capacity to extend these ties outward in space and into the future (Mawson 1991; Johnson

1989, 1990).

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In the vicinity of Bor, where few shrines remain, the most important of these permanent focal points are the largest dry-season cattle villages (wut).6 Each of these villages is made up of a number of herding-groups, called dhiëën (sg. dhien), after the cattle-hearths and windscreens that they stake their cattle around. Dhiëën are also organized into a radial hierarchy, which forms the physical framework of the wut, and provides the terms of reference by which people can place themselves within it. Older dhiëën were seen as “generating” (dhieth) younger ones by fission or attracting settlers.

On the best-drained mound or mounds in the camp [wut], and usually in central position, are the shelters of members of those sub-clans [dhien] whose ancestors are thought first to have established the camp on that site [Lienhardt 1958:110].

The nuclear sub-clans of the tribes, and the nuclear lineages of sub-tribes, are often spoken of as 'the people of the centre of the camp' [wut], since they have first established the cattle camps and occupy central positions on the sites, or ‘the (classificatory) maternal uncles’ of the subtribe or tribe, since they are the descent-groups whose women are most widely distributed through the other descent groups of the tribe [Lienhardt 1961:9].

At any given time a cattle village was basically seen as an aggregation of dhiëën. I’ve already mentioned that many people spent a good deal of time away from their villages. The seasonal occupation of horticultural villages and cattle villages differ in terms of duration, activity, gender, and age. Nowadays, many people have moved closer to towns and government barracks for the safety afforded by those places; others reside in Bor or Juba, where they are students or shopkeepers or officials; others are soldiers, posted in almost every part of South

Sudan. Many men and women traveled widely to visit and to look for opportunities elsewhere; others made a trade in clothes or jewelry. If they had cattle they generally entrusted them to friends or relatives, who would care for them over the course of the yearly round. All this meant

6 I am following Burton (1987) here in translating the term wut as “cattle village” as opposed to “cattle camp” because the term “camp” implies impermanence. People move back and forth between villages. Although horticultural villages are occupied year-round, cattle-keeping is a year-round occupation; horticulture is seasonal.

xxvii that what really wove a wut together was not a human genealogy but rather the thickness of these ties—a sort of genealogy of dhiëën; and what really bound a dhien together were its members’ overlapping claims on cattle, which were in turn continually regenerated by debts and their obligations to various others—family, in-laws, and friends. The density of all these ties also meant that in practice many people had multiple ways of categorizing each other in the kinship idiom: two age-mates who would generally for this reason refer to each other as “brother” often also stood in a relationship of uncle-nephew, for instance. As a result the use of a particular term for a particular kinship relation did not precede an instance of speech—it was rather by speaking that they defined their relationship.

At least since the 1900s, governments have tried to turn focal points into institutions of the state. The trouble was that they were generally occupied seasonally (Burton 1981).

The Anglo-Egyptian policy of Native Administration has often been described as one that aimed to preserve “native culture and traditional authorities” by ceding colonial administration to

“traditional leaders.” This helps to explain the support that British officials gave to the teaching of indigenous languages (Sharkey 2012). It also accounts for District Commissioners’ (DCs) sometimes antagonistic relationships with missionaries—to whom colonial officials granted denominational “spheres of influences,” so that they would open schools and train low-level functionaries at their own expense, while at the same time worrying about the corrosive (“de- tribalizing”) influence that might have on the “customary” modes of authority upon which Native Administration was founded (DH Johnson 2011:14; Collins 2005:277).

Deeply embedded in the political theory of Native Administration is the idea of a natural identity between people and place, and “the conviction that mobile societies are incapable of generating distinct forms of social power” (Wengrow 2003:131). Having “traditional

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authorities,” in other words, was assumed to mean having a set of clearly bounded political-

territorial entities. (“The very word ‘displacement’ implies an assumption that all human

populations ‘belong’ in a certain place and that, in an ideal world, they would all be where they

belong,” David Turton (1996:97) notes in writing about fifteen years of Mursi movements and

what it has meant to the Mursi themselves.) Like the Mursi, and other mobile pastoral groups

elsewhere, cattle-keeping people of Southern Sudan contravened a basic norm of nineteenth-

century colonial political thought—namely, the inseparability of political structures from the

material framework of the settled village and the practice of agriculture. Wrote an official from

the Sudan colonial Ministry of Agriculture in 1955: “the Dinka, as cattle owners, would not be

tied to the land and take to the discipline of being settled as cultivators” (see page 44, CHAPTER

ONE, for the full quotation and citation).

This understanding of the relationship between authority, mobility, and labor underlays

the many “villagization” schemes undertaken by governments since the early 1900s, which

involved relocating populations and fixing “traditional leaders” in horticultural village centers

(see CHAPTER THREE). The assumption “that a village is the primordial fully social arrangement and that the physical existence of clustered habitations imbues social relationships with a measure of permanence”—in Burton’s (1980:273) phrase—also helps to explain why European visitors to Bor country always remarked on two things: the contrast between the riverside “cattle camps” with their “temporary huts” and the “permanent houses” of inland “villages,” and how people used the fine ash produced by cow-chip fires as salve. Here is an example from Father

Anton Kaufmann, writing in the 1860s.

When speaking about dwelling-places, a distinction must be drawn between the temporary huts erected during the dry season near the river bank, and the permanent huts in the woods, which the Africans regard as their proper homes. The former are only used

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for a few months and are then demolished. They are built of canes and reeds, plastered with cow dung … and are filled with ashes to keep out the cold. Many look more like towers than houses, with canes of different sizes jutting out of the ground. There are no closed walls and many apertures. The permanent houses in the woods present a completely different picture. They are solid round huts, about two poles in diameter, and are constructed by staking a circle of poles, each about a perch in length, and filling the space between each pole with bamboo-canes. … [T]he door … is just an oval-shaped opening through which the inhabitants enters or emerges on all fours [Kaufmann 1975[1881]:161].

Any traveler along the While Nile will see in the morning the Africans still covered in the white-greyish ash which is allowed to remain until the sun’s rays begin to make themselves felt. Then, if by chance, they come across a stream, they immediately wash themselves, but they are most reluctant to do so if any effort is involved; thus they smell horribly of cow-dung, and their skin becomes almost saturated with it [Kaufmann 1975[1881]:163].

corral’] is the cattle stand, or Murrah, whereupon the cattle are‘ زر ] Near the Seribah herded together every night after grazing on the plains [der Steppe]. Their manure, carefully laid out to dry in the sun, is gathered at sunset and set alight to cover the animals and their guardians in dense smoke to protect against the plague of the Baudah [ ‘mosquito’]. The cattle understand this blessing and seek out the densest smoke, getting a seat as close to the fire as possible. Even the natives [Eingeborene] lie down on the smoldering dung and ashes, so that they are dusted by ash and their originally black skin color appears streaky-grey; and this, though abhorrent to European eyes, in their view much improves their beauty and health. The whole floor of the Murrah is covered with cow dung and ashes like a threshing floor. While the whole area is daily cloaked in a fragrant, smoky gauze that hangs over these places, by night, the firelight and rising clouds of smoke betray the natives’ presence there [Marno 1873[1869]:340-41].7

Travelers described scenes without houses—distinct, functionally specific spaces with walls—lacking contrast, clear edges, and any sense of order. For these observers, ash-covered

7 “Nahe der Seribah ist der Viehstandplatz, Murrah, auf welchen allabendlich das tagsüber in der Steppe weidende Vieh zusammenge-trieben wird. Der Mist desselben, sorgfältig ausgebreitet, um an der Sonne zu trocknen, wird bei Sonnenuntergang zusammengehäuft und angezündet, dass die Thiere und deren Hüter im dichten Rauch Schutz gegen die Plage der Baudah finden. Das Vieh weiss diese Wohlthat zu würdigen und benützt sie soviel als möglich, indem es in den dichtesten Qualm und möglichst nahe am Feuer einen Platz zu bekommen trachtet. Auch der Eingeborene legt sich an den glimmenden Mist und Aschenhaufen, so dass er von der Asche eingepudert wird und dadurch die ur-sprünglich schwarze Hautfarbe mit einem ungleich ver-theilten Grau überdeckt erscheint, was zwar in europäischen Augen abscheulich ist, ihrer Meinung nach aber sehr zur Schönheit und Gesundheit dient. Der ganze Boden der Murrah ist mit Rindermist und Asche wie eine Tenne bedeckt. Die auch am Tage schwach glim-menden Haufen hüllen die ganze Gegend in eine, eben nicht wohl duftende Rauchatmosphäre, welche über diesen Plätzen lagert, während sie Abends und des Nachts durch den Feuerschein und die aufsteigenden Rauchwolken häufig an den Eingeborenen zum Verräther warden.”

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bodies signified savagery, an organic connection to the swamps—so close that its inhabitants

seemed to be so much a part of the landscape that they were lacking even bodies, like ghosts.

The cattle byers (lwak, pl. lwek) built in the villages away from the river are of imposing dimensions. … In the dry season—we are speaking specifically of the riverain [sic] tribes in the neighborhood of Bor and Shambe—the whole community, men, women, and cattle, migrates to the neighborhood of the river, living in small temporary huts (Shambe) or absolutely in the open (Bor). … Hearths are made, surrounded by dry wood and uprights to which the cattle are tied at night. On these hearths dung is kept smouldering at night, and men and cattle sleep as near to them as possible to gain protection from the mosquitoes. By rolling themselves in the fine ash men and boys acquire a grey covering, a moderately efficient protective and one that makes them look strangely ghostly as they move about in the morning twilight [Seligman and Seligman 1932:137].

The men sleep as a rule in the ashes of their fires, and we saw men herding cattle whose whole bodies were smeared with ash. We were told that this was to keep off cattle flies, and other stinging insects. The effect was startling; they looked like ghosts [Treatt 1927:194]

[T]here was a big Dinka camp, with many fine, long-horned cattle. A perfect swarm of boys and men lay in an immense mound of ashes, and these ghastly ghosts came and gave us their clammy paws, and then returned to tie up their favorite bulls to short posts, one close behind each sleeping place, for the night [Millais 1924:132].

That this attitude toward cattle villages and pastoralism almost exactly reverses the

attitudes toward them held by most of their inhabitants is a theme that will be reiterated

throughout this dissertation. The most immediate reason was bureaucratic; a mobile livelihood

enabled people to refuse to take any part in the colonial process. And the reason was that people

could simply entrust their cattle to distant friends and relatives and move elsewhere whenever

officials attempted to round up the male population for -clearing or road-building projects,

or attempted a “punitive” raid.

It is worth noting here that “clothing” oneself (cieŋ) with ash is an act of more consequence than simply taking precautions against mosquitos. As a noun the term cieŋ refers to the domain of everyday life and practices, “habits and customs” (Nebel 1979), “surrounding

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land,” and, as a verb, means “way of doing things” or simply “to live.” Evans-Pritchard

famously translated the Nuer cognate as “home” (1940:135-6; but see Burton 1987:27-28); in

Dinka the term can mean “to wear.” This usage is not coincidental, one clothes oneself with

others. I mentioned that the main named focal points of social life are referred to with terms for

hearths, mac thok ‘cooking hearth’ and dhien ‘cattle hearth’. Hearths sites define networks of

people and their spatial relations index temporal sequences of growth and generation (Burton

1983). Francis Mading Deng (1973:226, 294) translates the term dhien as “clan” in a Ngok

Dinka song he recorded in 1962, which also illustrates the metonymic connection between ashes

and hearths. “Arom dhien e Dhaŋ ku ka kic alaam jak e yɛn,” a homesick woman laments, “the

ashes [arom] of the clan [dhien] of Dhang have not touched my skin.” Ashes are also an index of permanence and amenity; “layers and layers of ashes” and “deep ashes” are common expressions of long residence on a particular spot.

John Burton, author of the classic ethnography of Reel (called Atuot by Dinka speakers), who live in Dinkaphone country west of Bor—and who speak a language called Thok Reel

(“tongue of Reel people”) which is not mutually intelligible with Dinka—wrote about how

burnt dung ash … symbolizes [lineal] continuity, fictive though it may be. When a man acquires cattle through marriage and leads them to his camp to be teathered, one of the first things he will do is sift through the gol [it is the same word in many varieties of Dinka, dhien in Bor Dinka] to find clean ashes which he then spreads over the back, loins and head of each animal. Through this simple act they then ‘become’ part of the same ancestral heard. One of the first cosmetic chores each morning in the camp is to spread warm ashes over one’s own body, an act which accomplishes a similar end [Burton 1987:37-38].8

It is important to emphasize the density of experience around hearths alongside their more mundane functions. By sitting together, sharing a space, eating the same food, and

8 Burton (1983:114) quotes a Reel singer, “the ashes of the dung fire in my camp are so very deep,” an image suggesting “that the singer is a descendant of an ancient ancestor whose people have occupied the same space for uncountable years.”

xxxii covering themselves with ashes from a common fire, people come to share the same body by being people of one dwelling-place—sharing flesh and blood, each said to be produced by food, and sharing the same skin, clothed in ash.

Town and Country

“It is obvious [that] people will go back [to the village] because no one lives in town without a village.” [Major Aguto, 20 January 2010]

What I want to discuss here is how people imagined belonging in a place where the reordering of space—through border-making, settlement schemes, and displacement—has long been a principal mode of state power.

People whom I met in Bor country described a sense of localized identity in contrast to other places as well as in terms of being “local,” marginal to centralized powers, which were generally defined by a distinct style of bureaucratic speech associated with Government. In

Southern Sudan, where many on the countryside are largely self-sufficient, the centralized structure of government contributes to the perceived autonomy of rural areas. Concepts of citizenship in Southern Sudan have long been connected to locality, with the villages having chiefs’ courts being the locus of civic identity. Whenever people spoke about the specific locus of their most consequential actions, though, they spoke about cattle villages.

The strained relations between South Sudanese and the states which have sought to govern them have provided material for a story of international interventions that traces the problems to something inherent in the culture there. Related to the “culture of violence,” one of the most often cited is the supposed inability of people to distinguish between personal attachments and those which are supposed to be impersonal and bureaucratic, belonging to the market and the state. This is variously called “tribalism,” “corruption” or “nepotism.”

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Cherry Leonardi (2011:216-17) raised this issue recently in talking about debates over the

commodification of land and the

monetization of productive and reproductive resources, including human life itself. … [The resulting] debate and competition within families and communities [as some have sought out money and markets] has reproduced a binary distinction between the values of an idealised moral economy of kinship and reciprocity, and the immoral, individualistic cultures of money and town, … [a] moral dichotomy transcends ethnic divisions, and underlies perceptions of government corruption and of the broader changes wrought by the political economy of the 1983–2004 war and the subsequent interim period.

Clearly people in South Sudan understand the difference between the personal and

impersonal ties; few people elsewhere understand better or are more disturbed by their

understanding. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, one of the major divisions that people spoke of in

Bor country, which likewise summarized a more diffuse set of feelings about akuma

ق) government”), was between the town—which many referred to as “Jonglei State” or suk“)

‘market’)—and panjieng (lit., ‘people’s land’) or baai, terms that were generally used to refer to the rural countryside which can connote “home” and by logical extension, a house, a village, or a country.

The idea of conflict between town and country has been widely discussed in the anthropology of Africa south of the Sahara and has deep in the region as well as scholarly and popular discourse in Europe and elsewhere. Much recent discussion around the question of whether South Sudan is a “failed state” portrays homeland attachments to rural areas as something primordial, a social mechanism producing long-lasting differences between groups which now and then erupt in inter-group ethnic violence (“tribalism”). Given the reach and influence of colonial powers, post-colonial regimes, and non-state actors like corporations,

NGOs, and rebel militias, it is common to describe “local” forms of power in places like South

Sudan as forms of resistance to exogenous forces. This of course is important: people in Bor did

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come to redefine what it meant to be Muɔnyjaŋ in opposition to what they saw as the logic of

regimes established by invasion and maintained by violence; and, by doing so, they defined a sort of autonomous sphere, referred to spatially as “panjieng,” in opposition to Turco-Egyptian rule (and, later, the colonial and national governments that succeeded it). But to focus exclusively on resistance can miss most of what people consider to be most important.

I begin CHAPTER ONE with a series of jokes, and discuss the contrasts between “Jonglei

State” and panjieng, in order to examine how people in Bor country tended to represent their own perceptions of this contrast. What people generally focused on as the defining feature of panjieng was their ability there to create new social responsibilities through the power of words and objects: to make promises and, by being held accountable for those promises, to live in a community with all the debts and obligations that entailed. When people in Bor talk about consequential promises, they generally spoke about marriages. This is also what people mentioned when they described what, if anything, the war had been about preserving: the freedom to create obligations and restraints by being self-sufficient—not the freedom to do just whatever one wished. Allow me to illustrate by a brief ethnographic vignette.

Each week I would visit the fishing port, which lay on the bank of the Bahr al-Jebel at the northern edge of Bor Town. I would wander around and chat with the fishermen and gawk at their great bundles of dried fish, and then I would walk back to the market and tell my research assistant, Madit, about what I had seen there.

One afternoon I was sitting in the market, talking about how one of the boats I had seen at the port was named Aluak Jang 1 ‘slave/servant of people 1’. We were watching a group of

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“blockers,” wage-laborers whose job it was to unload trucks full of heavy bags of cement and

carry them into shops.

Figure 1. Boat Named "servant of people."

“It’s like those blockers,” Madit said. They were mostly from across the river, from Aliap, but there was one from Bor. A drunkard. “Nobody cares about him,” Madit said of the drunkard. “But other people are laughed at if they are loaders. Those Aliap are far from their home so they don’t care. But, here, eh? the lady will refuse you. She will say, ‘How can I talk to the dead person?’ [Ɣɛn cï lɔ ba jam won raan cï thou ‘I cannot go around talking to the person who’s died’], a person with such a job?’”

“That is aluak—the person who receives orders. The person who stays with you—he doesn’t have any cattle—, the drunkard [dɛ̈ k, one governed by alcohol], the dead person with no children [thuɔm ]. Or like the person without parents; you put your own children in school, but to him [the aluak, lit. ‘servant’], you say, ‘You do this. You do this. You do this’ [imperative, looi-ë kene. looi-ë kene. looi-ë kene]; and he doesn’t have any salaries in that job. Or you say to the soldier, yiin aluaŋ akuma [you’re a slave of Government], but that’s okay,” Madit said, laughing, “because the soldier is also the Government” [nb8, 7 July 2010].

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I should probably mention that Madit was a man of nineteen, which is part of the reason why he chose an image of a young woman’s refusal to flirt to illustrate the debasement of , wage-labor, and soldiering. In the young woman’s question in this constructed dialogue

(“How can I talk to the dead person?”) there is also a suggestive parallel with Patterson’s (1985) definition of slavery as a “social death,” since slaves could make no binding agreements with others. On one level, the conjunction between slavery, “social death,” and courtship was unsurprising; the term aluak was used to refer to young men who, lacking cattle for some reason or another and needing a place to live, stayed on in someone else’s household and looked after their cattle. A person with neither cattle nor land was in no position to marry or, really, make any kind of promise to anyone. Hence the term aluak, derived from luak ‘cattle byre’, wherein such a person was little more than a possession of another. I rarely heard the term used in this specific way, though; the most common use was in the phrase weu ka luek ‘money of servitude’, referring to wages got by performing menial work.9

People in Bor country generally saw the sale of labor as degrading (though working for the government in an office was something of an exception). While not everyone shared this attitude toward wage-labor and relations of command, this concept of labor as servitude was so commonplace that it was evoked to provide a set of assumptions against which contrary attitudes were articulated. For example, a few days later I was chatting with a man whom I will call

Majok. He lived alone in a house along the main road, and collected images of white women, which he clipped from advertisements and stitched into a little album for a hobby. He spoke fluent English, Arabic, German, and Dinka and had worked for a number of NGOs. Majok ordered two glasses of tea and said, “Even if someone brings the tea you still have to pick it up and bring it to your mouth. You serve yourself! Those people who say, ‘weu ka luek, weu ka

9 Compare Hutchinson’s (1996:83) discussion of the “money of shit.”

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luek’, they say, ‘this is our oil; this is our homeland.’ But they wouldn’t know a drilling platform

if they fell off of one. Where’s the oil? How many meters underground? They don’t know, and

yet they chase the teachers away. How will they get that oil without education? Everyone has to

pick up his own spoon—no matter who cooked the soup” [9 July 2009].

Hospitality, land, commensality: Majok’s speech was a series of inversions, the same

idea with the terms switched around. The first takes an image of positive value, hospitality and

fellowship, and turns inside-out. The act of giving a drink to a visitor is a basic “value template”

in Bor country (Munn 1986:11-12, 121). Small acts of hospitality embody potentialities for

positive values because performing them involves others, forming friendships and obligations

that extend relationships outward in time and space, creating a larger social world and investing

it with meaning. Majok’s image reverses this: to say “you serve yourself” is an escape from

restraint that empties these actions of all meaning. Even his proverb, “Everyone has to pick up

his own spoon,” is a reversal of a common proverb about reciprocity. The expression is “a bi lo

ku bi bo”, two basic centripetal verbs, go (lo) and come (bo), which are lexically centrifugal and

centripetal to a deictic center, loosely meaning, “[it] will go and [it] will come”.

Finding a balance

The association of towns, military slavery, jails and institutions of command with

“government” (akuma) is deeply rooted in Southern Sudan. Scholars have produced a large

literature concerning its origins and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history in Sudan (DH

Johnson 1989; Spaulding 1985; Kapteijns 1985) and with processes of ethnogensis in Southern

Sudan, Uganda, and Kenya (DH Johnson 2009; Leopold 2006). Madit’s phrase aluaŋ akuma was a common term for “soldier.” The term akuma mainly means “army”; it has always been

xxxviii associated with foreigners, coercion, and towns and has come to denote pretty much any organization with a bureaucratic structure—schools, hospitals, armies, as well as NGOs and other private bureaucracies like Total or Chevron, which tend to be much more powerful in the region (Riehl 2001). Noted Cherry Leonardi (2007:394): “Vernacular terms reflect this amalgamation of urban, military and government cultures: tueny in Dinka-speaking , for example, can indicate anybody schooled, uniformed (or even clothed) or simply town-dwelling; gela (or miri) in Bari/Kakwa-speaking Yei and Juba were originally used to denote , but nowadays refer to the government, the military and uniforms.” This emphasis on the contrast between town and country does not mean that the two exist apart from each other as two complete, stable worlds. Rather the two images form a pair which has a logical relation to a larger society. Each provides an image of a microcosm, by counterpoint to the other, each with its own distinctive activities and rhythms, cycles and relationships. The contrast provides an angle on larger social processes, bringing into focus two sharply different visions of human life and possibility.

The increasing size of towns’ plats after 2005—with the insecurity of land tenure, raised land-prices and extension of bans and police beatings that went along with the expansion—gave people’s efforts to block the expansion of towns into areas of collective land ownership urgency.10 But concerns were also more subtle. Relations characteristic of “town” contexts were

10 These restrictions ranged from the unremarkable (Jonglei Governor Kuol Manyang’s ban on plastic bags on environment grounds, which had the effect of banning ice cream, since it was packaged in plastic bags) to the very unpopular ban within Bor Town’s borders of loose animals and the carrying of clubs (both of which would be confiscated by the police and carried a fine), and the selling of home-made alcohol, which deprived women of a needed source of income for paying school fees. These restrictions were justified as “security measures.” See “Widows cry foul as state governor orders alcohol ban” (Sudan Tribune, 1 March 2013) for an an analogous situation surrounding the banning of home-made alcohol by Matur Chut Dhuol in Lakes State (available online, http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article45687, accessed 9 October 2013). The Mayor of Bor Town, Mayor Nhial Majak, recently banned shisha, which had also provided women with a source of income. Wrote Phillip Thon Aleu: “In addition to the shisha ban, Majak has banned sales of locally brewed alcohol, saying it was destroying the lives of young men and women in the state. If people want to drink alcohol, they should buy beer, he said, although xxxix infesting everyday life. After all, it is very difficult to engage bureaucratic political institutions—even if one’s main purpose is only to slow them down—without actually becoming a part of that political structure. The SPLA had likewise provided the very plain lesson that it is difficult to fight against a bureaucratic army without a similar kind of leadership structure.

Indeed, the creation of a great many homeland “community associations”—each with a chairman, a board, and a set of representatives who could meet with government officials or the staff of one of Bor Town’s NGOs—was based on a perfectly sensible appreciation of this fact; it was also why people tried to isolate these forms of organization from “home” contexts.

Relations between domains of town and country could thus stand for relations that were apparently internal to each. In order to understand how panjieng provided people with a concrete way to imagine living outside of state power in their reflections on life, well-being, and relatedness, then, one needs to understand that it is an image based on the contrast afforded by akuma (“government”).

Anthropologists sometimes use a sharp contrast as a device to focus an analysis: panjieng and panakuma, town and country, raw and cooked; and despite the many authors who have reminded us that terms like “tradition” and “modernity” or “the West” and “the non-Western” are at best probably meaningless, these cartoon-images persist because they capture a experiential divide, simplifying particulars so that we can make sense of them, provided that we are not too much concerned with history. Contrasts work as analytic devices because they provide distance, a point of leverage in a complicated reality.

In the next section I am going to lay out the chapters of this dissertation. Here I simply want to discuss the first chapter and the last. In CHAPTER ONE I discuss jokes. Like more serious

he did not explain why beer is a better drink” (http://www.voanews.com/content/bor-south-sudan-mayor-shisha- cafes-close-order/1761892.html). xl

forms of speech, jokes are often told with the express intention of their being repeated and more

widely represented by others. In that chapter (as well as CHAPTER NINE), I argue that matrimonial and other forms of effective speech share with jokes this attention to the repeatability of words.

The term for this quality of speech—its capacity to act, as it were, of its own accord; or, at least, to act in ways unanticipated by speakers—is kec, which I translate as “bitter.” This is an imperfect translation, because “bitterness” is generally a pleasurable quality and the term has mainly positive connotations. The opposite of bitterness is not really sweetness exactly, but rather blandness, a term with only negative connotations that is associated with boredom and used to describe words that lack agency. In the final chapter I discuss blandness with the terms nyathath ‘prickly’ and buthuth ‘tasteless’.

These two terms provide a sort of set of conceptual bookends for this dissertation.

Bitterness has the capacity to draw people together by getting them to talk to each other. It is agency defined intersubjectively. This is why effective words are referred to as “bitter words” and why bitter words and promises are binding. Effective speeches, funny jokes, engaging legends and stories: these are what bind people together as people of one place. One can even speak of bitter words as “tying words,” as I discuss in CHAPTER ONE.

Blandness, on the other hand, is socially inert. Blandness, like indifference, does not bind anyone to anybody else. In the final chapter I suggest some of the reasons why I was told that blandness is worse than more dramatic things, like anger or hatred. Throughout this dissertation I suggest that any community based on love and affection will generate all anger and quarrels, if only because people who live together and have strong feelings of one another will always have complicated histories with each other. That much is to be expected anywhere. But

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when people are indifferent, when life has become prickly, people are barely speaking to one

another—problems will go unsolved, differences go unaddressed, and conflicts will fester.

By seeking to understand what is meant by the metaphor “life is prickly” in this

dissertation, I have sought to consider how concepts like these, developed by people in Bor

country to understand the dynamics of their own history, can contribute to wider body of

ethnographic theory. After all, the meta-discourse surrounding speech implicit in jokes and

matrimonial discourse is a way of reflecting on making and keeping promises without relying on

contracts and courts, with police and prisons to back them up—and by doing so, sometimes,

keeping such institutions at arm’s length.

Plan of the dissertation

This dissertation is divided into ten chapters. I have already begun to discuss the topic of

CHAPTER ONE, “tying speech and jokes,” which is organized thematically rather than by a strict chronological sequence. Scholars of Sudan (now “the Greater Sudan” of Sudan and South

Sudan) conventionally divide Sudan’s history into a number of periods according to a several key events: the Turco-Egyptian or Turkiyah period (1820-‘21 to 1881-‘85), the Mahdiyah (1881-

‘85 to 1898), the Anglo-Egyptian or Condominium era (1899-1956), the first Civil War (1956 or

1963 to 1972), which ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement period (1972-1983) and Sudan’s second civil war (1983-2005), and the interim period created by the Comprehensive Peace

Agreement after 2005. This periodization is more useful for answering questions about colonial rule that focus on the perspectives of central states, less useful for understanding the experience of many Southerners. The problem with this chronology is that it risks reducing the history of

Sudan to a story of cultural domination and war, reproducing timeless oppositions between colonizers and colonized, Europe and Africa, Christianity and Islam, war and peace.

xlii

Contemporary descriptions of South Sudan—and Jonglei State in particular—describe

social breakdown and internecine violence. As I’ve said, framing our questions in terms of the

root causes of violence risks pathologizing South Sudanese (for an extended critique of violence

as a framing device in the region see Leopold 2005). Because misery isn’t the “whole story” of

Southern Sudan, I cannot see much point in limiting my description to suffering. This is one

reason I focus on the pleasure that people take in ordinary conversations. My time in Bor

involved a lot of humor, much of it connected to a popular antipathy to hierarchy and, especially,

the violence and pointless rules and regulations of schools and the army.

Another reason to focus on certain jokes, specifically, is that these kinds of narratives

focus attention on the creativity and repeatability of words, reflecting a particular attitude toward

language. Words themselves are commonly said to be a kind of Power inasmuch as they are

persuasive; talking about certain forms of speech, what I refer to as “tying speech,” is a way of

talking about how visible results can be attained through invisible means and how our collective

actions have power over us.

CHAPTER TWO is mainly meant to provide a thumbnail sketch of the early years of

Condominium rule in Southern Sudan. I take as a starting point the euphemization of violence and those aspects of the colonial encounter which were mutually comprehensible across cultural and linguistic differences. Its theme concerns the objectification of difference, between the identities and ideologies of colonizers and their colonial subjects, and among colonizers themselves. The colonial project not only imperiled indigenous populations’ sense of themselves, but also colonizers’ sense of themselves as “civilized,” or more precisely that their civilizing project was underpinned, ultimately, by violence. The following two chapters each consider this theme from slightly different vantages, with each focusing on the history of Bor

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Town and circling around a bit chronologically. Chapter three examines narratives about Bor

Town’s nineteenth-century history and the town’s development around the site of a garrisoned

slaving depot established in the 1860s by al-‘Aqqād & Co. of . Chapter fours pulls back a bit; its purpose is to sketch out a regional history of technologies of rule and command.

Examining longer term continuities illustrates how colonization depended on many other “agents of empire” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:21).

CHAPTERS FIVE and SIX consider generational differences through my encounters with individuals. CHAPTER FIVE centers on the life story of Fatinadït (Fatina + dït ‘big’ or ‘elder’)—or

Fatina Atier, as she was sometimes called—a woman of perhaps 85 years whose paternal grandfather had been a military slave from western Sudan. CHAPTER SIX centers on the life story of Husain Mac, a returnee to Bor Town who in the 1950s had been a clerk in , the provincial capital of Upper Nile, before working for a series of businesses elsewhere in North

Africa and the Middle East. CHAPTER SEVEN draws back a bit in order to provide an overview of the political economy of land in South Sudan. And CHAPTER EIGHT focuses on genealogical narratives through the life story of Mabior Makuei, a forty-year old veteran of the SPLA.

CHAPTER NINE, on matrimonial negotiations and strategies of incorporation, returns to

CHAPTER ONE’s theme of speech and examines the structure of matrimonial negotiations. I’ve already mentioned that people in Bor country generally talked about panjieng in opposition to

Government. In as much as this contrast forms a part of how people imagine themselves as distinct from and marginal to cosmopolitan centers, it makes another place—a town or a capital city, the state, a global political-economy centered in North America—an important frame of reference. A critical part of the process of constructing this frame of reference in Southern

Sudan involves those institutions (schools, armies, certain bureaucratic settings) within which

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people learn the region’s working languages (Arabic and English) and those which formed

around “Indirect Rule,” which supported seventy or so “local languages” (see Sharkey (2012)).

For their speakers, the difference between Dinka and English or Arabic is not necessarily the

same as that between Dinka and Bari, say, Acholi or even . Partly, as Sharkey

(2012:428) has shown, this has to do with the fact that while colonial “Native Administration,”

missionary activities, and later “Arabisation policies” in Southern Sudan did lead many to

articulate counterposed identities, English and Arabic “spread at the grassroots, often in spite of–

not because of–government policies.” The role that language varieties have played in how

people imagined their place in Bor country cannot be understood without considering its place

within networks of communication, movement, and exchange that spanned large parts of the

globe and link regional transformations to wider patterns of change in North-. Partly

it reflects the way in which language has come to be popularly identified with a sense of “local

culture” that is closely tied to certain forms of action and specific sites. The most salient is the

speech used for matrimonial negotiations, which is closely identified with cattle villages. This

chapter discusses those aspects of matrimonial negotiations that lend their characteristic forms of

performance to verbal objectification and comparison.

The dissertation’s concluding chapter describes how, for many in Bor in 2009, living side

by side with struggling foreigners from Uganda and northern Sudan while “big people” relocated

their families safely elsewhere was making an impression as an expression of growing disparities

of wealth and influence within South Sudanese society. It also examines a cultural politics of

belonging through the lens provided by discussions of “steadfast suffering” (guɔ m) in the face of insecurity, and the relationship of suffering to the wartime arbitrariness of place.

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CHAPTER ONE

“TYING SPEECH” AND JOKES

The British called a meeting to say, “I’m leaving.” The Chiefs replied, “You didn’t call us to inform us when you came. So just go. Leave as you arrived.”

Kual Col was summoned by the DC to discuss tribute, the construction of roads, and other development issues. Kual asked whether he could go to England. “Are you kidding?” The DC said, “You’re a black man with no money.”

“‘Remember,’ he added ‘no government has a sense of humour, and sarcasm has no place in official correspondence’” (Cruickshank 1962:36).

In this chapter, I would like to cast the problem of South Sudan’s recent history in terms of how people there were reconsidering their relations with one another rather than in terms of how they have dealt with outsiders. To do so, I will focus on people’s experiences of contradiction as an internal feature of everyday life through jokes and humorous stories.

Observers frequently make sense of Africa’s social complexity by contrasting two systems, or by describing Africans as temporally suspended “between tradition and modernity”—as if the only contradictions and dilemmas that people experienced were through their encounters with exogenous histories. Jokes share with this analytic rubric a structure of two realms whose relation to one another is incommensurable.1 I will argue that certain humorous expressions

1 I should probably add that few of the jokes in this chapter are likely to strike the reader as funny. Most of them involve terrible things happening to people. My rational for calling them “jokes” is that they are short, fictional narratives which were all narrated to me in a humorous register and share a particular structure and attention to the absurdist possibilities of language and logic. For a somewhat analogous approach to the relation between colonialism and the comic see Comedy, Fantasy and Colonialism (2002), a collected volume edited by Graeme Harper. I think my own approach is closer to the one that Ted Cohen takes in chapter five of Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (1999:45-68). Keith Basso (1979) observed that a common way of representing a positive social value is by the tangible representation of its opposite: images of social incompetence, disorder, obscenities, and so forth. By dramatizing positive values through the negation of a negation, inchoate feelings about antisocial behavior can be disowned and ideals can be articulated. He gives as an example Western Apache joking imitations of boorish Anglo-American speech (“Hello, my friend!”) and behavior. These “portraits of ‘the

1 exemplify with particular clarity the contrast between ways of speaking that characterize positive social relations (and matrimonial negotiations) and those ways of speaking characteristic of institutions such as schools, armies, churches, and aid organizations. My objective is to sketch out some popular attitudes toward speech, responsibility and commitments. This is also an experiment with method, built around two sources. The first is popular genre—a corpus of jokes

I collected in not far from Bor Town; the second is a valorized form of speech—a series of matrimonial negotiations that I was encouraged to record during my stay there.

Contemporary descriptions of South Sudan—and Jonglei State in particular—describe social breakdown and internecine violence. I don’t deny that there is much that can be learned from the study of armed conflict, but it is all too often overlooked in discussions of the root causes of conflict that this emphasis risks pathologizing South Sudanese (youth, especially) by understanding them only through “the lens of violence” (Kelly 2008:356). This has not gone unnoticed by people living in Bor.

On Easter Sunday in 2010, my research assistant, Madit, and I were walking along the road and watching the church groups that were celebrating the holiday. Churches in Bor were organized by a clear hierarchy of authority, very much like armies and schools. The groups were organized into “divisions”—women, young women, young men, children, and men—each wearing matching uniforms and sashes. They marched along the road in neat rows, four abreast, singing call and response, and carrying flags and banners. “That is why Americans say, ‘All

Southern Sudanese are soldiers’,” Madit remarked as the procession passed [4 April 2010].

Madit expressed a common ambivalence about schools, churches, government institutions and NGOs. Many people talked about the promise embodied by these institutions,

whiteman,’” Basso (1979:37) writes, “are “a form of play, … characterized by a paradox … consisting in a negative statement that contains within it an implicit negative metastatement.”

2

which afforded a vision of a desirable life but at the same time provided a continual reminder of

Bor’s marginality and the perception among foreigners that its inhabitants were pathologically

violent. Everyone was also perfectly aware that these stereotypes would not have any real

consequence were it not for the existence of a global apparatus of legal and economic

inequality—backed up by armies, police, immigration officers, passports, visas, and so on, …—

that transformed what “Americans say” into a reality that Southerners themselves had to cope

with on a day to day basis.2

I brought up schools because I want to tell you another story that I think illustrates this ambivalence perfectly, if a little bit obliquely. One afternoon in September, 2009, I was sitting in Bor Town with Madit, who was leafing through a book that I had brought called Perspectives

on Africa. He stopped on an image of a European “colonial officer in portage” shown wearing a

cork helmet and seated in a simple palanquin carried by four Africans (Grinker and Steiner

1997:567).

“There’s a song about this,” Madit said.

I asked him to sing it.

bɛny iye, bɛny yekɔcdït Master woe! Master of all the people duɔn [duɔk] ba bɛnydït jal (cök) piny Don’t let the master touch the ground. bɛny iye, bɛny yekɔcdït Master woe! Master of all the people duɔn [duɔk] ba bɛnydït jal piny Don’t let the master touch the ground. [23 Sept. 2009, recording WS500096]3

2 The idea that Americans viewed all Southern Sudanese as soldiers was so much on Madit’s mind was probably because he was imagining the scene from my point of view. His observation that the organization of the church groups recalled the organization of an army was of course true but that would not have occurred to me, coming from the US, where pretty much everything is organized like a coercive bureaucracy, enforced by the threat of prisons and police. While a lot has been written about colonial institutions like schools and churches with a theoretical emphasis on the relation of power and knowledge production, the ways in which this is ultimately backed up by the threat of physical violence seems to fall out of much of it. 3 Or, in another version, bɛny e bɛny kɔcdït, duke bɛny cɔk jak piny ‘master the master of all people, don’t let master’s foot touch the ground’ [NB2, 7FEB2010].

3

“They carried him in a bed,” Madit said, laughing at the vulgarity of it. “At that time, when the Europeans colonized the people here: if the leader wanted to go the next morning, he sent word to the village. He said, ‘You go and collect the young men!’ And then the next morning, the European said, ‘I want to go to Khartoum,’ or ‘I want to go to Malakal.’ And so they collected the young men—collected a lot of young men!—and put the European in the bed.

Then the young men carried him from Bor up to Malakal, and from Malakal to Khartoum.”

Figure 1. “Captain Grant leaving Karagwe”4

The song, duɔn bä bɛnydït jal piny ‘don’t let the leader touch the ground’, was sung by schoolchildren and learned by younger children from older ones. The image of carrying a

European bɛny ‘master’, in a bed was a vivid image of yɔŋ, a term which many people used as the verbal synonym of mustamr ( ‘colonialist’). Nebel (1948) translated yɔŋ as “compel, hurry,” illustrating it with Yɔŋ kɔc bï luoi lac thok ‘Hurry them to finish the work quickly’.

Bilingual speakers of Dinka and English commonly translated yɔŋ as “oppress,” but in everyday speech the word was more often used to mean “to humiliate” or “to degrade.” “When you laugh at a lame person or a blind person who hurts himself, if you knock that person [down],” Madit

4 The image in Grinker and Steiner (1997:567) is of a sedan chair. Madit described a “bed,” like the litter reproduced (above) from Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1868:370), with reading a book under a mosquito net in 1862.

4

told me, “that’s yɔŋ . If someone stole my money, then stole my clothes, then stole my mattress—I would say, ‘Ɣɛn acï yɔŋ arët’ [‘I’ve become very humiliated’]” [NB1, 24 FEB2010].

It was a humiliation which left you helpless and powerless to respond. The song drew on a vivid image of the pre-colonial and colonial past. But for the schoolchildren who sang it, the song had a much more immediate reference in daily life.

South Sudan’s educational system developed under the Anglo-Egyptian colonial regime.

The style of teaching in primary schools in Bor is entirely authoritarian, with a heavy emphasis on rote memorization and military-style order and discipline. Early in the morning, when school was in session, I used to pass neat rows of students standing at attention in the yard of Bor’s

Primary School B. After the students piled up the firewood that they’d collected to cook their mid-day meal, the head teacher took them through the morning drill, always starting with “a ten hut” and ending with “a ten easy.”

The students stand in rows, forming a rectangle in the schoolyard. The headmaster clasps a long switch that trails behind his back as he paces between them. “Attention!” he shouts, “Right!” and the students march right. ‘Aaa-ten easy’, and the students step left. “Good morning students,” the headmaster says. “Good morning,” the students call out in unison. “How are you?” the headmaster asks. “We are fine,” the students reply together. “No you are not fine,” he replies, “where are the rest of you?” [18 March 2010]

That strict discipline and corporal punishment were central to children’s school experiences was not only my impression; it was borne out by games. Madit and I would sometimes sit in his uncle’s compound in town. One afternoon, when school was out, Mabior’s children asked me to “play headmaster.” They fetched the little blue UNICEF notebooks that

Madit had bought for them in the market, and Yarthii ‘little Yar’, Mabior’s smallest daughter, leaned close to make sure I wrote ‘NAME ______’ and ‘FORM ______’, after the fashion of her

5

teacher, at the top of each sheet of paper. I wrote out a list of math problems and English

language and “mother tongue” translation questions, and passed around pens from my backpack.

The children busied themselves outside with their exams. Pretty soon they were back. As I was

checking their math, Mabior’s smallest son, Col, ran outside and returned with a long switch

(anyicui) that he had pulled from a neem tree nearby. The children stood in a neat row, wide-

eyeing their outstretched palms and giggling with delight, waiting to be struck across their open

palms for each incorrect answer.

● ● ●

I would like to suggest that this playful reenactment of school contains an ethical dimension shared by popular jokes, in that it entails criteria by which people judge one another’s actions, and reflects a particular conception of language, how it ought to be used, and the relation between commitments and spoken acts. A common way of representing a positive social value is by the tangible representation of its opposite: images of social incompetence, disorder, obscene errors, and so forth. By dramatizing positive values through the negation of a negation, feelings about how people should not treat one another can be disowned and inchoate ideals can be articulated. Jokes open up new space for reflexive discourse.

Although this chapter is not about education or schooling in Bor country per se or even mainly about the experience of children, it was in large part inspired by Mabior’s children.

While I knew a certain amount about the language, history, and sociology of Bor country, I was largely ignorant about children’s songs and games, riddles, humorous nicknames and jokes—all the commonplace, even vulgar things that ordinary conversations presuppose. The classic ethnographies of South Sudan rarely include this material. Edward Ayom’s Analysis of Dinka

Tongue Twisters (1987), the children’s songs collected by Francis Mading Deng (1973), and

6

occasional “notes on proverbs and games” in Sudan Notes and Records are almost our only

sources. But without attention to children and jokes, one cannot understand references made to a

common past in everyday conversations or the casual assumptions of everyday experiences that

oral narratives draw upon. It is rather like knowing King Lear without knowing “Eeny, meeny,

miney, mo,” or the Aiwel Longar corpus (e.g., Lienhardt 1961) without children’s nonsense

songs like “a-tiŋ a-tiŋ,” or “Bend your Leg” (see Deng 1973:248-49).5

One way to describe the sensibility guiding children’s evaluations of schoolmasters is to sketch out a contrast between two types of speech in Bor country: “tying speech” and what I will call imperative speech. Jokes provide a useful illustration of “tying speech,” which refers to the clever use of words to restrict another person’s course of action by focusing attention on what they have committed themselves to in the past. Here is an example from a popular corpus of jokes which dramatize interactions between Bor’s colonial District Commissioner (DC) and government chiefs. These often take the form of humorous syllogisms.

Some British were killed. The British decided to kill some people in retaliation and called the chiefs to come to Bor town. The chiefs said, “How far away is Britain?”

5 I owe this point to A.L. Becker’s (1995) discussion of intertextuality and Tannen’s (2007:1) demonstration “that ordinary conversation is made up of linguistic strategies that have been thought quintessentially literary.” Becker (1995:12) pointed out that we learn (for example) plot-constraints from fairy tales and nursery rhymes: the things which are most important to childhood and provide us with “lingual memory,” needed to know “if what someone says is new and original or old and familiar.” “A-tiŋ a-tiŋ” is a funny nonsense song that accompanies a game that Francis Mading Deng calls “bend your leg.” “It is not clear which language most of the song is in,” FM Deng (1973:248-49) wrote; “a few seem to be Baggara Arab words, more are Dinka words but the vast majority of the words are simply meaningless at face value.” It begins a bit like duck-duck-goose and ends with children making a V-shape with their legs; said Deng: it “must have as part of its objective to train girls to sit in the proper way.” It is often said that humor is one of the things which is most difficult to translate cross-culturally. Quite apart from the fact that getting a joke often requires considerable linguistic fluency, jokes resist a certain kind of anthropological generalization (“the Dinka say …”). And the reason, among others, is that humorous stories violate commonplace expectations; a punch line often reveals the presence of similar symbolic patterns in incongruous domains, unexpected “fits.” While it is a commonplace that getting a joke is “the high-water mark of fieldwork” (Carty and Musharbash 2008:209), one rarely reads of authors struggling with understanding violence in similar ways. It is as if people’s reasons for fighting were more easily translated than their reasons for laughing. Maybe so, but it seems to me that seeing violence as more “human” than laughter is a rather serious problem.

7

“Very far,” the District Commissioner said. “And why did you come here?” the chiefs asked him. “To educate you,” the D.C. said. “So you came all this way to civilize us and now you kill us when you find that we are not civilized? What did you come here for?”

The chiefs attend carefully to what is said and, by simply repeating the D.C., show that there is no logic to it. It is totally absurd. Like many jokes about colonial District

Commissioners, this one portrays the ironies of justifications for colonialism as a humanitarian project (see, for example, Shepherd 1966). The underlying assumptions are rather commonplace observations: if you have made a great effort to do something you should not be surprised to find it has not yet been done when you begin; the British set a rather bad example of “civilization”; one can no more civilize people by killing them than one can create peace by organizing for war or lay the groundwork for greater equality by creating top-down chains of military hierarchy.

lööc miir ‘choose giraffe’

Here is a more contemporary example (for convenience a short one). After the national election results were announced in May, 2010, the party ballot symbols (which had been adopted because of illiteracy) lent themselves to humorous stories about blundering politicians who misjudged the credulity of non-literate rural villagers.

The candidate for USAP [whose ballot symbol was a giraffe] made a speech in which he said, ‘the giraffe is a good animal, it can walk through your garden without taking anything. The giraffe also has a lot of milk. It is a very good animal.’ A member of the community stood up and said, ‘It is true, it looks like a very good animal. But no one can taste that milk—imagine: if you try to milk a giraffe it will kick you.’ ‘It’s true!’ everyone said. ‘The giraffe looks very good and has a lot of milk, but we don’t want to get kicked!’ So with that word they chased that USAP candidate away [6 May 2010].

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Figure 2. Looc Miir.

In this joke, an arrogant USAP candidate imagined his literacy would enable him to win a campaign by treating rural voters like simple hicks. It is possible to read this joke as a kind of secessionist allegory with the Giraffe standing in for the impossibility of Unity—like one of those nineteenth-century editorial cartoons where Great Britain is a woman in flowing robes with a trident and a funny hat and Egypt a crocodile. But I want to focus on something else.

The candidate’s speech was modeled on the kind of speech that parents used with little children. While many political speeches did make use of folksy animal stories to illustrate a point—just like the folksy stories of many political speeches everywhere—the butt of the joke supposed that non-literate voters did not understand the arbitrariness of ballot symbols. The joke portrays the candidate as an incompetent speaker who was ignorant of how to speak in public situations; he was chased away by his own words when the villagers tied him to his absurd premise.

the Chief and the DC The British never walked on their own feet and they amused themselves by tormenting people. A British officer called Tok Rial [Gabriel] in Atar made people carry him across a river. An elder named Deng said, “Let him fall in the water.” 9

They agreed, and when they reached the middle of the river, the people dropped Tok Rial. A great deal of splashing followed. Gabrial sputtered, “Who decided this?!” “All of us,” they said. “You are a human being, like us. So why do you mistreat us like this? You are supposed to walk like a human being.” “Okay,” he said, and let them go without killing them. But Tok Rial took his revenge. At that time there was no fruit in Bor. You would not find a single or guava; there wasn’t a neem tree or banana or lemon, anything. The fruit tree was carried by the white man. And he wanted to be carried too but the people refused. So, when people refused he said, “Okay, suit yourselves,” and he planted the neem tree—which he thought was bitter and useless. The white man planted that neem to punish the people. But those people were clever, because that neem saved them from many things: starvation and and malaria [story of “how the neem tree came to Bor”].

Kual Col was a strong chief who refused to make a road for the British. When the DC came to question Kual, he fell off his horse: because there was no road. So Kual was arrested. “You are stupid! Why didn’t you prepare the road?!” the DC shouted. “You are the stupid one,” Kual said, “trying to come here without a road.” This muzungu got very angry. He said, “Kual! Every day is not Sunday! No more joking around!” The DC gave Kual fifteen canes for joking around.

One effect of the experience of colonial rule was the association of record keeping with tribute, forced labor and slavery. Throughout the colonial era, people were made to ‘pay’ tribute to the government and to leave their gardens and cattle to carry District Commissioners around, clear roads, make bricks, and grow cotton without pay. It is difficult to reconstruct from British records exactly what life was like for the people who were forcibly recruited to undertake the labor of Britain’s “civilizing mission” during the early years of Anglo-Egyptian rule. As late as

July 1926, the Anti-Slavery Reporter, mentioned that the Governor General of Sudan “contends

that domestic slavery has always existed, though to an ever diminishing extent, and has certain

compensating advantages, [so] that hasty action against it would be dangerous.” And, therefore,

“while doing nothing to delay the natural ending of slavery, [the colonial government felt] it was

not desirable to try to bring it about too quickly” (ASR 1926:52).

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Colonial agents justified their actions with reference to laziness, claiming that they were unable to find anyone willing to work for wages. Laziness was a convenient myth for Europeans who wanted to justify their treatment of people who had resisted colonial subjugation. They were not always as candid about brutal programs of forced labor and the use of malnourished prisoners for sudd-clearing expeditions (see CHAPTER TWO) as the Governor General had been in

1926. Slaves were referred to as “servants” in official correspondences (Daly 2007:115-16) and

“colonial sources masked [their] existence … behind a number of euphemisms” (Johnson

1988a:144). Still, the British colonial archives in Juba are full of little hints. Whenever there was a labor shortage in the early 1900s, Wingate, the British commander-in-chief of the Egyptian

Army, would issue orders to round up a few hundred “religious believers [who,] although at the present time not dangerous to the State, may at a future time cause difficulties” (SIR, No.67. 1st

January to 8th March 1900). There are a great many telegrams between District Commissioners

(Discoms) swapping prisoners between districts whenever laborers were needed. Like this one of October 1949 from Captain “Dick” Richard E. Lyth in Akobo to Captain G.S. Renny, the D.C. at Nasir:

telegram PD/55.A.1 10/10/49 Discom Nasir

653 10 of the Prisoners you sent us are due for Release October (.) Could you spare any more you could send up on first boat ( . ) ( . ) We have a lot of work on hand in connection with new pump scheme

Discom UNPS Othow.

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Southerners were perfectly aware that the colonial government kept track of people by drawing up lists of the residents and headmen of each court center. While this was not the only source of suspicion toward writing, it was among those which were most commonly talked about. Lists were also a common theme in colonial jokes. Many jokes concerning encounters between DCs and chiefs portray government chiefs as cleverly protecting their people by keeping colonial agents at arm’s-length (cf. Leonardi 2007c).

The District Commissioner called a meeting of all the chiefs. He told them that sacks of grain would be distributed to every family on a certain day. So the chiefs should go inform everyone in the bomas. Lual Kur [the head government chief of the Makolcuei court center in the 1930s] suspected it was a trick; “maybe the grain is poisoned,” he said to himself. So Lual called a meeting and told the people in Makolcuei what the British had said. But, he said, ‘No one will to go collect the grain. I will go alone.’ The people were angry and grumbled, but they accepted his decision. So when the day came, Lual Kur presented himself [to the D.C.]. “I am Lual Kur, Makolcuei boma,” he said. “Where are your people?” the British demanded. “I am the only one who is hungry,”—he replied—“I work for the people while everyone else is cultivating.” So Lual Kur took a single sack of grain and his name was noted down in the ledger book by the British. After a month had passed, the D.C. called another meeting of the chiefs. “Everyone who took a sack of durra will bring one calf,” the D.C. said. So Lual Kur returned to Makolcuei and told the people what had happened. “I am going to bring my calf,” he said. When Lual Kur arrived at the D.C.’s place, he was asked, “Where are your people?” “I am the only one,” Lual replied. “Check your list” [10 March ‘10].

This joke dramatizes a “poisoned gift,” the false humanitarianism of colonial gifts of grain, a ruse to simplify the DC’s task of drawing up a tax register and more generally part of a deliberate effort to make people dependent on cash-crops and to restrict their movement.6 It also

6 In so far as the colonial government concerned itself with people’s daily needs, it was with the intention of creating a more deeply rooted dependence on crops which could be sold to pay taxes and to “tie [cattle-owners] to the land.” Here is an example from a Ministry of Agriculture report sent to the Governor in Wau in early December of 1955 about a small scale commercial trial of 250 feddans of rice in Bahr El Ghazal Province [SRO, A&F/93.J.24, 10 Dec. 1955, author’s name illegible].

12 provides a useful lesson about literacy and the idea that many nonliterate Southern Sudanese

“felt profoundly vulnerable to the arbitrary intrusion of ‘political’ forces beyond their control through the medi[a] of writing” and paper (waragga) (Hutchinson 1996:283; cf. Leonardi

2007a). The claim that so much could depend upon a tiny scrap of flimsy paper—whether paper money, a government report, a travel permit, or a ballot—must have seemed just as preposterous to many people in the 1920s as it did to the people I spoke to in Bor in 2009. There is no reason to believe that people were mystified by writing. Rather, I think, what lent such salience to paper as an image of “government” was that it stood out as a process by which violence was euphemized. Everyone was perfectly aware that the power of writing and paper—town maps and plot assignment slips, paper ballots, identity cards, birth certificates and travel permits, court decisions, and so forth—ultimately lay with the armed men who would show up to enforce written documents.

These jokes achieve their humorous effect by focusing attention on the iterability of words. Words can be quoted, decontextualized, and written down, inviting non-serious uses of language such as playful mimicry and sarcasm as well as quotations unintended by speakers.

“[The trial] has been successful in that the crop was sown and weeded in time and is now ready for harvest, but it was a failure in that the Dinka, as cattle owners, would not be tied to the land and take to the discipline of being settled as cultivators. [Also referred to as “tenants” in the report, they were meant to weed and harvest “allotments of suitable size” after tractors had disked and sown them; the size is not specified.] A different number of people turned up every day for the required field work, and the system turned down almost to raising a crop by direct labour [viz., corvee labor]. The Senior Inspector has therefore been keeping records of the number of days’ work done by each man or woman, and he will divide the proceeds of the crop based on a price of P.T. 60 per kantar [roughly half the 1955 price for paddy on world markets] among the people concerned, in proportion to the amount of work they have done.” I feel that if rice production is to be a success in Bahr El Ghzal whene [sic] conditions are in many ways ideal for producing it, the local people will have to develop a taste for it. Pending our sorting out the hulling difficulties to produce a polished white rice for external markets, I feel that we have to endeavor to establish a local market for it in the Southern Provinces. … If we can succeed in getting the local people to develop a taste for rice, then we will have gone a long way towards solving the chronic famine problems of the Southern Provinces, and improving standards of their nutrition. This will need a lot of propaganda, possibly in the form of free issue of paddy, or even cooked meals of pounded whole meal rice. The effort will be a huge one, for a start, and will need the cooperation of all, Agricultural, Administrative, Educational and Medical authorities.

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“Tying speech” binds speakers to their spoken commitments. The authority exemplified by tying

speech is essentially negative—a matter of restraining action rather than commanding others to

act (“Every day is not Sunday! No more joking around!”). Joking dramatizations of people’s

experiences are not only “reported speech” but also creative interpretations and appropriations

(Tannen 2007:102-132). By constructing little dialogic encounters between quick-witted chiefs

and angry DCs, these jokes frame and clarify contrasting attitudes toward speech and authority.

It is not the case that a reporter is misrepresenting history if Lual Kur never actually said,

“Check your list.” The materials of constructed dialogues are collected out of reality and

assembled in such a way that the encounter dramatizes conflicting ideas about how people ought

to speak to one another. After all, jokes are fictions (Cohen 1999, 2003). If the joke is good

enough, “small facts” can speak to “large issues” (Geertz 1973)—the particular idea implicit in a

joke can be representative and applicable to other situations. It is this capacity for producing

generalized and portable meanings from a particular situation that gives joking portraits of

colonial DCs their pleasurable and liberating effect (cf. Basso 1979).

These jokes also illustrate the circularity of social power. One has authority and the

capacity to get things done because others believe you to have it (a situation which lends itself to

absurdity). To be influential one’s words must be widely repeated by others. A leader (beny) or big person (raan-dit) depends upon the recognition accorded by supporters who make it possible to wield influence. Extending one’s influence outwards through the materials that mediate human relations—words, ledger books, other people, and so forth—also expose that influence to the risks of misquotation, playful restaging by children, and even—as the jokes about the giraffe and Lual Kur illustrated—being held accountable for what one has said, written down, or pictured on a campaign poster (cf. Keane 1997).

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the owl’s horns

Children’s stories and proverbs turn on similar themes of material representations, cleverness, and the feeling that social power is based on nothing more than the ability to persuade others that one has it (cf. Graeber 1998; Barber 1981). False appearances of power are pivotal to many humorous jokes and parables. This story, related to me by Madit, explains why no one knows where the adolcɛrec (hamerkop, or Hammerheaded Stork, Scopus umbretta) lays its eggs.

Adolcɛrec, a long-headed bird the color of burnished acacia-wood, lives a very long time and builds a big house in the trees, which it plasters, inside-and-out, with clay. Agumut (“owl”) was jealous of the first-rate house that Adolcɛrec had built with its fine view that looked out over the forest. So one day Agumut climbed up to Adolcɛrec’s house to evict her. Agumut said, “Look. I have horns. Should I gore you with the right one or the left one?” Adolcɛrec had no choice but to leave and find a new place to live. Now no knows where the adolcɛrec lays her eggs. That is why people say, duan ɣԑn thiԑr tuŋ ka gumut ‘don’t pretend to me the horns of the owl’ [since the owl’s horns are merely soft feathers]. Years passed, and Agumut lived in Adolcɛrec’s fine dry house with plaster walls and a view of the forest and did not learn anything. Eventually the day came when Agumut heard a voice. “I have an axe,” it said. “Give me your eggs or I will chop down this tree with you in it.” Owl peered down through the boughs of the great acacia tree. She saw Awan, the fox, who was standing at the base of the tree, holding a big axe. Now, Fox’s axe was made of clay, but Owl didn’t know it. So after much consideration the owl gave the fox a single egg. The following day the fox returned and the owl handed over another egg. When the fox had taken a third egg, Owl despaired and cried, “Fine, cut it down. I have nothing left.” And the fox swung the mud axe and it shattered into a thousand pieces. That is why people say, duan ɣԑn thiԑr a kɔcɔ [akɔrcok] awan ‘don’t pretend to me the axe of the fox’.7

7 (Scopus umbretta is more familiarly called paddavanger ‘frog catcher’ in Afrikaans.) The pairing of episodes here—so that each serves as a commentary on the other—is also a conventional way of narrating genealogies in

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Figure 3. adolcɛrec (Bor, 2010). blood evidence

In another narrative, Lual Kur avoided a beating at the hands of the DC. This story has the same basic structure as the joke about Lual Kur’s use of the ledger book as evidence to protect his people against tax collection.

During the time of the British, the District Commissioner called all the chiefs to come to a certain place. The DC had a leather strop of hippopotamus hide with three strips. The man began to beat all the chiefs. Lual Kur took some blood from someone who had already been beaten and smeared it on his back and his elbows and his forehead. When his turn came Lual Kur asked, “So soon? People are to be beaten a second time?” So they told him to go sit down again. He wasn’t beaten that day [10 Mar 10].

Beatings are a very common theme in colonial jokes. Cherry Leonardi (2007c:558) has written about how “oral histories of chiefship origins reflect a symbolic bargain” struck by chiefs with government, whereby chiefs “use their ‘good speech’ to mediate violence, and if necessary

Bor country and elsewhere (see CHAPTER EIGHT); it supplies a “plot” by focusing attention on a particular theme (Forster 1927). The question which the story is explicitly meant to answer is why no one knows where Adolcɛrec lays her eggs. One way to understand it is as an allegory of genealogical amnesia, the generational politics of land and memory: Adolcɛrec, the “owner of the land,” having lost her land is left without a name and descendants, her memory having been overshadowed by a second-comer, Agumut, who falls for a similar trick, giving up her own descendants to Awan. All this is to say that one way to read the story is as a meditation on the nature of social power and its basis in persuasion. But this idea is implicit in the narrative. The point of such a story is to entertain—even if the funny world of hamerkops and owls and foxes represents a new insight, not story should be asked to state such a thing abstractly, in conceptual terms; its purpose is to cultivate intimacy (Cohen 1978) and “involvement” (Tannen 2007). Many Dinka animal stories focus on relationships between trickster animals and emphasize their most ambiguous features (the hamerkop’s huge nest, the fox’s trickiness, the owl’s nocturnal habits, and so on). These are often persons in animal form—masks or persona (raan lɔ guop awan, lit., ‘person having a fox-body’; a cunning person)—or humans in animal form (acï rɔt waŋ bï a köör).

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sacrifice themselves to ‘bail’ people from external/government force.” Slave-traders and

Government agents had long been in the habit of killing whoever came forward to negotiate with

them. As a result a great many marginal women and men—“sacrificial chiefs,” after Leonardi’s

(2007c) phrase—are remembered in Bor country. The logic seems to have been based on the

recognition that traders and administrators would always try to identify leadership structures, and

if they couldn’t, create them by making alliances and then insisting that their allies enforce

whatever agreements they made. Putting forward marginal figures (“people without people,” in

the Dinka idiom) as “chiefs” helped to ensure that mediators would be unable to enforce the

agreements which they settled on with the government. This was a perfectly sensible

appreciation of a situation in which any kind of systematic institution of negotiation could turn

into a leadership structure passing on orders from the Government.

One could argue, as Leonardi (2007c, 2011) demonstrates, that this attitude is ultimately rooted in the logic of sacrifice. Entering one’s name in a ledger book, attending a meeting with the DC, paying taxes, clearing roads: these were little ritualized actions of propitiation by which people kept government agents at arm’s-length. Indeed, the great effort to have as little to do as possible with unwanted authority, all in order go on living as if it did not exist, was the archetypical response of Southern Sudanese who were often inclined to accommodate the colonial government’s demands if it would leave them to manage their own affairs (Johnson

1988b:545; Burton 1981).8 One way of exploring this attitude is to take up its cosmological dimension.

8 That is to say that “resistance” to colonial rule generally took the form of efforts to draw colonial agents into conversations on equal terms or, failing that, into relations governed by token sacrifices of labor and cattle (as opposed to violent uprisings) to maintain autonomy. Johnson (1988b:545) notes that much of the secondary literature on Southern Sudan uncritically accepts the “official British view of the long period of pacification in the Southern Sudan,” that is, the false idea that its brutality was “forced on government by the turbulence of the peoples themselves.” Writes Mawut in Dinka Resistance to Condominium Rule (1983: 11): “Language was an

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BӒӒR and Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ

I got the term “tying speech” from a corpus of tales I collected about BӒӒR, a Bor “clan divinity” (in Godfrey Lienhardt’s (1961) terms) belonging to the family of Laik Abei of Koc in south Bor. BӒӒR was a fifteen-foot long cannibalistic drum named after its length and the way it was always shouting and ordering people to come (bӓӓ r, lit., ‘tall,’ ‘long,’ or the imperative,

‘come!’).

One day one time, this man called Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ was having a problem with Yar Cath Ayol. Her marriage was decided and Ayuen was not given a cow but BӒӒR was given a bull. At that time, Ayuen claimed his cow from his sister. [“Sister” here in the 9 Omaha sense of sister. ] Then she ran to BӒӒR, and she said to him, “That Ayuen wants to chase me away and he wants to exhaust my wealth!” Then, automatically, BӒӒR sent the order to Ayuen Thuɔŋjäŋ, “You come to ME!” And BӒӒR said, “Ayuen. Please. Why do you disturb this lady? Do you want her to return back [viz., do you want to break up this marriage]?” Then Ayuel said, “No I do not want her to return back. But I need my cow.” BӒӒR said, “No! I cannot accept that. Ayuen. You. Stop disturbing this girl! Don’t ask again for any cow from this marriage.” Then Ayuen said, “Sorry, BӒӒR, I am more closely related by blood to this girl than you are [viz., inter alia, you’re made out of wood]. And you have got your bull. Why? I am related to this girl, and what is your relationship? So how did you get your bull while I remain here with nothing?” BӒӒR said, “Sorry, you Yar, please give Ayuen a cow: because we have been defeated by Ayuen.” And so Ayuen got a [female white] calf, Nayar, from Yar’s father Cath Ayol. So BӒӒR cannot deny the right of the people [WS500228, 14:15, 11:40].

The name Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ (yuën ‘rope’ + Thuɔŋ-jäŋä ‘mouth of J ŋ’ or ‘’) underlines that this particular episode is meant to be understood as an explicit parable

obstacle.” True enough. But as the Chiefs said to the DC, “You’ve come all this way from England and you haven’t even bothered to learn Dinka?” 9 Likewise said Evans-Pritchard (1940:258): “The wives of members of a man’s father’s [age] set are his mothers’, and the wives of members of his sons’ set are his daughters. … [A] man commonly addresses all persons [of his own wut and gol] much senior to himself as ‘father’ and ‘mother’, all persons much junior to himself as ‘son’ and ‘daughter’, and all persons of about the same age as himself as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’.”

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about political speech or—in the Dinka idiom—“tying” or “roping speech.”10 Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ’s encounter with BӒӒR provides a sharp juxtaposition between two ways of speaking; Ayuen’s tying speech exemplifies a form of authority based on restraint and attention to speech which is seen as essentially moral and justified; BӒӒR’s childish speech, on the other hand—all commands and shouting, like a policeman or a colonial commissioner—is almost the exact photo-negative of Ayuen’s more measured demeanor.11

BӒӒR used to be given people

Under the experience of nineteenth-century colonial rule, confinement, command, and bearing burdens came to be the very definition of coercive power. Here is a story about how

BӒӒR was domesticated—persuaded by the power of speech to accept bulls in lieu of human

flesh and blood (riɛ m, pl. rim).

BӒӒR was a Mundari magician, a Mundari drum. BӒӒR used to be given people—[BӒӒR’s followers] slaughtered the people, instead of slaughtering a goat or a bull. Then, from there, the people were getting finished—until the people began to migrate away from that drum. The people went away because it was bad that people were being slaughtered for the magician, instead of a cow or a goat. So then the people of Mundari pushed BӒӒR into the river: because they were not interested in that behavior of slaughtering a man, instead of a goat or a bull. The drum beat itself on the river as it came this way [north from Mundariland, downstream, to Bor] following the flood of the river. The people heard that the drum was beating itself on the river—they started shouting, killing their bulls,

10 Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ’s name is a complex image. Cattle-color is a prototypical sign; a rope is metonymic, in this case, a representation of an absent thing by conventional association. This imagery is drawn from cattle-keeping. Each cow has its own rope, which is unfastened each morning when the cattle go off to graze—each rope thus “stands for” a particular cow. During matrimonial exchanges, when a goat is to be given, the giver commonly holds up a rope and says, “This is a cow.” The humor of this particular story hinges on the absurdity of winning a debate against a god. 11 R.G. Collingwood, whom Godfrey Lienhardt drew on for his analysis of Dinka religious practice, wrote in The Principles of Art (1963:218) about how “feelings” tend to affect us in ways over which we have little control, and we often have difficultly putting them into words. We must therefore “fix our attention on the very feeling which threatens to dominate us, and so learn to dominate it.” By doing so, he says, we convert a feeling into an “emotion,” an idea invested with feeling. New possibilities for anti-social behavior tend to generate inverse ideals. Consider the argument put forward by the French sociologist Alain Caillé that the ideal of Christian charity as an entirely selfless act emerged as a repudiation of obnoxious aristocratics, who were in the habit of establishing their superiority through charity (see Graeber 2000).

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inviting the drum to come. But the drum itself refused to go to them. Every nearby people, every people nearby the river, they tried that—but the drum refused. … Then the drum came by the river here. The people of Wai community, they tried to invite the drum. That stick, that lëc [‘stick’ or shrine], [that] it used to beat itself, BӒӒR gave it to those people. Then, the people of Koc community— who, during the dry season, move looking for the pastures near the river bank, up to the place called Nhomriir—, were met by the magician BӒӒR. And they started shouting, slaughtering bulls, inviting BӒӒR to come. And BӒӒR stopped there, and didn’t move again. And the people were so happy, they slaughtered so many bulls. But they did not know that BӒӒR was given people instead of the bull—as it had happened in the Mundari community. They asked BӒӒR, ‘What should we slaughter for you?’ “I need the people,” BӒӒR said. The people refused. ‘We cannot accept to be your people if that is what you want.’ Automatically, BӒӒR changed the decision and said, ‘The pregnant cows, the lactating cow then.’ Automatically, the community refused. “We cannot do that.” Then BӒӒR changed again, and chose a bull and the community said, ‘Yes we can do that.’ Okay, BӒӒR was received by those people. They took BӒӒR to the community of Laik Abay, the elder son of the first wife of Abay, Acuia: that is why BӒӒR choose to stay with them, with Laik Abay: because Laik Abay was the elder son. … When that time of taking BӒӒR to the cattle village came— BӒӒR used to be carried by the people, the young men who are very strong. And it was very heavy [thiek]. BӒӒR can decide to push you to the sun, but you cannot reject that. If you are very tired you cannot say ‘I’m tired’ or you will die; you cannot say ‘it is very heavy’ or automatically you die. So you cannot attempt to complain or put BӒӒR down. You will die. Only the people who are with you, they can look at you—and, if [they see that] you are suffering, they will change [places with] you. So you cannot complain or say, ‘it is very heavy’ or BӒӒR will worry you, and say, ‘why are you complaining?’ and you will die--automatically. But young men are very strong. When BӒӒR refused to go, or refused to go back, or to come down: then, automatically, BӒӒR needs a bull. A lot of bulls should be killed, randomly, until BӒӒR reaches the cattle village [WS500228—27 May 2010].

The story describes how BӒӒR was persuaded to enter into “a common regime of personhood” through an extended negotiation in which human beings set the terms (Sahlins

2013:58). First demanding people and then milch cows and finally steer, the negotiation with

BӒӒR replicated a familiar hierarchy of value and exchange: goats for young bulls, young bulls

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or dry heifers for milch cows and, in matrimonial exchanges, cattle for women (Lienhardt

1961:24-5; Shipton 1989:19). Situations of ranked categories like this are generally called

“spheres of exchange” (Bohannan 1955). And when people living within what Graeber calls

“human economies”—those sorts that “recognize that the chief business of any social system –

or, indeed, of any system of the production and distribution of material goods – is the creation

and mutual fashioning of human beings” (Graeber 2012:412; see Hart et. al. 2010)—find

themselves exchanging objects with foreigners of one sort or another, they generally try to

12 maintain these distinctions. What is crucial is that BӒӒR’s power emerges from a popular consensus which has to be continually reaffirmed; BӒӒR must be given cooked sorghum and carried about by young men each season and the ceremony of BӒӒR’s arrival performed over and over, with the random killing of a great many bulls.13

The story about BӒӒR has a suggestive parallel with oaths. The Dinka term one would use in discussing oaths is mël, which generally implies that one has entered into a very binding relationship with one’s words. Usually, creating such an agreement also involves creating some invisible force, which has the power to enforce it, by licking a bitter-tasting piece of metal such as a spear (bil tɔŋ ‘lick a spear’) or brass bracelet, or tasting blood or mud. On one occasion, in telling me that she had converted to Christianity, a woman I met licked her flip-flop, tasting the soil on it, to prove her sincerity. In any case, there was always the sense that the agreement was created primarily through the power of words. Poison ordeals (mɛth wal) undergone to

12 If only because by maintaining these distinctions people can create and maintain open-ended relationships and mutual social debts, which is the whole point of exchanging things in the first place. 13 This random killing is a reference to awak, when “dozens of animals, sometimes more than a hundred, are speared by their young attendants. The killing appears to be at random, including not only oxen, bulls or dry cows but also pregnant cows and calves—at least one animal from each hearth” (Zansen and Hoek 1987:190). Zansen and Hoek note that the practice is a very clear image of the arbitrariness of god which, like lighting, strikes people at random. Described this practice to me in Bor, one man adopted the perspective of the cattle, “And the other cattle fear and say, ‘Ah, they want to finish us all’” [24 mar’10]!

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determine the truth of an assertion differ from oaths in that they are generally oriented toward the

past, rather than the future.14

Godfrey Lienhardt, author of the classic ethnography of (1961), referred to

15 powers like BӒӒR as “clan-divinities.” Lienhardt’s Durkheimian argument was that rituals surrounding clan-divinities provided people with a very concrete experience of what living in a patrilineal clan was like. BӒӒR’s Mundari origins recall Evans-Pritchard observation (1937) that

“[m]ost Zande medicines come to them from foreign peoples.” It was by negotiating with foreignness, by coaxing, pleading, refusing, and creating agreements, that the societies of

Southern Sudan expressed their distinctive attachments to locality and each other.

Cherry Leonardi (2007:38) has written about the danger posed by the term “foreign,” which risks implying that “isolation” was the natural condition of Southern Sudanese societies

“living as discrete ethnic groups, unless disrupted by sudden incursions.” The story of BӒӒR’s

14 I will pick this theme up again in CHAPTER EIGHT. Licking metal is the most salient example of an oath. “Tasting blood” refers to a specific sort of promise. After an intra-community fight (such as between co-residents of a single cattle village), participants taste some of the blood of the people killed to prevent their going insane or being killed by the shadows of the dead. In “Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation,” Sharon Hutchinson (1998) has written about similar practices among Nuer. She describes how the SPLA sought to claim sovereignty for itself by redefining deaths taking place in the context of the “government war” (toŋ hakuma) as without spiritual consequences and therefore not needing such action. A soldier explained to me in Bor: “When a person dies they will never come back. But when you kill someone and then deny it, that atiɛm raan [atiɛp pl. atiip; ‘shadow of the person’] will come in a dream. It will make you sick or kill your children or let them die. But that government war [tɔŋ akuma] is different. People on the front line expect to be killed. But when you kill someone when there is no government war this one [the shadow] will follow you until you die.” Many people resisted the SPLA’s efforts to define government killings as devoid of moral or spiritual consequences: “Ba raan riɛm-bil të cin kɔc nɔk juec [‘the person tastes-blood at the place where a lot of people were killed’],” another soldier told me. “Otherwise you will go insane.” Drinking some substance—often said to be a mixture of blood and milk—is the most common sort of thing used in poison ordeals, but not the only thing. There is a great deal of variation. Government courts also occasionally refer difficult cases across the river to be decided by ordeal. I should probably mention here, too, that when I say “used to determine the truth of an assertion” I do not mean that ordeals are used to determine some kind of inner state, such as whether someone is lying (cf. Lienhard 1961:221, 224, and 249). The paternity suit of an acquaintance of mine was referred to an oath once. He was convinced that he was the father of the child in question. Before undergoing the ordeal (which involved pressing a coin to his forehead) he was advised by the practitioner not to undergo it, since he was wrong, the man said, to think that he was the father. 15 In fact, in passing in a footnote (1961:52fn.1), Lienhardt mentions a very large drum, “fully 15 ft. in length, and quite unlike Dinka drums in normal use,” which he saw used as a clan-divinity among the Eastern Dinka in Bor country.

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“foreign” origins shares with Leonardi’s account of medicines and occult discourses “a sense …

of an ongoing need to regulate and evaluate outside knowledge and to define whether it can be

incorporated into what [Wendy] James calls the ‘cultural archive’ of ‘moral knowledge’ that

defines communities.” Indeed, Leonardi (2007:39) shows that mixtures and borrowings were an

integral part of the internal constitution of what she describes as a moral economy of knowledge,

“not simply a response to the changing economy of the colonial period.”

What I would like to suggest is an approach to Bor Dinka “culture” defined less by some

particular exotic institution like a lineage system (Evans-Pritchard 1940), spear-master or clan

divinities (Lienhardt 1961) than by attention to assumptions about how it is possible and

legitimate to influence others with words and actions that have evolved over time and across a

multiplicity of circumstances with outsiders. BӒӒR provides a reminder that it is useful to bracket out questions such as whether these practices and assumptions are “traditional” or

16 “modern,” “magico-religious,” “historical,” “serious” or “non-serious” because BӒӒR is all of these things. The image of a group of silent young men struggling under the weight of a lunatic who demanded people and was always shouting orders had a very specific resonance in Bor country. But the existential preoccupations that animate the dialogue between BӒӒR and Ayuën

Thuɔŋjäŋ are probably universal. However one chooses to view BӒӒR—as a monster or as the

16 Humorous stories also provide a useful lesson about knowledge and the idea that it is “transmitted.” John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash (2008:215) have written about how humor resists being set aside as a passive text because it depends on the contextual and sensual immediacy (the “you-had-to-be-there syndrome”) for its effect on “nuance, timing and knowing one’s audience.” Humor requires a storyteller and an engaged audience to really come off. Ted Cohen (1978) has written about how jokes and metaphors similarly generate “intimacy,” that is to say, each involves an “involvement strategy” creating and reflecting interpersonal involvement. This intimate involvement is why racist and misogynistic jokes wound so deeply; Cohen (1978:12) writes: “When the device is a hostile metaphor or a cruel joke requiring much background and effort to understand, it is all the more painful because the victim has been made a complicitor in his own demise.” Thus, Keith Basso (1979, 1990) and Tim Ingold (2009) have argued that we might do better if we consider jokes, parables, place-names, and humorous performances as compasses for orienting ourselves intersubjectively as opposed to containers of social knowledge passed from one person or generation to the next.

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center of a religious ritual drawing on images of Anuak kings17 and arbitrary force, a weird inversion of kinship, a history of alliances between Mundari and south-eastern Bor Dinka or between neighboring Bor Koc communities, a history of the slave-and-ivory trade in a capsule, or as a critique of colonial modes of authority—BӒӒR was above all a vehicle for dramatizing how Bor people should not treat one another.

One of the reasons why people objectify images of positive and negative value is to resolve more diffuse dilemmas by making a model of some aspect of their lives and gaining at least the illusion of distance and control. “[F]igurations and transfigurations reconcile the vicissitudes of everyday life with clarity, expectations and certainty that people draw upon in keeping their lifeworlds coherent and tangible” (Henig 2012:9). Lienhardt (1961) argued that people reconfigured their relationship to painful memories and unpredictable forces by transforming them into something that could be acted upon. Said Lienhardt (1961:291):

“Symbolic actions … recreate, and even dramatize, situations which they aim to control, and the experience of which they effectively modulate. If they do not change actual historical or physical events—as the Dinka in some cases believe them to do—they do change and regulate the Dinkas’ experience of those events.” Jokes and other genres of humorous fiction share with these practices in the creation of a domain of creative action in which people can master their own fate (Cohen 1999:50).

how to roast a hippopotamus

Through images of mistranslation and misunderstanding, jokes focus attention on the riskiness of speech. There is in Bor a strong feeling that whenever there is a question of

17 “There is a drum for the Anuak king. When it is played the people dance and, then, young men and women are speared randomly,” Mabior told me in another context. “And when a parent sees that, she will be happy: because ‘the king killed my child.’ But we don’t do that: because who bore the king? Somebody. The king is a person” [24 Mar.’10].

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common concern, whether the proposed location of a borehole or the resolution of a matrimonial

dispute, everyone affected by it ought to take part in deciding on a solution. Differences of

perspective are inevitable and generally considered an asset in these situations; after all, no one

could predict all the possible consequences any given course of action might set in train.

Certainly, there is no way to foresee everything that might go wrong or lead to conflict without

asking people first. And when everyone has a say, working together to solve a common problem

usually encourages them to cooperate responsibly.

The size of assemblies varies with the scope of the problem to be addressed and people

generally expect a meal of some kind or at least beer and soda. Really important decisions that

join together groups of people, such as marriages, are concluded with a sacrifice. The tensions

which can erupt during communal gatherings when care is not taken with words are a common

theme in jokes. Here is one about an argument that began as a small misunderstanding and

escalated into an all-out war which was told to me as a commentary on the collapse of southern

military unity in 1991.

There were some Dinka and Nuer soldiers in Malakal who shot a hippopotamus [rɔu] along the river bank. The Dinka soldiers said, ‘We’ll roast [nyop ‘burn’] this hippopotamus meat’. The Nuer said, ‘we’ll roast [bul] it.’ They were hungry. And they didn’t understand each other. So they began to fight [argue at this point]. “Why do you say, ‘abi nyop?’,” the Nuer said. “Why do you say, ‘abi bul’?’ What does that mean?” the Dinka cried. “We are hungry!” So they fought. And they had guns! And they were killing each other because they thought that they disagreed about how to cook the hippopotamus meat [5 may 2010].18

18 Partially this is simply an inversion of the positive virtues of eating together. Sharing a meal is the basic value template of relatedness and cooperation, thus the breakdown of eating together serves as a good illustration of the split within the SPLA. But most people told this joke in a manner that presupposed the knowledge that the Dinka verb nyop ‘burn’ or ‘roast’(on an open fire) is exactly equivalent in the scope of its meaning to the Nuer verb bul ‘burn’ or ‘roast’ (on an open fire). A great many people living in the region are bilingual in Dinka and Nuer—the two languages are closely related—, and even among those who are not bilingual, knowledge of small linguistic differences such as this one are a commonplace assumption of ordinary conversations.

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The jokes which I have examined turn on a number of overlapping themes—the repetition and risk of speech, violence, hypocrisy, speaking and negotiating in bad faith, writing and the nature of evidence—and jokes dramatize two ways of speaking, with the villagers and chiefs’ clever speech set in sharp contrast to the District Commissioner’s and the Politician’s, whose talk is a synecdoche for the bureaucratic practices of offices, churches, schools, armies, and NGOs. DCs issue commands; while villagers and chiefs ask questions and gently persuade.

The District Commissioner and the Politician each speak in bad faith—and each one is driven away by being held to his prior commitments. That colonial administrators and politicians lie and break their promises will surprise no one. But what does it mean to laugh at something like this? One of the reasons that people create and tell jokes everywhere is to restore themselves by making an improved version of some aspect of their world—in this case, the improvement is a fictional world in which DCs and politicians can be driven away by logic and being held to what they’ve said and done. (“To recount one’s story as comedy rather than tragedy is a triumph of disengagement: the original hurtful experience is rendered harmless” (Jackson 1998:124).)

Insofar as a joke contains an instance of reported speech, it also encodes a tacit theory about how speech is embedded in social action (Urban 1984); and inasmuch as these jokes

contain criteria for judging actions, they also encode an ethical vision of how language ought to

be used. These jokes suggest that authority, that is, the likelihood that one’s words will be taken

seriously, rests on a specific kind of responsibility, the acceptance by actors of their

commitments to their acts and their consequences. Perhaps the simplest way to illustrate this is

to turn to another genre, the speech of matrimonial negotiations: its participant structure, how it

distributes agency, responsibility and accountability (these topics are examined at greater length

in CHAPTER NINE).

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can words speak?

Roping speech focuses attention on the repeatability of words. While I have focused on jokes, this attitude toward language reflects a particular language ideology—a set of ideas about what it can do and how it works and should be used (see Woolard 1992)—which is realized in the most prestigious forms of verbal performance. A useful illustration is provided by matrimonial negotiations, which takes the form of a conversation between two groups.

Within the theatrical frame set by the speech of negotiation, principles do not address one another directly; instead a spokesman (called an agomlong) “receives” each person’s words and repeating them, conveys them on to the opposed party as across a distance. This repetition has a number of effects. It helps to construct the wife-giving and wife-taking groups as social entities that are larger than any particular individuals; it also dramatizes the nature of the social distance between them, with the agomlong acting as a kind of messenger. Indeed, conflicting points of view are emphasized, dramatizing the possibility of failure: partly because the point is to come to an agreement which takes conflicting views into account, not to make them go away. The repetition of dialogue also draws attention to the repeatability of words, providing a continual reminder that for a negotiation to have any wider effect it must be widely recounted across space and time. After all, in order for matrimonial speech to have any kind of lasting consequences it must be widely reported, extending beyond a limited circle of talk and committing its speakers to the consequences of their promises, words and actions.

Here is an example of a matrimonial speech addressed to a man called by his nickname,

Wɛlwɛl. The speaker’s (S1’s) words are repeated by “AL,” an AgomLong ‘prayer receiver’.

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S1: Wɔ ye kɔc ke pan tok S1: We are the people of one place AL: Wɔ ye kɔc ke pan tok AL: We are the people of one place

S1: Aa yene ke të de—yin Wɛlwɛl S1: This is how people should talk—[I am addressing] you Wɛlwɛl AL: yene ke te de—yin Wɛlwɛl AL: This is how people should talk—you Wɛlwɛl

S1: Ku wɔ kɔc kuɔn ye cɔl Jɔrkë S1: And we are our people which is called Jɔr AL: Ku wɔ kɔc kuɔn ye cɔl Jɔr AL: And we are our people called Jɔr

S1: ɛmiɛth tok yene ka yuku cam S1: our food is one [the same/shared] and we eat together AL: ɛmiɛth tok yene ka yuku cam AL: our food is one and we eat together

S1: Mane ë nyan thin ye cɔl Aja ku tenë Dɛ̈ r S1: for instance, this small girl called Aja eman now’s going to Dɛ̈ r AL: if she gets married to Dɛ̈ r now, this little- AL: Na thiɛk ëye Dɛ̈ r eman, enyan thine ye cɔl one called Aja Aja.

S1: ku lerku Dɛ̈ r S1: if we give her to Dɛ̈ r AL: lene ku Dɛ̈ r AL: if we give her to Dɛ̈ r

S1: ke wɔ lɔ wɔdhiɛ S1: we shall all go together AL: ke wɔ lɔ wɔdhiɛ AL: we shall all go together

S1: anɔŋ wɔ ɣɔ̈ k kuɔ thin, ku mian, ku riŋ S1: we’ll have cows there, beer/soda, and meat AL: anɔŋ wɔ ɣɔ̈ k kuɔ thin, ku mianda, ku riŋ AL: we’ll have cows there, [drink] beer/soda, da wɔdhiɛ ke wɔ ye wuntok and [eat] meat together as people of one grandfather [ws500179, minutes 36-44, transcription pp. 146-147]

In receiving each phrase and passing it outward, the agomlong’s role is not only practical—managing turn-taking and ensuring that everyone can hear what is said—but also has a more subtle effect. First of all, it discourages aimlessly rambling or “zigzagging” (tai) speech.

Second, it encourages everyone to listen carefully to what is being said. The separation of speech roles also reflects a cautious attitude toward language in Bor country which is based on the recognition of what—in Magnus Course’s (2012:1) words—“might be called an ‘excess

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force’ of language, or our control of language being somewhat less complete than is often

assumed to be the case.”19

In order for political speech to have any kind of lasting consequences it must widely reported, extending beyond a limited circle of talk and committing its speakers to the consequences of their words and actions. (The role of the agomlong itself is a kind of icon of this representational process in miniature.) The most valued objects and words exchanged during a matrimonial discussion circulate more widely because they seize an audience’s attention: humorous words circulate through quotations in everyday talk; well-phrased speeches circulate through other matrimonial discussions and are attached to particular cattle, which circulate through chains of other exchanges. For words and cattle to circulate through exchange, they must be “light” (pial), healthy and easy to carry.

The commonest greeting in Bor country is the question Yïn pial guop? ‘Your body’s light?’, or Yïn pial?, or simply Pialë? If you’re well and your outlook’s positive, you might reply Ɣɛn apuɔl guop ‘My body is healthy’, or Ɣɛn apuɔ l ‘I’m light’. (Nebel (1979) translates pial as “1) light, easy. 2) healthy, well.”) If, on the other hand, you are burdened by malaria or worries, you might reply Ɣɛn thiek guop ‘My body’s heavy’. Dinkaphone speakers describe the clarity and force of effective speech in terms of being “light” (pial) and “bitter” (kec), qualities which cause them to be widely repeated (see also Lienhardt 1961). Careless speech is often referred to as being dull and heavy. People sometimes used the phrase wël thiek ‘heavy words’

(or ‘sick words’), to refer to requests that weighted heavily upon them—requests which one could not refuse (because they were military orders or requests made from genuine need) but which one could not possibly fulfill. Madit defined ‘heavy words’ this way, combining a

19 Language has this excess force because “meaning” is a co-production.

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command and genuine need for something he knew I was powerless to get for him: “If I say,

‘You, Brendan, when you go to America, you bring for me a visa’” [13 April 2010].

I have found Course’s (2012:2) description of Mapuche ideas about language as an

“actant” (in Bruno Latour’s (1993) sense) helpful for naming this understanding of language.20

In Bor, the “excess force” of words, their “bitterness,” is different from J.L. Austin’s (1962) perlocutionary force or illocutionary effect. Rather bitterness refers to the agency of language itself, specifically the way in which language attracts human attention and human mouths to carry it outwards through repeated speech and, by doing so, commit people to their words.

Effective words “bite” (kec), Lienhardt (1961:209) wrote of the word kec, “which is a technical term for effectiveness in prayer and invocation, and means to ‘bite’ or ‘be strong’ as hot and bitter things are ‘biting’, a sensation at once painful and pleasant.” This very quality also exposes poetic speech to the vicissitudes of reality.21

The opposite of “bitter” (kec) is not “sweet” (miet), but yathyath (“bland”) (cf. Kurimoto

22 1992). In an earlier paper (Tuttle 2012 and CHAPTER TEN) I said that people in Bor country often described their situation with the phrase ciɛŋ acï lɔ yathyath ‘life has become coarse and tasteless’. Where life has become bland, words themselves have become “voiceless.” This is an

20 I should emphasize, however, that while Mapuche conceptions of newen ‘force’, (Course 2013) and Bor Dinka conception of jok ‘power’, and kec, ‘bitterness’, are comparable—because each grapples with to the capacity for human actions to outrun human intentions—their similarity rests only on their shared attention to something which is “peripheral to the language ideologies dominant in the Western world, running contrary to an overwhelming emphasis on language as the unproblematic encoding of a speaker’s intention” (Course 2013:1). Forms of what Michael Silverstein (1981) has called “ethnometapragmatics” are as plural as human societies are plural. The central place accorded to intentions in speech act theory’s definitions of communication tends to focus analytic attention on deliberate acts which has the effect of greatly reducing the complexity of terms like jok and kec. 21 The attribute of bitterness is part of a broader ontology of life-promoting forces. Kuarjuaac (the seed of thou, Balanites egyptiaca, lalloba, or heglig) is said to be good for malaria because it is bitter. 22 Actually, bitter” (kec), “sweet” (miet), and yathyath (“bland”) form a basic triangle of oppositions in Dinka, rather like Berlin and Kay’s (1961) black, white, and red; bitterness is associated with oaths and other predictions about the future, sweetness with the unpredictable. The nearest there is to a word in Dinka for “luck” is guop miet, ‘sweet body’, and one whose words are always true (in the sense given by ordeals, above) is said to possess a bitter body. Blandness generally refers to actions without consequences of any sort at all.

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elegant way of grappling with the possibilities and limits of collective human agency in

intersection with popular concerns about the direction of change in Bor country. Many in Bor

worried that everyday practices of Government threatened to transform daily life by replacing a

politics of intelligent persuasion (where words themselves had force within a sphere of collective

decision-making) with the kind of authority embodied by school headmasters, military

commanders, and BӒӒR. These are modes of authority characteristic of the State and based, ultimately, on what Sharon Hutchinson (1998:58) has described as “sadly, … little more than the demonstrated power to kill with impunity.”

But it would be a mistake to understand this expression of “blandness” as fatalistic.

People’s efforts in Bor to draw very clear lines between spaces of akuma ‘Government’, and baai ‘home’, say, or between the speech of Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ and BӒӒR, are efforts to carve out and maintain a sphere in which human actions are ethically consequential and their words are binding.

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CHAPTER TWO

HEAVINESS

In the last chapter I discussed some of the ways in which the history of the past century caused people in Bor to reevaluate there sense of themselves are their relations with one another. My object in this chapter is to sketch out some of the ways in which the colonial encounter imperiled colonizers’ sense of themselves as “civilized,” and how these uncertainties shaped and warped the various cultural lenses through which they viewed Africa and Africans.

In previous chapters I discussed internal conceptual oppositions between paanjieng and akuma and the objectification of two verbal repertoires, “binding speech” and the speech of command One of the themes running through this dissertation concerns questions about the relation between experiences of interpersonal differences and the use of the differences between individuals to define more abstract forms of social distance. For instance, whenever people in

Bor country spoke to me about what defined Bor Dinka society as distinct from its neighbors, they generally focused on habits of speech: either the formal speech of matrimonial negotiations or else the very “direct speech” that marked people in Bor country off from their neighbors to the south. That people should mention language in defining difference is hardly surprising; what I want to emphasize here is that people spoke of differences in how language was used rather than what language one spoke. Here is an example concerning “direct speech” from a missionary who worked in Bor in the 1980s, the Reverend Marc Nikkel (1988:79-80).

Perhaps this brief vignette may serve to set out some of the bold contrasts between the Zande and the Dinka, a polarity that would in some ways be parallel to that between other Nilotics and their ‘Sudanic’ or ‘Bantu’-speaking neighbors. While the Zande seem tightly bound in a hierarchical structure, and anchored to homesteads in their productive, semitropical land, the Dinka pride themselves on their freedom to move through vast

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lands unhampered in their more egalitarian social structure. Where the Zande are a circumcised people highly cautious of any form of self-exposure, the Dinka are proudly naked and uncircumcised. Where the Dinka pride themselves on openness and directness in conflict resolution, they dislike what they perceive as the Zande tendency toward artifice, secrecy and elusiveness. If the Zande fear the Dinka for their open aggressiveness and hot tempers, the Dinka fear the Zande for their witchcraft and covert manipulation of unseen powers. … One European friend [a Hungarian born engineer] provides an example of these polar opposites in conflict resolution between Bari and Dinka. She had lived for two years in the Ciec Dinka town of Yirol, and, in her efforts at community development, frequently tired of the violent emotions that could spark instantaneously. A seemingly small disagreement could provoke a Dinka to strong words and a potential fight. Later she went to live in a conventional Bari compound in the town of Juba, surrounded on three sides by people of Bari-speaking groups. After several months she found herself desiring to return to the direct confrontation of the Dinka for she discovered people in each of these compounds living in daily fear of being poisoned by relatives.

The ethnographer of the Atuot, John Burton phrased an aspect of this “polar opposition” between more egalitarian Nilotics and their neighbors in terms of an attitudes toward direct speech and secrecy, which was internal to Nilotic society—as opposed to generated by encounters with outsiders—, and locates fears about witchcraft in the constitution of wet-season settlements. Burton (1980:275) writes that dry-season Atout cattle villages, which are very much like their Bor country counterparts, “included as many as three hundred individuals, all living within the circular confines of an area with a diameter of about one hundred yards.” Typical wet-season “villages,” in contrast, tended to consist of much more widely dispersed settlements, with each homestead fenced by a high -stalk barrier and surrounded by fields.

[Dry-season] cattle [villages] offer little measure for privacy, even while men living together in a [cattle village] maintain a strong sense of respect for each other. Herding cattle—the very reason for the existence of cattle [villages]—requires collective and cooperative labor. Ox songs often refer to one or another cattle [village] as ‘a place where there is no confusion’ [viz., where people speak openly]. Among other things this reflects the ethic that men ought to remain peaceably among themselves in the camp, speaking their worlds openly (quite often with a delicate hint of purpose) in the continual effort toward maintaining a consensus. By contrast, the [wet-season horticultural] village invites hostility since in their view covert privacy suggests plotting, jealousy, and ignorance of the true intentions of others [Burton 1980:276].

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Each of these polarities is a bit too neat not to be a simplification. But each simplifies in the ways that many people I met in Bor talked about these things, setting up a stark contrast so that more diffuse dillemas could be discussed more clearly. The contrast between cattle villages and horticultural villages provides a kind of stage upon which questions about relationships more generally can be staged, enacted and discussed. These imaginative oppositions are not the same as a picture of Africans as temporally suspended “between tradition and modernity” or as

“people of two worlds” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997:26, 422n.39). Rather, oppositions such as these—between Bari and Dinka ways of managing conflict, or between cattle villages and horticultural villages—provide an imaginative resource for making sense of a single social order in which outsiders are a constitutive force at the center of a heterogenous social world. This opposition also provided a flexible resource from which people in Bor drew to speak about the colonial encounter.

In their first volume of the set, Of Revelation and Revolution, John and Jean Comaroff

wrote about how the objectification by Southern Tswana of two cultural repertoires, sekgoa and

setswana, “provided a means of asserting some control, imaginative as well as material, over a

world increasingly out of it” (1997:26). People came to redefine their sense of what it meant to

be Tswana in opposition to what they saw as the logic of colonial forces. The Comaroffs also

show that this was not a “one-way affair;” the colonial encounter not only led colonial subjects to

develop their “own tropes of otherness” but “was as much involved in making the metropole, and

the identities and ideologies of colonizers” (1997:22, 26). Webb Keane, for instance, has written

about how “Sumbanese sacrifices, offerings, and sacred valuables provoke anxiety in Protestants

because of the way in which they challenge the obviousness of the distinction between subject

and object and awaken latent contradictions in the Europeans' own relationships to material

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things” (1997:677; cf. Graeber 2005); and Ann Laura Stoler (1997:14) has described the

instability of “the boundaries between separating colonizer from colonized,” the ‘modern’ and

‘primitive’, and the lengths to which colonizers went to draw and reinforce them.

One aim of this chapter is to sketch out some of the ways in which the colonial encounter

imperiled colonizers’ sense of themselves as “civilized,” and how these uncertainties shaped and

warped the various cultural lenses through which they viewed Africa and Africans.

An illustration might be useful here—for convenience, a short one drawn from the British

Expedition to Abyssinia of 1868, which culminated in the Battle of Magdala of 1868, the whole

thing being occasioned by bureaucratic indifference.23 As part of his policy to centralize and transform Ethiopian society along the lines of contemporary Eurasian states, Emperor Theodore

(Tewodros II) composed a series of letters, four addressed to Queen Victoria (“This letter which is sent by the King of kings, Theodore of —May it reach the Queen of England,

Victoria. How are you? Are you well? I, glory be to God am well.”) as a fellow Christian monarch (see Asfaw et al. 1979:3b) and an antagonist to the Ottoman Empire,24 requesting

British expertise: principally some skilled workers to make “mechanical things” to supplement the work of other “foreign craftsmen, most of them missionaries from Germany or Switzerland, upon whom he relied for such work as road-building and the casting of cannons and mortars”

(Appleyard and Pankhurst 1987:24). Theodore entrusted these letters to the British Consul,

Captain Duncan Cameron, who having business in Sudan, sent the letters on to the Foreign

Office in London where they were ignored.

23 Theodore’s first two letters went unanswered. The third (also unanswered) was sent to Queen Victoria through Cameron to the Foreign Office which received it in February 1863 and waited three months before forwarding it on to the India Office, where it was filed away for a year until 11 May 1864, when it was returned to the Foreign Office without any indication of its having been read (Asfaw, Appleyard and Ullendorff 1979:xii). 24 Though during the 1860s Great Britian’s policy in much of North-East Africa was more pro-Ottoman.

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After a long delay a frustrated Theodore imprisoned Cameron—in an effort to get a the attention of the British—, and then a British envoy, Hormuzd Rassam, whom had been sent there to secure Cameron’s release, and two British officials and two Protestant missionaries. The

British Government refused to send the craftsmen (who were then at the port of Massawa) until the prisoners were released. Tewodros refused to release his captives until the craftsmen arrived.

The artist John Tenniel, best known for illustrating Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in

Wonderland, produced a cartoon for Punch of the impasse which captured the problem that placing Queen Victoria and Emperor Theodore side-by-side posed, that is, it threatened to suggest that they were comparable, two contemporary Christian monarchs with imperial ambitions to bring civilization to “the ignorance and blindness of … Ethiopians” (Asfaw et al.

1979:5d). Tenniel’s cartoon shows a female personification of Great Britain, Britannia, pinning with her fishing spear Abyssinia in the form of King Theodore II in epaulettes, with a crown fitted over his feathered headdress and holding the keys to the captives’ cell. The image is an allegory for the pacification of a savage power clumsily dressed up in the clothes of civilization by a superior ruler.

Figure 4. Britannia and King Theodore II.

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The Battle of Magdala of 1868 was a much more brutal matter than Tenniel’s allegory.

The British Government responded to Tewodros by sending 12,000 British and Indian troops armed with rifles and some fifteen elephant, which carried the mortars, rockets, and heavy artillery. More than 500 Ethiopians were killed and many more were injured.

Situations like this can lead one to reflect on the brutality of the British mission of

civilization in East Africa. F.H.M., writing in 1868—with the “corporate anonymity” that lent

The British Controversialist its authoritative Victorian voice25—, from the negative position on

“Was the Abyssinian War Justifiable?,” held that:

“The Abyssinian difficulty was one calling for the exercise of tact, discretion, and common sense, not for the use of fire, sword, and carnage. A little civility and a little money would have made the expedition unnecessary; and it is just to manage possible difficulties with judicious moderation, and little evil or expense, that statesmen are required. To bring the mere huffiness and self-importance of a savage monarch, touched, stimulated, and set up by a few pushing adventurers with a little authority, and a few not overwise or sensible missionaries, out of the unimportance of a squabble into the prominence of a war, was, to our thinking, an action suggestive of Dr. Walcott's lines upon the absurdity of him who

"Casts of manure a waggon-load around To raise a single daisy from the ground; Uplifts the club of Hercules—for what ? To crush a butterfly, or brain a gnat! … Why, the very absurdity of contrast appears in putting opposite to each other Victoria and Theodore, Britain and Abyssinia, "the ever victorious army" and the undisciplined hordes of a savage sovereign, the well-weaponed Briton and the almost gunless warriors of rude Abyssinia. To call the sending out of 15,000 British soldiers to meet the untrained, tactless mob of Theodore, a war, and to speak of this mere travestie of a contest as having "vindicated the honour of the crown " from the "insults" it had suffered from King Theodore, is surely a piece of the sublime audacity …; and this lofty braggadocio is reported, on the same high and trustworthy authority, to have gained "the admiring respect of Europe" (F.H.M 1868:358-59)

25 The British Controversialist and Literary Magazine: Devoted to the Impartial and Deliberate Discussion of Important Questions in Religion, Philosophy, History, Politics, Social Economy, Etc., and to the Promotion of Self-Culture and General Education.

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The trope of the “savage sovereign” is common in travel literature and refracted through

negative stereotypes of “Europeanised Africans”—in Lugard’s phrase (1922:79-80; see Sharkey

2012:434). What I want to underline is that “the absurdity of contrast” in Victorian literature

rests on the idea that whatever it was that made it possible for Victoria’s soldiers to be ever

victorious—to kidnap, dispossess, and generally wreak havoc with “fire, sword, and carnage” on

millions of human beings—was evidence of a superiority that extended beyond the bare capacity

to inflict violence. The story of civilization in other words needed the narrative of scientific and

moral progress to link up “mechanical things” and Christianity with armies, supplying an

additional element to victory. This narrative provided Europe with a way to hold out a

technological disparity as a moral disparity. “At the final battle of Karari (Omdurman), Mahdist

casualities included 11,000 dead and 16,000 wounded, compared to 49 dead and 382 wounded

on the Anglo-Egyptian side”—Sharkey (2003:5) wrote, noting that Winston Churchill described

it as “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians” (Churchill in

The River War quoted in Sharkey 2003:5).

When I left off my discussion in the last chapter I was arguing that if marching in line, and the

fetching and bearing of burdens were the most vivid images around which stories about colonial

violence had crystalized, it was partially because these experiences of inequality and humiliation

(yɔŋ) were still embodied by postcolonial institutions. The persuasiveness of these images was also rooted in part in childhood memories and adult’s experiences with children. Talking about how young people and elders should relate to one another was one of the main ways people talked about relations of authority and deference in general. Whenever I asked about the

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differences between dhäk ‘uninitiated boys’, and alɔ kniim (Bor Dinka) or aparak (Rek Dinka)

‘initiated young men’, lit. ‘pasturegrass-heads’ (alɔ kniim) or ‘[those who have] left milking’

(aparak), for example, the first thing people always said was that dhäk ‘boys’, “have to obey.”26

Indeed, whenever I asked recent initiates what they enjoyed most about their initiation period they always mentioned how they jokingly mocked and threatened the generation that parented them—their elder-sisters, mothers, and fathers—with sticks and gave them orders. In September,

2009, for instance, I was walking to Bor town when a group of aparak blocked the path. Their leader, a small boy of maybe thirteen, straightened himself up and carefully said, “I will kill you”

(in English), as he slowly waved a heavy iron pipe, miming the act. He waited a moment and, then, imitating a checkpoint soldier’s abrupt command, barked, “Okay. Pass!” [22 September

2009].27

Small children were always being sent off to fetch small items and hot embers from neighbors; little boys were expected to fetch things like firewood, a cup, water, a cigarette, and so forth when they were told to do so by an older person. Implicit in images of humiliation, in

26 That aparak no longer milked or cooked, or that they possessed “the right to speak in the community” (at least ideally, if not in actual practice) was only mentioned later [23 Oct 2009; nb1, 28FEB2010]. Alɔkniim ‘pasturegrass- heads’ refers to the undifferentiatedness of initiates who, like prairygrass, are all ‘equal,’ the ‘same,’ or the same ‘height.’ I am using the term aparak (Rek Dinka) rather than alɔkniim (Bor Dinka) because it was more commonly used when speaking to me. I got the feeling that this was partially because I was known to be interested in “Dinka culture,” and in Bor country there was a feeling that Rek Dinka, which was the dialect of many missionary Bibles and Dinka Primer vocabularies, was a more “traditional” dialect than Bor Dinka (which does have many Nuer- and Arabic-derived terms). On the other hand, it may have simply been a simplification strategy. Dinka is a monosyllabic language with a very complex morphology: with three contrasting tones and inflections made by changing voice quality, , and final consonants. Bor Dinka varieties elide final consonants and many linking and possession terms (like dë pl., kë, which indicates possession) as in “Garang dë Mabior” (Rek) v. “Garang Mabior” (Bor). 27 After I’d greeted the other aparak in the group I passed another man who said, “Ah. You’ve seen one of our traditions.” As in many life-stage rituals elsewhere, aparak undergo a kind of social death during their initiation (transition) period, and they engage in all kinds of ritualized abuse (behaving like soldiers, sexualized horseplay, and mock attacks and ‘bride-abductions’); anthropologists usually call this sort of thing “joking relations” (see Douglas 1968). Aparak are said to carry sticks around because if anyone manages to touch them they will develop a disease called thiaŋ (cattle are also said to catch this from the touch of a menstruating woman) whose principle symptoms are hard, pointy nipples (like breasts) and chronic skinniness (or dryness and skinniness, in the case of cattle). By “are said” I do not mean that people were necessarily certain such a thing would happen; in the United States, elves are said to work in a toy factory located on the North Pole.

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other words, were a whole series of assumptions about how people ought to treat one another.

Adults should not treat one another like children by bossing them around, for example; and they

shouldn’t treat others like donkeys by making people carry them around. This was part of the

reason why institutions like armies, bureaucratic government offices, schools, and churches were

popularly felt to be deeply problematic; these institutions provided continual reminders that

people were now treating one another in the way that they had been humiliated by foreigners.

And there is no reason to suppose that the inhabitants of Bor country had any difficulty in the

past understanding that colonial exploitation was justified in part by European representations of

Africans as children and adolescents, making “the exploitation by elites pass for strict-but-fair

paternalism and also [serving] to ridicule the complaints of the exploited as the tantrums of

ungrateful toddlers” (Argenti’s 2007:7).

When I asked people about the colonial period, they always mentioned forced labor and

the tribute levied in cattle. But most people spoke at the greatest length about violent lashings

and carrying heavy burdens.

Colonial sources also mention the issue of walking. By the end of the nineteenth century

the British government was concerned that its control over Egypt (and its route to India and East

Asia through the Suez Canal) and the Upper Nile—which was thought to be the principle source

of Egypt’s water—was threatened by other European powers: the Italians, Belgians, and

French.28 The Mahdist rebellion had overthrown the Turco-Egyptian administration in 1885,29 and the British claimed the Sudan in 1898 “in the name of the Khedive of Egypt, as a

28 Actually, more water comes from the Blue Nile. The White Nile discharges a more regular flow. “Wingate, the British high commissioner in Egypt, and ex-governor general of Sudan, … wrote, ‘As long as we hold the Sudan we hold the key to Egypt because we control the source of its water supply’ (cited in [Ruth] First (1970) p. 128.” 29 In 1821, Muhammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, claimed Sudan for the Ottoman Empire, hence “Turkiyya.” “Muhammad Ali’s dynasty ruled Egypt and Sudan with virtual autonomy until 1882, when in response to a rebellion of Egyptian Army officers British forces occupied Egypt” (Powell 1995:10).

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‘reconquest’ of what the regarded as their territory,” in order to avoided putting

themselves into direct conflict with France and other European powers (Brown 1992:79).30 (The

“fiction” that the Condominium Sudan was an Egyptian holding (Sharkey 2003:5), hence co- dominus, enabled the British to permit slavery to continue in the region.) The Turco-Egyptian administration had been based on a combination of forced labor, tribute, and slavery which many people saw as the very definition of oppression. By the time the British formally re-appeared on the scene, the refusal of European soldiers to walk had become a potent symbol of slavery. For instance, Hubert Horatio Shirley Morant (Assistant Director of Intelligence in Sudan), a British soldier who served in the Egyptian army between 1898 and 1908, wrote that

the Dinkas themselves seem an unintelligent, ignorant, uninteresting lot, thinking apparently of nothing but their cattle and cowdung and ashes, with which they cover themselves in lieu of more decent clothing. … As is well known, they are not a-go-head lot, as the following conversation with an enlightened Dinka, who had been to and Secandaria, and a brother of a big sheikh, denotes:—

Have you any dhurra? [Morant asked.] Only a very little. Why don’t you cultivate more, then you would make a lot of money? We don’t want money. Are not donkeys any use in your country? Yes very useful, but we don’t “know” donkeys, besides we have got no money to buy them. Yes, but if you cultivated more ground you would get money? True, but our fathers and our grandfathers walked, so we walk; but I believe the sheikh perhaps is going to get one. Why do your people smear themselves with cowdung and ashes? Because our fathers and forefathers did so, &c.

30 Which didn’t entirely work. In 1898, France claimed almost the entire territory of present day Bahr El Ghazal, and the Anglo-Egyptian “re-conquest” precipitated the famous Fashoda crisi” which almost brought Britain and France to war. Winston Churchill’s (1899) The River War contains the most readable account of the Fashoda crisis; Riker’s (1929) A Survey of British Policy in the Fashoda Crisis provides a short summery. For the triangular relationships among Belgium, Britain, and France see Collins’ (1968), where his map on page 67 helpfully lays out the “Anglo-Belgian Commercial Concessions in the Southern Sudan” which, after it had been decreed “vacant land,” allowed the region to be carved up and leased to European concession companies. For an readable account of this process see Adam Hochschild (1998).

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[SIR, No.92. 1st to 31st March 1902, Appendix E., Notes on the people, country, &c. between Renk and Kaka wood station. By El Bimbashi H.H.S. Morant. 25 March, 1902, pp. 16-17.]

Since Morant was collecting sorghum (dhurra) for his troops and livestock when this conversation supposedly took place it is hardly surprising that the “enlightened Dinka” whom he questioned would have been reluctant to volunteer that he had any. And, from “the Dinka” point-of-view, the principle thing that made donkeys “useful” was that they could carry sorghum to market. If you had no reason to want to do that, then a donkey was only, really, a rather silly prestige item that ate a lot of grain, the sort of thing a sheikh might keep around.

But what I want to underline is Morant’s dialogical frame. There is obviously more at issue here than an abstract discussion about the economics of donkeys, or the comparative merits of cattle and grain. This little dialogue belongs to a genre whose most famous example is probably David Livingstone’s (1858) “Conversations on Rainmaking,” in which the voice of abstract reason merges seamlessly with that of the plain spoken “European” and allows—as

David Graeber (2007:338) remarked—“an Italian atheist to read an Anglican missionary’s account of some ritual in Zimbabwe without ever having to think about that observer’s dedication to bizarre tea rituals or the doctrine of transubstantiation” (cf. Fabian 2001:163-4).

Assuming that this conversation actually took place,31 what Morant’s interlocutor is plainly trying to explain is that just as British people like Morant do things because their forefathers did

31 Evans-Pritchard (1971:143-44) noted that few of the conversations put down by European visitors to illustrate the irrationality of Southern Sudanese pass the credibility test. While Evans-Pritchard’s own illustration in The Nuer (1940:12-13) of people’s reluctance to answer basic questions takes the form of a little dialogue which belongs to this genre, his point was that the "Nuerosis" induced by conversational foot-dragging was a very effective way of keeping obnoxious strangers and government spies at arm’s length; it sprang from the “deep resentment” produced by the colonial Government’s terrifically violent assault on Muot dit (see below). Evans- Pritchard’s dialogue is an obvious satire of the colonial government genre. Geertz (1988) of course notices Evans- Pritchard’s irony, and the “of course” discourse is no doubt meant to put some distance between ethnography and travel writing, to establish Evans-Pritchard’s scientific authority as no mere interloper, as Geertz suggests; but this satire is also meant to insist that travelers accounts of ‘irrational savages’ were part of a textual strategy to project colonial violence onto its victims.

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them, so too do do things because their “fathers and forefathers did so.” After all,

if Morant was so soft-headed that he was unable to grasp the perfectly ordinary and obvious facts

that donkeys were rather pointless, expensive animals and that people covered themselves in

ashes for all sorts of reasons (to repel mosquitoes, to look attractive) perhaps he would at least

understand an appeal to “tradition.” It would have been quite obvious to anyone who had “been

to Cairo and Secandaria [school]” that the British held dear to their own traditions—the actions

of their own “fathers and forefathers”—given all their exotic pageantry, “God Save the King,”

and talk about tea and “real English plum pudding.”

(I mentioned the poetic dimension of covering oneself with ashes in the introduction to

this dissertation. Morant’s question, “Why do your people smear themselves with cowdung and

ashes?”32 implied the idea that smearing could be treated as evidence for a coherent body of

“strange beliefs” (Keane 2008:S110). By emphasizing the metonymic connection between ashes and hearths and hearths and lineal continuity, I may have suggested an understanding akin to the

“mystical connection” sort which Morant’s interlocutor was here dismissing.)

Colonial sources also draw attention to the issue of bearing burdens. Like colonial authors speaking about other colonies in Africa (Ann Whitehead 1999; Johnson 1992) and elsewhere (Alatas 1977), these writers attributed the resistance of colonized people in Bor country to bearing burdens to their “laziness” and childish pride. When, for example, in 1919, three-thousand Aliab Dinka men attacked the police post at Minkamman near Bor, “the Bor

Dinka” were said to have “attributed the uprising to being told that next year part of the tribute would be in grain and not cattle [and] their dislike of carrying because it deformed their hair-dos

32 Morant’s question is meant to imply to his reader and his interlocutor that with money one could buy ‘proper clothing’ and put aside the ‘cowdung and ashes’.

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…” (Collins 1967:80).33 (Collins notes that a more likely cause of the rebellion was the demand for tribute itself, which the government demanded without providing anything in return. “The

Government had done nothing for the Aliab,” Mongalla Province Governor V.R. Woodland had said in 1920 (see Sanderson and Sanderson 1981; Collins 1981:113; Collins 1967:87).) The attribution of the rebellion to a refusal to carry conveniently attributed the contradictions of colonial rule to a completely imaginary failing of the colonized, “laziness,” and implied not only that the Dinka were lazy but that they were lazy for a stupid reason (their “hair-dos”).34

Wrote the South Tyrolian missionary Johannes Chrysostomus Mitterrutzner in his Die

Dinka-Sprache in Central-Afrika, attributing this refusal to suffer hard work to the climate:

“Weakened by the climate, [the Dinka] are incapable of hard work” (1866:viii).35 “Dinkas will not carry loads, and the Jur and Bongo are not much better,” the Director of Woods and Forest for the Sudan Government wrote in his “Report on a Tour of Inspection in the Forests of the

Bahr-El-Ghazal Province” (Broun 1902:19).36 That “the Nuer would not carry my stores and equipment,” Evans-Pritchard (1940:10) attributed to “their disgust at my presence” in Muot dit in

1930. Evans-Pritchard said that his reluctant interlocutors’ disgust owed to the “Nuer settlement” of 1929-30—that is to say, a series of punitive campaigns and raids (for “tribute”) by

33 The suggestion seems to be that Aliab Dinka rebelled because ‘paying’ tribute in grain would have meant carrying it—since cattle can walk all by themselves. I think this misses the point in another way too: Much as the ‘spheres of exchange’ model falls short at times (see Robbins and Akin 1999; Hutchinson 1996:90), it does help us to understand that one reason why people felt that cattle and grain should occupy separate circles of exchange (and thus why grain should not be used as an object of prestige for the payment of tribute or the making of alliances but rather be freely given to anyone in need of it) was because everyone was aware that linking prestige to horticultural lands and livelihoods (more calories came from grain) would enable ‘big men’ to reduce others to slavery by controlling their livelihoods, their ability to eat. A person without cattle is poor, of course. But a person without land or livelihood is wholly dependent on others, aluak ‘a slave’. 34 “The Dinka is so abnormally lazy that he has no desire whatever to hire himself for work of any description. ‘Carriers are most difficult to obtain from them even when applied for through' the medium of their most influential sheikhs’” [Gleichen 1904:144-5]. “The Dinka is stigmatized as lazy because he resolutely refuses to work as a carrier” [Cummins 1904:154], etc. etc. 35 “Durch das Klima geschwächt sind [die Dinka] unfähig harte Arbeit zu ertragen” (1866:viii). 36 [SIRno95, June 1902, Appendix “B.” Report on a Tour of Inspection in the Forests of the Bahr-El-Ghazal Province. A.F. Broun, Director of Woods and Forest, Sudan Government, 24th May 1902, pp.19]

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the British authorities, the forced separation of Luo and Gaawär Nuer from their Dinka neighbors

and in-laws, the machine-gunning of cattle and people and the burning of villages, RAF

bombings, the “herding of people into dry ‘concentration areas’,” the killing of Guek Ngundeng

in 1929, the arrest and murder of other major and minor religious figures, and an attempt to

dynamite Ngun-deng’s shrine, the so-called “pyramid of Dengkur” (H.C. Jackson’s (1954:168-

70) description gives some idea of the total lack of British sympathy for Nuer; see Evans-

Pritchard 1940:7-15; D.H. Johnson 1979, 1980, 1982b:236, 1994; Hutchinson 1996:63, 115-

16).37

Colonial authors held that their ‘nomadic pastoral life’ had disposed Dinka to dislike carrying things as well as to violence, short memories, laziness and improvidence: they couldn’t handle responsibility; “they were not a-go-head lot;” they were quick to forget violence and hardship, and frittered away whatever they got as soon as they got it without laying anything in for lean times. (This would have come as some surprise to people who entrusted their cattle to others for two or three generations, in part, as a kind of insurance against drought and epidemics.) Ewart Grogan, who visited Bor country in 1899-1900,38 combined these racist themes in his description of how he disciplined his porters by making each man

37 See David Killingray’s (1984) 'A Swift Agent of Government': Air Power in British Colonial Africa, 1916-1939. Decades before Europeans started bombing each another in Europe they practiced the techniques of air power in colonial Africa. The first use of aerial bombing occurred in Libya in 1911. “Air policing which involved bombing and machine-gunning people and cattle was generally acceptable in official quarters for use in what was termed ‘uncivilized warfare,’ in operations against Kurds, Afridis, and Sudanese, but not in “civilized warfare,” as for example in Ireland in 1919-21,” (Killingray 1984:432). So many Europeans came to doubt whether Europe was indeed “civilized” following the First World War not so much because Europeans had “acted like savages” but rather because they had brought familiar forms of “uncivilized warfare” to Europe. 38 Grogan’s dates are hard to follow. A Sudan Intelligence Report of 1900 noted that “on the 10th February the French left en route for Cairo, together with Captain Gage, Dr. Milne, and Mr. Grogan. Mr. Grogan kindly submitted a map of the country lying between Fort Bor and Sobat for the Intelligence Department to copy, it is of a very rough description, but will be undoubtedly very useful. Mr. Grogan was firmly convinced of the fact that the Belgians treat the natives in their territory, west of the White Nile, in a most brutal manner” (see page 2 and 6, SIR No.67. 1st January to 8th March 1900). Grogan (1900:305-8) ran into one of Peake’s sudd-cutting expeditions (see

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stand with his load on his head in the middle of camp till sunset, or as long as was deemed sufficient for his particular case. We found this much more effectual as a punishment than flogging or fines (a system that I strongly object to, except in Government stations). The nigger enjoys his afternoon nap, he likes to stroll into the neighbouring villages, show his best clothes off before the local beauties, and pass the time of day with the village cronies, and it jars on him to have to stand doing nothing while he sees his friends chatting and discussing their bananas and the topics of the day. One such punishment usually sufficed for at least a month, and a nigger must be very much impressed to remember anything for as long as that [1900:104; pdf.ver.135].

This kind of punishment helps to explain why carrying became a potent token of slavery and oppression. But what I want to underline, here, is that two conjoined themes which recur again and again in travelers’ accounts of Bor country are the impermanence of what people built there and how quickly the past was forgotten.

The tribes here have no historical traditions, and so far as we have not come across any monument dedicated to bygone glories. As everything is made from clay, it soon turns to dust [Kaufmann 1881[1861]:169].

[A]fter five hours’ paddling [we] reached Bohr, which lies on the right bank at a sudden corral’] of the Dervishes and the more‘ زر] bend of the river. The original zeribas substantial earthworks thrown up when they heard of the occupation of Kero are already falling to pieces, and the elephant now takes his mid-day siesta midst the grinning skulls and calcined bones that are scattered about, all equally regardless of the wanton brutality of the near past. The past fades fast in Africa; yet another year, and the cotton-bush will have hid the moldering relics of the earthworks, and the white ant will have seen the last grin of those gruesome jaws [Grogan 1900:266; Pdf299].39

Partially these accounts were literal; termites really do cause granaries to collapse and the

“zeribas of the Dervishes” were soon overgrown by cotton bush. But Grogan and Kaufmann were each making a larger, metaphoric point: Grogan’s claim—suggesting that the people of Bor were the main source of their own calamities—was that “wanton brutality” was so intrinsic to

African societies that the memory of violence dwindled because it ‘fades fast’ into normality;

below) in late January of 1900, “the work was so hard that no one had time to get fever,” he said, “and the health of the expedition was excellent” (1900:308). 39 There were two forts in the vicinity of Bor. This was likely the southern fort, roughly eight kilometers south from the present day site of Bor town.

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Kaufmann’s idea was that people lacked a historical tradition upon which to build a moral

foundation. Gorgan’s implied comparison was against European political and economic

systems—the State and the so-called “legitimate trade”—, and Kaufmann’s against the

‘historical tradition’ embodied by Christianity. Other, earlier travelers, such as Wilhelm Junker

attributed “the absence of trustworthy traditions”—which, he said, made it “difficult … to bring

into clear perspective the occurrences even of the most recent times”—, to the savagery,

superstition, and slavery, of societies based “only [on] the right of the strongest,” and the

confused patchwork of “incessant displacements, dislocations, divisions, and migrations” created

by the slave trade (1890-92:262;pdf277).40

British colonists in Sudan also measured themselves against Islamic “Dervishes” and

“Arab slave traders,” whom they condemned for racism and cruelty toward “Africans.”

Hoschschild (2006:28) has written about how this Islamaphobic discourse of “one ‘uncivilized’ race enslaving another” palmed off colonial prejudice on a “safely nonwhite target.”41 In Sudan the phrase “the ” was a blatant misnomer and boundaries between Arab, African, and European were never stable; “the zariba [slave-and-ivory] system … was … initiated by

40 On a single page Junker describes the brutality of the slave trade in graphic terms (“reeked with blood”) and obliquely admits that his porters were slaves (1890-92:307;pdf322). Evans-Pritchard (1971:138) wrote that while the German “naturalist” Georg Schweinfurth (1873-4, vol.I:190, 236) described slavers from and as “incarnations of human depravity” and “cattle-stealers and men-hunters” he was also “candid enough to record that on his arrival at Khartoum after his explorations his servants were arrested for trading in slaves, an accusation he could not deny.” 41 Hochschild (2006:27) is clear about who had a short memory. “Britain, of course had only a dubious right to the high moral view of slavery. British ships had long dominated the slave trade, and only in 1838 had slavery formally been abolished in the British Empire. But Britons quickly forgot this, just as they forgot that slavery’s demise had been hastened by large slave revolts in the British West Indies, brutally and with increasing difficulty, suppressed by British troops.” While slavery had been abolished in the British Empire, was allowed to continue because Sudan was claimed to be an Egyptian colony. Historians’ debates about terminology are often useful—what should we call the polity of 1821-1885?—but I think the debate about whether Sudan between 1899 and 1956 was a “British colony” is stupid. It was a British colony, even if it was placed under the Foreign Office (rather than the Colonial Office). And prisoners were slaves (Sharkey 2003).

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European traders”—Lane and Johnson (2009:519) note—such as, for example, the French

diplomat Alphonse de Malzac, de Malzac’s nephew, Amabile Lanzon (a Maltese trader who

married a daughter of the Parisian trader G. Thibaut, who ascended the White Nile under the

name Shawqī Ibrāhīm), an Austrian merchant named Franz Binder from , and

Andrea Debono from Malta (a British subject known as Latīf Efendi whose ships sailed under the British flag) (Hill 1951:80, 110-111, 209-210, 229, 357-58). When, in 1871, Samuel W.

Baker (1874 vol.1:252) annexed all “the countries south of ” for Ismailïa the Khedive of Egypt and justified his monopoly on “all ivory [—which,] being the property and monopoly of the government,” closed the territory for slave and ivory traders—, he insisted that it was not to make a profit but rather to establish “legitimate commerce;” and—he wrote—“considering the savage condition of the tribes which inhabit the Nile Basin,” to rescue them from savagery and their “reckless spoliation” (Baker 1874 vol.1:6-8).

The “day of annexation,” the 26 of May 1871, was celebrated with a magic lantern show and “real English plum-pudding.” Baker (1874 vol.1:251) wrote about how “the representation that was most applauded was” a slide of Moses leading the Israelites from slavery through the

Red Sea “followed by the Pharaoh.” (The implication was that Egyptians had been oppressing people since antiquity and Baker was finally going to do something about it.42) British colonists defined themselves against both the native’s savagery and indolence and the Muslims’ cruelty and infidelity. Placing the blame on profit-seeking “,” rather than Europeans, provided a way to justify colonization as a humanitarian mission. And this issue lay behind much of the colonialists’ moral posturing in their writings about subjugation and ‘legitimate commerce’.43

42 Commemorations of the slave trade were a regular feature of Christian missionaries’ activities throughout the time of their work in Southern Sudan. 43 This strategy obviously did not end with twentieth-century. A number of Evangelical Christian authors took up the cause of Southern Sudan and argued that wars there justified incredible violence against ordinary Muslims.

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Slave raiding and slave trading had declined in Southern Sudan during the Mahdist period (1883-98), Johnson (2004:6) notes, “very largely as a result of the contraction of state power during that period.” Indeed, McLoughlin (1962:361-2) observes, it was one of the lasting ironies of the colonial ‘re-conquest’ of 1898-‘99 that, while the British “applauded” themselves for protecting Southerners from “Islamic” oppression and slavery, forced labor actually increased with the establishment of Condominium rule. After all, there were roads and telegraph lines and stations to be built, railways to be laid and farms to tend, rivers to be cleared of obstructions and steamer-ships needing wood, the colony had to be paid for …, and if Africans were made to help out in the establishment of “legitimate commerce,” well then that too was only for their own benefit, to rescue them from their laziness.44 The idea that Africans had no history and no memory, then, marked them as doubly deficient, and allowed the brutality of colonial methods to be obliquely acknowledged while at the same time justified by claiming that people subjected to the slave trade had “no sense of social responsibility” and therefore had to be kept in line (H.C.

Jackson 1953:94).

Winston Churchill’s The River War, his campaign report of the British “re-conquest” of

Sudan which I quoted above, is organized by a similar device—the boring desert railway and the

Perhaps the ugliest published example is Lost Boy No More (Mills 2004). DiAnn Mills is the author of, among other things, dozens of Christian Romance novels and an account of how “35,000 ‘Lost Boys’ of Sudan escaped the tyranny of Islam to seek Hope and Freedom” in the United States which describes “the basic differences between Islam and Christianity in order to create a better understanding of why these atrocities are happening in Sudan and throughout the world today” (2004:82). 44 A rapid transformation from slave- to wage-labor also risked alienating a diverse set of stakeholders and the collapse of Sudan’s export economy, which was heavily reliant on a small number of agricultural commodities— particularly, gum arabic (for confectionary and paper) and cotton—, and cheap labor (Brown 1992:79; McLoughlin 1962). “The Government had to choose between almost equally distasteful alternatives: the temporary sanction of slavery or the immediate liberation of the slaves, the latter a course which might bring economic ruin upon the country. … To have freed all the slaves would have meant letting loose upon society thousands of men and women with no sense of social responsibility, who would have been a menace to public security and morals” (H. C. Jackson, Behind the Modern Sudan, London Macmillan, 1953, pp. 93-94; cited in McLoughlin 1962:362).

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bright flower as representatives of the slow labor of civilization and the fleeting act of

violence—which was meant to euphemize the violence of the British colonial mission.

It often happens that in prosperous public enterprises the applause of the nation and the rewards of the sovereign are bestowed on those whose offices are splendid and whose duties have been dramatic. Others whose labours were no less difficult, responsible, and vital to success are unnoticed. … Victory is the beautiful, bright-coloured flower. Transport is the stem without which it could never have blossomed. Yet even the military student, in his zeal to master the fascinating combinations of the actual conflict, often forgets the far more intricate complications of supply. … The Khalifa was conquered on the railway [1951[1899]:121].

I have already mentioned that it is difficult to reconstruct from British records exactly what life

was like for the people who were forcibly recruited to undertake the labor of Britain’s “civilizing

mission” during the early years of Anglo-Egyptian rule. One indication of what the experience

of colonial rule was like in Sudan just after the ‘reconquest’ can be drawn from a “Report on the

Sudd-Cutting Expedition” written by Major Peake, R.A. (SIR No 77, 9th December 1900 to 8th

January 1901, Appendix C, September 1900).

Sudd (< ‘dam, barrier’) refers to the thick islands of aquatic vegetation, ballasted by roots and decomposing papyrus, that carpeted the Bahr al-Jabal between Bor and and prevented river passage through the Upper Nile swamps (see Collins 2002).45 In some places it was 30 ft. deep and “sufficiently solid for the elephant to pass over,” Gorgan (1900:307), and most other travelers, remarked. Collins (2002:59) points out that the main reason for cutting a channel through the swamp was to justify the British claim on the Upper Nile against the French in order to maintain control over Egypt and, by extension, the Suez Canal. Major Peake

(1900:11) described how the canal was cut “bank to bank” through the sudd in Southern Sudan

45 The Sudd—derived from the Arabic word sadd, meaning “dam” and originally applied to barriers formed by mats of floating papyrus—is the name that travelers gave to South Sudan’s vast equatorial wetlands (the Sudd, Ghazal and Sobat marshes), perhaps because they regarded it as an obstacle to boat traffic.

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so that British boats could pass through the Suez Canal in Egypt.46 First, the “the Dervishes47

[prisoner-slaves],” working from the downstream side, hacked away and burned the surface vegetation; then, “armed with fasses, picks, axes and saws,” they dug and cut the swidden into large blocks by trenching along three sides until the fetid water welled up over their heads, or the

“strong current” sucked them underneath. Then they drove telegraph-pole pales around each block to brace it. Next the prisoners pierced the mass with a hooked pole and, with a whip stitch, threaded a one-and-a-half-inch flexible steel hawser through the thick mat, under the block—

“Good swimmers are required for this work,” Peake remarked (SIR No67, 1900:7)—, and then

up again and through a hawsehole to the bollards of a heavy gunboat where it was bolted with

enough slack to allow 20 or 30 yards’ momentum before the cables snapped taut across the water

and, like a cheese-wire, severed the roots holding the mat in place. “If the piece showed no signs

of coming away the engines were reversed and the steamer was brought close up again and then

went astern again.”

Despite Grogan’s insistence that Sudd “country was full of cannibals,” Peake complained

that whenever he sent his prisoners off into the forest on wood-cutting expeditions (to fuel the

46 And so boats could travel up and down the White Nile, which contrary to Baker’s claim was already a part of world history and global economy. The Suez Canal was also built by corvee labor and contributed to the “panic of 1873” (called the Great Depression until 1930), which was brought about by speculative European banking and caused the price of Egyptian cotton to collapse. As a result, by 1875, external debt forced Isma'il Pasha (who had sent Baker to suppress the slave trade in 1869) to sell Egypt’s share in the Canal Company to Great Britain and provided Britain with a mechanism to take over control of Egypt’s finances and depose Isma'il. The British installed his son, Tawfiq, in Isma'il’s place which (predictably) caused an uprising (the ‘Urabi revolt) that, in turn, provided a pretext for the invasion and colonization of Egypt in 1882 (see Mitchell 2002:73). This is why more recent examples of this strategy are called “neo-colonialism.” 47 In Sudan the term, “Dervish” [

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steamboats) they ran away, evidently unafraid of the inhabitants of Bor’s forests.48 While many must have returned to the places where the colonial government had kidnapped them from; the genealogies I collected in Bor country in 2009 and ’10 contained many people who were said to have escaped from military operations not unlike what Peake described: The five gunboats, twelve sailboats, and five barges were manned by seventy artillerymen under the command of five Captains (Royal Artillery, Scot Fusiliers, etc.), three Lieutenants of the Royal Navy, and five

Royal Marine Artillery Sergeant-Majors and Sergeants. Twelve Egyptian and Sudanese army officers managed a company (100 men) of the 11th Battalion and 30 men of the 17th Battalion, who guarded the British base camp and supervised the prisoners, “one Sudanese soldier being employed as overseer of 30 workmen.”

Peake wrote that

On leaving Omdurman in December, there were about 800 Dervishes and prisoners from Omdurman Gaol [prison], with about 100 women. Of these some 35 died during the first two months, and 91 were sent down to Omdurman as being not worth the expense of keeping, owing to weakness; about 640 men were brought down at the end of the expedition, that being the number which was always available for work…. These Dervishes and prisoners were fed on three rotls of dhurra [sorghum] and 50 dirhems [3 tbsp. maybe] of salt daily to each man and woman from December 16th to March 1st, on which date the ration was reduced to 2½ rotls daily, that being quite sufficient [1900:6].49

The British had an interest in keeping their prisoner-slaves alive; it was difficult to replace those who died. The “Dervishes” were given basic medical treatment and a few handfuls

48 This was not the sudd-cutting expedition Grogan (1900:305-8) ran across. Peake and Captain Sabt El Magahid describe that elsewhere [SIR No.67.1st January to 8th March 1900]: Peake notes that the hawsers kept breaking, 20% of his slaves were sick, and, by July 1900, he had lost more than 30 men. “In March a huge block suddenly broke loose and swept the dam busters—steamers, barges, and men—downstream” (Collins 2002:60). It proved so difficult to prevent the slaves from running away or drowning that after the third sudd-cutting expedition of 1902, Sir William Edmund Garstin (the under-secretary of state in the Egyptian public works) proposed an alternative overland canal from Bor to Sobat (as part of a plan to irrigate the Jazira) which could be mechanically excavated. This canal was known as the Garstin Cut until it was renamed the Jonglei Canal. raṭl’] was a bit less than 1 pound. Dhurra [Ar. dhura, sorghum vulgare] is sorghum. And 50 dirhems‘ رطل>] rotl 1 49 Ottoman Turkish < Greek ‘drachma’] is between 3 tbsp. and a handful. Equivalences are hard to > درھم >] determine (these are from Budge’s (1906) Cook's Handbook for Egypt and the Sudan), and the slaves probably did not always get a full share.

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of grain per day to prevent their starvation and allow them to work. Some indication of the

conditions under which the prisoners had been held by the British in Omdurman—and of what

happened to the 160 prisoners who went missing—can be gleaned from a report of the medical

staff who accompanied Peake’s sudd-cutting expedition [Medical Report by El Kaim Dunn Bey,

S.M.O.].50

On journey up several cases of smallpox occurred, and all women and children were vaccinated, but with disappointing results. Owing to the state of semi-starvation of Dervish prisoners when first taken over, there were numerous cases of sickness, and five deaths occurred on journey, besides the others subsequently at base camp [1900:13, emphasis added].

Most of the workers also suffered from ulcers of the legs and feet from working in the water. The medical staff set up two hospitals, one for the soldiers and one for the prisoners. No deaths were reported among the British troops. While “amongst the British officers, N.C.O.s and

Engineers only a few slight cases of [malarial] fever occurred, and no case was serious enough to require admission to hospital;” thirty-five prisoners died—2 died of “exhaustion,” 4 drowned, 1 asphyxiated, 1 died of cerebrospinal meningitis, another of “gangrene of the lung,” 13 of dysentery, 2 of chicken pox, 1 from an embolism, 4 from pneumonia, 2 from malaria, and 1 person died from rheumatic fever [1900:12-13].

• • •

50 Jacques Pepin (2011) provides a useful overview of colonial medical practices in Africa south of the Sahara in his sociocultural-epidemiology of HIV/AIDS titled The Origins of AIDS. Pepin convincingly shows how large-scale colonial mass-vaccination campaigns (with unsterilized needles) and colonial labor practices provided the amplification necessary for the creation of a global HIV-1 pandemic. An account of British medical practices in Southern Sudan in the 1920s can be found in Alexander Cruickshank’s The Kindling Fire (1962). Cruickshank also describes how in 1924 Major Larken, the D.C. of Yambio, had arranged for a plentiful supply of labour”—to make bricks (500 per day), clear a site, and so forth to build the leper colony at Li-Rangu that Dr. Cruickshank was there to manage—, “at the ruling wage of one piaster a day.” (A single hammer cost 36 piastres.) Each “chief” was made to deliver up 100 men, he wrote. “Soon the gangs were felling trees, excavating rocks, leveling ant-hills, cutting iron-stone blocks… and timber …. [A]t the end of each week they received a handful of rock salt” (1962:24).

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If all this jeopardized colonists’ idea of themselves as ‘civilized’, and if the English were to think of themselves as different from the Arab slave traders and rebellious “dervishes” whom they condemned for ‘depravity’ and infidelity, or the Belgians whom they criticized for their

“brutal manner,” how could the British justify this treatment of Sudanese men and women?

Grogan writes about how in contrast to Belgians,

the name of Englishmen is held high throughout Africa, and the Union Jack is the surest passport in the land. Let this be the answer to those who casually assume [“stay-at-home England,” presumably] that because a man goes to Africa he necessarily becomes a brute, no matter what his social status, education, or previous mental condition. It is obviously to the interest of men who live as an infinitesimal minority amongst hordes of savages, to find out what means are most conducive to the proper control of those hordes, and to inspire them with that respect and assurance of justice, without which they will be in continual revolt [Grogan 1900:363;pdf398].

Ann Laura Stoler (1997:14) has written about the instability of “the boundaries between separating colonizer from colonized,” the ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’, and the lengths to which colonizers went to draw and reinforce them. Jill Lepore (1998:13) has described how doing so often meant displacing the suffering of colonialism onto colonizers themselves. (“The scene is so painful to the English that it is torture just to watch it.”) Southern Sudanese were said to lack compassion, to be “impervious to the sufferings of others,” even to take pleasure in the misery of their loved ones. Africans did not suffer their own pain, travel writers said. Rather, the

Europeans did.

Their lack of the sense of pity is shown in their brutal treatment of animals, or the sick, and of those who are too old to work. … They are impervious to the sufferings of others, and rather regard them as a joke. On one occasion several boys were standing under a tree, when a snake dropped from a branch, and bit one of the boys on the check, causing the most intense pain which ended only in death. The other boys thought it great fun, and were distorted with laughter at the agonized convulsions of the unfortunate. A further proof of the lack of these senses is their utter inability to understand them in others [Grogan 1900:357].

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When a Nilote is killed by a hippo during a hunt or snatched away by a crocodile while fishing, his friends and relatives might even joke about the calamity, regarding it as a comical happening, much as a modern might look upon someone slipping on a banana peel and taking a pratfall. Certainly they wouldn’t hesitate to return to the scene of the death to continue the same activity [Goddard 1979:142].51

I have been suggesting that it was not the differences of Southern Sudanese that seemed to have animated the most extreme colonial cartoon images of Africans, but rather the threat of common humanity that lay behind its most extreme repudiation. John Millais’ Dinka in Far

Away Up the Nile (1924), for example, are “horrid-looking ghosts” who live in great piles of

ash. He writes:

[S]haking Hands with a wild Dinka is a gruesome proceeding, and I have never quite got over the chill it gave me. A Dinka’s hand is always cold, and always wet or damp, and the process of greeting is like nothing but grasping a dead fish that has just been taken out of cold storage [Millais 1924:98].

Colonial racism bounced twice against the Nilotes whom were said not only to lack any

kind of human compassion or fellow-feeling but also the capacity to remember calamity. Lepore

has pointed out that readers of popular lurid accounts of the slave trade were themselves taking

51 Jill Lepore (1998) describes a very similar kind of colonial displacement in the prologue to The Name of War: King Phillip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. I’m quoting Grogan and Goddard here, but a story about Africans laughing while their friends and family are killed by hippopotamuses and snakes was a mandatory cliché in accounts of Southern Sudan and elsewhere south of the Sahara. Evans-Pritchard (1971:144-5) remarked that every early traveler’s account of Southern Sudan had to contain “a reference to cannibalism, a description of Pygmies (by preference with a passing reference to Herodotus), a denunciation of the iniquities of the slave trade, the need for the civilizing influence of commerce, something about rain-makers and other superstitions, some sex (suggestive but discrete), [and as many] snakes and elephants” as needed. Harold Lincoln Tangye’s single reference to Bor in In The Torrid Sudan implies that the animals there were more human than the people: The noblest impulse of mankind is to care for the unfortunate, to succour the disabled. Who that has seen a wounded elephant rescued from danger by his fellows, supported on either side, can deny this an attribute superior to every other? It is tempting, too, to accuse him of possessing a bump of humour. … At Bor, on the Mountain Nile, they were at one time full of practical jokes. Passing at night-time through the village, they would knock the sleepers up by demolishing their huts above their heads, then contentedly march away [Tangye 1910:84]. This was also a common trope. In response to a request from Captain Charles R.S. Pitman (former Game Warden of the Uganda Protectorate), who had been “asked to write an article for a scientific journal on the subject of elephants succouring or endeavouring to succour a stricken comrade” (4 Nov. 1951), the Bor D.C., Major Cumming, replied, “Unfortunately, I can be of little assistance, as I’ve never actually seen an elephant succour a stricken comrade …” (29th. November 1951, BD/31.6.9 / FILE 336, 337, 224, ‘Elephant Succouring’).

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pleasure in the spectacle of violence, which they palmed off on its victims. Scholars of colonial

discourses of “laziness” (Ann Whitehead 1999; Alatas 1977) argue that it was, first and

foremost, a denial of the ambiguous situation created by colonial rule. Their attribution of

“fatalism” on the basis of jokes and laughter sprung from the same source. But while human

beings in many places do joke about calamity, and laugh when they cannot think of what else to

do;52 I still can see no reason to believe Grogan’s story about how “on one occasion” several boys “thought it great fun” when their friend was killed by a snake. I suspect that he got this account from someone else, and like so much of his travelogue, it is often impossible to say whether he is telling a story on his own responsibility or recycling something he read or somebody else told him. Goddard’s breezy assertion that “friends and relatives might even joke about the calamity” suffers from the same problem: when Goddard visited Bor in 1950, he spoke neither Arabic nor any other Nilotic language and cannot have known a joke if he heard one.

52 In Laughter Out of Place Donna Goldstein (2003) has written about how, sometimes, the most sensible response to hardship is laughter. My point is not that this reaction is universal, but that travel writers came from places where morbid humor was intelligible. See Douglas (1968) for example, and Thomas S. Langner’s (2002:54-60) Choices for Living: Coping with Fear of Dying or Jennifer Marmo’s (2010) Using Humor to Move Away From Abjection for a collection of death and dying jokes.

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CHAPTER THREE

EVOLUTION OF RULE

The sparsely wooded backcountry to the east of Bor Town seems to lie pancake-flat, but is in fact hollowed and hummocked by the seasonal shrinking and swelling of the plain’s clay soil.

Here and there are the clearings, pits, and humps of ancient villages. Walking through the landscape, the sprawling grassland loses its simplicity underfoot: webbed by footpaths (dhöl / dhɔl ) and dotted by tall rusty termite pillars and thickets of scrubby orange-barked acacia, stretches of low bushwillow (combretum fragrans), and an occasional tall Balanites aegyptiaca.

People see important variations of topography, vegetation, soils and micro-climate across the plains stretching from the Bahr el-Jebel’s permanently drowned swamps past the papyrus fringe, through river flooded grasslands (toic) and sandy woodlands, to the seasonally-flooded grasslands of the east.

The country fanning out eastward from the Bahr el-Jebel river across the Upper Nile’s plains is today divided up into a series of long-strip administrative districts, called payams, and subdivided into ribbons by court centers—called “bomas,” since 1994, after the town of Boma, which was the first to be liberated by the SPLA—along the old Malakal-Bor Town motor road, laid out along a low chain of sandy wooded ridges and knolls running from Bor to Kongor, through Duk Paiwel and Duk Padiat, to . In southern Bor country, this section of road is called Mathiang Cot53 after the huge, rust-colored (mathiaŋ) iron roller which people were made to push (cöt ‘thing that is pushed’), chief’s section by section in the manner of a relay race, from

53 I heard several different theories about the precise reference of Mathiang Cot. According to some it was related to the term acot, ‘hornless cow’. Since everyone described pushing a great heavy cylinder to flatten out the road, a more plausible theory is that the name was derived from a term used to refer to a long pole used to “push.” For instance, a pole for pushing boats is called cöt (pl. coot). A flat-bladed hoe of the kind used to uproot grass using the same technique can be referred to with the term pur ma-cot (‘metal hoe’ + masc.— + thing pushed).

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one “tribal border” to the next.54 A few kilometers east from its junction with Mathiang Cot, the boma-center of Makolcuei lies at the terminus of Char Akau, a road named for Akau Deng, the government chief who in the late 1960s saw to its completion by levying a fine of one cow

.(رع ,”against anyone who failed to show up for roadwork (Akau’s “road

The clay road leading north from town is, even during the dry season (December to April), too deeply rutted by heavy military trucks and construction vehicles for any but the toughest

Land Rovers to pass. With the rains (April-November) the road goes from mud, to muddier, to almost impassable. People walk. Goods are transported by river in long pirogues, on bicycles and motorcycles, or carried. A fair number of people who live in Bor Town worked small plots of land entrusted to them by friends or in-laws within walking distance of town. My friend,

Mabior, had a field a forty minute walk from Bor, close enough that he could live in town, where he had a job supervising security on a building site, and still cultivate his fields. Many divided their time between rural villages and Bor Town, with houses in both places.

When I say “rural villages,” I should probably explain again that I am following the Dinka idiom here by referring to the whole of the inhabited countryside as “village,” after the way that people commonly spoke of panjieng ‘people’s land’, to distinguish it from Bor Town—referred to by terms like panakuma (“government’s land”), “Jonglei state,” suq (“market”), or pangeu

(“fenceland”). Settlements vary considerably in their size, social composition, duration, and principle activities. Outside of town any place of human habitation is called pan, a “village” or

“abode,” even if it is only a single homestead.

54 Descriptions of Sudan and South Sudan frequently use the words “tribe” and “clan” as units of kinship, representing political affiliations as being based on primordial “bloodlines.” By using the term here I do not mean to endorse primitivist stereotypes of Bor people as “tribal.” In Sudan, “tribe” is a political-administrative term. As we shall see, the organizing principles of political-territorial “tribes” have varied over time and place, are neither primordial nor wholly invented and do not imply common descent of links of kinship.

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“A ‘village’ is sometimes as long as 30 kilometers,” de Mabior wrote in his doctoral dissertation (1981:71), arguing that it was largely because of this dispersed settlement pattern that there was no large-scale commercial agriculture or public services. “This settlement pattern makes provision of infrastructural services (schools, health, security, markets,

[agricultural] extension, tractor pools, etc) extremely difficult and expensive” (de Mabior

1981:71). Indeed, the reorganization of rural settlements into clustered villages was apparently what the SPLA intended in the early 1990s when it established a “civil-military” administration based on the colonial chieftaincy structure, which in Bor country had remained largely in place after it was established during the later years of the Condominium government (see Johnson

1998; cf. Rolandsen 2005:67-80). The military goal of establishing a uniform system of administration was mainly geared toward supplying rebel forces with recruits, porters, grain, cattle, and other supplies.

Sixty years earlier, the colonial system of “tribal districts” and chiefs’ courts was similarly meant to press people into a more “manageable” way of life by putting up impediments to free movement. This was part of the impetus behind border-making and colonial “villagization” schemes and other efforts to relocate and regroup people into settlements clustered around administrative courts. After all, it was difficult to rule people if you couldn’t find them. The

Anglo-Egyptian Government introduced a system of taxation in 1906 and starting by turning grain into currency by collecting taxes in the form of sorghum in the hope that it would encourage people to spend more time farming. Fines were levied in cattle. The tax was later collected in money (5pt per family) to encourage people to grow cash crops. Nor did matters change much immediately after independence in 1956. The new Sudanese government kept almost all the old, colonial institutions of rural administration in place.

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Rolandsen (2011) has written about how the Khartoum-based government in 1956 followed the colonial government of the year before, which after the 1955 mutiny—a year before

Sudan became independent—focused mainly on public security. In 1956, the “perception of exceptional circumstances served to justify the government’s lowering of the threshold for resorting to violence and exacting punishment” (2011:106). This escalation, in turn, culminated in the start of the first civil war in 1963-’64. Indeed, when I was reading the Sudan archives in

Juba, I was struck by how little independence had registered in the products of the government bureaucracy—there was very little difference between correspondences written in 1948 and ones written in 1958.

Figure 5. Bor Town, major roads.

When I was there in 2009 and ‘10, Bor Town was a settlement of roughly forty thousand people. As I have already mentioned, it was only after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace

Agreement (CPA) in 2005 that people began to settle there in substantial numbers. After 2005, the town’s proximity to river and air transportation led it to be chosen by the UNHCR (United

Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) as a repatriation way-station where displaced people gathered before moving on to rural areas.

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The town’s plat was divided up into a grid by wide avenues. In 2009, these roads passed mostly through scrub and forestland. The town itself clings to a few major roads. Its houses are mostly of wattle and daub, with thatched roofs and a single room. Here and there are square built houses with tin sheet roofs. Residential neighborhoods are dotted with little shops where vendors sell a limited array of household goods: soap, candles, matches, packaged biscuits, soda, laundry detergent, cigarettes, soda bottles full of cooking oil, little piles of charcoal, and so on.

The most densely settled southwestern quarters are a maze of fenced compounds of three or four houses. Most of Bor Town’s Somali, Kenyan, Uganda, and Northern and Western Sudanese residents live in this part of town.

The southeastern extent of Bor Town’s surveyed grid of cleared roads is marked by a cluster of fortified NGO compounds and, adjacent to the airstrip, a high-walled UN barracks with razor-wire, a moat, and machine gun turrets. A blocky cement prison marks the northeastern extent of the grid.

On the southwestern corner of the town, just to the west of the junction where the main road bends abruptly back on itself, is the old Anglo-Egyptian colonial medina, which is considered the symbolic center of town. A few of the descendants of the slaves brought to Bor still live on the plots laid out in 1905 (or 1919) when the Government began to levy taxes on residential and commercial lands there. Most of these families have intermarried with surrounding communities; a few itinerant traders have maintained multigenerational links between Bor Town and river-port towns to the north since the 1900s. There is a mosque, a few restaurants, vendors, and, nearer to the barge port, the offices of the ministry of finance housed in the now defunct White Nile Bank, the Governor’s and several other government offices, the

Parliament building, a police station, the old jail and government “town court.” To its south is

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the old colonial rest house; to its east, beyond a petrol depot and the old meteorological station

(now housing Central Intelligence), is a wide field that was once the aerodrome and now serves

as a soccer field and stage for political rallies. There is a high school and a hospital and, to the

north, a taxipark and a large surveyed market of restaurants, photocopy shops, clinics, and

sundry shops laid out in a grid of quarters with a block of butcher stalls, another of plastic

furniture. Tin sheet roofed stalls line the road and constitute a marketplace of dry goods shops,

clinics, bicycle and motorcycle repair shops, nightclubs and restaurants.

One of the striking things about urbanization in South Sudan is the tendency of town

centers to persist through time. Bor Town grew up around a garrisoned slaving depot established

near a riverside fishing village. Nearly contemporary sources say that it was owned in the 1860s

by al-‘Aqqād & Co. of Khartoum—though it may have been established by a Maltese trader,

Andrea Debono, known in Sudan as Latīf Efendi, whose business al-‘Aqqād bought in 1865. By the mid-nineteenth-century, military and commercial networks established in the Upper Nile region converged on garrisoned slave-and-ivory depots. Bor was a nexus in these trade networks and linked by river and overland routes to other military-commercial centers. This was part of the reason why General Gordon established a government station there on behalf of the khedive of Egypt in 1874 and manned it with the old mercenaries of the al-‘Aqqād company by conscribing them into the Egyptian army.

The spot was probably chosen as a slave-and-ivory depot because it was located just to the south of the Upper Nile plain’s “paludes immensas,” providing a confluence for river and overland routes and a convenient place to levy labor and wood. There was not much in the way of hills that would give a comparative advantage to some special point. Soldiers I spoke to speculated that the zariba had probably been built strategically for defense—with the Bahr el-

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Jebel on one side, the slight relief of a seasonal watercourse called aciɛŋdiir (literally, ‘big creation’) on the other provided a kind of moat and formed a brow that gave the fort’s position some relative elevation.

Successive settlements of Bor Town were mainly led by political and administrative considerations which provided its locational advantage. A succession of governments did not need to invent a network of rule, since by the 1860s the basic groundwork had already been put in place by private trading companies. Gordon Pasha established a Turco-Egyptian government station in what is today Bor Town in 1874. By the late 1870s it was somewhat eclipsed by a larger Mahdist fort a few kilometers to the south at Kondak, near the joint Ascom-TOTAL compound in what is today Anyidi. In 1897 the Mahdist force at was forced to retreat north to Bor by the Belgians advancing from the southwest. In Bor the Mahdist force was increasingly isolated. Oral and written accounts describe frequent Mahdi raids for grain during this period.

Following the Anglo-Egyptian “re-conquest” in 1899 Bor was mainly used as a wooding station by steamers and gunboats until 1905, when an Anglo-Egyptian district headquarters was established there. The establishment of the Anglo-Egyptian government was facilitated by the preexisting, if weakly articulated, set of practices and alliances centered on an archipelago of trading towns linked by river and overland routes. Though administrative districts and political boundaries have changed, Bor Town has been a continuous node of government authority since

1905. But though the town has periodically brought money and employment, it has rarely become an integral part of the surrounding rural economy; Atuot country to the southeast has long been more central to regional trade in iron implements and tobacco.

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The main sources that one has for how southern Bor country came to be divided up by long parallel borders during the colonial era are oral history. It is difficult to get a detailed picture of what was going on in Bor between 1905 and 1920 from written sources because the center of colonial interest was farther north. One of the main sources one has for corroborating oral testimony are government documents—mainly a series of monthly reports issued by the

Sudan intelligence department between 1892 and 1929, which contain little about the administration of Bor; in fact the earliest document concerning Bor that survives in the national archives in Juba is dated 1927. Most of the information about borders, resettlement and amalgamation schemes (such as it is) concerns the events father north, in the Sobat and Zaraf

Valleys, that culminated in the brutal “Nuer Settlement” of 1928-’29, a series of raids undertaken by the British authorities to terrorize the Nuer and to provide a lesson about their new government, which involved forced resettlement schemes, the machine-gunning of cattle and people and the burning of villages, RAF bombings and many arrests.

In Bor country, there is a story whose main features just about anyone in the vicinity of the

Athooic-Gok border could tell you; I recorded a dozen versions if it during the time I was there, no two quite the same. But the most common version went something like this:

During the first years of British rule there was a huge man called Puɔ̈ k Mandït (puɔ̈ k

‘separate’ + mät ‘gathering place’ + dït ‘big’) from Koyo, who created the payam borders that today lay between Angakuei and Biong and Biong and Baaidit. All described how he used the coercive power he derived from his alliance with the Anglo-Egyptian government to create a large territory for Koyo. (A few people said that it was during this time that the people who found themselves in the territory sat down together and came up with the name “Biong” to refer to themselves.) Some said that, finally having had enough of him, his own family killed him;

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according to others, the people of Angakuei gathered together for a meeting. They looked at

their poor situation and at the growing landholdings of their neighbors. The only thing to do was

to assassinate Puɔ̈ k Mandït before he took all their land. So this was done.

In late July, 2010, during the harvest, Madit and I set off from Hai Salaam soon after dawn to see a man named Majer Lual Nhial. By the time we reached his compound in

Malou some forty minutes later, we had passed two dozen homesteads, all surrounded by fields of rustling maize and linked by footpaths. Buried in a stand of acacia and encircled by gardens of maize and sorghum was a neatly-swept circular yard with three houses and a busy cooking hearth. One of Majer’s wives was sitting on a reed mat beside the fire in the shade of a four-post scaffold rack (kät, pl. kɛ̈ ɛ̈ t), which provided a platform for a bundle of millet stalks and a collection of dishes. The lid of an oil drum—a griddle for making ayot, a thin sorghum crepe that many refer to in English as “paper food”—leaned nearby. The largest of the three houses was built on a square plan, perhaps seven meters on each side, large by rural standards; another was reed-walled. Majer brought chairs, inviting us to sit in the third house—a circle of twenty- four posts supporting a conical thatched roof. His wife served us with water and roasted maize.

Madit, knowing my interest in local history, asked Majer about Puɔ̈ k Mandït.

Majer: So at that time, this man [Puɔ̈ k Mandït] separated all the people. He took some people from Deer to Biong, and he took some people from Biong to be Deer. And he took some people from the desert [viz., from the east] and brought them there to be Biong, like Koc Yuoom Diing, from near the Murle area [near Pibor]. That is why Deer is separate from Biong, and why Biong is separate from Angakuei, like that and that. “To know the clans,” Madit said in English “You see, before: people lived freely— because a cin wut thok [cattle-village territories don’t have boundaries].” Brendan: How was that? Madit: So, before, people stayed without clans. Some people would stay over there, and some people they stayed over there.” Brendan: But why did he do that? Majer: Puɔ̈ k Mandït said it was because of the young generation. He said, “The young generation will be different later. They will not be strong like me. So let me now make

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the borders. Now I am very strong: so: I will make something so people will remember me” [WS500264, 22JUL2010].

This was a very common way of representing the early years of Anglo-Egyptian rule.

Whenever people spoke of prominent early Government chiefs, they usually said something like,

“So-and-so, who made the borders [loi borders loi], …” using the English word rather than the

Dinka term akeu ‘division’ (which bilingual speakers sometimes translated as “border” in other

contexts). Border making was seen as one of the main things that the government did—that is,

building roads, setting up boundaries, and placing restrictions on people’s movements backed up

by force.55

One reason why border-making became one of the most salient activities of the colonial government was simply that it was so brutal, with people forced to uproot themselves and resettle elsewhere.56 David Turton (1996:102) has noted, in writing about fifteen years of Mursi movements and what it has meant to Mursi themselves, “a contradiction, or at least a tension, … between the identity which derives from an historical association with a particular territory

[autochthony] and [one] derived from a tradition of movement into, and appropriation of, new territory.”

In Bor country, the key factor was land and cattle. Since people generally had a lot of options about where to live (and it was always helpful to have extra hands around), whenever people came around looking for land, earlier-comers would usually give them a place to settle and graze their livestock. While they seemed to be disposing of their landholdings, they were

55 Part of the reason why people talked about roads when they spoke about “borders” was that these most resembled the kinds of divisions that were drawn during the colonial era—long lines. As I discussed in the introduction, a much more common way of speaking about territory anchored divisions in specific sites or dense points of contact shared by people—that is to say, territory was defined by its centers rather than its edges. Another reason why borders and roads were such a salient symbol of “government” was that they were “made by force,” which invested these lines with associations of coercion and slavery. 56 See, for instance, Johnson (1982a) and Wyld, who in his 1930 handing-over notes, mentions that, in 1910, “[Captain Charles] Fox collected the scattered remnants of the Nyarreweng and Gol from Bor and Twi[c]” and resettled them elsewhere (UNPH, Johnson, ed. 1995:212).

66 actually spreading their prestige and generative influence over a much larger territory through a range of dependents and semi-dependents who would remember their generosity: distant relatives, affines, adopted kin, strangers and other kinds of foreigners. At any given time, community was basically seen as an agglomeration of such families, with later settlers fanning out from the identities of a few named founders.

There was nothing unusual about young people leaving their homes and families to travel in search of new places to settle. Lienhardt (1961:42-43), for instance, described how sons were often in conflict with their own fathers, particularly when they wanted cattle to marry and set up their own independent households. “[T]he support given by the father…demands also submission, and exacts a control over the dependent son in ways which he may come to find irksome.”

Fathers want to have their sons remain dependent on them, while the sons, when of suitable age, are anxious to detach themselves sufficiently from their fathers to set up their own homes and start their own lines of descent. In starting or hoping to start his own lineage, a man is in effect hoping for the day when he himself will be known as ‘the father of so-and-so’, rather than as ‘the son of so-and-so’” [Lienhardt 1961:43].

Lienhardt’s (1961) point was that this dynamic played out in miniature a wider sense of distinctiveness rooted in a tradition of movement. Founders tended to be represented as young men who had left home either because of some disagreement there or to find better pastures. To become a famous ancestor however it was not enough to leave one’s own home and settle as a dependent elsewhere; dependents’ names were unlikely to be remembered. The history of most places begins with an episode about how an ancestor came to found a new territory, rather than settling as a guest. Here is a brief example from a man named Ajak Alier Ngong [Ajak Jur Ajak

Anyuet Thodajeta Rubek] about the arrival of an ancestor of his named Rurbek to Bor country.

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When those from Rurbek—[a few people from Eastern , Lokorong Jebel hills, who spoke Luo]—arrived here from they became close friends with Awan, and those Awan people said, ‘You sit here, between us and Mundari.’ That place was small, so our cattle had no pasture. We talked to the Mundari and asked for some land but they refused. So those of Rurbek took their cattle by force to that place and occupied it. There were some cattle there belonging to Jur, and after some time Jur went to an elder man of Awan. The elders decided that [a certain heifer], Naluo, belonged to Jur—woŋ aacï bï bɛ n dhuk, the cow was taken forever. So we were called Abii [abï ‘will, shall’]. But before 2005 it was only Nyara and Biong that were called Abii. In 2005 the name spread to Awan, Nyicak, and Gol. When we were between Mundari and Awan— when we took that pastureland—the land was very big. So Awan, Nyicak, and Gol joined Abii [to gain access to that land]. So all of us are called Abii now [Nb3, 23 April 2010].

The primitist stereotypes of “tribal” South Sudan as composed of people ordinarily living in “closed” or “discrete ethnic groups, unless disrupted by sudden incursions” (Leonardi

2007b:38), was a product of the conditions under which visitors to the region have written about it. The inhabitants of fortified compounds live like persons on board a ship: every necessity comes from a distance: water is brought in bottles, food in packages. In like manner books and laptops, propane gas, and many articles of food, are imported. If accounts of discrete ethnic groups written by observers ensconced in South Sudan’s present humanitarian geography of

“fortified enclaves”—inhabited by an international elites linked much more closely to the

“international community” by light aircraft, satellite communications, and common experience than to their surrounding rural hinterlands—strongly recall the scene described by visitors in the

1860s, there is a reason.

The merchants and governing inhabitants of Bor Town have, since the 1860s, always tended to be foreigners of one sort or another with better contacts and connections and more interests in common with other military-commercial settlements across a wide swath of Northern

Africa’s Sudanic region (cf. Roitman 1998) than with the residents of the town’s own hinterlands. This quality of Bor’s connectedness to other towns and isolation from its own

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hinterland partially accounts for the perception among its resident record keepers that rural

regions were isolated from the wider world. Later colonial administrators now and then

discovered much to their frustration that the people of the Upper Nile plains were too much

engaged with surrounding regions to be neatly disentangled from them (D.H. Johnson 2012:2);

but there is still a tendency, in contemporary writing about South Sudan, to see towns as much

more “connected”—and for that reason more important to South Sudan’s future direction of

history—than rural areas.57

John and Jean Comaroff (1997:20-21) have written about how situations likes this indicate why it is misleading to speak in abstract terms about “the colonial state.” The colonial process was anything but monolithic, and everywhere depended upon a collection of “agents of empire”—not only missionaries, traders, settlers, mercenaries, but also structures and habits of rule inherited for earlier times. As I have mentioned before, one of the great ironies of British colonialism in Sudan was that while the colonizers always portrayed themselves as emancipating slaves captured by “Arab slave-traders,” the construction of colonial infrastructure required a great deal of forced labor overseen by former masters. The Anglo-Egyptian government likewise depended upon an earlier geographic process of coercion, which the Condominium government did not create but whose expansion and consolidation the Anglo-Egyptian

Government accelerated (Leonardi 2005).

57 My interest is not really in the perspectives of NGO workers. However, in a practical, everyday sense, working for an NGO tends to blind people in predictable ways to the interconnectedness between and the internal dynamics of the societies within which they work, exaggerating the social distance between NGOs and the people around them as well as the distance between those societies. The reason is simply that people’s complicated lives and histories with one another tend to be seen as an impediment to bureaucratic time tables, predicable budgeting, and so forth; put differently, “culture” is experienced as a barrier to humanitarian work because it is often “illegible” (Scott 1999). This is of course part of the danger posed by the NGOization of social movements, the phrase applied to adoption of state-like bureaucratic relations by groups working for social justice.

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Absorbing the social and physical infrastructure of the slave trade afforded the spatial expansion of the colonial project in Southern Sudan. This helps to explain the continuity and tenacity of Government in the region as well as why so much of this infrastructure of rule— roads, airstrips, institutions of discipline, and so forth—was later targeted during the war. This expansion was ultimately the target of deliberate destruction when—used by the SPLA—it became an impediment to later forms of capital accumulation through oil mining. A similar story could be told for other places addicted to oil. In Southern Sudan during the 1980s, the skills and techniques of military organization that had been built into institutions of Government rule provided a way to coordinate resistance that, by becoming a threat to the appropriation of southern land, were targeted for destruction. The new “community development” infrastructure that was built by Chevron in the 1970s and ‘80s, for instance, was meant either to support oil mining or to bolster government efforts to bomb and terrorize dispossessed southerners.58 All the same, even as British led colonial processes incorporated the preexisting and territorialized social and material infrastructure of the slave-trade, British agents always presented themselves as creating a totally new landscape geared toward wholly humanitarian ends.

This also helps to explain why, when Samual White Baker (1867:230) described the region in 1866 (as “that portion of the world ever unknown [which] has been unreckoned in the earth's history”), his characterization says much less about the supposed isolation of Southern

Sudan than the political economy of the slave and ivory trade.59 British ignorance of the African

58 Or both. Chevron’s runways provided a base for government bombers; it was “dual use” or a “public-private partnership.” 59 Wrote Sam’s sister-in-law, Anne Baker (1972:18): “the huge ‘dark Continent’ of Africa … seemed as intriguing and mysterious to the Victorians of the [18]50s and ‘60s as the surface of the moon and of the planet Mars seem to us.” This was a common image of mid-Victorian exploration; wrote Richard Hall (1980:125): “filling in the ‘blank spaces’ on the map of Africa stirred the blood just as, in a different age, would the idea of exploring space and conquering another lunar landscape.” But the metaphor—suggested by “the Mountains of the Moon,” perhaps— seriously distorts the context of Samuel White Baker’s The Races of the Nile Basin; read in 1866 and published in

70 interior in the 1860s was an indication of how isolated London merchants were from a system which they sought to control.

One way to illustrate the change in Europe’s relationship to Southern Sudan between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth is to contrast two accounts of the founders of the great city of Sinnar. In 1772, James Bruce (1813:378-79) wrote about how, in 1502, the “shillook” had founded the city of Sinnar after defeating “Wed Ageeb” in a battle near Herbagi. After forcing him to pay a regular tribute—“by which the Arabs were to pay their conquers, in the beginning, one half of their stock, and every subsequent year one half of the increase…”—the Shilluk made

Wed Ageeb move his capital from Gerri to Sennar where they could keep a closer eye on him. A century later, in 1874, Gessi (1892:152) dismissed Bruce’s claim that the city had been founded by the Shilluk. “The equator could only contribute a family of savages,” he wrote, “and from these could not be derived the type of civilized race, of a labourious and active people, who opened commerce with the world by sending the products of its industry to the markets of

Europe.” The differences in Bruce’s and Gessi’s attitudes exemplify a number of central changes that depended on colonial processes. These are, broadly, the changed position of the

Western Europe in the later seventeenth century, the development of European industrial production and the deterioration of its historiography alongside the extension of the Ottoman

1867 in Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, Baker’s image of a “place without history” was part of a discussion turning on the debate between abolitionist monogenists and pro-slavery polygenists.

Every phase in the history of the Adamite creation is linked with a belief in God, but where is the creed of Central Africa? These hitherto unknown races of the Nile Basin have been as obscure as the Nile sources; but as that vast river has poured down its cataracts from the beginning, so the roar of those falls has sounded in the ears of savage tribes upon its borders, and these tribes have never known the name of God; they have never been linked in that chain of evidence that binds us to the belief in an Adamite creation. Are these races the result of that historical creation when God said “let us make man in our own image?” or are they descendants of a family as ancient or of greater antiquity than those whose arrow-heads of flint excavated from the drift are the testimony of the existence of pre-historic man [viz., “pre-Adamites”]? I do not presume to lay down a theory, but at the same time it is impossible to witness the barbarous White Nile races which have been entirely excluded from the history of the human race, without reflecting, that, as the Nile sources have been but recently laid down upon the hitherto blank chart of Central Africa, even so the savage races of the Central Nile Basin have now for the first time appeared upon the page of history; thus, both the sources of the river and the races of men being pre-historic, upon what evidence can we claim the co-relationship with the wild savage of the Nile Basin? can we venture to date from one common origin, and claim him as a “man and a brother?” [Baker 1867:238].

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state. Indeed, as Europe was rapidly transformed by its late entrance into the Afroasian world

system, and as more and more information about this world traveled back to Europe through the

extension of its colonial possessions, its “historians and social theorists took a huge step

backward even from European, not to mention Islamic, perspectives that had been much more

realistically world embracing up through the eighteenth century” (Frank 1998:14). Consider that

while European colonialism began it it made very little headway until centuries

later—after the vast influx of wealth from the Americas (whose inhabitants lacked resistance to

old world diseases).60

During the mid-nineteenth century, the price of ivory on world markets more than doubled. Ivory reached London’s markets through a complicated network of traders in East

Africa, each of whom naturally took a cut. In 1852, by the time it reached markets in Cairo, ivory fetched as much as 1,000 times the cost of the Venetian beads which had been traded for it along the White Nile. It was thus only a matter of time before those at the end of the supply chain in London decided that it would be more lucrative to bypass the intermediate stages to obtain raw materials for the manufacture of billiard balls, cutlery handles, and piano keys. For instance, in 1859, Carl Westendarp, a representative of the family which controlled the German ivory firm of H.A. Meyer of Hamburg, visited Cairo with the purpose of buying ivory on more advantageous terms than were available in London. He found that the Nile river trade in ivory was “practically monopolized” by “Greek” traders—who received imports from the “interior,” but whose knowledge about their ultimate trading partners, had they sought it out, would have had to come from south Sudanese living in the north (Grey 1961). The alternative overland route

60 This is not necessarily to argue that “the Shilluk” founded Sennar but only that Bruce found the story credible (see James Funj). James’ characterization of the relative strength of the Shilluk, Dinka, and Sennar was accurate.

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from the interior to London passed through Zanzibar, where it was monopolized by Sultan Sa’id,

who provided a base for the Gujarat creditors who financed the trade.

Prior to the Turco-Egyptian invasion, Shilluk and Dinka had prevented major incursions

for tribute from Sinnar into Southern Sudan. The lack of detailed written information about

Southern Sudan is one indicator of the regional strength of Nilotic people living along the White

Nile. The “vague and strange reports … brought of these strange lands”—in Baker’s (1867:236)

words—is simply an indication that the regions described lay beyond the first-hand experience of

writers in seventeenth-century Sinnar and ancient centers of civilization like Cairo, Meroe, and

Axsom. The reverse was not the case, however.61 The historian Douglas H. Johnson (2012:6) has pointed out that while writing about South Sudanese history has been hindered by a lack of written sources, among other things, “If we reexamine aspects of ‘northern’ Sudanese history we often find that ‘southern’ Sudanese were also there” (an observation also made by Beswick

(2004)). Theodoro Krump wrote of his visit to Sinnar in 1700, for instance, “that in all Africa,

… Sinnar is close to being the greatest trading city. Caravans are continually arriving from

Cairo, Dongola, , from across the Red Sea, from India, Ethiopia, [Dar] Fur, Borno, the

Fezzan, and other kingdoms” (Spaulding, trans. 1974[1710]) It is certain that Dinka were among the mercenaries recruited into the Sinnar army (Lane and Johnson 2009:514; Mawson 1989:70).

This is a useful reminder that the reason why Southern Sudan was not the subject of a large literature was because it had not been incorporated as a dependent periphery into any large empire.

61 The Egyptian flotilla that ventured up the Bahr al-Jabal late in December 1839 carried a Dinka soldier from Bor country as an interpreter.

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Following the Turco-Egyptian invasion of northern Sudan in 1820-21, the major settlements of riverine northern Sudan came to play a crucial role in the intensification of trading and slaving by linking Egypt to Gondokoro, a trading station established on the east bank of the

Bahr el-Jebel roughly 200 kilometers south of Bor near what is today Juba Town. A variety of factors lay behind this extension. One of the most significant was the determination of the

Macedonian governor of Ottoman Egypt, Mehmed Ali, to obtain a steady supply of slaves for his army, with which he hoped to control the region’s mineral resources and major ports of trade.

By 1854 the ivory trade was controlled by private merchants. And by the 1860s, slave and ivory traders had established an archipelago of fortified towns (zara’ib, literally, “corrals”) across large parts of Southern Sudan and “supplanted the Egyptian Government as rulers”

(Sanderson 1965:7). It’s usually said that Khhedive Ismā‘īl only made a “concerted effort” at suppressing the slave trade in response to pressure from the British Government—and for this reason sent Sir and then, in 1873 , to Equatoria. While not false, exactly, it gives the misleading impression that the British were mainly interested in the suppression of the slave trade—and by doing so endorses the main “humanitarian” narrative by which England legitimized the colonization of Sudan, one result of which was the rapid expansion of slave labor.

By late 1873, Egypt was nearly insolvent, largely as a result of the “panic of 1873,” brought about by speculative European banking which caused the price of Egyptian cotton to collapse. By 1875, external debt—from the Suez canal, the Wadi Halfa railway, and efforts to regain control over Sudan’s southern and western hinterlands—, forced Isma'il Pasha to sell

Egypt’s share in the Canal Company to Great Britain and provided Britain with a mechanism to take over control of Egypt’s finances and depose Isma‘īl. This was why, after Government

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efforts to suppress the slave trade had removed his competitors and enabled a Ja‘lī merchant

named az-Zubayer Rahma Mansur to gain a complete monopoly over stations in Bahr al-Ghazal,

Isma‘īl simply made him governor of the province. (It was cost effective.) By 1882, the British occupied Egypt to protect its holdings, helping to spark the Mahdist revolution in Sudan.62

At any rate, when speaking of this “zariba system,” which is usually said to have existed for roughly twenty years between 1854 and 1874, I am referring to a diverse set of relationships whose common background consisted of a far-flung network of fortified garrison entrepôts, established to conduct slave-and-ivory raids on concessions leased from the government by

Khartoum-based trading firms. A French diplomat named Alphonse de Malzac is usually credited with the establishment of the first set of uniform rules for their administration, meant to reduce costs by regulating competition between established companies and their trading partners, and by preventing newcomers from establishing forts on existing concessions. These rules— which came to be known as qanun Malzac ‘Malzac’s laws’—played an important role in regulating trade and commerce and encouraged the spread of networks of zariba as new merchants had to press farther and farther into the interior (Land and Johnson 2009). Each trading company had a territorial monopoly and its own caravan highways. “As the result of this compact,” Georg Schweinfurth (1874:201) wrote, describing his travels between 1868 and 1871,

“it had come to pass that no less than fifteen different roads, corresponding to the same number of different merchant houses in Khartoom [sic], branched out towards the south and west from the localities of the Seribas into the remotest lands.”

62 Which was convenient for the British, since the Mahdi did not pose any threat to Egypt. Actually, it was the relative weakness of the which posed a challenge to British rule. Daly and Hogan (2005:13) write, “While British control of the Upper Nile was an attractive proposition, its control by no other European Power was even more attractive; that is to say that [even] a Mahdist State of unparalleled barbarity was an acceptable proxy for costly Egyptian or British rule in the Sudan, so long as that State could keep out other powers.” Belgian incursions into southern Sudan from the Congo and French incursions led to the Fashoda crisis.

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The written history of Bor Town itself between 1860 and 1872 is generally a history of

Baker’s and Gordon’s efforts to turn slaving concession companies into institutions of the

Ottoman-Egyptian state, and more particularly a history of al-‘Aqqād Company of Khartoum, a family firm founded by two brothers from Aswan, Egypt, al-‘Aqqād was the head and, his brother, Musa Bey al-‘Aqqād a partner. In 1865, the firm acquired the business of

Andrea Debono, a British subject from Malta who was known in Sudan as Latīf Efendi and whose ships sailed under the British flag. Musa Bey al-‘Aqqād died in 1867. And with the death of Muhammad Ahmad al-‘Aqqād, management of the firm passed to Muhammad abu Su’ud Bey al-‘Aqqād, whom contemporary European writers referred to as Abou Saood. Abū Su‘ūd’s commission agent (wakil) at Bor, Wat Hōjoly (probably Romolo Gessi’s “Walleduille”)—whom

Baker had caught en route to Fashoda in 1872 with a cargo of 700 slaves piled onto three ships like cordwood and “reeking with small-pox” (Ismailia, vol.II 1874:484)—was made Governor of the Bor District by Colonel Gordon in 1874. Gordon’s establishment of a center of Egyptian authority at Bor basically came down to conscribing the mercenaries of al-‘Aqqād Company into the Egyptian army, its major merchants into the Government.63

Oral histories of Bor Town that concern the period between 1860 and 1880—or, more precisely, oral accounts of this moment in history which stress its distinctive characteristics— center on Alier Nyieth, who led an army called cam ciɛɛth (“scorpion eater;” or, cam ciɛ̈ th “shit eater,” depending on how you pronounce cam cieth) from his seat at Pakau Akon in Koc

63 Baker had Abū Su‘ūd arrested for slave trading in 1873. Hill (1951:275) notes in his Biographical Dictionary of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan that “Baker’s successor, Colonel (afterwards Major-General C.G.) Gordon Pasha, appreciating Abū Su‘ūd’s great local influence, appointed him lieutenant-governor of Gondokoro in 1874.” Recall that this was how Isma‘īl dealt with az-Zubayer Rahma Mansur.

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country.64 This is a story that just about anyone from the vicinity of Bor Town could tell you.

One of the first times I heard this story it was from Reverend Daniel Garang—whom everyone recommended to me as a great expert on Bor history. “Cam cieth would dance with a bare anus until a child laughed, then that child would be stolen and held hostage for cattle,” he told me laughing. I collected a few dozen different versions of the story during the time I was in Bor.

The most common version ran like this.

Alier Nyieth had been a captive of the Turks. “He saw the organization of the army of the

Turks and how they traded.” After returning (or escaping) back to his natal home in Jur Koc

(Ayol, Aciai section) he began to recruit people—young men, orphans, and land-poor settlers from Atet, Deer, Koc, Chol Adol, and Adumor, mostly—for his militia. There are stories about how Alier Nyieth, in Koc country, and his second in command, Mathiang Bior, of Deer who sat several kilometers away, used to drink milk from the same gourd, making their “recruits” run back and forth between them with each sip, and especially, about how his militia performed a scoffing “anus dance.” Most said that Alier’s militia would appear and do a crooked-legged limping dance (tuluku ka thianyku) that ended with them bent over and spreading their buttocks.

In a few versions, the militia held a kind of mock court. They would fine anyone who laughed ten head of cattle and kidnap their children for ransom. Others said they simply sold their captives off as slaves to the slave merchants who had installed themselves in Bor Town and

Pariak. Details about the particular fines and sales differed, but all described the dance and the relationship between Cam Cieth and slave traders and how, finally having had enough of Alier

Nyieth’s looting and pillaging and the suffering of the people, his own family joined together and killed him.

64 Pakau Akon is now called Ayaah [nb3, 28 April 2010]. Said to have been founded by Ajak Kur who stuck his fishing spear (bith) into a pool of water there and the land had risen up like a great bull emerging from the water, becoming dry, where the cattle village was established.

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Many of the stories concerning Cam Cieth’s methods of recruitment closely resemble elements of Aiwel corpus (Lienhardt 1961). While these stories are mainly told by the descendants of his recruits, they are known by most people in Bor country. Here is an example from M.G. Ajak, which begins with his great-great grandfather’s, Aŋuk’s, departure from

Pabathou country (today a central lineage of Biong said to descend from a man named Ayuel

Paguaŋdiɛɛr byway of his son, Joh, whom I will introduce shortly).

[the departure of Aŋuk] Aŋuk went to Koc before the Turuk came. His home was in Pagok. And at that time, when life was based on looting by force, he was very good at targeting—people feared him. When he went out for looting he killed some people and took their properties. His brothers were sad and said to themselves, “We will get rid of Aŋuk; he is bringing us trouble.” His brothers had a meeting. They said, “We’ll kill this man—his is ruining our reputation. He’s causing people to loot us.” Those of Nhial Men and Jor Deng and Lual Deng and Yom Deng agreed to kill Aŋuk. They needed a lot of people. But one man refused: Agong Lual, from Lual Deng. He said, “This man will not be killed.” He refused. He argued with his brothers for two years. Finally the majority said, “Fine. We’ll just kill you too.” So then he agreed. What could he do? They all agreed together, “Let’s kill him.” So those uncles were happy, and they said, “Let’s go now.” But Agong Lual said, “Wait ‘till nighttime,” and he went to warn Aŋuk. He told Aŋuk to escape. Aŋuk made a trick. He put a very big ox in his luak. Then he made a very smoky fire of cow dung in the luak. He tied the big ox by its horns and left. Then the big ox remained alone. The big steer was alone and it made a lot of noise [making the luak seem occupied]. Then Aŋuk moved with all his cattle to Werekok. That night, the brothers surrounded Aŋuk’s luak. When they attacked they found that it was empty except for a single ox, which was standing in the darkest corner of the luak. They killed the ox and ate it. Aŋuk went to Kok, to Pakau, and got Ariik Kang, the Chief of Koc. Ariik Kang welcomed him because he had cattle—after five or six days, Ariik Kang said, “I shall give you my daughter.” But first he asked him, “What brought you here?” and Aŋuk told Ariik the story. Ariik said, “Ah, such a problem is here too. I shall give you a girl for your protection.” [That is to say that by marring a dominant lineage in Koc, Aŋuk could count on his in-laws for protection and assistance.] So Ariik gave Aŋuk one daughter and Aŋuk stayed for two years. Then a man of Payou came with a daughter, Alɛk Noon; Aŋuk married Alɛk. Aŋuk then married Ayak Ajak Liɛt [the speaker’s great-grandmother], who named her son Ajak, after her father.

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Aŋuk married Ayak Ajak Liɛt, whose son, Ajak, married Akon Atoŋ, from Pathuyith. During the time of her marriage with Ajak, Akon was captured. She was taken south to Gondokoro, and then back again to Bor, to Mac Köör Ajuoŋ. Ajak saw his wife there and tossed a small clot of soil, hitting her cheek. And she saw him, and he took her back home. That is what she said.

[the trial of cam cieth] Alier Nyieth used to amuse himself by tormenting people. When Alier came to recruit my grandfather Ajak Aŋuk he said, “Come here. Stand in the door of the luak.” Then he tried to spear him with a fishing spear. My grandfather dodged Alier’s thrust— succeeded: he wasn’t touched by the spear. Then Alier said to him, “You are very strong and brave, and from today onward I’ll recruit you into my Cam Cieth army. I will give you two dhien in Pakau Akon [a cattle village in Koc area, the area of Alier Anyieth].” Those soldiers of Cam Cieth—they went to loot and kill resisters. And if you do not resist they will take you and you will remain without properties. There was an uncle of Ajak Aŋuk named Dot Lit who cultivated his farm early. One day, when Dot Lit’s durra ripened early, Alier sent Cam Cieth to raid him. Alier sent Ajak Aŋuk and his brother to raid. They commanded a group of Cam Cieth. When they arrived, Dot was inside the house. They called him, “Dot, please come out.” And Alier had some people monitoring Ajak Aŋuk—[to learn,] “Would they defend their brother?” Dot came out from his house with the small door, Dot was speedy and strong. Mapier tried to strike him with a big stick—he was about to break his two legs… but Dot jumped very high, over the stick. Secondly, Ajak threw his stick and hitting the roof of the house [missing Dot]. Dot ran away. They began to cut the ripe durra, to loot it. When they took the durra, the spies took their report to Alier. They said, “Ajak protected his uncle, but Mapier tried to kill him. Dot escaped. Mapier only failed because his uncle Dot was very quick.” Alier said, “This Ajak will be punished tomorrow. He will sink in the pool [of water]. Then he will be speared like a fish in the water.” But someone told Alier’s plan to Ajak and, in the early evening, Ajak crept to the pool of water and hid a long stick among the reeds. The pool is in Paankau a Kon, the headquarters of Cam Cieth. The next morning, Alier ordered the army of Cam Cieth to surround the pool with fishing spears. Perched at the edge of the pool, Alier ordered Ajak to dive into the water and swim among the reeds [apier]. And with that, he was pushed in. When Ajak dove in he swam below the surface to the place where he had hidden the stick. He took his stick and poked the reeds ahead of him as he swam so Cam Cieth threw the spears into the wrong place. After a while, he resurfaced, unscathed, among a bristle of fishing spears. Three times this was repeated. Finally Alier said, “You leave him. He is not guilty.” This is how my grandfather succeeded against the trial of the commander of Cam Cieth.

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The “trial of the commander of Cam Cieth” is modeled on a story drawn from the Aiwel

Longar corpus65 and the episode describing Aŋuk’s departure from Biong was meant to intertextually mirror a well-known account of Alier Nyieth’s death. Here is a version told to me by one of Alier Nyieth’s great-great&c. grandchildren, Mabil Jok-Kor [Col Kudia Nyieth Alier

Nyieth], who was born around 1939.

[the death of Alier Nyieth] Alier Nyieth’s father was Kudiar Col Kudiar Nyieth. There weren’t any soldiers around Bor before Alier Nyieth formed the militia of Cam Cieth. He got the poor people: orphans, slaves, runaways …. Those soldiers were the source of Alier Nyieth’s power. Alier sent his soldiers to take beautiful girls and other things by force—north and south of Bor. Turkey came and found Alier Nyieth and asked, ‘Can you do this?’ and shared power with him because he was a big man. Alier had seven sons—Malual has one boy, Kok, Jiet, Riak has two boys, Nyieth, Kual has two, and Kuarang; they are carrying the alama [chiefship] now—and three daughters, and four wives. Mathiang Bior was also a chief—he was killed in the fight between Anykuei and Deer. At that time when Turkey was there and selling people away, the people of Koc came together and made a meeting about Alier. All the people of the village attacked Alier and set his luak on fire and when he came out they killed him and his boy, and the ladies were chased away [m.j. Col, 20 may 2010, nb5].

This story echoes accounts of Aiwel Longar, known in Biong country as Ayuel

Paguaŋdiɛɛr. Ayuel’s story, which is something of an anthropological classic among students of

Nilotic religious experience, goes like this: A few days’ journey east from Makolcuei there is an ancient place called Pajok. A long time ago there was a bany jak who ruled over the people there from his seat at the hearth (dhiennhom) of his great byre (luak), whose name was Ayuel

Paguaŋdiɛɛr. He was the kind of man who, in childhood, pulled the legs off spiders for

65 See Lienhardt (1961:173-74): “…Longar stood above them on the opposite bank of the river, and as soon as he saw the reeds moved as men touched them, he darted his fishing-spear at them and struck them in the head, thus killing them as they crossed. … The people were thus being finished altogether, and a man named [in this account] Agothyathik called the people together to make a plan to save them from the fishing-spear of Longar. His plan was that his friend should take the sacrum of an ox which he had fastened to a long pole, and should move through the water before him, holding out the sacral bone so that it would move the reeds. They carried out this plan, and Longar’s fishing-spear, darted at the sacrum which he mistook for a human head, was held fast there. Meanwhile, Agothyathik left the water and seized Longar from behind and held him.”

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amusement; he was huge, with a fat neck and wide chest all tucked up above his long, skinny

legs “like a black chicken” [cok ciir achol ajith]. There are stories of how he would he would cut off people’s calves with an adze to make their legs skinny—hence his name: Paguaŋdiɛɛar, p

+ guaŋdiɛɛr ‘shinbone shaver’.66

Paguaŋdiɛɛr had a spear called gäijaŋ ‘a wonder’. In his report on The Religion and

Spiritual Beliefs of the Bor Dinka (S.N.&R., vol.xvii, 1934) R.T. Johnson, wrote that the spear of

Paguaŋdiɛɛr would not have been worth comment except that it resembled the more famous spear of Gualla. He wrote, “There is another spear in the Bor Athoich called ‘Gajang,’ at

Biong[,] the village of Ch[ief] Lual Kur of the Bor Athoich … its repute scarcely spreads beyond the confines of the village” (1934:127-8). One afternoon I was talking with a man who had seen the spear before its “arrest” and destruction in 1993. I asked him what gäi jaŋ had looked like, and he fished in his pocket for a red pen and took my notebook. He laid out a pencil on it for a ruler and drew a triangle and then freehanded in a squiggly line to indicate the blade’s hammered iron taper. He began talking as he drew two lines to indicate the shaft. “When people leave a thing, there are no more histories. The people don’t talk about it. It was called gäi jaŋ [a wonder, gäi ‘amaze’ + jaŋ ‘people’],” he said, “because it surprised the people: it flew alone

[unassisted] and made a loud sound”—finishing a picture of a broad elephant spear in my notebook and, returning it, he described the sound of air busting apart, a gray streak across clear sky—“like a MiG” (3 November 09).

Paguaŋdiɛɛr made the people of Pajok walk day and night to the riverside to collect baskets of clay. With this clay, he intended to plaster his byre to have a great adobe tower (or a great mound) for some reason or another. Here is how Mabior Makuei told the story.

66 In a version of the Aiwel story recorded by Lienhardt (1961:188n.3) in Bor Gok country, “Aiwel began to cut off people’s calves… This act, not otherwise explained, appears to be a sign of the mad freakishness of Aiwel.”

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[the death of Ayuel Paguaŋdiɛɛr] It had happened that one evening Paguaŋdiɛɛr’sa bull, M ŋ ok (“blue-green bull,”), returned from the pasture with his horns caked in sticky mud causing Paguaŋdiɛɛr to think, for Pajok was surrounded on all sides by a sprawling desert. He picked up a fist of mud, letting it squish through his fingers, and summoned his son, Joh, to pass an order to the youth. “You go,” he said, “collect this soil for making my luak.”

Joh was collecting soil at the riverside near the pasture where he had released his calf to graze, when he noticed that someone had marked its ear. He asked the others, “Who has cut my calf’s ear?” No one knew, so they followed the calf. After hours of walking they came upon the entrance of a huge termite pillar inhabited by a man named Ayom Tuɔ̈ lthook, after the way he ‘peeked out’ (tuɔ̈ l) from ‘the mouth’ (thook) of the termite hill, and his sister, Aduit. “They were two alone—no mother, no father.” “Where have you been?” Joh asked. “In this mound,” Ayom said. [Ayom Tuɔ̈ lthook is the founder of Biong’s first- comer lineage.]

Anyway, the people were unhappy, Mabior continued. Paguaŋdiɛɛr was cutting their legs, and making them carry soil from the riverside to plaster his great luak. Finally, having enough of his father’s mayhem and the suffering of the people, Joh said, “Okay, now we have started to build that luak. And now we are suffering a lot of misery. We’ve taken a long journey for that soil. So all of you—just look at the place where I put my soil and you put yours there too.” The people gathered together for a meeting and agreed. When they returned to Pajok, Paguaŋdiɛɛr was sitting by the hearth with his friend Padolnyaŋ, whose grandfather had come from Mundariland. Joh dumped his soil on his father. And the others began dumping their soil on Paguaŋdiɛɛr too. When Padolnyaŋ saw what was happening, he said, “How can I survive? How can I live without my friend? When my friend dies, I will leave the earth with the other chiefs. I will die also. So wait for me.” And he sat beside Paguaŋdiɛɛr and they were there buried together.

There was generally a tension between chronology and theme in the structure of oral traditions in Bor. The story of Aŋuk and Ajak is a multigenerational journey which provides a linear chronological structure and moves the narrative through space (southeast: from Biong to

Werekok to Paankau a Kon) and time (from Aŋuk to his son Ajak). The theme of successful action—doing the work of flashbacks and flash-forwards—spirals back: Aŋuk’s cleverness is

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dramatized first by his escape from his brothers and, then, by Ajak’s success in the trial of Alier

Nyieth, which echoes his father’s success against Alier Nyieth’s fate.

Like cleverness, strength is ethically ambiguous and may be put to antisocial or prosocial ends. Polarizations such as this one, which imply a generalization, are frequently implicit in narratives but rarely stated flatly in more abstract, conceptual terms. Much like the “figures” of

Kuranko fiction which Michael Jackson (1982:157, 184-85) describes in Allegories of the

Wilderness, the protagonists of Bor Dinka genealogical tales tend to “exemplify modes of action

and kinds of choice, thereby affording insights into an interplay of forces, influences, and

possibilities which always retain an abstract definition.” Many narratives turn on “a search for

equilibrium and adjustment between opposing forces: hunger and plenty, conflict and unity, self-

willedness and communitas.” The oppositions between figures like Aŋuk and Alier or between

Aŋuk and Ajak (or Paguaŋdiɛɛr and Joh) and between places like the village and the bush, the desert and the riverside, or between the town and the village provide a metaphorical framework for expressing these contrasts.

Stories about founding ancestors generally follow a similar stylized and conventional form that is intended to project an image of the solidarity of one’s group, so as to gain the moral authority and social centrality that comes from long co-residential continuity (which is a simple index of how well people are able to manage their internal disputes). Speaking this way, in the

“lineage idiom” (Evans-Pritchard 1940) as it were, is not just a way of representing something else. It is itself a way of asserting authority within it.

I mentioned earlier that each place in Bor country has its history that usually begins with an account of its founding ancestors. Stories concerning first-comer lineages (koc piny) usually begin with an account of how a few named ancestors first came to the territory where their

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descendants now reside, how they cleared the land, and established the first villages. These

stories generally go on to explain how the land was divided up between various sons (or

sometimes wives or daughters) and various “settlers” (abokok). The story of Luol Tiok, an ancestor to whom many settler-lineages in Bor country trace their origin-routes, provides a convenient illustration of a first-comer narrative and the use of figurative oppositions.

Luol Tiok stayed alone in the forest, where there wasn’t anybody. He married and cleared the bushland and produced five sons—Joh, Ajak, Bior, Kuot, Mac. When they grew up there were no people to marry. Luol had some goats, twins, a male and a female. He forced those goats to mate and he killed the kid that was born. [Luol made a sort of wäl.] He cut its tongue into pieces and then mixed them with grass, which he tossed into the wind. He cut through the relationship among his children [acï kaar tɛm kɔ u, this was a relationship of blood and food].67 ‘You can marry among yourselves and no one will die,’ he said—because he cut the relationship, the family was scattered. Joh produced Palek, which now has ten chiefs. Ajak became Awan. Bior and Kuot became Nyicak. Mac became Nyara. So now we marry each other [Ngong Dech Mabiei Deng Bior Angong Ajuong-ween Bior Luol Tiok, 24 March 2010; 1 Feb 2010]

Some of the same principles that were at work in the negotiation between Paciriong and

Paluɔny apply to the story of Luol Tiok. What I want to examine are acts of differentiation

(“cutting the relationship”). The whole process of tossing grass into the wind can be seen as a tangible aspect of the process of genealogical amnesia. “Cutting the tongue” is actually a quite explicit image of cutting the unified tongue of the collective voice of an agomlong, which binds people together; it is an image that brings into being what it represents: tossing bits of tongue bound up with grass into the wind is how these ties can be forgotten.

I once asked a man named A.P. Ariik about a community called “Jur Koc,” some of whom were said to descend from Luol Tiop. He began, “Okay, the name of Jur Koc, and where

67 The verb “tɛm” ordinarily means to stop or confine. The meaning here is that Luol Tiok “separated” the relationship of kaar which bared intermarriage by stopping the circulation of his own blood.

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this name came from, and how the community came to exist. Gɛu is the grandfather of Jur Koc,

from Jur Mac, Bor Alian. They were given power by their grandfather Luol Tiok.”

“There were two brothers. Deng Gɛu and Abɛi Gɛu settled near the riverbanks and from there they started moving [inland] to the east. They met a community that was there already, occupying the land—it was called Payak. And there was also Patang, Pager, Pagueny, Padol, and some others. Those people were the owners of the land before the arrival of those two brothers: Deng Gɛu and Abɛi Gɛu.” “The origin of this name ‘Jur Koc’ is the settlement of this large community under the responsibility of [a community called] Koc—Koc ke Yak, Yang Koc…or Payak community.68 This is how this name came about. Deng Gɛu and Abɛi Gɛu settled under the Koc community, under a Koc man, that was Yang Koc from Payak, one of the people who occupied the land before the coming of these two sons of Gɛu. That man was the owner of the land. Yak welcomed and accommodated the two brothers when they came from the river bank.”

I should probably repeat here that when people spoke about groups of people they generally identified everyone who lived in a particular place (“people of one land,” kɔ c pan tok) either by a name such as Paluɔny (or Payak or Jɔr), the name of some ancestor said to have founded it, or some prominent individual there who provided land to settlers. The name ‘Jur

Koc’, here, refers to the ‘foreigners’ (jur) hosted by a people collectively called Koc, to whom they could be said to “belong.”

“Then this community grew—Deng Gɛu bore two sons, one called Luala Deng and another called Bior Deng. The Bior community is now occupying the Dɛr community land—that’s called Werekok boma by now. And then Luala, one of the sons of Deng Gɛu, is now occupying Konbek that is now known as Wai community from Konbek boma. So that community started to generate—they were bearing children under the responsibility of Yang Koc.” “From there they started settling, occupying the land. They grew and grew, and they subdued the land, from those communities. Then they became the second owners.” “When this community became very large, it came as a surprise. The people asked themselves ‘What is this community? Where did these people come from?’ Then they answered, they are ‘Juuoor koc’,” A.P. said, drawing out the vowel to underline it. He broke off to explain, “In our language, they are the community under this Koc man. Because this community, this Jur—jur is a community, jur are people. Juur in plural, the

68A.P. paused to denasalize and segment “Yang Koc” to make sure I understood that he was referring to a group of people claiming descent from Yak—hence “Payak” (pa— ‘home-place of’ + Yak).

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entire community, if we are talking about a lot of people we call them jur, in our language.”69 “So this is how we came to be called Jur Koc: we belong to the Koc man, the Koc man is our origin. And now we are united by this name of Jur Koc because when those people of Deng Gɛu and Abɛi Gɛu arrived, they stayed with Koc. They stayed for a long time.”

E.M. Forster (1927:86) once defined a story as an chain of events, “a narrative of events in their time sequence.” But if a story was to be more than “and then—and then—” it needs an element of suspense. The plot adds an element of drama that carries along a story by sparking our curiosity about what will happen next.

Another man who had been sitting nearby and occasionally supplying details picked up the story from A.P. Speaking in English, he continued the narrative, bringing Luol Tiok’s legacy back into the story.

“One the sons of Abɛi Gɛu died. And in our tradition as Dinka when someone dies the drum is forbidden. But Patong and Pathang and Koc brought out the drum and danced and the Abɛi boys became sad, ‘Why are they dancing? Are they happy because my child has died? If they are happy I shall scatter them.’” “Abɛi Gɛu made his magic power. He killed a dog and cut its tongue into pieces and scattered it. And in the morning children were playing stick ball [adau]. One of the children was hit in the eye—one of Koc, Patang, and Pathang—and lost his eye. When the father of the child saw what had happened, he said that the one who hit the eye will be caught and that child’s eye removed also.”70

69 Nebel ([1936]1979) translated jur (pl. juur) as “person of another tribe,” giving as examples jur col “Jur Lou” and jur thith “white people.” While the people Nebel referred to as “white people” were commonly described as thith, the term actually refers to the pinkish-red color of newborn babies (manh thith-lual). While a few young, foreign- educated Anglophone Bor used ɣer ‘white’, to refer to light-skinned people, this was clearly a back-translation from “white man.” I never heard a monolingual Dinka-speaker use the term: because human beings don’t come in white (ɣer). I was once walking with a friend of whom an elderly woman demanded, “Why are you leading that red-brown person [thiang, lit. the rusty-brown color of a topi, tiang antelope] around here?” My friend responded, “He’s not a jallabba [lit. ‘merchant’; Arab in this context]—he’s a white person [ran ɣer].” Lienhardt (1958:108) translates jur as “foreigners” and points out that the term is used to refer to unfamiliar people. Jieng people who live far away are considered jur, whereas neighboring Nuer are more usually referred to as “one of the Dinka ‘peoples’ [thai].” “Real foreigners,” Lienhardt (1958:108) writes, “are distinguished [by Rek Dinka speakers] by the colour of their skins as jur col, black foreigners or the Luo, brown foreigners (the Arabs) and red foreigners (Europeans).” These colors tend to shift according to distinctions that speakers wish to draw among various kinds of foreigners—and, in Bor at least, color was not the most salient criterion for drawing these distinctions. 70 In other words, the father refused mediation within a very close circle of agnates. The implication is that the father of the child was beyond reason with grief—so much so that in his anger he refused mediation and

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“The war broke out between the people of the land, among Pathang, Patang, and Koc. They scattered. Now Abɛi Gɛu became the owner of the land.” “Abɛi Gɛu’s people were dying, they called a tiir [diviner], ‘Why are we dying?’” “The tiir said, ‘It is because there is no one of the land here, you scattered them.’ So those of Abɛi Gɛu looked for someone from Koc. Ajak Yang Koc was in Dɛr, where his mother was, and those of Abɛi Gɛu found him and brought him back to Jur Koc in order to recover from death” [ws500219, -20, 21].

The repetitions and recurrences across this multi-generational narrative provides a unity to Luol Tiok’s descendants, binding together thematically the otherwise disparate stories of their lives, and plotting out a kind of symmetry between them. Since this is what gives such narratives their particular rhythm and shape, it might be helpful to lay out a set of inversions between Luol Tiok’s scattering of a goat’s tongue and Abɛi Gɛu’s scattering of a dog’s tongue.

The two acts can be seen as mirror images of one another.

Luol Tiok Abɛi Gɛu generation appropriation or theft first owner of the land second owner of the land unselfish wholly egotistical sacrificed after planning sacrificed what was close at hand without planning oriented toward the future oriented toward the past goat (animal with exchange value) dog (animal with no exchange value) allowed people to marry prevented marriage by creating a feud and by severing his own relationship with them severing his relationship of co-residence with his neighbors cool heart hot heart thereby risking the memory of his own name, did so in order to preserve the memory of his by ensuring that his children could build their own name, carried by his son own reputations

demanded ‘an eye for an eye.’ This sort of thing happens occasionally, since no amount of cattle is ever a replacement for a loved one, or even compensation for seeing the pain of a loved one. When people refuse mediation, the story suggests, there can only be war. There is a parallel here between Abɛi Gɛu’s grief and the father’s. Both men were so grief stricken they ‘killed themselves,’ as it were, unable to see the larger consequences of their actions.

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allowed people to move freely (light) compelled people to move (heavy)

This is how genealogies were generally narrated. While anyone who had grown up in

Bor country could usually list twelve or thirteen of his or her male ancestors, people rarely found themselves in circumstances where they felt called upon to do so. Kinship was not realized through abstract images but as a set of relationships embodied in living where one’s ancestor’s lived, moving along the paths that they’d moved along, and relating their actions to the actions that their forerunners had undertaken in the past—which were carried forward, transformed, and sometimes betrayed. All these retellings are also why it is possible to lay out a set of neat inversions like those between Luol Tiok’s scattering of a goat’s tongue and Abɛi Gɛu’s scattering

of a dog’s tongue; these details are surely embellished if not wholly later inventions.71

At the risk of talking one story to death, I want to say something about how this relates to the two forms of speech, exemplified by Ayuën Thuɔŋjäŋ (yuën ‘rope’, + Thuɔŋ-jäŋ ‘mouth of

Jäŋ’ [Dinka language]) and BӒӒR (‘big’, ‘come!’). I will just put it epigrammatically like this: influential ancestral words and deeds can be seen as what binds a land of living descendants together, or they can be seen as the efforts of individuals to compel the people of one place to remember them. What incensed Abɛi Gɛu was that his neighbors had acted as though they had forgotten his son; rather than mourning, they had held a celebration.

When ancestral actions are seen as enabling people to live together freely, those acts can be seen as essentially justified; when such actions are purely egotistical, however, they can only end in disaster.

Motifs of trials and journeys recur as metaphors for human conduct and life-courses, providing images of puzzles, cross-roads, and boundaries out of which narrators construct

71 This pairing of episodes—so that each serves as a commentary on the other—is a narrative convention in Bor and elsewhere. The story adolcɛrec ku agumut ‘owl and hamerkop’, illustrates this convention in a very clear fashion.

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allegories of cleverness and choice (cf. Jackson 1989). The sense of kinship here between father

and son is born of their shared movement outward and the identification of common trials.

Earlier I mentioned Lienhardt’s (1963:43) remark about a contradiction of interests between

fathers and sons, with sons dreaming of “the day when [they] will be known as ‘the father of so-

and-so’, rather than as ‘the son of so-and-so’” and fathers trying to keep them at home. Stories

like these about Aŋuk and his son Ajak (or Paguaŋdiɛɛr and his son Joh) provide resolutions to this contradiction. The consequences of one’s forbearers’ actions may weigh like Paguaŋdiɛɛr’s tyranny or provide a lesson which can be learned, as Ajak exemplified by carrying his father’s reputation forward into new circumstances and making it his own.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A FISHERMAN’S HISTORY

Figure 6. Mading Bor.

Sketch map of Mading Bor (the westernmost parcel of the town plat) and its principle roads, centered on the town’s symbolic foci: the main market (8) and Governor’s office (5). (Adapted from a c.2008 satellite image, with landmarks, paths, feeder-roads, and houses removed.) (1) north port, a neighborhood popularly called Laudiet (or, less commonly, Madingdït) which is situated at the junction of Athioc and Gok countries; (2) south port (where passenger barges offload onions, soft-drinks, clothing, furniture, household sundries, &c.); (3) aciɛŋdiir [aciɛk + dït ‘big creation’, a toponym and the name of a seasonal watercourse running NW from #3], a (peace quarter’]; (4‘ م] neighborhood commonly called Hai Salaam Malek Secondary School; (5) neighborhood of the old prison, prison-mess, & cattle byre of Anier Akon; (6) Governor’s House/ née District Commissioner’s House; (7) County Administration compound; (8) Merol Market; (9) Listic (shifted slightly south). Accounts of the location of mac köör ajuoŋ differ, most people I spoke to located it within the triangle made by #1, #9, and #3.

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In March, 2010, I was seated in Laudiet near a place called listic that was sometimes said to be named after the strong material once used to bind captives’ arms there (probably from

‘fasten, glue’). I was listening to a discussion about some cattle exchanged during a thiëkkɛ röörthii ‘marriage of young men’, which had taken place earlier. The youth (röörthii) of the bride’s mother’s family had agreed on a dozen cattle and the discussion concerned the transfer of several of them to the family of her father, a fisherman who had been the husband of her mother for several years in the 1980s. It was a complicated marriage even by Bor country standards; whether her genitor, the fisherman, was also her pater remained an open question, but the thiëkkɛ röörthii had been completed with the understanding that the rights of the bride’s pater lay with her grandmother’s family (as opposed to the bride’s mother’s husband’s). No one expected a resolution that night. The fishermen left after dark. A little red light appeared on the horizon in the northwest as a barge slowly approached, blasting its horn as it passed the town’s north port. I asked Mabior why the site was called listic.

It used to be called mac köör ajuoŋ, Mabior said. It was a blacksmith’s (ajuoŋ) furnace—he made “spears, bells, malotas….” There was a huge pool of fire and the government interrogated people here. If you didn’t tell them where the Dinka people were, they would burn you alive. You see, when the Executive Director [‘leader of the armed forces > ‘director, leader, governor’; ‘directorate’, or governorship] came to communicate it was through the chiefs. If the chief was aggressive, he was taken to that mac köör ajuoŋ.”

I asked him why it was called mac köör ajuoŋ [mac (fire) + kör (man-eating lion) + ajuoŋ

(blacksmith)].

“Because no one returned,” Mabior said. “That was the place for torturing chiefs. You came back dead or a collaborator.”

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I mentioned that I’d read something once—it was Johnson (1993a)—about a man who was going to be tortured and killed but he had escaped by saying ‘Allahu Akbar.’ After that he had a jok ‘divinity’, called ALAKBAR: because it had saved him.

“There is a story about that,” Mabior’s nephew, Madit, said.

Before. There was another leader who came and said, ‘I need the bird’s child— the child of the bird that doesn’t lay eggs—I will not kill the man who brings that bird.’ The leader killed a lot of people: because they couldn’t find the bird’s child. A lot. A lot of people. So people went home to find that bird. And then a man went to his house and his wife brought him food. ‘I don’t want to eat. I will be killed tomorrow,’ the man said. ‘What’s happened?’ his wife asked. ‘There is another leader who said, ‘you find the bird who doesn’t lay eggs. If you don’t find that bird, you will be killed tomorrow.’ His wife said, ‘You eat. I will tell you later, after you eat.’ So the man ate. When he finished, his wife said, ‘It is only the bat.’ The man was silent. He stood with the people, last in line. All those before him were killed. When his turn came, he said, ‘It is only the bat.’ And so he wasn’t killed by the leader. Who helped? That is why people say, ‘Don’t kill your wife’ [NB1, 7-9 March 2010].

This joke turns on the arbitrariness of foreign leaders, the obvious point that one shouldn’t go about killing one’s wives (rather how chickens cross roads), and evokes a widely circulating collection of trickster tales about animals that escape obligation or punishment by cleverly claiming different identities. In Dinka Resistance to Condominium Rule 1902-1932,

Lazarus Leek Mawut (1983:7) describes an event in Bor that has suggestive parallels with the

joke about the ‘the bird who doesn’t lay eggs’.

[In the 1890s] when ‘Umar Salih or ‘Arabi Daffalah was stationed at Bor, the Ansar [Mahdist] earned their living by raiding the Dinka in the hinterland for cattle and grain. Their activities enraged the Bor Dinka who rose and annihilated an Ansar party engaged in collecting grain in the villages. In retaliation, the Ansar made a counter raid into the villages and captured chiefs, some of whom they brought back to their station at Bor for questioning before they were killed. It was under this tense situation that one of the

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captured chiefs, Riak Wai, realized that if he behaved like an Ansar and recited the name of Allah, he might evade death. Riak Wai had a friend among the Ansar, called Jab al- Rab [probably a Dinka captured as a slave soldier] who, seeing his friend facing death, approached him secretly to inform him that he had no way to physically intervene on his behalf, but promised to work behind the scene for his release. Jad al-Rad secretly taught his friend the elementary forms of Islamic worship: to recite Allahu Akbar and to make ablution before praying to Allah facing the east, and gave him a sibah (rosary) to pray with. … When the time for execution came, the chiefs were led to the guillotine one after another. Among the chiefs killed were Loc Deng, chief of the Thony section, and Deng Atho of the Palle section [Er Jok]. Riak’s turn came next. At that critical moment, he asked for a prayer mat and water for washing his face, hands and feet. When brought, Riak washed and then stood up facing east, hands raised heavenwards, and loudly shouted Allahu Akbar. The Ansar, amazed, asked him where he learnt that way of worshipping. He replied that it was God who told him. The Ansar took him for a Muslim and freed him, the only chief to escape death.

I heard several versions of this story while I was in Bor. In this version a second man, Chou

Alith, also escapes.

At mac köör ajuoŋ—the government of the Mahdi executed Loc Deng Nyeth. Yes. [long pause] And Kon Anyiin Werriic was killed also. And the beny baai [—“a traditional chief”, another man interjected—] called Athieu Madol. And Malual Kang. They were all killed on one day. And a man called Deng Athok [was also killed]. … And Riak Wai was there with Chou Alith, the great-grandfather of the governor. But Riak Wai had a man who loved him: because Riak was tall and very handsome. That man thought, ‘If they kill this man, ah, they’ll simply destroy his life for nothing. What a waste!’ So then he called, ‘You’re without Muslim beads; and, you two, you want to say this, if you want to escape—say, ‘I want to pray, and go ‘praaaaaay’, and cut the bead and cut the bead [go bead-by-bead, as if you were counting]. These two people, Riak Wai and Chaw Alith, they did this—so they were left alive [20 May 2010, A.K.].72

72 Actually, Aciek—whom I introduce later—said, “manköör ajuoŋ—hakuma dë … hakuma dë british? Eh. Arab. uh. hakuma dë Mahdi. Mahdi is the one who killed us at manköör. [Jol: ‘who did they kill there?’] Louic Deng Nyeth. Yes. [long pause] Kon Anyiin Werriic was killed also. Kaman…eh, beny Baai [—‘even traditional chief in the villages’, Jol interjected—] ë cɔl Athieu Madol, Malual Kang, yes they was killed on one day. And raan ë cɔl Deng Athok. …[I ask about Listic and Aciek told me that they were separated by a few hundred meters, then describes the two sites called manköör ajuoŋ]… guët encol ŋo? [Jol: ‘beads’] Chou alith ku wai, chou ee wun akuol manyang, wulen ee governor. Go riang wai anɔŋ raan ee nhiar riang wai: ria[k] baar [a]rëtic. ku kɔk apieth. {Go raan ben go- diur ee raan kor bakele [[bä ( > bï ɣɔn)+kek + la]] na} Go ee go ca cool, ‘ku yiin ciin guith, guët muselemiin—islamic, market’, manufactured beads]…beads—yiin en kor luel na kor bi ben no? ku luela, ‘an kor‘ وق < ] um, suk suk lööŋ ku jal löööööŋ, ku jal guët tuɛny, ku jal guët tuɛny. These two people they made this. So they [were] left [alive]” [WS500215]. My friend Jol glossed the bit I have in kinked {…} brackets ‘If they kill this man, ah, they’ll simply destroy their lives for nothing.’ {Then the man came, then (he) went ‘(it’s a) sorry (thing), (you’ll do it) for what?’} The part about suq-suq ‘rosary beads’ [], was an aside in Arabic and English which Aciek directed at me to make sure I understood the Dinka word guët ‘bead’. “Hakuma de Mahdi” was a simplification for my benefit; speaking to someone more competent, he would have elided ‘dë’. This was a typically multilingual

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It was not only Madit’s impression that this story bore a remarkable similarity to the joke.

(“It is about [Riak] Wai,” another man told me when I repeated it later.) I got the impression that because Riak Wai’s family still lived in Bor there was a reason to turn the story into a joke.

After all, the punch line might have been “that is why you shouldn’t kill your wife,” but the implication seemed to be that one shouldn’t “remain silent” when another person’s life is at stake; Wai should have mentioned the trick to Loc Deng and Deng Atho.’ At least that was what

I thought when Madit told me the joke.

Riak Wai’s wives and their children

I’d first read a short account of Riak Wai’s near execution in Douglas Johnson’s

Prophecy and Mahdism in the Upper Nile. Johnson’s summary (1993a:52-53) was drawn from

Lazarus Leek Mawut’s (1983) Dinka Resistance to Condominium Rule 1902-1932, where he

cites Aciek Wai, “great-grandson of Riak Wai, 7 April 1977” (1983:8), as his source for the short

account I’ve reproduced above. Johnson and Mawut each use the story to illustrate how

nineteenth-century Dinka incorporated Islamic practices into their religious lives, while

“divorcing them from any Islamic connotations, associations or meaning” (Johnson 1993:52).

Following Riak Wai’s encounter with the anṣār, ALAKBAR became a divinity among Wai’s people.

A few days later I was talking to Reverend Daniel Garang Ayuen. Daniel Garang was in

Junior 3, in Juba, in 1983, when the war broke out. He attended school there until 1987. In 1991 he entered a theological seminary, and in 1994 he returned to Bor country as a “community

narration with several people speaking at once. Most people I spoke to were comfortable translating many terms and stories between several varieties of Dinka and Arabic, many between Dinka, Arabic, and English. [20 May 2010, Aciek Kual, WS500215] “Traditional chiefs”, beny baai, was a term people used to distinguish pre-colonial chiefs from colonial government chiefs and from beny jok ‘masters of power’.

94 mobilizer.” In 1997 he joined “the movement,” the SPLA, as a teacher “in a bush school” and as a priest in Gualla country (in what is now payam). By the time I knew him in Bor,

Daniel Garang was perhaps forty-five years old. A very tall man, confident and unfailingly affable, he was also the Senior Inspector for mother tongue education (“… now I’m working in Bor County, as a native of Bor I want to teach Mother Tongue, to maintain my dignity”).

I first met Daniel Garang in September 2009 [NB4, 27 Sept 2009 & summary notes], not long after I first arrived in Bor. I had wandered into the County Administration compound (#7 on the map) and he invited me to sit. Daniel listened as I tried to explain that I was doing research on Bor country’s culture and history and that I had been looking for the path to Block 1, and that I knew his son. He wrote “Brendan Tuttle, Temple University, Philadelphia,” in a little notebook. “The first thing you have to know is the sounds,” he said. He unfolded a pair of reading glasses and, taking my notebook, neatly wrote out the vowels.

Lower sounds ä ë ï ö ԑ̈ ɔ̈ [u] akeer yäu73 Lék High Tone pestle Higher sound a e i o ɛ ɔ akeer dheu Lēk medium tone confess [as to a yath = which means = Taboo crime] jok Lek Lèk yäth = axe handlestick scale = Fish Lower Tone

73 [u] is always “breathy,” which is why Daniel did not include it in his list of contrasting vowels. For a brief history of Dinka orthography, see Leoma Gilley’s (2004) Morphophonemic Orthographies in Fusional Languages: the cases of Dinka and Shilluk (Institute of African and Asian Studies, University of Khartoum, and SIL International. Final consonant deletion is limited to Bor varieties of Dinka.

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When he had finished writing out the breathy and non-breathy vowels, and the high, low, and

falling tones, he returned my notebook. “Kiit ke Jieng [alphabet, lit., ‘colors of Dinka’]. You

see we do know everything through different colors,” he said laughing. Then he took me

through the ‘colors’ of Jieng: “a. ä. e. ë. i. ï. o. ö. ɛ. ԑ̈. ɔ. ɔ̈ .” I repeated the series, demonstrating my uneven ear for Dinka phonology. After the lesson, he was telling me about how “the Dinka” have always been depicted as “violent, uncivilized, savages… The Dinka are called warriors,” he said. “But that isn’t true. We want peace. So what we want to tell Obama is: Don’t just extend your economy, also extend your management to South Sudan, so that South

Sudan can be part of America. Half of the population of South Sudan, of the rising generation, is in America already. So why isn’t South Sudan part of America?”

This was a common observation. Many Southern Sudanese had gained refugee status in the United States. And while the US helped to bring about the Comprehensive Peace Agreement

(CPA) of 2005, everyone was fully aware that Southern Sudanese living in North America were

“not even 2nd or 3rd class citizens—we are 7th, 8th, or 11th class citizens in America, those of us who come from here are the last class” [NB1, 22 Feb2010].74 No one I spoke to imagined that the US had been a disinterested broker of the CPA, and many people said that for this reason

South Sudan should be “part of America”—that is to say part of “the developed world,” which was mainly a way of saying that if South Sudan was important to the United States, then

Southerners should have access to hospitals, medicines, books, and education.

Daniel was a patient teacher, and I became a regular visitor. What drew me to his office at first was that he obviously wanted to talk to me, if only to satisfy his curiosity about what I was doing in Bor and to remind me of the political aspects of conducting fieldwork and writing

74 See Douglas H. Johnson’s most recent revision (2011) of The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (2003, 2007, 2011) for a short analysis of the peace process, which focused on the North-South talks at the expense of interconnected civil wars in Darfur and the .

96 about Bor country. He asked me the kinds of questions that everyone asked me about daily life in the United States: what it was like for Southern Sudanese people living there? what kinds of jobs did people have? did they walk to the market or drive there, what did they buy? what attitudes toward ‘the Lost Boys’ and South Sudan did people hold there? and so on. People asked these questions because they were curious about life in the United States and because the answers were relevant to people whom they cared about.

These conversations were an important lesson about the difficulties of conveying the everydayness of a place and time. Madit would often begin a little expository story to translate a term or to illustrate something about life in Bor country by drawing a parallel with the United

States. “Say you are going to go to the market and…,” he would say before stopping to ask how far the market was from my house. Indeed, many people I spoke to illustrated concepts with little stories that very much resembled ethnographic descriptions: self-contained descriptions of essentially regular processes which one could assume were uniformly characteristic of a place and the people there. A number of scholars have cautioned that these kinds of objectified descriptions tend to arise most often in speech directed to outsiders. While this is a useful warning, it risks taking for the granted the very model of communication—that meanings move in one direction from local huts to regions to national discourses—that it is meant to challenge.

People are everywhere always trying to explain things to people with different life experiences.

Indeed, in Bor country, the ordinary terms people used to talk about their lives and traditions had been translated and retranslated in everyday conversations—and there is no reason to believe that this situation was at all unusual.

Webb Keane (1997) and Michael Silverstein (1977) have, in parallel ways, sought to understand how certain cultural objects and linguistic features are more available for reflexive

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talk than others. My own approach is broadly inspired by Lienhardt (1961) and the ongoing

work of Keane (1997, 2003, 2007:16-22, and so forth) on what Keane has called “semiotic

ideologies.” One thing that I want to examine over the course of this dissertation is how the past

was constructed as an object that could be passed from one person to another, evaluated and

creatively altered. I have already mentioned BӒӒR (lit., “tall,” “long,” or “come!”), which put a whole fan of experiences into a tangible, shared performance. In this section I focus on place- names, and how they were constructed as verbal objects in narratives about Bor’s past.

But, first, let me return to Daniel Garang. One thing that made Daniel’s way of talking about Bor a little unusual was that he always talked about yath and jok as “local gods” or in terms of “traditional religion;” others translated these terms as “satan” when they were speaking to me in English.75 If Daniel saw himself as somewhat beyond the divisions of Bor country, it was partially because he saw himself as moving in a larger world. He spoke English fluently and was a pastor at the big Episcopal Church in town that people called the cathedral; he’d studied with the American missionary Rev. Marc Nikkel, and had read widely about the history of

Sudan. He was an instructor of “mother tongue” (Dinka language literacy) and so he was used to seeing the stuff of “tradition” as folklore, a fixed body of knowledge that lay on the other side of an impermeable boundary between the past and the present. While the attitudes held by many people toward this or that “satan” (joŋ rac) were rooted in part in their identification with

75 The terms joŋ rac “bad jok,” jok ‘ultra-human agency’, and yath, ‘jok with some kind of relationship with people’, obviously do not overlap entirely. Let me underline that the term ‘supernatural’ is inappropriate here for, as Lienhardt (1961:29) pointed out, “the force of lightening is equally ultra-human for ourselves as for the Dinka.” Most people used the term joŋ rac for anything that could harm people by ‘catching’ them: hunger, lightening, sickness, European technologies, the nefarious agencies that inhered in stolen things, and so on. Lienhardt (1961) translates jok as ‘power’; ‘satan’ and ‘devil’ are obviously a product of Christian missionaries, and most people had some idea of the pointy-horned hellion of Christian mythology to which these terms referred. I rarely met anyone who took this conception of the devil seriously: partially because so few people took the idea of an ‘afterlife’ seriously. All this also provided a useful lesson in the provincialism of my atheism; I “believed” in hunger and smallpox just like everyone else did but felt that whatever malevolence was said to have inhered in a gourd that Mabior’s father had acquired in Atuot country, it was something altogether different.

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Christianity, few felt that the church had much to do with their everyday lives and realities

within which these agencies moved. Indeed, few were really certain that the old powers had

really disappeared in 1991 when their paraphernalia was imprisoned and burned near Dhion (>

‘zion’) in Werekok by the ‘army’ of Kon Ajith.76

For example, in July 2010, I interviewed Alier Gai Ajuong Cɔc, a former beny jok,

‘master of power’, of a famous divinity called Lirpiou ‘cool heart’ and Lirpiou’s spear [19July

2010, WS500259, -60].77 Alier Gai began to tell me the story of Lirpiou in an old, hoarse-voice.

He was nearly blind. When I showed him a photograph of an earlier priest of Lirpiou, called

Biordït (at Paandït in Kolnyang) he held it up to his nose for a full minute before saying that

“yes,” he recognized Biordït from a photo that ‘another whiteman’ had showed him.78

76 Many felt that one could remove jok with the help of the church, but people still got hungry and sick all the same, and they swore oaths and undertook iron ordeals. Kon Ajith’s ‘youth army’ was called joŋwa lieec, ‘god/power-of-our-father glance [at us]’. With some hesitation, SPLA commanders threw in their support behind Kon in 1993. When his movement began to look like the nucleus of a popular uprising, Kon Ajith was captured by Khartoum Government soldiers and killed. His body was cut into pieces and scattered around town to demonstrate his powerlessness. There were a number of highly syncretic Christian movements in Bor. Gabrial Garang, “Vice Principal” of John Garang University, listed three “Christian cults”—(1) Kon Ajith’s movement of 1992; (2) Tot, a movement made up of a few of Kon Ajith’s remaining followers who moved to Tot in anticipation of a great flood and later formed Bor’s Pentecostal church; and (3) De Mamim, a pre-1991 movement [NB5, 23 May 2010]. Many people regretted the destruction of the “satans,” which I discuss elsewhere. 77 In 1946 the spear was “arrested” by the D.C. of Bor, Major Cummings, following the murder of a government chief named Joseph Maciek Deng. Lirpiou was then “exiled” to Khartoum where it remained in prison, in the Ethnographic Museum, until 1971, when it was returned to Bor country by President Nimeiri as a gesture of goodwill (Nikkel 1992:94fn.16; DH Johnson and C.A. Willis 1995/1931:417; Hill 1951:220). (Mac) Paanchol Maciek Deng, the son of Joseph Maciek “signed” for Lierpiou to be returned. He told me that he did so somewhat reluctantly: “Lirpiou was the chief satan in all of Bor [but] the whole Bor population was crying for the release,” he said [20 April 2010]. After being hidden in Bahr al-Ghazal from Kon Ajith’s movement, the spear was thrown into a deep well in Kolnyang (Gualla country) sometime after 1992-‘93. Lienhardt (1961:53-4fn.1) described it as an elephant-spear and gave its dimensions: “a shaft of some 194 cm. long and 19 cm in circumference, with a blade over 50 cm. long and proportionally broad.” People commonly mentioned that when Lirpiou was taken from one shrine to the other, it “demanded” to be carried in a perfectly straight line (just like a border, road, or telegraph line) and anything in its way, houses, say, had to be destroyed. The commonest way to say that someone was a pre-1931 government ally, a chief, was to say “he made the borders between X and Y.” The drum Bäär’s oppressive power was represented by its weighty demands; the power of Lirpiou was represented by its road- and border-making. While the adoption of the imagery of oppression of the 1840s-1920s to underline the power of indigenous divinities may seem a little bit exotic, it’s really very much like the anachronistic placement of a medieval crown on the infant Jesus to indicate his power. 78 The photograph was taken by Charles Gabriel Seligman during the dry-season (March) of 1910. The Seligmans (1932:196) describe the encounter in Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan. My copy was from the website of Oxford

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I had met Alier Gai in Bor’s central market, Merol (#8 on the map), where he often sat in a little stall rented out by his nephew. When I turned on my audio recorder, he narrated the origin story of Lirpiou: ‘long ago’, during the time of Ajak’s migration from Legi (Mundari country to the south of Bor), Ajak’s son, Rieth, had found the spear of Lirpiou at the foot of Lege

Mountain. Rieth remained in Gualla country (Kolnyang Payam) and his half-brother, Kut, continued on to Anyakeui. Then Kut came and stole the spear of Lirpiou from Rieth by breaking a hole in the house where it was kept. And since that time, every four years—“like the world cup!,” Madit interjected—the spear would be “stolen” by the people of Kut (Anyakeui) and stolen back by the people of Rieth (Gualla), and stolen again by Kut, and so on, back-and-forth.

The house where the spear was kept was plastered with a weak spot indicated by a little hole.

When the group came to steal the spear they would always sleep one night on the road and send a messenger ahead. The spear-holders would prepare a meal and begin eating. When the thieves arrived they would drive off the men guarding Lirpiou by tossing handfuls of loose soil before settling down to eat the meal that was left behind. Then they would dig through the wall of the house, take the spear from a priest waiting inside, and carry Lirpiou to another cattle village, where the mock attack would be carried out again four years later.

When Alier finished speaking I pulled 5 SP from my pocket. Madit placed his hand on my arm, insisting I add another five pounds. “For your tea,” I said, giving Alier Gai 10 SP. The small gift was partially a token of recognition that the elderly priest merited “appreciation.” But,

Madit said, I’d better not risk offending him, you never know, “maybe there is still some power left—power këde aŋuɔ t [maybe he’s still got power].”

University’s Pitt Rivers Museum (# 1967.26.166; southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk/details/1967.26.166/). I gave a digital copy of this and several other photos of Bor country taken in the early 1900s to a friend who ran a portrait studio in Merol Market, he sells prints for 2 SP.

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At any rate, after I’d heard the story about listic, I dropped in on Daniel Garang. When I asked about listic, he began by listing the foundation of several Catholic mission stations, starting with Dolieb Hill in 1902 and ending with Opari and Juba. “That was in 1904, 5, 1919,

’22, and 1931. The colonial system, you see,” he said, “the main target was people—

was to take children to be sold, to be slave soldiers to protect the colonial system, or to be sold out for money. In , you know that Lake Kabaka? King Kabaka was there in 1937-‘38, getting soldiers. Before, there was Alier Nyieth from Koc and Mathiang Bior from Deer. They were traitors working for the slave traders. Even Biong [a territory just north of Bor town, Daniel Garang’s home community] had five people forced to be soldiers by cam cieth. Cam cieth would dance with a bare anus until a child laughed, then that child would be stolen and held hostage for cattle. [Daniel laughed for a few seconds.] Talk to Reverend Steven, he is the grandson of Mathiang Bior. Ask Dr. Mathiang Kuk Alier at Werekok Hospital, he is Director of C[hurch] and D[evelopment]. BT: About the soldiers of cam cieth? DG: Cam cieth. cieth, you see: the scorpion. Cam Cieth stole children to sell into slavery and ransomed them off or sold them in the Pariak market.79 They were smuggled from market to market, from Pariak to Uganda and from Uganda to Zanzibar. Even some Dinka reached the United States. You see: we are the remnants of the colonial system. We have been taught by the Arab colonial system and the British colonial system. So now we are wrestling with the Arabic system. Under the British we were suffering under the slave trade. The colonial system stole children to defend them. Now we are suffering under Islamization. BT: What about listic? DG: [I’m getting to that, first you have to understand something.] People will ask you, ‘why have you come here to Bor? What will you get?’ Kon Aŋok, from Aliap, Yirrol County—it was [Yirrol] District then—; he was a Paramount chief. In 1948 he asked, ‘What do you British want? Do you have like me in England ruling you? Then why do you come here?’ He asked that question in Mongalla, where he was killed. DG: You see, listic is a big rope, rubber for keeping people in a line. It is anything that cannot be cut by hand, here, write this down: wɔ[wuɔk] ci tau në listicic [‘we’re under the rope’]. Riak Wai was taken to Manköör—tied with the listic rope. When his time came to be killed, he said, ‘let me pray first.’ He stepped aside and said, ‘Allah Akbar’ three times and he was set aside. They asked him, “Why do you pray like

79 Near Kondak (> khandaq ‘trenches’, now where the ASCOM petroleum company has its compound near the site of an old Mahdist fort). I was often told that Lake Kabaka, which is just to the south of Pariak town, was named for King Kabaka. Daniel’s date of 1937-’38 is less plausible. For an account of the relations between the kabakas of Buganda, the Egyptian government, and Christian missions, see Shukry’s (1953) Equatoria under Egyptian Rule, 1874-1876, and Alice Moore-Harell (2010). [NB3, 5 May 2010, Daniel’s 2nd on the “deeper meaning of cieth”]

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that?” He said, “It is my god.” He was set aside as a believer, even though he was illiterate.80 DG: Wai Deng, his father, was a Mahdi soldier when the French were across the river, in 1870, ’80, 1, 2, …the 1890s, the French were there[—Daniel said, gesturing toward the river for emphasis—]. [Wai Deng] went to ’s homeland, to Fashoda81—to work in the field, um dulic, known as Muluth county now—to work in the sorghum fields, um dulic or madulic, the big fields for white grain—, and he came across the Mahdi soldiers who said, ‘If you don’t say Alakbar, you will be beheaded.’ So he was conscribed by the Mahdi and learned to pray like the Mahdi. Wai Deng escaped and returned on a steamer and bore a son, Riak Wai, who learned to pray by watching his father. After his escape, Riak killed a bull for the name ALAKBAR “god of his father,” so the jok was called ALAKBAR. His grandson, Wil Alier Riak Wai, was the first Muslim man in Bor. In the 1970s he made the azan, he would cry to call for prayer from the mosque. Mawut Riak Gai Riak Wai is a Muslim still. Riak Akon, a major general of police, is a grandson of Riak Wai [NB1, 10 March 2010].

One thing that set Reverend Daniel’s account apart from others I’d heard about the various mission sites and the people there was that it was full of dates. He was of course speaking to me, an American student, and foreign books about Sudan were largely a matter of dates and mission sites. Partially, he was telling me what he thought I would want to hear and constructing his own authority to tell it. Daniel also tended to speak of an unusually wide geography, always emphasizing connections between the United States and South Sudan (“from

Pariak to Uganda … to Zanzibar … [to the] United States”). Granted, he had spent his life surrounded by books and maps and he was accustomed to translating between English and Dinka and between narratives organized by place-names and genealogies and narratives organized by dates and the movements of foreign powers (French, English, Belgian, …).

Johannes Fabian (2001:117) has written that “in order to be knowingly in each other’s

present we must somehow share each other’s past,” and about the kinds of “obstacles” that the

distinctions and oppositions that make up the study of oral history can place in the way of mutual

80 In almost every account I heard, Riak Wai spoke Arabic but was non-literate. The implication was that he had been a slave. In a few accounts, such as Daniel’s Riak’s father, Wai Deng, had been a slave. 81 Fashoda is an of Pachod, where Lam Akol is from. The Fashoda of the ‘Fashoda crisis’ is a different town called Kodok [see the map of the Upper Nile Province below].

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recognition—oral/written, narrative/descriptive, local/universal, genealogical/chronological …

(Fabian 1996:248). During that first conversation with Daniel in September 2009 he explained

that in Bor, there was a strong feeling that the right to narrative history was a matter of privilege.

One could gain some authority to narrate oral traditions by identifying oneself with historical actors as ancestors, for instance; but there was also a strong feeling that only those who had lived in a place could really know its history. When he mentioned that “People will ask you, ‘why have you come here to Bor? What will you get?’” he was also telling me that people might find my research disconcertingly like theft. Indeed, by then several people had equated oral transmission with monetary exchange and asked me what I would gain from learning “this local language” and what I was prepared to offer by way of compensation.

Most people were a little more oblique. In February, 2010, I was talking to my friend

M.G. who was telling me about how he had had a copy of Principles of Marxism and Leninism

from a library in Ethiopia. He’d managed to hold onto it until he was caught up in a bombing

attack in 1992. When I knew him in Bor, M.G. was nearly fifty years old and he had developed

a fine sense of the absurdity of rarified theory about violence and inequality. He asked whether I

knew what plastic was made out of (“oil,” I said). “If I had power,” M.G. told me, he would ban

the factory-made plastic hair-extensions sold in the market.

MG: You should live with your own hair, whether it is short or tall. Ah! We are lacking many things! Due to what? the war and due to our brother who took his family abroad. So we have many minerals but only two, what? geologists. If you are clever they will keep you there in America. So we consume what the Americans know, but they will consume what we don’t know: that is the way of development. We will remain like this. This is called political economies; they [Marxists, Leninists] call you [Americans] imperialists—they say, ‘this is the last stage of development.’ Ha! and, you and me, we still have 30 or 40 centuries between us [—he said, reaching over and placing his hand on my knee to underline the absurdity of the claim—]. They call us ‘tailless monkeys.’ … America takes our raw materials and sells them back to us; Chevron takes our oil and

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sells it back to us. We only have this local charcoal, and you cannot sell that out [—to the Americans]. That is why capitalism is terrible.

I wrote “America takes our raw materials and sells them back to us…”

MG [laughing]: Why are you writing that? it’s against your own people.82

Few people were able to put into these words the impression they got that many foreigners were convinced not only that every variant of human life could be placed somewhere on an evolutionary ladder but also that Bor ranked someplace near the bottom. M.G. recognized a familiar prejudice in Principles of Marxism and Leninism and used it to underline that the

invisible walls (“30 or 40 centuries”) separating us were based, ultimately, on simple racism,

violence, and appropriation. He could reach over and touch me, true, but even his wife’s hair

had been sucked up by geologists protected by armed mercenaries, taken off to a refinery and a

factory someplace else, and turned into plastic before it was sold back for a profit to people in

Bor.83 The vision of a desirable life afforded by development was often empty and came at the cost of inequality and marginality.

Rev. Daniel expressed a similar concern by emphasizing the connections forged by the slave trade and the people who gained refugee status in North America. If roads, schools, concrete buildings, hospitals and the projects of international NGOs were among the most visible ways that the promises of global interconnection and membership in the “international community” were expressed, everyone was also perfectly aware that modern roads followed old

82 “They call us ‘tailless monkeys.’ …” In the ellipsis MG described how Africans had been exhibited in cages [nb1, 22 Feb ‘10]. 83 I mention TotalFinaElf (“TOTAL”) from time to time in this dissertation because, in 1980, it gained the mineral concessions for “Block 5,” 158,113 square kilometers in the Bor, Pibor and districts of southern Sudan. In September, 2009, a TotalFinaElf manager told me that TOTAL would never allow a refinery to be built in South Sudan because doing so would hand over too much leverage to the South Sudanese government. Everyone knows this, of course, but TotalFinaElf’s expatriate vakïls rarely admit to it in these terms.

104 slave routes and had been widened for the trucks that transported soldiers or carried teak wood out from South Sudan to international markets and brought back plastic hair, for instance, or carted sand dredged up from the Nile by Moldavians and sold back to the people who supposedly owned it. With that advice, Daniel told me to go talk to Philip Awou Lek, the Deputy Director for Alternative Education and another grandson of Riak Wai, “Then come back and tell me what he said.”

The circumstances in which my conversation with Philip Awou began are relevant here because they explain my reason for going to talk to him in the first place and prefigure something about how historical traditions circulated through a number of intertwined spheres: mass media, class rooms and mother tongue instruction, sermons, legal discourses, genealogies, place-names, and everyday exchanges of historical traditions, songs, jokes, legends, and fairy tales—and how the relations between these circuits were constituted in political relations, among them the relations between people (like Daniel) who had remained in Bor country during the war, and people who had been able to attend universities elsewhere, the children (like Philip)—in

MG’s phrase—of “our brother who took his family abroad.”

After I talked to Daniel, I walked to the Malek Secondary School Riak Wai’s wives and their sons: (#4 on the map above) in the center of Bor town, where Philip Awou 1st wife: Alɛk Diiŋ had a small workspace. A man in his mid-forties, I found him seated in Thaar Kuac (from Palɛk, Erjok, Deŋdït his office: a small cubical formed by low, whitewashed pasteboard section) Kor Riak (1st born partitions. I introduced myself and he invited me to sit. He called son) twins (died in their through the window for tea. On his desk there was a worn copy of infancy) Nybol Riak Middlemarch by George Eliot. I said that Reverend Daniel Garang had (daughter)

2nd wife: Adhal Deŋ

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sent me and explained that I was interested in Riak Wai, whom Lazarus Ajuoŋ (from Gualla) Ajah Riak (daughter) Leek Mawut (1983) mentioned in his book. Atoŋ Riak (son) Achol Riak “Philip Awow Lek Akur Riak Wai Ajak Luala Deng Gau (daughter) Akon Riak (father of Abiai,” he said when I asked how he was related to Riak Wai. Riak Wai Brigadier General Riak Akon Riak) was his great-grandfather. Philip was the son of his grandfather’s 3rd wife: Jang Anyat second wife, Adou Apath Ajak. “I want to tell you the correct (died without sons)

information,” he said, and suggested that I return the following week— 4th wife: Athiaŋ Aduot after he’d had an opportunity to talk to his mother “in the village.” Dhom Riak (daughter) As much as there was a very real feeling that the locus of history Aciɛŋ Riak (son) Paanjok Riak (son) was in “the village” (paanjieng), where it was known to elderly Akoor Riak (son)

grandparents, putting off a conversation by saying, “I don’t really know, Kor Riak Wai’s you need to talk to so-and-so in the village,” was also an effective way wives 1st wife: Yar Deng of keeping a foreign researcher at arm’s length. (‘So-and-so’ was Mayen (nicknamed Kol Jok; from usually off someplace else, or had only just died last year.) Mathiang, Pathuieth) Thiak Kor Riak (his I was a little surprised, then, when a week later, I bumped into son is a colonel in Prisons) Philip at a stand near the school and he invited me back to his Mac Kor (died in early childhood) office. Col Kor (also died early) He opened a spiral notebook and said, “During the time of the Anyi Kor (daughter) Achol Thiak (died Turkish [Anṣār or Mahdists]—1896 maybe—when the chiefs were young leaving one child) gathered in Listic. One of Riak Wai’s friends—from Turkey maybe— 2nd wife: Adou taught him how to pray. He started with washing. When the time came Apatha Ajak Lɛɛk Akor (son, to be killed he asked to wash and pray—first, before he was killed. Philip’s father) Aɣɔl Jok Kor (son, Then the people became surprised—‘how does he know how to killed in a well- digging accident,

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pray?’—so they allowed him to pray. So he washed and prayed. Then married) Anyieth (daughter, they left him and the rest were killed.” died) Alɛk Kor (daughter, “I heard that Wai Deng spoke Arabic,” I said. died) Wai Kor (son) “Riak Wai was a translator.” Philip said Riak’s nickname was 3rd wife: Nuan Wel ‘Targiman’ [from , ‘translate’]. “Before Riak died”—Philip Jooh Guet Kor (daughter) added—“he said, ‘you, please, when you hear later on the word of god Atoic Kor (daughter) Acol (daughter) coming, you repent and join the lord.’ This happened in 1992. … He Nyandöt (daughter) Kuɛric (son) was very old and tired he could only drink milk. He called his children 4th wife: Nyan Nyiɛth and they danced around in so that he could rest.”84 (from Aliap) Mathiaŋ Kor (son) He began reading from the notebook, where he had written his Abol Kor (son) Riak Kor (son) mother’s account. He listed each of Riak Wai’s wives and their children Alam Kor (son) one-by-one. Then he listed the wives and children of Wai’s first-born Philip Awou Lɛɛk son, Kor, with little details about each one. He finished by listing his Kor’s children: Unnamed, first-born own children. I copied the names into my notebook. The list was not an son (2004-2006) died in a displacement effort to fob off an annoying researcher, however. His point—or, camp in Laboni, “many children died perhaps, the point which I should have drawn from the list—was that then.” Acol Awou there was more to the Riak Wai and his descendants than the story of (daughter) Riak Wai (son) their Riak’s escape from mac köör and his rosary beads called ALAKBAR. Akon Awou (daughter) Atoŋ (daughter)

84 “He could only drink milk” is a conventional way of saying that Riak Wai was very old and died very well (surrounded by his loved ones) at a time of his own choosing. He was old, feeble, too weak even to eat—tired of living. He sat down near a cattle hearth and his family danced around him all night until the dusty ash raised by their dancing suffocated him (lɔ thiöp, deic). Philip probably added this detail to emphasize the “traditional” character of Riak Wai’s religious observance, since certain bitter-bodied priests should be suffocated [NB2, 3 Feb ‘10]. The Anglo-Egyptian government tried to ban the practice. Philip elided Alier Riak and Mawut Riak’s grandfather, Gai Riak Wai from the list (sidebar right). There was often a sharp generational contrast between an elderly cohort of former colonial civil servants and many younger men (like Philip) and women who were educated in Uganda and Kenya in terms of attitudes toward practices associated with Islam (female circumcision, Islamic conversion, saliently Arabic-derived names, and so on).

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But that only occurred to me later. So I asked about the divinity Mac (son) Ajak (daughter) ALAKBAR.

“[Riak Wai] practiced Islam in a traditional way,” Philip said. “He had those thuk-thuk

”.’market’] beads called ‘ALAKBAR‘ ق store bought’ > suq‘]

“You note this down,” Philip continued after a moment. “Society’s attitude toward idols changed considerably in 1983. When we study the Bible we get everything there. Our people had a lot of cows until the Nuer side came and took them and people became displaced—like

Israel one time was driven to Babylonia and when they returned all the idols were burnt; so sometimes people plan, but god has planned for people” [NB1, 16-17 March 2010].

I finally got the feeling that I was pressing Philip in a direction that he didn’t want to take, so I stopped. My aim was to write down what people wanted to talk about. We chatted awhile about English literature, which he had studied at Juba University and Khartoum.

It only occurred to me later that by treating Riak Wai’s story as an exemplification of something other than itself—as an encounter between “Islam” and “traditional religion,” say—, as opposed to a moment in the life of an actual person, with a family, I had failed to recognize

Wai as an historical actor in a complex moment in the internal history of Bor country. (As I got to know Daniel a bit better I began to wonder whether he had sent me to see Philip to illustrate his claim that even the best educated returnees did not know Bor’s history: because he knew that

Philip would not want to talk about the story.)

let this ‘o’ be a ‘u’

Philip shared a building at the Malek School with several other teachers and

administrators. Solomon Amac [Ciec Can Nai Kol Nyeth Angok], whom I had met earlier, was

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roughly Philip’s age, a teacher, and the ‘community leader of Mading.’ Solomon was

comfortable in Dinka, Arabic, and English. He spoke English fluently with lots of backchannels

(“yes, yeah, um-hm”) and ratifying repetitions,85 stopping occasionally to correct the notes that I was making (“Jacob Arep Agol … that is A-R-E-P Agol. Agol is A-G-O [I wrote ‘L’] yes …”) or to denasalize and segment phonemes (“mañpac, manpac, mác—pác. [brief pause] manpac, …”).

Soloman was a member of the Mading community, from the people of Nyeth, whose ancestors, he said, had migrated to Mading town from Cuai Bek, western Gok in Bahr al-Ghazal, byway of the country now called Kolnyang Payam in South Bor. Mading people were fishers—called

Thɔny (or Thain) by most people in the vicinity of Bor—, and many of his relatives lived in

riverside fishing villages along the Bahr al-Jabal which were divided by payam boundaries.

Before I turn to Solomon’s account of the founding of Bor and the death of Riak Wai’s

contemporary, Loc Deng Ngeth, let me explain what brought me to Solomon’s office in the first

place.

By 2009-‘10, when I was living there, Bor country had divided up into a series of long

strip administrative districts, called payams, each with access to the Bahr el-Jebel river’s floody

marshes and pastures. Dotted by cattle villages, the strips ran far inland from the river to the

easterly plains, past a rise of sandy soil where a string of court centers (‘bomas’ since 1994,

marked by circles on the map to the right) divided up cattle villages and horticultural settlements

85 Brendan: mmm, and so then? Solomon: And so then Nyeth defected … [see Deborah Tannen’s Talking Voices (2007:69).] Solomon’s ability to segment morphemes was not simply a result of his literacy. Almost everyone in Bor was familiar with Rek Dinka varieties which are different enough to provide a lesson in Dinka phonology. I discuss the use of Rek Dinka varieties as a simplification strategy for talking to incompetent Dinka speakers (like me) later. Edward Ayom (1987:178) has suggested that tongue-twisters may also “make available some of the difficult features of the grammar and stylistics of [Dinka]” for children. For example, children in Bor sometimes try to say, moic mot nhom, very quickly over and over again, which is really hard to do and illustrates a nasalization rule: [moic mot nhom] ‰ /moiɲmotnhom/ ‘pointy-headed-man, pointy-headed-man, pointy-headed-man, pointy- headed-man, …’ [NB4, 16 Sept ‘09].

109 of sorghum fields and vegetable gardens into ‘administrative tribes’.86 The process of adaptation to life on the Upper Nile’s clay plains, with its uncertain rainfall and seasonal flooding and , led people to a dispersed settlement pattern and economy that mixed horticulture, fishing, pastoralism, and encouraged expansive social networks. Johnson (1988, 1989) has described how the region’s peoples knitted together a ‘common economy’ of webs of marriage alliances, expansive kinships and reciprocities across localities and languages that was more appropriate to the plain’s uncertain ecologies than the limited social ties and rigid ethno- linguistic units that colonial administrations sought to impose upon them.

Figure 7. Bor payams and bomas.

86 The usual reason given for the term ‘boma’ is that it was the Murle district and town of Boma which was the first to be liberated by the SPLA in 1984 [NB3, 5 May 2010].

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The boundaries between Nuer, Dinka, Shulluk, European and Arab were rarely stable, as administrators quickly learned when they tried to take an inventory of their colonial possessions in Sudan after 1900. No single trait could be used to distinguish one people from another; and while it seemed obvious enough to the British that there were “Dinka” and “Nuer” or at least

Ghol, Nyarweng, and Lou (indeed this much seemed obvious enough to the people themselves) what was not at all obvious was where one began and the other ended. Indeed, as John Winder, the Deputy Governor, Upper Nile Province in 1951, remarked it was not even clear whether a group of people who were Dinka in 1951 would remain Dinka in 1952. The Nuer did not even call themselves “Nuer,” they called themselves Naath, ‘people’; but their neighbors, “loyal

Dinkas” (who called themselves Jieng, ‘people’) insisted that Naath were Nuer [see SIR No.95

1902:4]. Nuer-speakers called Ghol and Nyarweng collectively Jaang, a cognate of Jieng; and while both Nuer- and Dinka-phones called individual people raan, ‘person’, many Jieng people called other Jieng-speakers juur, ‘foreigners’ (Nebel 1957), despite their shared language (see

Evans-Pritchard 1940:3, 126; Lienhardt 1958:107; Southall 1976). There were Atuot people who spoke Dinka but traced their ancestry to Nuer country, and non-Dinkaphone residents of

Bor country who claimed to be Dinka all the same.

In 2009-’10, I heard a lot of speculation about where, exactly, Dinkaphone fishermen fit into all of this. Unlike Bor country’s other administrative “tribes,” the fishers lacked their own boma, and since fishing settlements ran along the river, rather than perpendicular to it, their territory was bisected by payam boundaries.

Fishing

One of Bor town’s few international exports was dried fish. Great braided bundles of dried fish are nowadays trucked from Bor to Uganda and Kenya. This old route is part of the

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reason why the Ministry of Fisheries acquired several new Volvo refrigerated tractor trailer

trucks which, while I was in Bor, were usually parked in a large clearing at the edge of town.

(They were parked there for two reasons: (1) shipping frozen fish is more expensive and

altogether different to shipping dried fish; and (2) several vehicles had been attacked along the

road.) When I was there, Bor’s main fish market was located near the town’s north port (#2 on

the map). Most mornings, merchants gathered around the north port fish market to buy the fresh

and dried Nile perch and huge catfish (and other fish) that they then sold in little stalls scattered

throughout the town’s smaller markets.

Figure 8. Fish bundle (detail).

I had gone to talk to Solomon Amac mainly because so many people had described fishermen to me in such derogatory terms: as homeless, impoverished and ‘endlessly wandering about after fish’, akɔ r rec; their diet made them ‘smell fishy’ (tik), others said; a few joked that fishermen had “fish blood.” This characterization did not really fit the scene at the north port

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market. When I pointed out that fishermen hardly seemed like impoverished vagrants, another

man admitted that, well, sure, fishermen always had enough to eat and they were better off than

many other people in some respects, but, still…. “Go. Talk to that Solomon Amac,” he told me.

“He’s a beny rec [fish master],” he added derisively [7 April 2010].87 This kind of attitude toward fish and fishers has been widely attested among pastoralists (see Almagor 1987;

Lienhardt 1961:204-5). Uri Almagor (1987) has described the role played by the cycle of seasonal smells in the distinctions drawn by Dassanetch in Southwest Ethiopia between cattlekeepers and fishermen, which are marked by pastoralists' feelings of superiority. My argument will be a little different.

Here is a small sample of comments about fishermen drawn from several conversations I had around Bor country:

“The government will move the ancestral people [the fishermen] who lived here originally, these local people, to another place.” [said by a school teacher, non-fisherman ancestry (emphasis added)] Laudiet is the place of Nyeth Ango[k]. He took a lady of Kolnyang. The British asked him, “Why do you live here? What is this place called?” and Nyeth Angok said, “Bor, the place of water.” And the British said, “This place will be called Bor.” [Mabior Makuei, when I asked why Bor was called Bor. [20 September 2009]] “All the fisherman do smoke, because of the smell—atik aretec! [very fishy- stink!]” “Those fishermen decided to be residents of the River Nile. They have movable chiefs! They don’t have a permanent place—no payam, no boma. Their nets are like this dhien [cattle hearth, social unit defined by a herd in common and anchored by a hearth], they use their net as their dhien.88 And they have boats and bundles of nets. A man with around 30 bundles—he [the man said with a snort, laughing] will be very rich!”

87 “Fish master?” I asked. “Fisherman king,” he replied. 88 The identification of nets with cattle-hearths (dhien) was based on the collective efforts which each focused. This plays off an exaggerated symbolic contrast between different “kinds” of people. Each “kind” has its own dhien. The hierarchy of fishnets and dhien is only partially a colonial import (as I explain below). It is also worth underlining here that if fishermen are said to be unusually mobile because they fish, then cattle-keepers’ earthy anchorage is rooted in the places where they keep cattle. This is a neat inversion of the colonial distain for herders, who were said to be nomadic on the basis of their transhumance.

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“Even hundreds of fish will not be [equivalent to] a cow, because they are food: just rations. No one will allow a dowry of fish.” [I had asked about a marriage between the speaker’s niece and a fisherman.] “Those fishermen just let their children go freely, like the fish. When the fish lays its eggs on the running water does it protect them? Is it better to lay or to feed? Everything alive was born, even the insect. We are not like the fish, we know the mistake.” “Those thany, the people who used to live here [in Bor]? They are the ancestors of this land. Now they’ve been integrated into the communities, but if you go around the river you will still get them” [17 September 2009, emphasis added to underline both the priority of fishermen as well as a implied lack of “coevalness” (Fabian 1983)]. “Thɔny United Students Association” [printed on a tee-shirt] “They just move around on their canoes. The people of Makɔ̈ lcuei said to them, ‘Since you are in our payam you should make some contribution.’ At that time there was war—so the Thɔny contributed rations to the soldiers” [NB4, 18-19 Sept. ‘09]. “He has a fat mouth, like a fish. [said of a Thɔny man who rode past on a bicycle] “You have a friend who brings some fish and you give him some milk. Not for buying and selling. The Thɔny keep their cattle with the people with cattle.” [25 May 2010, ….]

“I’m not sure about these Thiɔny; maybe they are another ethnic group,” a college graduate told me in September 2009. Using the English phrase “ethnic group” was mainly a nod to the authority of textbooks that used that kind of language (he was speaking to an anthropologist), but it also indicated that their lack of a payam and court center set Thɔny apart as much as their lack of cattle. He had listed the “major tribes of the [Bor country] Dinka people—Gok, Athoic, Twic, Nyarrweng,” from south to north. “Then you see inside there is

Kolnyang payam, Anyidi payam, Makuac, Baidït, , Pakeer, Ajuong, Nyuak, Kongor, Lith,

Duk Payuel, Duk Padiet Payam. Inside Baidït there is Makolcuei, Manyadeng, Mathiang….”

He said, describing the divisions geographically, moving through ‘greater Bor’ payam by payam, boma by boma, starting in the south and moving north. When he finished he said, “There is also the Thiɔny. I’m not sure about these Thiɔny …”—he said as he wrote ‘Thiɔny’ in my notebook.

“Even if that is a bad word, they have taken it as their own” [17 September 09; WS50088, -89].

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One thing that stands out about these ways of denigrating Thɔny is the degree to which they draw on nationalist discourses and European constructions of ethnicity, Africans and Africa.

Again, let me emphasize that the college graduate was speaking to me, a researcher from a foreign university who was interested in ‘Dinka culture and history’ and holding a digital recorder, all of which helps to explain why he continued in the way that he did:

Thɔny means people living inside the swampy area, the toic, in our dialect. And the main economic activity of these people is fish, they don’t cultivate, and they don’t keep cattle. So, a long time ago, we were together with these people. Our first ancestors were staying in Kush, the place currently called Ethiopia, and due to some calamities, the people of Jieng, who are called Dinkas, they started their migration in the sixteenth-century. They came and stayed in a place called Mac Bol, from there different calamities affected the people there in Mac Bol. So the most Dinka ethnic group, there, were called Agar. Agar stayed there for two-hundred years …. And by then, they left to the other side of the river. Currently they occupy the area of Rumbek. And from there, …they start[ed] their migration, and the people currently called Luo in Uganda and Kenya, they migrated from the area of Bhar al-Ghazal, and then they went to Uganda—first of all in Pagungoo—and from there they went to Kenya. And the Luo were categorized into three major groups of people: so there is what is called Jakka Jakka, Jakka Awuola, and Jakka Wei. And we Dinkas, we are a Nilotic group of people: we stay here. Under these major groups we have Nuer, Luo, and we have Dinka. We are called, we nilotics, Nilote. And [at that time] we are staying here eating fish, or we are practicing what is called subsistence farming, and keeping cattle. And by then, do to different dynamic changes, we came here and replaced the people of Agar—we Dinka Bor. So our forefathers came here and settled alongside the river. No. Not along the river. During those times people were depending on wild foods, and people were eating the meats from the wild animals, and that period was called the First Stone Age. [mentions the second stone age, when people lived in dry deserts]… By the Third Stone Age, people came to know the importance of water. So the Dinkas came here, especially the Dinka Bor. … There are two categories of people here: people living in the river, in the swampy areas; and there are people staying outside the river. And the people staying inside the river are called Thɔny. These are the people eating meat, from the wild animal, the aquatic animal. They are eating fish. These people left this place in 18-zero, they went to stay inside the river. So, they said, “Now we suffer in the dry area. We better quit and then go to the river, and then we will go and enjoy our life there in the river.” Thɔny ke Mading, in our dialect, they are ‘the people of Mading.’ By then, by further growth and the expan[sion] of their culture and ethnicity, they are now very many. So some of them went to the other side of the river; and so some of them went to the other side of Twic East. Their brothers are called Gualla and some of them are from Abii.

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They are people of Kon Anyeth [Anguo], and Abii [a community in Pariak] is the grandfather of Thɔny staying here in Bor town … [17 September 09; WS50088, this emphasis was the speaker’s].

This narrative combined a number of genres. People in Bor country were probably most

familiar with what Rupert Stasch (2011) has described as the “mythic chronotope of civilized

and primitive” from encounters in churches, schools, and universities, and from the efforts of the

SPLM/A and NCP to create a national past for (South) Sudan. This nationalist discourse,

however, did not really provide people with a way to discuss the relationships among the various

lineages in Bor country, which is why the speaker (above) fell into a ‘kinship idiom’ (“their

brothers are called Gualla”) when he described the places where some of ‘the people of Mading’

had resettled as their numbers grew. The feeling that becoming a part of “the modern age” was

partially a matter of developing a written history which proved South Sudan was a modern

nation by proving that it had an ancient history (“Kush”) also helps to explain why a number of

people in Bor (pastors, teachers, lawyers) were developing written histories of Bor country’s

cultural histories and folklore.89 (Another university student once remarked to me that “the

Arabs swept away the chronology of the Dinka. In the National Examination of Sudan you cannot trace where the Dinka came from: because the Arab swept it away!” [29 March 2010].)

Perhaps the simplest way to illustrate the similar nationalist discourses of the SPLM and the NCP parties (or governments) is to reproduce two election posters from 2009-’10 which contrasted elements of ‘traditional dress’ and language, showing them to coexist without conflict.

89 But this does not fully explain it; the appropriation of the culture concept was not only a matter of creating a nationalist historiography. Several of Bor’s pastors and lawyers had written books in Dinka. Majer Mac, a pastor, has written a number of books in Dinka, which are in manuscript form [25 May 2010, WS500216, -217, -217]. Abraham Chol Nyok [18 March 2010, 19 March 2010] is also working on a folkloric account of Bor. The lawyer, Kuot Jok Alith, a returnee from Canada has collected a book of folklore called Dinka Folktales, which he self- published in Dinka and English “for the diaspora,” he said [NB 8, 21 June 2010, WS500240].

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Omer Al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) poster particularly drew attention to costume, suggesting that the divisions of Sudan were little more than a matter of what people wore.90

Figure 9. SPLM/A party poster. The Arabic reads “unity… Figure 10. NCP party equality… diversity…” poster.

Most election posters featured candidates wearing suits and ties (as in the Thɔny (independent) candidate poster below: Cuɛttë Ɣɛn , ‘vote for me’ / Pïïr tueeŋ de alɛ Mïäk yennëkë ë mane!, ‘The forward-moving life of Tomorrow can be now[today]!’).

90 Bashir wore a long leopard skin apron tied with a bright green sash over a white toga over his suit when he visited Bor town during pre-election campaigns. The outfit has been widely regarded as Nuer-ish and reminded people of the alliance between Riak Machar and the Khartoum government following the split of the SPLA in 1991 which led to the Bor massacre. He performed a strange dance and waved his cane at the audience.

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Figure 11. Pïïr tueeŋ de alɛ Mïäk yennëkë ë mane!

But what was most striking about the denigration of Thɔny as “the ancestral people” of

Bor town was that it reversed the normal logic and dynamics of land rights in Bor country.

Ordinarily, those who claimed ownership of a place did so by tracing the genealogical links that connected them to the named founders of a particular ancestral territory. If your people cleared a place, named it, and attracted others to settle there, then your people owned it. In this respect, people in Bor were “much like others in every continent: whether having arrived first puts you on the top or on the bottom, it is likely to place you in some sort of formal or informal hierarchy”

(Shipton 2009:114-115). Yet for fishermen, their priority as first arrivals had been neatly inverted—rather than anchoring their claim, it had been transformed into evidence of their

“backwardness.”

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Parker Shipton (2009:115) has described how, among Luo in Kenya and Uganda, claiming status as wung lowo, ‘master of the land or soil’, is largely a matter of demonstrating that one’s “ancestors cleared a place of wild brush for first settlement.” In Bor country, in the neighborhood of Makɔ̈ lcuei, the court center a territory identified with the major cattle villages

(wun; sg. wut) of Biong, for example, the descendants of Ayom Tuɔ̈ lthook who live there claim founder status, kɔc piny (“people of the land”) and base their ownership of Biong country on being the place’s first arrivals; the rest of the people there are abokok (“settlers”), of one kind or another. The distinction between kɔ c piny and abokok is fundamental to political life in rural parts of Bor country.91

Almost everyone I spoke in Bor acknowledged the priority of Thɔny people, “the people of Mading,” but many then went on to claim on this basis that the fishermen were merely backward “local people” who subsisted on “wild meats,” floated about on the river, didn’t care properly for their children, and ate huge piles of worthless fish. This was a familiar discourse;

European NGO-workers used the same kind of language (local, strange food, irresponsible parents, nomadic, …) to describe Bor’s cattlekeeping residents.

John Holtzman (2004) has cautioned that “manifestations of ‘the local’ in specific ‘local’ contexts” are a kind of kin to anthropological models predicated on the spatial and temporal contrasts encoded in the relationship between ‘the local’ and ‘the global.’ The teleology of localness in Bor—this “mythic chronotope of civilized and primitive”—provided non-Thɔny with the material for creating a more positive image of themselves at the fishermen’s expense.92

91 Two people, Madit (my research assistant) and Pac (my roommate) each glossed the distinctions between people in a village (people of the land, abokok, and abarok ‘from the forest’) to me with reference to cats by saying, “thödït—burra—aŋɔu,” (housecat—feral (stray) housecat—wild (forest) cat/prostitute). [NB5, 18, 20 May 2010; 8 feb ‘10]. 92 Roy Richard Grinker (1994) describes a similar situation in which Lese adapted racist European images of denigration and applied them to Efe.

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(This idea of progress (a better tomorrow) also supplied the slogan for the Thɔny candidate’s

election poster Pïïr tueeŋ de alɛ Mïäk yennëkë ë mane!, ‘The front-of-the-line [first/best] life coming-Tomorrow can be [here] today!’.) What I want to underline here, however, is that the

Thɔny/non-Thɔny contrast took the shape, in part, as a consequence of the geographic expansion of government-land in the vicinity of Bor town and the expansion and reorganization of government courts and chiefs since the 1890s.

The marginalization of fishermen was partially a product of the gradual demarcation of land tenure in terms of grazing rights. Before I begin to place this contrast in a wider perspective, let me suggest why the occupation of Bor town in 1992/3 may have sharpened the contrast between fishermen and cattle-keepers.

While the denigration of fishermen in 2009-’10 was partially rooted in a much older, common-sense hierarchy of value and exchange (sheep and goats ‰ bulls/dry heifers ‰ heifers

‰ people),93 it had a more immediate reference point. 1990 gave a bad harvest in Bor Country, and by July of 1991, crops in the region were “completely washed out.” The floods brought an infestation of tsetse flies and a severe outbreak of trypanosomiasis that devastated herds of already weakened livestock. In late October, 1991, Bor was attacked by a coalition of the Nasir- faction SPLA and Nuer recruited from Ayod, and “virtually [the] entire population of Kongor

District [north of Bor] was permanently displaced [to the south and east] by fighting” (DH

93 Thus people say that ‘a goat will bring a cow’— …thou ke yuɛn woŋ, ‘…goat of the rope of the cow’ [NB1, 14 Mar ‘10]. This hierarchy of exchange also implied a temporal sequence which was grafted as a life-stage trajectory onto the teleology of localness; when people emphasized fish, they were suggesting that Thɔny lived in a sort of suspended social adolescence of dependence on herders. (“Even hundreds of fish will not be [equivalent to] a cow, because they are food: just rations….”) I mentioned earlier that people objected to the use of grain as a medium of prestige for the payment of tribute because doing so carried the risk of reducing others to slavery (aluak ‘a slave’) by controlling their livelihoods. Milk, grain, fish and cooked food occupied a ‘sphere of exchange’ that was kept separate from livestock in part by gendered spheres of production; milk, fish, grain, and cooked food were given to establish familial or friendly and more-or-less equal relations through links through women. (“You have a friend who brings some fish and you give him some milk. Not for buying and selling. The Thɔny keep their cattle with the people with cattle.”)

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Johnson 2004:202). A WFP/FAO/UNICEF assessment carried out by D.H. Johnson in October

and December, 1991, noted that there was “no locally produced food in Bor and Kongor.”

The main foods available have been aquatic plants, wild foods, and fish. A large harvest of small fish from shallow pools was made in October and November, but already in some areas supplies were running low. Fishing nets and hooks were needed in able to exploit the fish while available in streams and rivers [DH Johnson 1991:53]

Families were scattered and many people died far away from home following the devastation of

1990-’03. Many from Bor country found safe haven in Thɔny villages near the reedy swamps, where they appealed to in-laws, distant relatives, and exchange partners (Johnson 1991:53).94

(Giving the town itself a wide margin, people began to return to their villages in the vicinity of

Bor in the mid-1990s.) A decade later, when I was in Bor, people often told me that the

Khartoum government soldiers posted in Bor town after 1992/3 had referred to southerners as

“papyrus” (aguot, apath) or “floating clumps of swamp grass” (apac); implying that they were nomads who, more like weeds than people, just drifted along the Nile. Southerners were called

monkey’), and ‘abd ( ‘slave’). But‘ د) dark skinned’, colloq., ‘negro’), gerit‘ , ز) zanjī whenever people listed the derogatory names that had been applied to them, ‘grass’ was always among the first.

If, in 1991-’03, many people found themselves suddenly reliant on the goodwill of people whom they had denigrated for their riverine livelihood, it could only have contributed to the feeling that the war had turned Bor society up-side down. That the soldiers who came to

94 Indeed, Emin Pasha noted of Bor country in 1882 that with the suppression of the slave trade, “people, who formerly left their homes, and who preferred to lead a miserable life as fishers on the numerous islands in the river, rather than lose their children …” (1888:437; full quotation below).

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dispossess them of their land made use of the same metaphor, referring to Dinka as ‘weeds’, I

think, may help to explain the salience of the insult. 95

“Thɔny are Bor people,” Madit said, “but the language is different. It is a photocopy language [poor-quality counterfeit, a knockoff]—they talk like Aliap [Bahr al-Ghazal Dinka- speakers], but they are not Aliap.” Almost everyone I met could offer a potted history of this or that fisher family, which was always a story of loss and impoverishment—a family had lost all of its land and cattle somehow and was reduced to eking out a living catching fish. Madit told me another joke.

A Thɔny man came to [a village in] Biong [a territory north of Bor town] and saw the cattle there. And a cow said, ‘ŋööŋ’ [‘moo’]. The man said, ‘kudualdu woŋ [I greet you cow]’. And the cow said again, ‘ŋööŋ’. The man said, ‘Ɣɛn abɔ Patɛrou watheei [I’m just coming from Patɛrou yesterday evening]’. And the cow said, ‘ŋöööööŋ’. ‘Yeŋö cï yïn na ŋöömic?! ku noŋ ŋöömdu yede ŋööm?!, [the fisherman finally shouted, ‘Why are you ŋööming always?! and what about your ŋööm also?!’].’ “The fisherman,”—Madit explained, still laughing, after he’d recovered from the joke—“doesn’t know about cattle.” Like everywhere else, Bor is a place where there are defined conventions for speaking in particular situations. Greetings usually begin with pialë? ‘you’re light?’ or kudual, ‘hello’, followed by ‘Where are you coming from?’, and end with a series of conventionalized adjacency pairs, which can be strung together endlessly: because the information expressed by speakers is usually beside the point. So, when the cow said ŋööŋ, the fisherman assumed it was a greeting and replied appropriately. When it said ŋööŋ again he thought it asked him where he was coming from…. The joke is obviously that the fisherman doesn’t even know the first thing about cows—that is, they don’t speak Dinka, cows just moo or ŋööŋ endlessly: because they are always hungry [ŋööŋ, ‘moo’, or ‘pasture’]. I got the feeling that the listener is meant to imagine the fisherman standing there talking to the cow for hours before eventually losing his temper [NB1, 7MARCH2010]. 96

While “ethnic jokes” are usually most revealing of those who tell them, in as much as jokes are

also short fictions, they tend to reveal salient categories. If fishermen were depicted as having no

95 Derogatory terms for riverine Southerners drawing on the imagery of fishy swamps (“poor Icthyophagi…Nile slime…” (Werne 1840/1:234)) and nomads have a long genealogy in travelers’ accounts. 96 The joke involves a kind of ‘pragmatics as comedy,’ in Mark Liberman’s phrase.

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cattle, the point was that to be Dinka was to be familiar with livestock. But by almost any

ordinary anthropological definition of the term, the fishers and cattle-keepers shared the same

“culture.” That is to say, they spoke the same language and shared an historical experience,

married and entrusted cattle to each other, ate the same foods (for the most part), lived in the

same sorts of houses, and so on.97 Fishermen around Bor town tended not to possess very many cattle, but almost no one living in the immediate vicinity had very many cattle anymore—there was a West Nile fever epidemic in 2009-’10 and many thousands had been lost in 1991-2.98 The vast majority of Dinkaphone people living in Bor country had also long combined multiple livelihood strategies—relying on animal husbandry and cultivation, fishing, hunting, and foraging, trading, charcoal making, and wage-labor. Each of these activities required different forms of social organization, group size, cooperation, skills, duration, and provided people with experiences living in a variety of different forms of social organization. Indeed, the man who told me that “those fishermen decided to be residents of the River Nile…” had married a fisherman’s daughter and had been living on and off in his father-in-law’s river-side village since the mid-1990s. Like any identification (state/non-state, cultural, familial), such statements are one way in which people position themselves vis-à-vis others. And while as circumstances change such positions are correspondingly adjusted, people may come to see former differences as less important, or they might seek to create symbolic differences in an effort to maintain earlier certainties.

97 Whenever people spoke about the differences between different varieties of Dinka they always emphasized that “only the sound is different” unless they were speaking about fishermen. “Only the sound is different” was usually followed with the observation that there was almost no difference at all between the Rek Dinka Bible and the Bor Dinka Bible. (This is true, but largely because the Dinka orthography of the 1950s was such a blunt instrument of representation. I should mention here that I am using a similar orthography and adding final consonants, which are often elided in Bor Dinka varieties.) 98 Thɔny were said not to have many cows, anyway. If a fisherman did have a large herd, it was usually entrusted to cattle-keeping in-laws or friends which, from the perspective of those claiming that fisherman lacked cattle, amounted to pretty much the same thing.

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Figure 12. Photograph of a fisherman at Bor Town’s north port fish market. The boat in the background of this photograph is named Aluak Jang 1 ‘slave/servant of people’, which I mentioned in the INTRODUCTION.

So I went to see Solomon Amac. What should be clear by now is that many fishermen had every reason to feel mistreated in Bor country. Many felt dispossessed and anxious about their future (“The government will move the ancestral people who lived here originally, these local [fisher] people, to another place.”) Solomon was very concerned that I get the story of

“Ngeth Angok, the owner of Mading,” down exactly.

This section contains some fairly substantial chunks of that conversation. I have reproduced it with a fairly broad, only lightly ‘denaturalized’ (Bucholtz 2000) transcription in prosaic blocks rather than poetic lines. I have not represented many speech errors, repairs, or the kinds of phonological details (through nonstandard spelling, &c.) which would convey

Solomon’s accented English. I have transcribed two kinds of oral form discourse markers, however: backchannels and poetic repetitions (which I have stacked in several places, but do not otherwise indicate). The conversation was in English; when Solomon uses Arabic or Dinka

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terms, I have for the most part represented the written-speech forms.99 I’ve also, in a few places, lightly edited Solomon’s English so that he reads more fluently. This was how he sounded to me at the time, when he had the advantage of a nuanced context: we were looking at each other and could nod, grimace, and ask one another clarifying questions; Solomon could echo and evaluate my responses; he could point to various features of the landscape, and we shared a basic knowledge of the region’s history and geography.

Solomon: Can I talk through this here? Brendan: yeah. yeah. Solomon: Nyieth Angong is an original citizen of Yar Adou. Nyeth Angok was originally from Yar Adou, Kolnyang Payam, [a] payam by this day. He came to this Mading when it was bush [uninhabited land]. That was 1882. 1882. [[long pause as I write “…original citizen…1882”]] Yes, 1882. And he just came and he started building shelters in this particular place. He was building his own shelters. Brendan: um-hm Solomon: Yeah. And this place was called buur. Brendan: boor. Solomon: buur—before it could be named as Mading. It was called Buur Anyieth. Buur. [[long pause. I write ‘boor’ in my notebook.]] Let this ‘o’ be a ‘u’. Buur Anyeth Angong. Nyeth Angok is the brother to Kual Anguk. [[pause]] He is the brother to Kual Angong. Then Nyieth came to this Buur because of a certain quarrel with his brother Kual.

Let me quickly explain my orthographic confusion here. On maps and in texts, Bor town and Bor country are indicated by the word “Bor,” which bilingual Dinka-speakers translate as an undulating ‘floody place.’ Solomon clearly said, “buur.” I heard the elongated vowel, but wrote

“boor,” following the conventional spelling. It wasn’t until later, when I asked around about the term, that I learned that the locative of bur, ‘fishing settlement or fishing house’, is buur. I only

99 As opposed to a phonemic transcription: I’ve transcribed written forms (for the most) because my purpose is not to provide Dinka language learners with a study text (cf. Bowern 2008:64), and transcribing the conventional written form of words helps to convey Solomon’s literacy. (I am also not able to transcribe spoken Dinka with much accuracy.) I have spelled names phonetically, for reasons which will become clear. Emphasis is indicated by bold lettering, additional emphasis is indicated by underlined bold lettering. Glosses are indicated by single brackets [italics] and annotations are indicated by brackets [[italics]]. Overlapping speech is indicated by crooked brackets { overlapping speech }.

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worked out Solomon’s claim that ‘Bor’ ought to be spelled ‘Bur’ when I later transcribed the

interview. Writing ‘o’ had ideological and historical implications. Solomon was arguing that the

name “Bor” came from the term buur, ‘fishing village’, rather than from bor, ‘floody place’, which was evidence of Ngeth Angok’s descendant’s rightful “ownership” of Bur town and—by extension—the dispossession of his claim by others.100

Brendan: oo-kay Solomon: yes Brendan: can you tell me about that conflict? Solomon: Yeah. That conflict was about uh… about… a cow, Nayar. They were arguing about a cow, Nayar. Ah. Because that cow belonged to the uncle Garang. Garang Anguk. And when that uncle, Garang, died, he said, lastly, to his elder son [Kual], ‘You divide this cow [i.e., a cow and it’s calf]: you take Yar [the heifer] and take this calf, Nayar, and give it to Nyeth.’ Because Kual was the elder son of Garang’s brother. So after Kual refused to give that calf to [his younger brother] Nyeth, it brought an argument between them. Brendan: mmm, and so then? Solomon: And so then Nyeth defected from his family and came here to Buur. Yes. He came here to Buur. He stayed here for quite a long time. Alone. And this place was bush. Nobody was here. It was the land of no-man, by the way. [Nyeth stayed a long time.] And from there, some missionaries came through this river, and they were staying at Jong—lei, at Jong-k-lei, which is north of Bur town and is called Jongoolei now.101 There was no Mading town then.

100 More precisely, he was suggesting that ‘floody place’ disguised the fishermen’s right to take part in the political life of Bur country. Neither Solomon’s bur ‘fishing village’, nor the more usual ‘floody undulating land’, are implausible candidates for the origin of the place-name. Solomon’s account of the origin is suggestive—after all, bur and bor are not mutually exclusive origins for Buuranyieth ‘Nyeth’s fishing-village’, as Mabior pointed out above (“The British asked him, … ‘What is this place called?’”). But the source of the place-name, ‘Bor’, is the term būr can refer to a port ;[ ور ] complicated by several other factors. In Arabic, Bor is spelled bā-wāw-rā ,( ور ودان ) and būr sūdān ( ور د ) Ar. ‘būr’ > . ‘port’), as in Port Said (in Egypt) and Port Sudan, būr sa‘īd) which is a possible source for the name of the riverside-station after the Upper Nile swamps. The place-name may have been a creolized term which originated from dozens of conversations between multilingual foreigners, their translators, and Bohr’s Dinkaphone residents. I have been following the orthographic convention of spelling .B-o-r” throughout this dissertation“ ور/bohr 101 Compound-ish linked names are formed by turning consonants into ‘ng’ [ŋ]: block tok ‰ bloŋtok (‘block one’); aciɛk dït ‰ aciɛŋdiir (‘big creation’); jok alei ‰ joŋlei (a place-name). In English, compounds are formed tonally: big foot ‰ bígfùt. Jonglei [jok ‘divinity, power’ + alei ‘foreigner, enemy’ (pl. alɛi)] refers to a site called Jonglei some distance to the north of Bur town where there was an epidemic of smallpox among captured slaves which was attributed to a malign power of the foreigners there. In other versions of this story (see below), the red- speckled steer Mading was chosen for sacrifice for the foreign jok because Mading’s color-pattern resembled the color-pattern of smallpox. Bor is the capital of Jonglei State, which takes its name from this site along the White Nile.

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Then these missionaries were quite bitter agents of change. To change the situation. Yeah. And even Nyeth went there [to Jonglei] along the river Nile. He saw in that Jonglei that there were changes: because there was an intellectual group of people [in Jonglei], composed of so many missionaries from Britain. [So Nyeth returned from Jonglei to Bur and thought to himself], ‘How will you call those people to come here [to Bur]?’ So he went to his best friend. His best friend by the name of Barong. Brendan: Barong? Solomon: Yeah. Barong is from Anyidi. [[long pause as I note that down.]] And Nyeth talked to him. He said, ‘Let us make some magical activities to call these people to come to this area.’ Then Nyeth went and brought the bull Mading. Brendan: Barong was a tier? [[diviner (tiet), or beny jok, ‘master of power’]] Solomon: tier, yeah. Brendan: So Nyeth brought him to help him to bring {the missionaries}? Solomon: {to bring the mission}aries. Yeah. [[Solomon quickly added]] Because it was just, uhh—primitive thinking. So Nyeth came up with the bull Mading [[slowly]]—the bull. The big bull. Mading.102 Then the bull Mading was slaughtered there [[--he said, pointing toward #6 on the map above—]], near the Governor’s House. Mading was slaughtered, and they called for those people to come here. Then the missionaries came. After a period of time—the missionaries came. And his house was there—do… do you know in the place of the local government? Brendan: yeah Solomon: The place of the local government [[—nodding toward #5 on the map]], yeah, that was his house. Brendan: of Anyieth? Solomon: Yea—... of Nyeth. Yeah, that was the house of Nyeth, of my grandmother: my grandmother, Amou, the elder wife of Nyeth. And there was another house of our grandmother, Anier Akon. Anier Akon, was the second lady: the second wife of Nyeth. Do you know the position of the [old] prison? Brendan: um-hm [[#5 on the map above]] Solomon: Yeah. That was the luak of Anier Akon. Yes. [[long pause as I write]] When the missionaries came, and he welcomed them, and he told them to erect their camp or shelters—camp? camp. I think so—nearby to his house there.103 So [Nyeth] gave the western part [of his land], which is very close to the river, to the missionaries. And he gave them a bull, Mayen, to welcome them. After the missionaries came and saw that the place was beautiful, they called back to the government to bring the District Commissioner. Then the District Commissioner came, from Malakal, then—… the District Commissioner was in Malakal? No. no. no. Mongalla [[Gondokoro]], put it in brackets. Gondokoro [[across the river from the present-day city of Juba]]. Yes. So one of the District Commissioners was sent there to come and establish the government system.

102 The repetition of ‘bull’, I think, was an effort to hold the floor against some question he expected me to ask about Barong. 103 The triangle formed by #2, #6, and #4 (the south port, the D.C.’s house, and Malek school) encompasses most of the old colonial town plat.

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That was time of Gordon. Charles Gordon the Governor of Sudan at that time, Charles Gordon. And the man who was responsible as ah…, it was called Director of the County at that time, which is in Arabic mudīr mudīrīa [[ ]], that is Dr. Amin from Nimsā, he was in Gondokoro. Dr. Amin. Nimsā. Nimsā, do you know Nimsā, in Europe? Brendan: no I…

Let me take a step back and explain my confusion. It should have been clear enough to me at the time that Solomon was talking about Edouard Schnitzer, known in Sudan as Ahmed

Effendi Emin or Emin Pasha. Schnitzer was born in the Prussian province of Silesia in 1840 and showed up in Khartoum in late 1873/5 “penniless” and looking for work (Hill 1951:333). He was brought along in April 1876 by Gordon Pasha to act as chief medical officer when Gordon succeeded S.W. Baker as the Governor-General of the Equatorial Province.104 Schnitzer was appointed Governor of the Equatorial Province in 1879 and held the post until 1889. My problem was that I didn’t understand the word nimsā, and thought that Solomon might be referring to some other person with a name that sounded like “emin” or a Mahdist government

indicated that a person was official, entrusted (ا) official stationed at Bor. (The term amīn

refers to Austria (Hans Wehr (ا) with some duty or office.) In most Arabics, an-nimsā

1961). It wasn’t until much later that I learned that the old Ottoman Turkish term nèmché ( > nimsā) referred either to the Holy Roman Empire or Prussia.105

Solomon’s story about the founding of Bur, on the other hand, was a conventional account of the founding of a new lineage. A young man breaks away from his family (because of some dispute, or overcrowding, which amounts to the same thing) and moves on to new,

104 For tropical fever Gordon’s men had an infusion of ginger, ipecacuanha (from which ipecac is derived), myrrh, camphor, cinnamon, rhubarb, wood fungus, and some other things, sold as “Dr. Warburg's Fever Drops” (Maclean 1875). For malaria they took quinine. For everything else, they took gin. 105 Which is how it entered Southern —see Sir James William Redhouse’s (1856:1094) An English Turkish dictionary in two parts, english-turkish, turkish-english, in which the turkish words are represent in the oriental character, as well as their correct pronunciation and accentuation shewn in english letters, on the plan adopted by the author in his ‘vade-mecum of ottoman colloquial language …’ (London: Bernard Quaritch). Victorian titles were always straightforward and descriptive and rarely left their readers with many questions other than where the title ended.

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unoccupied lands. After clearing the bush, he founds villages and cattle settlements there; names

the various features of the landscape; and has a number of sons, or attracts ‘settlers’ (abokok) to

whom he gives a cow or bull (“he gave them a bull, Mayen, to welcome them”), and divides up

the land so that each son or settler occupies his or her own section. The family of the first

settlers will be remembered as the ‘owners of the land’ (kɔ c piny) who (ideally) share authority with a second lineage of “power masters” (beny jok), indicated in this story by Barong.

Solomon’s claim, in other words, was that the site of Bur town was “owned” by Mading people, the descendants of Nyeth.

Solomon’s use of present tense constructions (“[Nyeth] gave the western part, which is very close to the river”), other spoken deixis (here, there, now, …), and gestures allowed him to link past actions to the ‘here-and-now’ by way of the bridge afforded by the landscape (Hanks

1990). Indeed, one reason that the geography of place-names was so important to the construction of relatedness and historical memory in Bor town was that it was one of the few kinds of knowledge which everyone who lived there and took part in the town’s life came to share in the process of getting from one place to another—to visit friends and relatives, go to the fish market, and so on. (Accounts of particular family histories and genealogies, in contrast, were often contested, fragmentary, and less widely known. In a moment I am going to argue that they probably wouldn’t be widely known to begin with if they weren’t contested.) This, in turn, provided the ground for a larger claim about history.

Solomon: Nimsā. No I don’t know—how do you call it in English? It is a country there near Britain. When Britain conquered Sudan—let us say Britain or, from ahh… from that nation... They were all European by the way—[The Governor of Sudan] sent one of his own administrators to this Mading. So the name of this Mading came through that bull; yes, which was killed by Nyeth. Then [the British] met with Nyeth and made an agreement. Nyeth agreed immediately to give [the government] this portion of the land [[—Solomon said, with a sweeping gesture for emphasis—]].

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Then Nyeth went to Mading Athiaŋ [[thiaŋ, ‘dry (something), bask in the sun, like a crocodile’]]. Nyeth gave this portion to the government; then he moved to the northern part of Mading which is called Mading again, that place called Laudiet. It’s not Laudiet by the way it is Madingdït: because he went to that place and killed another bull, Mading again, and he called that place Madingdït. And this place will remain Mading Aciek, Mading Aciek, which is the government—the name for government. Mading Aciek, which is Mading for the government. Brendan: Mading Akuma? [‘Mading of the Government?’] Solomon: Mading Akuma. Yes. And, at that time, the District Commissioner said, “I will give you ten houses here in the middle of town, in case you want to stay with me. I will leave a portion of the land, to contain 10 houses for you. [So that you can] be near with me.” Then Nyieth agreed and built ten houses there in marsubit [[> + loc.]], the place which is called Marsabanat [[#5]], where the prison mess for officers is. Solomon: Then Nyeth stayed with the government until 1931.

The ten houses mark the end of the story of the founding of Mading Bor by Nyeth

Angok. Solomon’s narrative called for a map which he generated through a narrative reenactment of journeys made through an older geography but anchored by the colonial landmarks of the 1930s which were still visible in 2009-‘10.106 Using the political geography of

Bor circa 1930 to anchor a story about the 1880-‘90s had the effect of shifting the action a little bit south. For example, Solomon implied that the ox was killed in the vicinity of aciɛŋdiir (the symbolic center of power in the 1880s) but placed the event at the site of the Governor’s house

(the symbolic center of power in 1920 and 2010). While Solomon may have used Bor’s colonial geography to make the story easier for me to follow, or to locate the action in a recognizable past, moving the site of the sacrifice of the ox Mading to the site of the governor’s house was one way in which Solomon anchored his claim political participation in the contemporary town of

Mading Bor.

106 The image (above-right) is a detail from the map that headed this section with the 1930-‘40 colonial town superimposed pretty close to scale (it’s a composite of several sources, the river is not to scale). The big X is an airstrip. #8 indicates the Merol Market (c.2007); #4 marks the spot of Solomon’s office; the old marketplace is just above #2, the port; #5 marks the old prison and police station, government offices, &c.; and #6 indicates the District Commissioner’s House. In 1930-’40 the road was a narrow path. Neem trees still mark the roads laid out after 1905.

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Figure 13. Colonial Bor Town, numbered.

Solomon’s next line begins a second narrative about how the family of Nyeth was marginalized by political events subsequent to the establishment of a government station in Bor in 1875. Once again, he located the story of Loc Deng, one of the chiefs killed at mac köör ajuoŋ, in the spatial and political geography of 1932. By bundling together two distinct time periods, the 1920s-‘30s and the 1890s, across the linear span of history and generations,

Solomon implied that the death Loc Deng in the 1890s bore a relationship to and prefigured later events; the two periods amplified his central point that fishermen had been divided up, again and again, by the spatial organization of government centers under European rule. Historians trying to reconstruct the past often look for linear chronologies. Storytellers are often more interested in crafting a particular image—and, indeed, history serves here as a kind of repertory of examples of the divisions imposed on alternate generations under two periods of British rule.

Solomon: Nyeth stayed with the district commissioners until 1931 [[that is to say that Nyeth’s descendants ‘stayed with the government.’]]. In 1932 there were conflicts between Aliap and Bor, [about] grazing land. That is the land of toic [[seasonally

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flooded grazing-land]]. Here [[—he said, gesturing southwest, toward the river, for emphasis—]]. Solomon: So, at that time there was a system of courts: there is one between Yerol district and Bor district, so the chiefs of Aliab had to come and settle their cases, here [in Bor],—and one in Pariak, which is called Makam, especially during the dry seasons. Makam. Another field court is inside of the Nile in a place which is called Cad Lier, which is Wuol Lier now, where the capital of Awoul Lier is now. So the case was settled between the two district commissioners, between the district commissioner for Yerrol and the district commissioner for Bor. And they agreed that ‘nobody will enter the toic for almost four years. That is the resolution of the two courts’—the Makam field court and the Cad Lier field court. Solomon: So our chief at that time was called Loc Deng. [[short pause]] I forgot a necessary point. Nyeth [had] three sons: the first was called Kol Nyeth, which is my [[great-great-]] grandfather, Kol. Kol Anyeth, the elder son. The second son was Deng Nyeth [[Loc’s father]]; and the third was Nguot-Niny Nyieth [[Nguot Nyin of the Mading Padeng section, was a government chief in 1930.]] These three sons of Nyeth, this elder son, Loc was the head chief of the Nyeth clan. Loc Deng Nyeth was the head chief of Mading Community at that time. And he was even a paramount chief of whole Bor—yeah…

By saying that “Nyeth had three sons,” Solomon was describing the succession of leadership from Nyeth Angok to his son Kol, from Kol to Loc Deng, and from Loc to Nguot-

Niny Nyeth, the government chief in of the Mading Padeng section in 1930. There are, in other words, two parallel narratives unfolding here: one anchored by the genealogy of Nguot-Niny

Nyeth, and another about how Loc Deng was set up to take the fall for the burning of the toic.

Solomon: When the case was settled in the field court, [it was decided that] no one will enter the toic except after 4 years. At that time, those of Bor community violated [the law] after 3 years and went into the toic. They stayed for three months without burning, without putting [any fire to the grass]. When they violated the rule of the two District Commissioners they had gone and stayed in the toic for three months without burning any fire. Yes. After 3 months [however], they burned the whole toic. And the paramount chiefs were with the district commissioner in that house, which is the governor’s house by now. When the district commissioner saw that the smoke was high [visible in the sky], he asked the paramount chiefs, “What is that?” And they all replied, “I don’t know.” Then the district commissioner sent his policeman to check—to see what was there [in the toic]. They came back and reported, “This Bor community has violated the rule of law.”

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Then [all of the] chiefs of Bor were called by the District Commissioner to come and explain, “Who was the person who violated the law?” Then all the chiefs said, “It was the Paramount Chief, Loc, who gave that order.” [Even though] Loc was not there [when the fire was set]. Then the authorities, the authority of the two district commissioners came out with the decision that Loc must be killed for violating the law. [[short pause]] Then Loc was killed. [[quietly, long pause]]

There is again a telescoping of time and space here. Solomon situated the death of Loc

Deng Nyeth in the political geography of post-1922 Bor country—with British commanders in

Bor and Yerrol rather than Mahdi commanders in Bor and Malek, and with the event that led to

Loc’s death described as a violation of an ordinance against crossing the river (a district border)

and burning the toic. These transformations preserved the narrative while locating its action in a

past that was recognizable enough to bear on the present.

Locating the narrated events in the 1930s enabled Solomon to tell a story with a

recognizable geography, cast of characters, and motivations.107 Stories are usually remembered as long as their protagonists’ actions are identifiably consequential for the spoken present. This is why the founder of a territory will tend to be remembered much longer than his sons, for instance. The social landscape is continually transformed by human actions, and the memories attached to places are also transformed in the process. What I want to emphasize here is that one effect of the creation of colonial borders and “tribal territories” was that they reshaped the landscape which anchored human attachments.108 By locating the story of Loc Deng in the oldest geography of Bor town that was still preserved by old colonial buildings, roads, and neem

107 The transformation of a skirmish in the 1890s into a violation of a grass-burning law in the 1930s may have been a kind of euphemism; when older people described the 1850s-1890s, they tended to emphasize that if there was a skirmish, it had been instigated by government soldiers. There was a generational contrast here. When younger people narrated stories that their parents had told them they tended to de-euphemize these conventional images and describe a fight. 108 I noted earlier, for instance, that roads were a salient symbol of colonial borders because they combined an element of violent coercion with a sharp contrast in ways of viewing territorial division—the ordinary way of defining territories focused on points of focal social importance and “moral density” (cattle villages, for instance), while colonial borders were drawn as straight lines, cutting through social ties (this may also help to explain why straight lines were taken up as a symbol of power in the rites surrounding Lierpiou).

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trees, Solomon was able to claim that events which occurred long before that landscape was

constructed still had implications for the present.

Each period, the 1890s and the 1930s had reconfigured alliances in ways that marginalized fishing communities: Mahdist rule shifted the locus of rule in the 1890s south, from

Mading to Anyidi;109 in 1922 Bor country’s fishing communities were divided between the Bor-

Duk District and the Yirrol District to the west; and the present division of ‘greater Bor’ in payams and bomas has effectively scattered fishing communities and made them reliant on the customary owners of the lands which they inhabit as visitors. Indeed, without their own payam and boma, fishermen are effectively foreigners in Bor country. Clearly, the greater and greater importance attached to autochthony with the imposition of ‘tribal territories’ has left the position of fishermen more than a little problematic.

If the death of Loc Deng still stung in 2010, it was not because “[Dinka are unable to] see that the period which had elapsed since an event was at all significant in the attempt to settle a dispute” (Lienhardt 1961:150); rather, the death of Loc Deng mattered because it marked the loss of Mading community authority in Bor country. After all, fishermen were reminded in a thousand little ways in daily life that others regarded them as “local people,” backward hicks, who smelled bad.110 They did not have their own lands or court centers and, indeed, at least one man spared alongside Riak Wai, Chou Alith, was the great grandfather of the Governor of

109 There was also a Mahdist encampment in Ayod (in Jalle payam), which I do not discuss here. 110 Cf. “Our view of the passage of time influences the value we attach to past events far more than is the case for the Dinka.… In the early days of European-type court-procedure among the Dinka, it was found very difficult to persuade them to see that the period which had elapsed since an event was at all significant in the attempt to settle a dispute. Even now, a Dinka may think it unreasonable and unjust that a cattle-debt or an injury of many years’ standing should be less serious as a subject of litigation than an event of the immediate past” (Lienhardt 1961:150&fn.1). While it is true that many people’s reference points tended to be “actual events” rather than an abstract series of “years counted serially,” the idea that this had anything to do with people’s reluctance to disregard long-standing debts and obligations was mistaken. Since the “cattle-debts” of marriage were always expected to last three or four generations, it was unreasonable to refuse to litigate them on the basis of their being old. And: people’s reference points were very often the names of ancestors ‘counted serially.’

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Jonglei state when I was there, Chou Alith Akuai Kuot Ayom, the old

SPLA regional commander of Bor country.

Brendan where was he killed? Solomon: He was killed in Manakör. Manakör which was the headquarters of the court, it was all one boma then [[ruled by a single court]].111 Mac köör ajuoŋ, it’s Loudiet [[#1 on the map]] by now. That was the District Court [then,] by the way. Then the policemen came again and the court was changed from here [in Bur town south] to Anyidi—from Mankör to Anyidi.112 All the authorities were taken out from our hand, the authority was taken out from our hand, we Mading clan [the descendants of Loc]. Brendan: why was all the authority taken away? Solomon: Yes. Because of the violation of the law: the other chiefs came in and said “there is this Loc,” which is why the British became very hostile to the Mading clan. And [the British] divided these sons [the three sections of the Loc clan]: so the three brothers were taken to three places. Col was taken to Anyidi; Deng was taken to Makuac, and part of Deng was taken to Baaidit; [and part was] taken to Makuac… and we have remained [scattered and without a court center of our own] like this since that time. So we are now in Jerol, which is south Mading town, and Nyeth is there in Tueŋgou by now. And it is not changed until now. We are now trying to change: because the SPLM government came up with justice and equality for all marginalized people. So that would give our right back to us—it would give us ownership of this Mading town, and even give us two [court centers, which are based on population]. Solomon: Mading clan is composed with 3 big clans: Kol Nyeth clan, which is in south Mading, and Deng Nyeth is also a big clan, yes, now, about 3 chiefs and they are in the [north]-west part of town, Mading, the third son is Nguot Nyin [[Padeng section, chief of Mading in 1930]], also in the northern part of town, now residing in Tueŋgou Ariik. Deng Loc Languit,113 and also Kol, here, in [the neighborhoods of Bor called] Jerol, Paanliet, Makol, and Mayok [[18 March 2010, WS500183]].

Allow me to pause Solomon’s narrative here and to take a step back and sketch the outlines of Bor town from the early 1830s, when Nyeth Angok arrived, to the late-1880s or

1890s, when Loc Deng Nyeth was killed.

111 Government court centers have been called ‘bomas’ since 1994. 112 Solomon is referring here to the shift from Emin Pasha’s station at Bor town to the Mahdist fort under the command of Arabi Dafaalla roughly 4 miles to the south (the southern mac köör ajuoŋ). In the collection of Emin Pasha’s letters and journals edited and annotated by G. Schweinfurth, F. Ratzel, R. W. Felkin, and G. Hartlaub (1888:526), the location of Emin’s station at Bor when he was Governor of Equatoria (1878-’89) is given as 6° 13' N, 31° 44' E, a spot which falls in Longbaar, just east of the northeast corner of the map which begins this section. 113 Or Lɛŋguet, a long-disused cattle village located at the northeastern extent of aciɛŋdiir. Its hump is overgrown with grass and bordered by tall trees. There is a borehole there now, near an old church. In 2010, carpenters were framing a new church alongside it [nb8, 9 June ‘10].

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Bor under the rule of Dr. Emin

At its broadest, Bor now refers to the surrounding countryside, “Greater Bor,” a strip of territories running from Cuai Kiir (in Gok territory) to Cuai Thon, which borders Nuer territory to the north. At its narrowest, Bor refers to the center of Mading, the town named for a speckled bull which developed around the site of an old fortified slaving-station (the northern site called mac köör ajuoŋ) established in the 1860s by the trading firm al-‘Aqqād & Co. of Khartoum (in

1873, Bor was under the command of “Wat Hojoly”(?)).114 Bor was linked by river and overland routes to Lado (where Emin later established his base) and Rejaf, which was part of the reason why Gordon established a government station there in 1874 and manned it with the old mercenaries of the slave-and-ivory company that had established the site. Romolo Gessi, who accompanied Samuel Baker’s successor, Gordon, to Equatoria, described the Mading Bor in

August of 1874:

From the time that Colonel Gordon had assumed the command of the province, he had established the centre of authority here; the garrison was composed of soldiers, formerly mercenaries of Agat [al-‘Aqqād], who had taken service in the regular army. The governor was a certain man named Walleduille (formerly Vekil [agent] of the same Agat) of gigantic size; he seemed to be made on purpose to hunt down men. I never saw a countenance so manifestly expressive of cruelty and perfidy. Having given the necessary orders, we left this haunt of wolves [Gessi 1892:77].115

114 al-‘Aqqād & Co. [Agad in contemporary documents] of Khartoum acquired the business of a partner, Andrea Debono (Latīf Efendi) from Malta, in 1865. Debono started off in Khartoum as a miller and brickmaker before entering into the White Nile trade in the early 1850s and may have founded the site in the 1850s. al-‘Aqqād & Co. was headed by Muḥammad Aḥmad al-‘Aqqād until his death in 1870, when Muḥammad abū Sū‘ūd Bey al-‘Aqqād [Abou Soud in contemporary documents] took over the company. Samuel Baker writes at length about Abou Sud efforts to oppose his suppression of the slave trade and tried to have him arrested in 1873. Baker’s successor, Gordon Pasha, appointed Abou Soud lieutenant-governor of Gondokoro in 1874 on the basis of his influence but later discharged him for using his position to engage in private trade. “He was appointed director of accounts in the central treasury in Khartoum in 1878” (Hill 1951:275). 115 1874 map detail from C. M. Watson and Richard Strachan (1876)..

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Figure 14. Bor, 1870s.

Romolo Gessi returned to Bor again in July of 1878.

The commander of the station of Bohr was Surur Effendi, a Soudanese officer, who had taken part in the expedition [led by Napoleon III] into Mexico against Juarez.116 But this officer had learnt very little of what concerns military discipline. I was told that he possessed a quantity of slaves. The last time I was at Bohr I had admired the immense extent of land sown with doora [sorghum], not only sufficient for the wants of the station, but also for those of Ladò. The annual crop exceeded 700 erdeb [ardeb > ardabb, roughly 198 liters], with 1,500 oxen captured in various raids, they furnished the means of subsistence, but this station too had fallen into ruins. In place of the doora thorny bushes were growing in the midst of high grass. The inhabitants, decimated, maltreated and led into slavery, were dispersed, and in the station we only found some sickly Dongolese, and disorderly soldiers. Two-thirds of the tukul [houses] were uninhabitable, and the station shared the fate of all the others founded by Gordon Pasha” [Gessi 1892:204-5].

In July 1882, Emin Pasha (1888:437) described the station at Bor amidst growing concerns about the Mahdist revolt against the Turco-Egyptian colonization of Sudan, which had begun in 1881.

116 In 1861, the Mexican government of President Benito Juarez announced a two-year moratorium on loan repayments to Spain, Britain, and France. Emperor Napoleon III (the nephew of the famous Napoleon) invaded Mexico the next year and, after his French troops began dying from yellow fever in the swamps between Orizaba and Veracruz, applied to Muḥammad Sa‘id Pasha (a son of Muḥammad Ali Pasha) for the loan of African slave- soldiers who, he hoped, would be more resistant to tropical diseases. Most of the roughly 500 Ottoman soldiers had been captured from the Nuba mountains, Shilluk, Anuak, and Dinka country. Richard Hill and Peter Hogg narrate the story of the Egyptian Sudanese conscript battalion in Mexico from 1863 to 1867 in A Black Corps d’Élite (1995). The soldier named Surur Effendi mentioned by Gessi is probably Surūr Bahjat who, after returning from Mexico, was posted to the Equatorial Province where he commanded Tawfiqiyya between 1874 and 1876. Hill and Hogg (1995:171) note that by 1882 he had been transferred north (presumably by Emin Pasha). See also Ravert et Dallard. Historique du Bataillon nègre…—Revue d’Egypt t. 1, Cairo 1894; Memoirs of a Sudanese Soldier (Ali Effendi Gifoon). The Cornhill Magainze New Series, vol. I. London 1890.

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Emin no doubt wanted to embroider his success as governor, but here he is also drawing a

contrast between events in the north and the relatively placid situation in the south.

The station of Bor was, as usual, in a very neat and clean condition; it is surrounded by extensive gardens, and its garrison lives on the best footing with the thousands of Negroes who reside in the neighbourhood, and who have learnt to feel like men since I drove the Danagla [Sudanese soldiers] from this place, and so put an end to the slave- trade here. The Government, too, has gained materially by this transaction, for the tax in grain, the only tax which I have imposed, has been almost doubled in amount. The people, who formerly left their homes, and who preferred to lead a miserable life as fishers on the numerous islands in the river, rather than lose their children, have gradually returned home, and have recommenced to cultivate extensive stretches of land which they had left lying fallow. The whole district between Bor and Lado on the west bank of the river, is an almost unbroken line of villages and huts, and even where the Dinka give place to the Shir (who are Bari), new fields and plantations have started into existence. All that is needed is to protect the Negro population, and unrelentingly to prevent the old razzias for men and cattle; the Negroes will themselves see to the spreading and increase of the population. The Dinka, who possess large herds, were once the most oppressed of the natives, and now they have already extended far beyond their original boundaries.

Two years later, in July 1884, Bor was still held by soldiers under Emin Pasha’s

command. By December, Emin received word that “our men in Bōr had been nearly

exterminated in a foraging raid” (2 Jan 1885, pg.474). “[T]he garrison at the river-station of Bor was besieged by Nuer and Dinka tribes. United under the leadership of a prophet called Donlutj, the besiegers ‘behaved like Dervishes and wore rosaries’ (Gray 1961:161; citing Emin’s dairies, vol. iii 26/XII/84). Emin sent reinforcements by barge, but in a letter to G. Schweinfurth on the

1 of December, 1885, he wrote that Bor had to be “given up for lost.”

On [November] 30th, the barges which had been sent to Bor returned without having effected anything, for the officers there had refused to give up Bor, because they had too many people belonging to them to march by land, and the barges at their disposal were too small and too few. They now asked for a reinforcement of three hundred men and large quantities of ammunition, neither of which I was able to give them. The vakïl of the mudirië [agent of the government at the post] was satisfied with this answer, and brought me an inventory, from which it appeared that each officer had thirty to forty persons in his household. Bor must therefore be given up for lost [1888:477].

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By 1887-’88, Mahdist troops under the command of ‘Umar Ṣāliḥ (later killed in a battle

against Belgian forces at Rajaf in 1897) had occupied Bor, where they remained after retreating from Rajaf in 1891. A number of the Ottoman mercenaries at Bor joined the Mahdists. Over the course of the next two years, Mahdist positions near Bor were reinforced (see Collins 1962:84-5,

164-9). But this was only one political dynamic of a complex web of regional alliances and divisions among the various people there. Slave- and –ivory merchants allied with their former slaves, and Mahdist troops were just one among many colonial armies and irregular militias in the region. While people in the vicinity of Bor were at times pressed into alliances with Mahdist troops against their Dinka- and Nuer-speaking neighbors (D.H. Johnson 1993b), there were continual skirmishes between Mahdists and Dinka which “more often than not ended in defeat for the Mahdists” (Collins 1962:167). In 1896, pressed by Belgian advances from the south,

Mahdist troops attempted to reopen the old slave- and ivory-route NE from Bor to Khor Fulluth with the help of Dinka allies “and were massacred by the Gaawar Nuer” (DH Johnson 1993b:46; see also DH Johnson 1993a).

Whenever people described the late Turco-Egyptian and Mahdist eras to me, they mentioned that raiding parties were always digging up people’s graves, looking for grain hidden there. During the famines of 1888-92, Mahdist foraging parties based in Equatoria subjected people there to regular raids. Several elderly men in Biong country told me that people had, indeed, buried grain during this period of famine in an effort to hide it. The Turco-Egyptian,

Mahdist, and Anglo-Egyptian governments imposed taxes, which could be paid in cash, livestock, or grain mainly to encourage a market in ivory and grain: because it was much simpler and less dangerous to buy cattle and grain to feed soldiers than it was to kidnap people and ransom them for rations and ivory.

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• • • Precise alignments and entanglements are not what I want to underline here. It is clear from Solomon’s account that Loc Deng was framed. What I want to emphasize is not so much why Loc was set up, but rather what wider significance that event held for Solomon. It is obvious enough from Solomon’s own account why Loc was framed: he was cooperating with the

Turkiyya under Emin Pasha’s irregular command.

I was talking to my friend Mabior a few hours after I left Solomon’s office and I mentioned what Solomon had said about how Loc Deng had been set up to take the fall for the grass-fire. “The people agreed beforehand [to frame him],” Mabior said. “Whenever the British found something out, people would ask, ‘who told this secret?’ and the answer was ‘Loc Deng.’

He was the one working with those British at mac köör ajuoŋ, killing people.” Thus, when

Mahdist soldiers occupied Bor country, they provided an opportunity to get rid of one of the old allies (an ‘informer’, thiaidït, lit. scatter + big) of the Turco-Egyptian forces that had been stationed there.

Solomon drew a parallel between the 1890s, when Loc was killed, and 1931, when indirect rule was formalized. On both occasions Thɔny families who had allied themselves with colonial governments in Bor were betrayed when more influential allies presented themselves.

(Solomon underlined Dr. Amin’s European genealogy (“a country there near Britain …—let us say Britain … They were all European by the way”) and his role in the Turco-Egyptian government in order to connect the Equatorial colony established in 1871 to the Anglo-Egyptian

Sudan of 1900 to 1955.) Following the “re-conquest,” of Sudan in 1899, British administrators sought alliances with individuals with influence or who occupied strategic positions: people who had worked with slave-and-ivory companies in Bor in the 1850s; those captured by Turco-

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Egyptian or Mahdist forces to work as translators and soldiers; and people who occupied one of

many pre-colonial positions of authority and influence, beny baai.117

While there are clearly mythological elements in Solomon’s account. One reason that it is difficult to weigh it against contemporary documents is that Thɔny do not appear very often in contemporary colonial records. While Charles (“Chunky”) Armine Willis Governor of the

Upper Nile Province, for example, listed Akol Ajuot as the chief of Famou section of the Mading

Thɔny in his handing over notes of 1931; Akol Ajuot was not mentioned in the “personality reports” of Bor-Duk District chiefs. Willis hardly mentions Thɔny at all—except to comment that “the Moin-Thain (Monythain) Dinka who live in the marshes almost entirely on fish and hippo are barely human (C.A. Willis (1931[1995]:389).

The reason for the absence of fishermen in colonial records is obvious enough. When faced with an attempt to impose violent rule, a typical response almost everywhere of people who are not dependent upon violent rulers for their livelihoods is to try to escape predation and go on living their lives as before, often by moving someplace else (Scott 1985, 2009). Nyeth

117 “Mabur Ajuot Atong [Mahbub Agwot in British documents] was working as a soldier. He learned Arabic. When the British came they followed what those who knew Arabic said,” a man from Duk Padiet (Duk Duɔɔr) was telling me in May, 2010. “Mabur Ajuot [and two other men] went to Mongalla. When they reached Mading it belonged to the Thony. They met the people of Anyeth Anguk and they talked about the problems with the Nuer. They found the British and reported the problem with the Nuer and the British began in Bor and went to Pawel and opened a police station and named it Nupta, in Twic East. They made a station there and then went to the Nuer” (nb3, 3 May 2010). Mabur Ajuot had been an ally of the Egyptians. In the 1890s, “he found his paternal homeland along the Bahr el-Zeraf under Gaawar occupation” (DH Johson 1993:120). He settled in Twic East and in 1902 managed to instigate a government patrol against the Luo Nuer prophet Ngundeng. His son, Moinkwer Mabur was recognized as a government chief of Ghol until 1930 and of Angai country in 1931 (see DH Johnson 1982b:136-7, fn24, 25) and Deng Laka and Mut Roal: Fixing the Date of an Unknown Battle (1993b:120)). DH Johnson notes that the presence of the old Dinka allies of the Egyptians and slavers among the soldiers of the British patrol no doubt made a strong impression on the Nuer whom they attacked. In 1902, Hawker wrote that “The Nuers are now threatening reprisals on account of the expedition against Dengkur, not so much because of the Government expedition, but because Dinkas with the column burnt the villages” (G. Hawker, Officer commanding the Xth Sudanese, SIR No.98, 1st to 30th Sept., 1902, pg.5 (Claude Julian Hawker Bey, commanded (1899-1909) the 10th Sudanese Camel Corps before becoming the military governor of Baghdad (1916-’18)). The man from Duk Padiet whom I’ve quoted above may have exaggerated Mabur’s role in the Anglo-Egyptian patrol against Ngundeng. He made this claim after the elections in Sudan which had marginalized the people of Duɔɔr who claim founder status in Duk Padiet payam.

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Angok had apparently “agreed immediately” to give some of his land to the government—he’d

even built some houses for the soldiers stationed there—and then relocated some distance away.

Since Thɔny did not grow grain and were in no position to pose much of a threat to the soldiers, the soldiers were not obliged to take them into account. As a result, it is much easier to glean the old archives for the personalities of those who were the targets of slave- and ivory-traders, tribute and grain taxes. Cattle keepers could hide their cattle and bury their grain, but when their children were stolen and held ransom for grain and ivory, they had few options but to attack or try to defend themselves by making alliances.118

Indeed, when older people spoke about the resistance their ancestors had put up against raiders they did not suggest that it was a matter of armed resistance. Most people laughed when

I suggested that people had attacked Mahdist troops. A direct attack would be suicidal. (“They had guns!”) If you couldn’t get away like the fisherman had, if your children had been stolen, say, one could try to form an alliance. One could perhaps try to lure unwanted intruders into relations of sacrifice and exchange which would end up rendering them much less dangerous by forcing a kind of dialogue or, even better, so hopelessly entangled that they were unable to move at all. This was the approach illustrated by the story about Bӓӓr (lit., “tall,” “come!”) which started out like a slave-and-ivory trader, ordering people around and demanding human sacrifices, and ended up wholly objectified: feared like an oppressive force by merely wood and leather that was entirely under human control. (And like Riak Wai’s rosary called alakbar, the drum Bӓӓr evoked the materiality of discourse.) What people emphasized instead was a kind of

118 “Each Dinka group reacted to the Anglo-Egyptian presense according to their own local situation. The weaker and peace loving sections unreservedly embraced the Condominium Government as their protector while the stronger and aggressive ones reviled the Government as an ally of their enemies” (Mawut 1983:45). One reason that betrayal is such a common theme in accounts of colonial governments (and contemporary neo-colonial governments) is that those marginal groups which “embraced the Condominium Government” were, after an initial alliance, further re-marginalized through colonial efforts to co-opt those “stronger” groups which posed a greater threat.

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rebellious “obstinacy,” as Maja Frykman (1997:79) put it, “aimed at preserving everyday

integrity” by maintaining a “material link to [a] prior life.”

By drawing terrifying ‘outside’ forces into a society formed by human beings working

together, they could be transformed into something manageable. If, by carrying Bӓӓr, people

were dramatizing their own oppression, the ability to do so provided them with a way to take back the capacity to act collectively and, perhaps, to regain the ability to define what kinds of projects people could undertake together.119 Indeed, armed resistance was typically the method of last resort. In a letter to Khairi Pasha about the occupation of Bor, for instance, Gordon noted that he ordered the planting of sorghum because the main source of conflict in the area, in 1874, was his soldiers, who were provoking attacks by looting and kidnapping. “Tous les guerres qu'on a eu avec les noirs ne viennent pas d'autre chose que la manque des provisions on m'a dit que les noirs jamais ont commencé l'attaque, cétait seulement en défense de leurs vaches qu'ils ont battu dans une manière assez faible. J'ai ordonné qu'on seme le Dhorra tout de suite, et heureusement il était justement la saison pour la semence” (Gordon, 5 May 1874, reproduced in

Shukry 1953:145).

At the same time, however, Solomon was also describing a betrayal which was parallel to

Rev. Daniel’s and MG’s observation (above, pp. 129) that, whatever Southerners do, they always seem to end up getting treated like “11th class citizens”—a few NGOs show up and dig wells and open primary schools, but still there were only two geologists. The people who joined the

Mahdists against the British in the 1890s were taken on as chiefs in the 1900s and ended up with the governorship, while Solomon’s family ended up scattered, without land or a court center.

119 I’m drawing here on Paolo Virno’s idea of “engaged withdrawal.” The best introduction to this approach is in David Graeber’s (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. See also James Scott’s (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed and Peter Wilson’s (1992) Freedom by a Hair’s Breath.

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Like Philip Awou, though, Solomon was also asking me to authenticate a particular account and to dispute alternative versions of Bor country history. Before I can discuss how people placed themselves in history and society through stories about the past, however, I need to introduce an alternative account of the founding of Bor town.

• • • Many people living in Bor country referred to the town plat as “Jonglei state” to

distinguish it from of the surrounding countryside, paanjieng, ‘people’s land’, where decisions

about land tenure were made by processes of consensus. There were a number of reasons, I

think, why so many people readily admitted the priority of fishermen’s claims on Bor town

[NB2, 12 Feb 2010, 4 Feb ’10, 12 Feb ’10; nb8, 30 June ‘10]. One reason was that most of the

people I spoke to were from other parts of Bor country, and the fishermen’s claim to Bor town

did not overlap their own. But for people whose claims to land did overlap with the fishermen’s,

the issue of priority was much sometimes more salient.

An illustration might be useful.

I first met Aciek Kual completely by accident in May, 2010. Together with Jol, an uncle

of a man I knew in the United States, I was in Pariak (Kolnyang Payam) to carry a message to

Abeny’s mother that he was planning to come to Bor. Jol insisted that we sleep in a little

roadside restaurant near the army barracks because there had been a cattle raid a few nights

before. Aciek was a soldier posted there. He was a stout man, perhaps a little short by Bor

country standards, and he wore a floppy wool ivy cap. He could manage pretty well in Dinka,

Juba Arabic, and English. He spoke fluently, switching between the three languages and—like

Solomon—he simplified his speech slightly by adding particles and final consonants which a Bor

speaker would ordinarily elide. We shared a huge, long-barbled black catfish and he told me

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how he had joined the SPLA and explained something that he’d learned during the war: it is not

very difficult to create lasting divisions, really, if you can kill people.

I was living in Bor town, then, on 16 May 1983. During that time, yes: I was running, I ran away with the people going to Bilpam [an SPLA training camp in Ethiopia]. Me myself, I was the one who started. I was one of the first.

I asked him about the split of the SPLA in 1991.

In 1991 I was in Nasir. I left Ethiopia in 1984. In 1991, I was with Lam Akol, ,… and the rest. Lam Akol [from Shulluk country] just started it. He said, ‘The big tribes are Nuer plus Dinka and the Shulluk are few. I cannot lead them if they are not fighting themselves.’ So he deceived Riek Machar. He deceived Riak Machar by telling him ‘You. You are a good leader, a better leader than John Garang. Think about it.’ He called Riek Machar, and said, ‘John Garang cannot lead us. So everyone must sign [on]. And if someone refuses to sign, then they can kill [that person].’ Ah. Riek killed more than 3,000 Dinka, Commanders, … so many people, so many people. Riek killed so many—it was a genocide, as you’ve heard, a massive killing—women, all, and young… so at that time, women were killed. So. We ran out from that government of Lam Akol first and Riek Machar second. We ran out and joined John Garang. We were in that place in 1992, up to 1993 up to now. I was here, around Bor, because the Omar Bashir soldiers were here in town. So we used to fight with them every day.

And that was the main problem with armies, Aciek was telling me: it is easy to create divisions if you could convince others to kill people. By flattering Riek Machar, Lam Akol managed to orchestrate an attack on Bor by a largely Nuer force. To be sure, Bor was an SPLA stronghold; but the attack accomplished something much more enduring than a military defeat.

After 1991, there were thousands of people who were distraught for a thousand individual reasons, but what all those painful moments had in common was that they had been caused by people under the command of Riak Machar from a small part of Nuer country.

Later that evening, I mentioned that I was interested in the history of Bor town. The story of Mading presupposes an earlier story cycle about the events leading up to the sacrifice of the ox, Mading, which gives the town its name. These were: [1] a fight at a place called Ajak

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Baker, accounting for its name; [2] Turkey’s arrival and the outbreak of smallpox there; and [3]

Turkey’s departure. When I asked Aciek to narrate the story of Mading, he summarized these

three stories before turning to [4] the main narrative. After that he added another event, [5] the

story of Akoiny Beny, to explain why people call Bor town ‘Mading Nyeth Angok.’

[[I turned on my audio recorder, WS500210]]120 Aciek: Yeŋo car ba luel? [what do you want me to talk about?] Brendan: about bor, akokol mading. [the story of mading] Aciek: akokol amading—mading aa mading a number arou ne Jonglei, cok. ee number two Jonglei cok amading. [‘the story of Mading. [Mading] is number two, there is Jonglei, first. Mading is number two, Jonglei leads Mading.’] Jol: Mading is second {to Jonglei} Brendan: {right.} {um-hm) Aciek: {is second to Jonglei} because the [first] town was in Ajak Baker. {Yes.} atɔ town Ajak Baker, te col Ajak Baker. [he was in that town Ajak Baker, called Ajak Baker] Jol: when he was there in Ajak Baker [1] Aciek: Ajakbaker… raan ee col, uhhhh, Ajak Paakeer. [Ajak Baker… a person named, uhhhh, Ajak Pakeer] Brendan: {pakeeer} Aciek: {Ajak pakeeer} Jol: { yeah} somebody called Ajak Pakeeer Aciek: Yïïn ëke atɔ atënë, yiin këya thɔr kene jur col ciec etɛn…{so——} [he was there and he had a fight with black foreigners, Ciec, there.] Jol: {he went} there and {fought} with those of Aciek: {ke tɛɛ r} [fought] Jol: Ciec Brendan: with Ciec? Aciek: ke tɛɛr eepiny yetɛn [he fought someone to the ground] Jol: Ciec is a community. There was a dispute about that area. They are now in Bhar al Ghazal. When Ajak knocked people there it came to be called Ajak Paker. [’yes‘ هأ ] Aciek: yes. īwa [2] So now that jok was killing those people called Paker, all of them. So when Ajak Paker killed that person, there, in Ciec, they were all called Paaket [[> paan ‘land’ + ‘Aker’]]. That was when Turkey came, and stayed in that place, and sat there. Turkey made it a capital, like Bor town.

120 I have transcribed my own questions and backchannels up through to the end of [1], and Jol’s commentary up to the explanation of the name Jonglei (Jol: … it is from other people / Aciek: yes) in order to provide a sense of how the audience shapes storytelling. When Aciek is speaking, I italicize words spoken in Dinka which I’ve translated into English. Annotations are in [[ double square brackets ]], and overlapping speech is indicated by { crooked } brackets.

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Jol: When a sickness came that is called, {eh… measles} Aciek: {en col [it’s called] second} chicken pox second chicken pox, actually en col akoi, yes koi e jong rac [called akoi, yes, koi is a bad power] Aciek: So [Turkey] wanted to leave [kor bi jal]. Jol: Turkey was about to go back, to leave, because that sickness was about to finish them, to complete their lives. [3] Aciek: So Turkey called the people living around that place and said, ‘We are about to leave now. We want to leave, to go to Bahr al-Ghazal: because this sickness will finish us completely. So now we will leave Ajak Paker.’ And the people that stayed around there accepted and said, “Okay, go,” because they knew that the sickness might finish them too. [4] Then Turkey went to the Bor leaders and said that they were leaving. A certain leader from Koc, Kang Ariik, the superior leader among the leaders there, asked them, ‘Why do you want to leave? Why do you want to go to Bahr al-Ghazal?’ So Turkey answered Kang, ‘This {sickness} will finish use completely, that is why we want to go away.’ Jol: {this disease} So Kang asked them, where do you want to go, and they said, ‘We want to go to Bahr al-Ghazal.’ Aciek: Then Kang answered, ‘This jok does not belong to us. It belongs to Bahr al- Ghazal. So you want to go to Bahr al-Ghazal, but it came from Bahr al-Ghazal. You’re making a big mistake.’ Jol: Then in that time Kang answered, ‘this satan [jok] or this disease [bec] does not belong us.’ Aciek: But this disease, akoi de mior de mading or mabior macuac [“smallpox of the bull of red-speckled or white spotted bull,” Kang said] Jol: ‘This disease should be treated whenever you kill a bull with a different color.’ ‘That is how it will leave you.’ Brendan: Yes. uh-hu … Aciek: you see. Aciek: J—O—N—G ee Jong. ku lɛ i L—E—I. Jong Lɛ i nee thong de Jiang. Thong- booor. [“J—O—N—G is Jong. and lɛi L—E—I. Jong Lɛ i here in the language of Jiang. The language of booor.”] Jol: They tried to put a word to make a description against {that} [disease/jok]121 Aciek: {yes!} Aciek: Like Jonglei: Jong Lɛi It’s not called Jongoolei it’s called Jong{lei }. {In Bor dialect} Jol: {That} satan does {not belong to} us, it is from other people122

121 The divination and cure of most diseases involves a symptom and a causal agent (much like the English word “cold,” which suggests certain symptoms and an agent). Here, the disease (smallpox) is diagnosed as a foreign Power and a certain spotted cow (mading) is matched to a symptom and killed to remove it. 122 I’ve been translating alei ‘foreigner, enemy’ (pl. alɛi) after Nebel (1957). In the context of “Jongalɛi” it has this sense of “antagonistic foreigner” but it can also just mean ‘somebody else’s’—as in kalei ‘somebody else’s thing’ or ‘teleponalei ‘somebody else’s telephone’.

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Aciek: yes

People reacted in all sorts of ways to unfamiliar situations involving foreigners with recording devices, partially because such situations were so often unpredictable and marked by steep inequality (this was one reason why I did not usually record informal conversations).

When I collected oral histories, I was usually accompanied by my friend Madit, or one of a number of other young men, like Jol, whom I traveled around with. I would record a narrative in

Dinka interleaved by my friend’s running translation in English. While most people in Bor could manage in Arabic if they needed to, and many people who had lived in Kenya or Uganda could switch between English, Arabic, and Dinka, I adopted this method because people usually included more details when speaking mainly in Dinka.123 Usually there were many people talking at once; storytellers would debate genealogical relations and who-did-what-where, and correct my assistants. People in Bor also asked me to record events that were public and memorable with my camera and audio recorder: marriage negotiations, wrestling matches, celebrations, prayers, interviews with elderly priests, and so forth.124

The ‘context’ of any speech event emerges in part through negotiations between participants. Recording interviews had the effect of making their repeatability in other contexts explicit. Philip and Solomon continually assessed the discourse that was emerging from our conversation. Each embedded a metanarrative commentary on his own ancestor’s story. Philip emphasized that “[Riak Wai] practiced Islam in a traditional way,” and Solomon underlined

Nyeth Angok’s “primitive thinking.” Both used the category of “traditional religion” to imply a

123 Running translations provided by Madit, Jol, and others also introduced dynamics of intergenerational communication into my interviews. Just as people often tried to embed explanations of cultural practices into the stories which they told to me, older narrators also often had to explain older social divisions and practices to younger interviewer/translators. 124 Since the actual exchange of cattle promised in matrimonial negotiations often took decades to accomplish, people have begun taking notes during the discussion anyway. One reason for this was that matrimonial speech was meant to be repeatable.

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decisive break with the past for opposite reasons: Philip to head off the suggestion that Riak

Wai’s beads indicated a contemporary religious alignment, Solomon to carve out a category of

religion that was separate from and different to political alliances. Unlike Aciek, neither Philip

nor Solomon recounted the story in a mythical register. Each was attached to his claim.

Aciek also assessed the story as it was emerging and approached the problem of

translation a little differently. He began by mapping out a situation and a cast of characters

armed with certain motivations and abilities which could be taken for granted: the residents of

Ajak Baker and some Turkish soldiers, all of whom are afflicted by smallpox, some chiefs in Bor

country, and Kang Ariik, who could rid the Turks of the jok that afflicted them. Having set up

the situation, he then went on to speculate about how the present situation could have come

about through the interplay of these characters. Turkey was dying off and set out to leave, much

to the relief of the residents of Ajak Baker; and Turkey would have left were it not for the

wisdom of Kang. He also encouraged his audience, Jol and me, to move the narrative along and

to help to construct it by asking questions or assenting. For example, Jol underlined Kang’s

reasoning that a speckled ox (“mading or mabior makuac”) was suited to remove a specked jok

(smallpox) with a loose cultural translation: “They tried to put a word to make a description

against {that} [disease/jok]”. And Aciek picked up Jol’s annotation as an illustration (“{yes} /

Like Jonglei …”) to highlight Kang’s reasoning in his response to Turkey by emphasizing the place-name as “a description [a word] against” Turkey’s plan to go to Bahr al-Ghazal (Jonglei < jok ‘divinity, power’ + alei, ‘foreign’). Through repetitions of elements of Jol’s running commentary, and by pausing occasionally, he allowed his audience to move the story along.

Jol [[translating Aciek’s last line]]: When they came back to Athoic [from Jonglei], Athoic refused, ‘Why you bring this satan? Please. You leader, Kang Ariik. We have

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already refused this satan. You have to leave, and it is your problem alone: this problem you’ve made by bringing that joŋ alɛi. ,’trenches‘ ق < ]] Aciek: So they went to Palek, and they chose a place called Kándák the site of the southern zariba called mac köör ajuoŋ]]. They only stayed there for a short time before those people of Palek said, ‘No, not in our area. You cannot stay here unless you Kang, unless you slaughter a bull there where you’ve settled, that way…’ So the color of the bull was Mading. Aciek: Then Kang said, ‘You Koc community, you bring a bull, in order to sacrifice for this jok, so that we can be well again.’ Then, in that time, the community called Koc said, ‘Now you Payak, give us a bull because we found you in this area.’ Payak Clan. Then Payak, a certain clan in Koc, gave a bull. It was somebody named Liet Nyii who gave the bull. He brought the bull called Mading, with the color Mading. Jol: yeah, write it like that. Aciek: So that bull was the child of Ciir Guk. Mading Ciir Guk. [[Cattle lineages are traced matrilineally.]] They killed that bull so that the sickness would go away Jol: They killed it in order to cast [off] that sickness from Turkey. Aciek: {go bec go jal} [then the sickness left] Jol: The {sickness left} and Turkey remained free. Aciek: When Turkey took over that place, the sickness had already left. And when they took over the place, Turkey gave Aliet a piece of land, which is now called Paanliet, in Bor town. And then Kang was changed and Liet was changed also, they went back to the village. Jol: You see, whenever you are done with your job you should go back. So they went back. Aciek: And the son of Kang Ariik took his father’s place. Ariik Kang Ariik took over the leadership. And Ariik Kang remained as the leader. [[Long pause]]

Aciek paused here. He had ended the story cycle by sending the chiefs home, “back to the village.” I asked about Liet. Solomon had mentioned Liet in his account (above) and identified him as the fisherman after whom Paanliet ‘home/land of Liet’, was named. When I asked about Liet, Aciek reversed Solomon’s version in order to account for the identification of

Mading fishermen with an ox called Mading, after which the town is named.

Brendan: what about Liet Nyii? Jol: what about Liet? Aciek: And the son of Liet, Mapier Liet Nyii, took his father’s place, at that time. [5] Then So. At that time, the time of Ariik Kang Ariik. I think you know Paanmacuar. In Paanmacuar there is a certain tree between between Degroot and Paanmacuar, near

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the junction. You will get a tree called Akoi there. The people gather there, all the leaders, the koc ke bany [[the big people]]. So. During that year of Akoiny Beny [tree of the leaders], that was the time when Nyeth Angou came to organize his Gol community. He was fighting with people in Kolnyang Payam. And he came to Akoiny Beny [[the tree]], and was caught by that sickness there. Bec en col joŋ lɛ i [the sickness called jok lɛ i]. Jol: He came there to Gol when he fought with his uncle or parents, I don’t know. And he came and sat there under that tree, and was caught by that sickness, by that joŋ lɛi, that sickness from outside. And what is the solution there? [[laughing]] Aciek: When Nyeth Angou was caught by that sickness, he tried to ask for help. He said, ‘Please, chiefs, ask the civil administrator of Turkey to please bring another bull of this color Mading to help me.’ But the son of Kang, said, ‘It is no longer my job. So let this be an opportunity for Deng Atho.’ So Deng Atho is from Palek, a leader of Palek. Deng Atho brought Mading again—the second Mading, for curing Nyeth. So. The joŋ lɛi number two was released for Nyeth Angok. And from that time up until now, there has been no joŋ lɛi again in Bor town: because of these two bulls of the color mading. So now we say, ‘Mading Nyeth Angou.’ Mading has many people now, like 4 chiefs or 3 chiefs, maybe. So now we call them Thain ka Mading: because the first mading is the Mading for Turkey and second Mading is for Nyeth Angot. So that is why we call them Thain ka Mading, yes. Aciek: “And from that time up until now, there has been no joŋ lɛi again in Bor town: because of these two bulls of the color mading.”

I’ve placed Aciek’s final line in quotation marks (“And from that time up until now, …”) because it is a conventionalized ending for legends, folklore, and trickster tales. Stories about land claims were usually expected to be a little antagonistic, because a storyteller is expected to praise his own ancestors’ achievements. Indeed, the conflict implied by alternative versions is part of what makes stories interesting and memorable enough to be circulated from person to person and to endure over time.125 Aciek’s story about the leaders’ tree was a well-known

125 I owe this point mainly to Madit’s uncle, Mabior, who would often say “because it will bring a story” when I asked why someone did something [nb2, 17 Feb ‘10]. He wasn’t brushing me off. Events which were meant to be memorable usually involved a performance of mock conflict because, Mabior said, that was the kind of thing people would talk about. Matrimonial negotiations were typically staged as little contests with all kinds of dramatized hostility. This was most apparent when there was a marriage between neighborhoods who saw one another on a daily basis and would, in daily life and other ritual contexts, refer to one another as kin. The ritual frame of the negotiations cast the people who sat opposite one another as antagonistic strangers. (Indeed, the division was necessary for an exogamous marriage.) And, for some time afterwards, people would do all of the things that anthropologists call ‘avoidance’ (they wouldn’t eat with one another, etc…) until certain key acts of

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alternative to Solomon’s version of the story which most people I spoke to said was a little bit

hackneyed. Jol afterwards suggested to me that Aciek tacked on the conventionalized endings

(“so now we say… / and from that time…”) between a conventional way of saying that so-and-so

was the owner of a place (“Mading has many people now”) to distance himself from the version he was expected to tell and to leave an opening for others to interject alternatives. He was, after all, Kang Ariik’s great-grandson. His authority to tell the story at all depended in part on telling the version that adopted the perspective of his ancestor.

These stories form an overlapping series from the founding of Bor town through two colonial regimes. Here is another map and brief summary of the accounts indicating the different stakes that were at play in each.

SOLOMON AMAC wanted me to tell the story of the marginalization and betrayal of the Thony. Throughout our conversation he emphasized political continuities extending from the 1890s, through the 1930s, to the present, eliding the differences between periods which historians have tended to separate, the Turkiyya, Anglo-Egyptian, and post- colonial governments. Solomon downplayed what he called the “primitive thinking” upon which his family’s claim to Bor town was partially based in order to insist that, really, not much had changed. I got the impression from Solomon’s account that he mentioned the bull, Mayen, which “[Nyeth] gave … to welcome [the missionaries],” partially in order to emphasize the political dimension of sacrifice: bulls were as often a part of opening up or strengthening alliances with people—through marriages, exchange and guest-host relations. (He started to explain how Jonglei came by its name “Jong— lei, at Jong-k-lei,” but thought better of it.)

PHILIP AWOU wanted me to counter Rev. Daniel’s allegation that Riak Wai’s possession of a rosary and his father’s capture as a slave was akin to conversion to Islam (or, perhaps, evidence of an alliance with the Mahdist government). Where Solomon downplayed the “traditional” aspects of his family’s history (emphasizing, instead, the continuity of political dimensions of alliances), Philip emphasized discontinuity by locating Riak Wai’s actions in an unrecognizable past; Riak had “practiced Islam in a traditional way,” Philip said, underlining his father’s prophecy, and drawing a comparison between the “beads called alakbar” and “the idols” which were burned in 1992. I didn’t push Philip to tell me more about Riak Wai. Like many people I spoke to, Philip wanted me to record names in my notebook.

kinship had been performed. (I’ve already mentioned the emphasis placed on detachability of marriage speech (entextualization) by agamloŋ).

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Aciek Kual’s version of the Mading story faced a number of challenges. The main challenge was the geography of Mading Bor; it is, he noted, commonly called “Thainy Bor” and full of fisherman place-names. Aciek is Kang Ariik’s great-grandson and based the authority of his own version of the story on the evidence of two genealogies: (1) he told me that his father took him around and narrated the history of Bor in each spot; and (2) the genealogy of the first bull Mading, Mading Ciir Guk, which was an assertion of his knowledge of the bull’s origins. In Solomon’s story, the first Mading was killed in the vicinity of #6 and the second in the vicinity of #1 & #9 (at Madingdït). However, in this account Aciek was much more concerned with the collaborative construction of the narrative than the particular version which emerged. While he was not particularly attached to it, the first Mading was again anachronistically killed in the vicinity of #6, but the second bull Mading was slaughtered between #10 and #11, just inside Anyidi Payam, a place claimed by the descendants of Kang Ariik.

Here is another map of Mading Bor (Adapted from a 2005 USAID rapid assessment baseline map (Map 821 Bor C).) with many details removed and Payam Boundaries added where people usually placed them.** (1) north port, a neighborhood popularly called Laudiet (or, less commonly, Madingdït), which extends north to #9; (2) south port; (3) wet season extent of the khor called aciɛŋdiir and the northern extent of the neighborhood commonly called Hai Salaam or aciɛŋdiir, which runs from #3 SW to the road; (4) Malek Secondary School, where ( م) Solomon and Philip worked; (5) the old prison, prison-mess, police station, and site of Anier

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Akon’s cattle byre; (6) Governor’s House / District Commissioner’s House (the symbolic center of government); (7) County Admin. compound, where Daniel had his office; (8) Merol Market; (9) Listic; (10) Macuar junction or Paanmacuar (widely thought to be named after Archibald Shaw but, according to Hussein Mac, actually named for one of Shaw’s students; (11) Degroot, named after a construction company. Akoiny Beny was said by Aciek to be roughly 2/3 of the way S from #10 to #11, in Anyidi payam.

** I have drawn these lines to intersect points where people usually indicated that they thought the payam boundaries would fall if Bor town were not there.

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CHAPTER FIVE

FATINADIT

This chapter, focusing on a Malakiya woman named Fatina, examines the differences that personal experience and point of view make.

In May 2010 I was talking to a woman named Fatina about her paternal grandfather,

Somit Muhammad, who had come to Bor during the Ottoman era, “before the British,” she emphasized, “not the kawaaja, zaman de ingliizi […not the white man: the time of the

English].126 Like many elderly people, Fatinadït divided Bor’s colonial history into three

periods: the time of the “English” (Ottoman-Egyptian), the Mahdi, and the British (Anglo-

Egyptian Sudan).

Fatinadït (Fatina + dït, ‘big’ or ‘elder’)—or Fatina Atier, as she was sometimes called—

lived on a fenced plot in the old quarter of town near the mosque. For money she ran a small

restaurant on the land once owned by her grandfather. She lived in a one-roomed house with her

sister-in-law behind the restaurant. Madit and I found her stirring a pot of greens and meat-soup

in the bare yard between the blue-tarpaulin walls of the restaurant and the small thatched house.

It was sparsely furnished: the plastic-sheet that carpeted the floor was neatly swept; there was a

bed, plastic chairs from the restaurant, and a rolled-up sleeping mat. Fatnadït sat on the bed. She

had left Bor town in the 1990s, she explained, after “the time that Nuer came, and Arab people captured the town. So I went to my husband’s home in the village, in Abii [Kolnyang payam]. I stayed there [in Abii territory], at home. So even my luggage is there in the village now—I never

126 I have placed translations from Dinka in italics and underlined Juba Arabic (whether or not I’ve translated it). Words spoken in Dinka or English are not italicized. Bor Dinka speakers have borrowed a large number of Arabic terms—I have only indicated Arabic when Fatnadït clearly switched. Emphatic statements are printed in boldtype.

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brought my things here [—she said, nodding toward the rolled mat—]. I only brought a few

small things to Bor town. My luggage remains in Nyicak” [WS500209].

A slight, short-haired woman with gray eyes, Fatina was 75 or 80 years-old when I met

her in Bor town in 2010. Like many people living in Bor Town, Fatina was descended from

slaves brought there by either by al-‘Aqqād or a later administration. In this respect she was no more or less ‘typical’ of her lot in society or generational position. She held perspectives that were more or less available to everyone and her concerns touched on general anxieties because they were shaped and fastened by the circumstances shared by most people in Bor country. Her extended family included people from Biong country, my research assistant Madit’s natal community, and Abii, the natal home of a friend who attended Temple University and found me long-term lodgings in Bor town.

She couldn’t be sure of her age, she told me apologizing for her round figures; her father was still a young man when she was born. She had not gone to school. “I cannot write.” She said she did not have brothers or sisters, “so I was always working, I was the only one. So they couldn’t put me in school.” She brought water, pounded grain, ground grain—, she said when I asked about her childhood—“and cooking and preparing food ….” Doing this kind of work was not drudgery when it was done for relatives (parents, in-laws), she said. Her account of her childhood was a little image of ordinary routine and normality. Cooking for strangers in town was a continual reminder of displacement, the war, her son’s death, insecurity in Abii country.

I went to talk to Fatinadït because a man I knew mentioned that he had found a map of

Bor town and a nominal land register from—I think—1945 in the desk in his office. The register was a little unusual because the district records in Bor town—land records, administrative journals and ledgers, and so on—had been destroyed in the early 1990s. When I dropped in on

156 him a few days later at his office he let me copy it (see appendix one). I was helped by many people (too many to name here and to whom I owe a considerable debt) to decipher the names, which were spelled out phonetically in Arabic characters, and could be traced only by those who were old enough to remembered the adopted names, languages, and origins of the people listed.

While I occasionally conducted formal interviews, my main ethnographic method was simply to repeat something interesting that I’d heard and hope that doing so would begin a discussion. Of course this is a commonplace ethnographic technique for setting people at ease, as Gottlieb and Graham (1993:124) have noted; and testing my own research interests against what others considered interesting also provided a useful lesson about what constituted public knowledge. It helped that most people I spoke to knew what sorts of things I was interested in, or held strong opinions about what I should focus my research on; people would sometimes mention things I’d asked about before and fill in little details that they had learned or remembered during the intervening months.

A list of names and plot numbers from 1945 was an interesting object in Bor town—not least because land rights were being hotly contested—and it provided a handy conversation piece. One man suggested that I talk to Fatinadït, whom he had met at a restaurant near the mosque. I asked Madit to come along to translate.

The interview began badly, because I went into it under the mistaken impression that

Fatinadït was a “foreigner” in Bor country. My first question was, “When did you arrive in

Bor?” Asking after her in the old quarter of town I gathered that Fatinadït was ‘Sudanese’ (or

‘Nubi’), a term which has come to refer to the creole descendants of the Sudanese soldiers of the

Egyptian army who came to form a diaspora—in Sudan, Greece, Turkey, Mexico, Uganda,

Kenya, and elsewhere. J.A. Meldon (1908:128-29), a British officer, wrote in “Notes on the

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Sudanese in Uganda” about how [the Sudanese] had “managed during all these years to keep up

their customs and traditions and live like strangers in the land” (quoted in Johnson 2009:117).

Fatinadït spoke fluent Dinka as well as creole Arabic and Khartoum Arabic. But so many people

had recently arrived in Bor town, I guessed that she had grown up someplace else. I turned on

my audio recorder and asked her when she had arrived in Bor town.

“My grandfather [Somit Muhammad] brought us here, he was here. He was a soldier.

He came here [from Dongola, a ‘Nubian’ province, byway of Mongalla]. He had come here with his wife.127 He brought her and she gave birth to my mother. My grandmother was the one who gave birth to my mother. She gave birth and then we grew up here in Bor. And then I gave birth to my children here also,” she said emphasizing that I had mistaken her for a foreigner.

I didn’t take Fatinadït’s meaning and asked when she had learned to speak Dinka.

“I was born here,” she said. “And I stayed here. I am like a child of Dinka. And my father spoke only Dinka. Only Dinka—not another language.” Then, softening her reproach for my failing to see that I was on sensitive ground, she continued: “So, now, we are the same as

Bor, but we are not Bor. I’m the girl of Arab.” Slipping into Juba Arabic as she spoke, and politely allowing that my confusion was understandable, she clarified her relationship to Bor country by explaining that her husband was Dinka. “And my husband’s Bor, here, Jieng. Dinka.

My husband—my husband died. He’s died. I … [[Fatinadït laughed, acknowledging that she

had slipped into Arabic with the pain of the memory]] … language of the english. My husband is Bor, here, from Abii, Cuai Kiir [a village].128

127 Equatorial garrisons composed of slave-soldiers were accompanied by “women (wives, concubines, and female slaves), children, and men slaves attached to the households of individual soldiers” (DH Johnson 2009:116, quoting Lugard 1893:217). 128 “Amani wa ciir loi wa ciir bor, ku wa ci bor. Ɣɛn ee nyan Arab. Ku mony dhiɛl ee bor tënë a Jieng. Dinka. Mony—Rajul bitī mat. Ee yal bitaī, yo ka— yi—[[laughter]] thoŋ d’englises. Mony Bor a tënë: Abii, Cuai Kiir.” Fatinadït identified Arabic as the language of “the English,” here, referring to the Turkiyya.

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“Cuai Kiir. Monydu ee raan Nyicak?” [yes, Cuai kiir. Your husband’s Nyicak?], I asked

in Dinka, trying to apologize.

Fatinadït’s sister-in-law laughed. “He knows it [Nyicak]?” she asked Madit.

Fatinadït: “yes. A man of Nyicak, baba, a man of Kuot [a minor lineage of Nyicak in

Abii country]. My husband died and I remained here.”

I asked her why her grandfather came to Bor. Madit translated my question into Dinka.

“During the time of the English, my grandfather was brought here to build the telegraph

[loi asilik hawa ‘to do + a- [Dinka declarative proclitic?] + air/sky-wire’],” Fatinadït began.

Madit tried to translate her response, getting as far as “grandfather” before he stumbled on the word asilik (lit. ‘wire’). While, in Dinka, the term can also refer to ‘iron’ more generally,

the problem was not that Madit misunderstood what she was saying.129 The problem was rather that Madit had never seen a telegraph. He asked what the wire was for and what her grandfather had done and after a short back-and-forth between Madit, Fatinadït, and her sister-in-law,

Fatinadït said, “The people talked to each other in their offices with that wire.”

“Her grandfather was brought here to work on that wire,” Madit said tentatively, “for the offices.”

“My grandfather was brought here to build the telegraph,” Fatinadït continued. “He was brought from Mongalla. And came and made this Bor to be a town. At that time he built the houses. He came at that time to make the town for the government. He came and made his house here. He came with his wife also. He came and sat here. My grandmother came and gave birth here. And my mother gave birth here.”

129 In Bor Dinka at any rate. Luɔŋ̈ (sg. luŋ) was the more common term for “iron rings, bars, and heavy wires.” The term wëu (sg. wëëth) indicated metal objects like pots, metal-money, bits of iron, and glass and was a term that had indicated durable trade-goods. Younger and older speakers agreed that it was narrowing such that in everyday usage it mainly indicated money.

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I asked about her mother.

Her mother was a daughter of Farajallāh Allajabu, a man from Zandi country. “My mother married a man of Dongola, an Arab man. My mother came and gave birth here—living in this place, long ago [acieŋ atënë, akol thɛɛr].” Her husband [Fatinadït’s father] was a shopkeeper [nɔŋ dukan, ‘having a shop’]. “He was called Abdula Osman [Said].”

I asked whether he’d had a plot in Bor town.

“This land is my grandfather’s land”—Fatinadït said, pressing down on the bed where

she was seated—“It was given to him before.” Her grandfather was called Somit Muhammad,

his son Abdula Osman. “I’m Fatina Abdula Osman, my name is Fatina Abdula Osman.”

I opened my notebook where I had transliterated the nominal land register. “Abdulla

Osman” was listed alongside plot #65. Madit spotted the name alongside plot #73, a graining

mill, and asked Fatina whether her father had had a graining mill.

“Yes,” she said, laughing—surprised, I think, by the question—“he had a graining mill

and a garden there…,” she said, gesturing toward the river. Fatinadït apologized that she did not

recall specific dates; she had not gone to school. She was obviously delighted by Madit’s

question about her father’s graining mill, in part, I think, because it was evidence that her

family’s long residence in Bor had not gone unrecorded. If she had worried (or been annoyed) at

the beginning of our conversation that my confusion about the language she spoke and her

genealogy undercut her authority to speak about Bor country, the deference which Madit and I

showed to the written land register projected her authority to speak about the past on the basis of

her advanced age into a sphere of writing and official government records.

“I had three sons and three daughters. My eldest son was in Khartoum, in university—he

wanted to finish but people took him,” Fatina was saying as Madit paraphrased: “Before, it was

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different and Omer Bashir said, ‘Before you finish [university], you can go and fight first, then I

will give you the certificate.’”

“And so he went to fight”—Fatina continued—“and then he was killed there. So now I

have three daughters left—two daughters here [in Bor] and one in Rumbek. And one son, in

Wau, Deng Philip. He is working with the kawajaa there.”

Throughout the interview, Fatinadït emphasized her attachments to and anchorage in Bor

country to me: her grandfather’s generation had built Bor town and three generations of her

family had been born there (“she gave birth to my mother … My grandmother was the one who

gave birth to my mother. She gave birth … And then I gave birth to my children here also”); she

had married a man from Kolnyang, where her luggage was still stacked along the wall of her

husband’s house, a reminder to his family that she meant to return there.

For those who had been slaves, Fatinadït was saying, it had not been difficult to create

enduring ties to Bor country in the early 1900s. “The Arabs long ago had other languages,” she

said, “Arabic and other languages—but no one in Bor knew those languages, so they learned

Dinka.” At that time everyone learned Dinka, she said.130

Things had indeed changed, but the dynamic was familiar. “If you have another language, that one is difficult for you. Even now, if you are in the cattle [village], no one will speak English. So you can learn Dinka,” Madit added.131

130 Sudanese slave soldiers were recruited by European commercial companies in East Africa in the 1890s and by Britain and Germany to expand and hold their colonial possessions. The Anglo-Egyptian army continued the practice of recruitment into the first quarter of the twentieth-century, and the slave and ex-slave soldiers in the service of colonial governments in Sudan became the “nucleus around which nascent urban centres grew in the Southern Sudan and northern Uganda” (DH Johnson 1988:143). Despite the importance of Sudanese military slavery for the formation of colonial states in the region, historians have paid little attention to the institution, DH Johnson (1988:144) writes. The difficulties of working from archival documents had been compounded, he notes, because “contemporary colonial sources masked the existence of slave soldiers behind a number of euphemisms.” 131 Madit said “cattle camp” in English, which is how bilingual speakers usually translated the terms wut and wuɔẗ in this context.

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The small plot where Fatinadït stayed behind the little restaurant had been her grandfather’s, she explained. She had been born there and, after she married Philip Garang Deng

Alier, had divided her time between Bor town and Kolnyang. Her husband, Philip, had attended the Malek primary school with Archdeacon Archibald Shaw (known in Bor as Macuar) and worked as an assistant to a missionary there. “Macuar came here and took my husband from the village and took him to school and even took him to Nairobi… He put him in school, and then

Philip came to Bor town and found me here.”

“How did he talk to you when you first met him?” I asked.

Fatinadït laughed. “We were engaged. After Macuar died there in Kenya, and left Philip in Kenya, Philip came back to Bor—because there was no one there for him anymore. He saw

Macuar buried, and then returned back. So, Macuar was supposed to tell the man something, to be good—or something—something, if you are going to die, there are some words you speak to the man who helps you, but Macuar died before he could talk to Philip Garang again. So Philip went to Juba then and sat there and was working in industry with the Kawaja in Juba making some chairs, or something, I don’t know. Saraf, he was working finance. Bookkeeping, I think.”

I asked when she went to Juba to join her husband.

“The time that my husband married me, I went to Juba. Then I went to Torit then I came

back here to Bor during Anynyanya 1, and then I stayed here… I stayed in the home of my

husband in Abii. Then, the time that Nuer came, the Arab people captured this place—so we

went to the village. I stayed there in Abii, atɔ baai [at home]. So even my luggage is there in the village now, I never brought my things. I only brought a few small things to Bor town. My things remain in Nyicak. I came here because of Murle there.”

I asked Fatinadït when she was born.

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She laughed. “I have 75 years,” she said, but apologized that she wasn’t sure. She had not attended school. “The British were here when I was young. They were here, I knew them, I knew Kar Kuei, ee col Kar Kuei. Mr. Cumming.” Cumming spoke English, but he knew a little

Arabic and a little Dinka. “Kur Kuei was a name here, given by the children, but his name there was British,” she said, gesturing north, toward England.

My father worked for Kur Kuei. He was called Abduli Anier Dau [‘Abduli snatches young heifers’] by people here. My father was employed by the British. And the people made a road, and if the cow passed there on the road, my father would go and collect the calves—he was the driver for Kur Kuei—then he would judge them and take their calves [as a fine]. So he was called Abduli Anyei Dau [(Abduli + (a)nyaai ‘snatch’ + dau ‘young heifer’)]”

Madit was laughing. “So,” Madit said, elaborating Fatinadït’s account with a little invented dialogue in the British language of command, “he took all the calves of the cows. So, the British people said, ‘Now you collect the calves and bring them here.’ And those calves would not return again. So, if you say, ‘Abdulla Osmon,’ no one [in Bor] will know him. You will only get him if you say Abduli Aneir Dau.”

“The market was there by the riverside,” Fatinadït continued when I asked about the town she remembered from her childhood. “Only the ship [baboor], stopped here.132 There were no

small boats, only the ship. And there was no market there at Marol. The police were there then

too. The place where the police are now, is where there was a court. The place where national

security is now, that was the place for the officers of the police.”

“The big office [that is now] Kuol Manyang’s was the governor’s office then, it was for

the British, Mr. Cumming. There was no fan then. Before. So they made something shaped like

this …,” she said, describing a big square frame with a cross-piece that was covered with a bed

132 “babuur” (ship) is another possibility for the name Bor.

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sheet in the fashion of a kite and attached with a hinge so that it would see-saw up-and-down.

“And there was a prisoner—and he sat outside and pulled it like this”—Fatinadït said, laughing,

pantomiming a pumping motion—“he pulled it like this….”

Madit was shaking with laughter. “Kar Kuei just sat in his chair and the prisoner fanned

him—outside,” he managed to say.

I asked about the police and the market.

The police force was made up of people from “everyplace, Dinka, every kind of person.”

The market was the same. There was not trouble between people from different parts of Sudan

then, Fatinadït continued; “there was no problem. Even people were dealing with marriages and

there was no problem. Even if you came as a foreigner. So before, Bor was good, but the

problem was only the fighting. When the fighting came, it brought problems.”

I asked again about her father and grandfather and read a few names off the land register.

“My father had a tawuoona, a shop [dukan], and tobacco. He brought chewing tobacco

and bicycle parts.

“Farajallāhs Allajabu i Furuge, from Raga” she was saying. “His father was Ahmed,

from Fardak—Sumeed Muhammed Fardak, from Raga in Bahr-el-Ghazal. He had come from

Raga to Bor by-way of Diem Zubier (named for the slave trader Zubier Pasha) and Wau. He was

Zandi. During Anglo-Egyptian rule, he was charged with the maintenance of the D.C.’s lorry.

“Farajallāh Allajabu was a mechanic. He was from Biong, he’s the father of Sabit [wun Sabit], he is the father of Sabit, the big man, Sabit Makuei. So the father of Farjalla, Alla-Jabu, they are the people who came with my grandfather, who made this land. Farjalla is from Zandi. From

Zandi, but he is now Dinka, here.”

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“Balal Abdulla Bilal, he has people here. His name is Lual Ayen.”133

“The British were the one who chose those people—but the british didn’t know where they came from,” Fatinadït continued.

“I think these people were slaves,” Madit said. “[Some of those people] were taken to

America and sold away, and these people remained here.”134

133 Lual Ayen is currently the subject of a land dispute. 134 Scholars have focused much more on the than the Mediterranean, East African Coastal and Sudanese slave trades partially because of the “the importance of the Atlantic trade to the United States, combined, of course, with the importance of the United States itself,” Mark Leopold (2003:653) has noted. This imbalance, which has also shaped popular memory, only partially accounts for Madit’s comment that the former slaves in Bor were those who remained after others were “taken to America and sold away,” however. Many of 500 or so well trained and battle-tested veterans of the Mexican campaign of 1863-‘67 were sent to the Equatorial region and the Eastern Sudan (Hill and Hogg 1995). Indeed, the commander at Bor in 1878 had been a member of that elite regiment, and memory of those Sudanese taken to “America”—who had returned to tell about it—, was still present in 2009-’10.

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CHAPTER SIX

HUSAIN MAC

This chapter discusses generational differences among returnees. It emerged from the difficulties I encountered when I tried to generalize about the effects of return migration on

“returnees” and “stayees” as if they were two homogenous groups. Husain Mac, whom I discuss here, had traveled widely and spent a large part of his life outside Sudan working in Kuwait,

Beirut, and Egypt before returning to Bor. He was almost eighty years old and a member of another large diaspora: British colonial civil servants put out of their jobs by decolonization.

Anthony Kirk-Greene (2001) noted that little has been written about the dispersal of some

25,000 British overseas civil servants by de-colonization as a class of migrants; and he has written in terms of a “diaspora” about the British migrants created by the dissolution of the

Indian Civil Service in 1947, the Sudan Political Service in 1955, and the Colonial Service (Her

Majesty's Overseas Civil Service after 1954) in 1997. But with the exception of Heather

Sharkey’s Living with Colonialism (2003) and Ilana Feldman’s Governing Gaza (2008), even

less sustained attention has focused on the typists and clerks recruited by the British to undertake

the day-to-day office work and ordinary bureaucratic practices of colonial rule (whose careers

were also cut short by decolonization).

Partly this can be explained by narratives of colonized people as temporally suspended

between tradition and modernity; colonial chiefs have received much more attention than

colonial clerks. Presumably this is because scholars have tended to feel that even chiefs created

out of whole cloth were more legitimately members of their communities: as a part of more

“authentic” or “traditional” structures of authority, chiefs made a better contrast to colonial

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officials, their intercalary position being more representative of the contrast between tradition

and modernity.

This chapter contributes a sketch of one colonial clerk and the insights he gained from his

subsequent “second career” as a British-educated office-worker in North Africa.

What follows is largely a composite of two conversations I had with Husain Mac, our

first meeting and a later one, with details drawn from others that occurred once or twice each

week over the course of five months. This section is meant to provide a sketch of Husain and

some information about social life and history in Bor town. It is not a chronology of our

developing friendship. I never formally interviewed Husain, though I often took notes while we

were talking or reproduced our conversation later in my journal notes when I was sitting alone.

A number of scholars have noted that the most distorting convention of ethnographic

writing is the removal of the author/interviewer from the final text. (“Questions do not ask

themselves.”) In this section I include very few of my own questions, partially because my usual

method was to sit back and let people speak, occasionally saying “ɛɛ” (yes), “um-hmm,” or

clicking my tongue. My presence obviously shaped some conversations more than others: sometimes I asked a lot of questions; other times it was hard to get a word in edgewise. There was in Bor country an explicit value attached to allowing a person “to have her say,” as it were, without interruption. This expectation was not shared by foreign NGO workers, who often complained about the lengthy speeches people made when a project was up for discussion.

While my attention to the concept of language ideology elsewhere is meant to bring a contrast into sharp focus, ordinary conversations were always more complicated than a series of uninterrupted monologues.

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Throughout this dissertation, I have tried to provide a little about the setting of conversations upon which it is largely based and something about the speaker’s personality. I’ve not transcribed every backchannel and question that kept the conversation going; mainly because it would not be possible to transcribe the full context of any conversation nor to know every factor which contributed to the particular speech event that occurred. I was often not my interlocutor’s only audience; many people I spoke with meant to say something to someone else within earshot. Husain obviously enjoyed talking to me, partially because he felt a little out of place in Bor. He reasonably assumed I felt the same way. Like many narrators, Husain had a tendency to move back and forth between the past and the present to underline parallels and to note distinctions.

clumsy gods, temporary people

I first met Husain Mac in May, 2010, in Hai Macuar, a busy quarter of Bor near the junction made by the road from the center of town past the taxi stand to the airstrip and the road leading south to the ministries. An informal market of one-story zinc sheds hugged the Y made by the two roads. There were a few Ugandan-run restaurants and bars that served oily potatoes over chapatti or rice, household and hardware stalls, others that sold soap, cigarettes, batteries, and so forth; a butcher’s stand that was always surrounded by a few dogs looking for scraps. A few stalls sold new and second-hand clothing, a few stocked school supplies. There was a

Ugandan barber’s stall with two swivel seats, tinsel rope, a generator for electric clippers, and a mirror.

I sat down beside Husain in the little coffee stall where he was chatting with another elderly man who had been a colonial clerk. He turned to me and said, “These people do not

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understand me.” He laughed and asked me where I was from and whether I’d heard about the

earthquake that in early January, 2010, had left more than 300,000 people in Haiti dead, an equal

number injured, and roughly 1,000,000 homeless.

By the time I knew him in Bor, Husain Mac was almost eighty years old. Small with a

thin mustache and bald except for a gray edge behind his ears, he was always wearing thick

glasses that magnified his eyes. His vision was “smoky,” he said, clouded by cataracts that an

operation had failed to correct. He took a little jar of wintergreen menthol ointment from his

pocket and rubbed it into his scalp. “I found it in the market,” he told me—it helped his

rheumatism and his hair seemed to be growing back. “Look,” he said, “tell me what you see.” I

looked and said I saw a few thin white hairs. “Don’t go telling this to everybody, but you could

make a lot of money selling this for baldness,” he said, laughing, offering me the jar. I took it

and copied ‘Emami Mentho Plus’ into my notebook and returned the ointment. Husain replaced

the jar and folded a white washcloth into a neat square and balanced it on the top of his head.

For income Husain owned a diesel generator that supplied electricity to a few dozen

lightbulbs and a few deepfreezes in shops and restaurants nearby. I never pried into Husain’s

budget. (It never came up—another man I knew in town rented electricity at a fixed rate: 30 SP per month for a single light bulb and 200 SP per month for a deepfreeze. If you could find it in early February 2010, a drum of diesel went for about 500 SP but prices fluctuated widely.)

Husain didn’t need much money for himself. He sent most of his income to his son, a student in

Kampala, through one of the Somali money-transfer services in town, and a little to his wife in

Malakal, where she was working as a midwife. Mostly he saved for a family plot in Bor Town, waiting for a land register to be drawn up. “When the land is distributed [in Bor], I will bring

[my wife] here. She can be transferred to Bor Hospital,” he said.

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Husain had been born in 1930, he thought, in what is now Anyidi Payam. His earliest memories were from 1938-40, in a cattle village there.135 In 1942, he went to Malek primary school, where he received four years of Dinka language (“mother tongue”) instruction. “My mother used to cry, but my elder brother took me to school. My uncle was chief,” he said. The missionary who ran the school, Archdeacon Archibald Shaw (known in Bor as Macuar) liked children. There was also a man who came by steamer to Malek each month, a friend of Shaw’s who liked to play soccer with the children. Steamers were always stopping at Malek, Husain said, but he would walk from Bor to Malek, because children weren’t allowed to ride on the ships. In 1946, Husain was “sent”—he said—to Khor Atar intermediate school for another four years of instruction under “Mr. William” [C.W. Williams?], Mr. Webb, and

Mr. Hunter from South Africa. “Just enough to be put as an office worker, a clerk, a typist,” he said. “Dunkin—he wasn’t the governor then—he brought me from Atar school where there were lessons on Public Works, Veterinary, Agriculture.” Husain was later “sent” to work as a clerk in

Malakal, which was by then the provincial capital of Upper Nile. “We were given six months’ training in typing and office routine. I was a typist and dispatch—taking care of letters and telegrams from everywhere, from England and other districts. I would file them, and then take them to the governor for response. Then I would type. There was a post office and telegraph at that time. Now? ah—there is nothing.”

The perception that independence had marked the beginning of a general decline in living standards in Bor country was widely shared. To be sure, the British had marginalized people and treated them like children and slaves; but they had also built hospitals and schools, which somewhat redeemed Anglo-Egyptian rule in popular memory and partially accounted for the theme of colonial nostalgia that surfaced in people’s conversations about the past. In 2009-’10,

135 I got into the habit of asking people, “What is the first thing you remember?”

170 when people spoke about the referendum on South Sudanese independence they often pointed to the roads and crumbling colonial town as evidence that, during the four years since the CPA was signed, little had been done to make “unity [with Northern Sudan] attractive.” There used to be a post and telegraph office, a meteorological station, a primary school, a hospital with a roof; in

1950, Bor’s connections to the wider world seemed to have been more available to ordinary people. Whether or not ordinary people could have sent a telegram or posted a letter in 1950 did not really matter—there were no walls around the old colonial offices. There were windows that children could peek into.

In 2009, everyone was aware that there were computers, satellite phones, and mailbags in the high-walled UNDP fort near the airstrip. People also knew that the armed guards there would never allow them to enter—to see what was inside. In 2009-’10, the architectural contrast between the remains of the old colonial town, with its open plan and buildings you could walk into, and the high-walled UN compounds, with their moats, gun turrets, razor-wire, and blue- helmeted soldiers from Pakistan, was making an enormous impression as a tangible expression of new disparities of influence and participation within Southern society.

While a quarter century lay between the old colonial town and the post-CPA geography of fortified humanitarian aid compounds, the coexistence of the two geographies in Bor town allowed people to draw a line between periods of history: the late Anglo-Egyptian era, the period of Sudan’s civil wars, and the signing of the CPA in 2005. Nothing had been built after independence people told me; during the years of fighting much of what had been built had been bombed and destroyed; and after 2005, the construction of walled compounds had only served to underline what was becoming obvious to most people: post-conflict “development” was a

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process through which fewer and fewer people were able to take part in the decisions which

affected their lives and their loved ones.

Figure 15. The satellite image (above) illustrates the co-existence of the old colonial town and the town in 2005. In addition to a few of the permanent stone colonial-era buildings, the outlines of the old town are still unmistakable in the rows of neatly planted neem trees which, people often mentioned, the British imported after 1905 for shade.136 The faint outlines of the old airstrip are also visible. [1:5.000, detail adapted from a Quickbird Satellite Image of 10 October 2005, SS-064, IMU OCHA SS.]

• • • Husain often translated for the colonial District Commissioner (D.C.) at Bor, Major

Cumming, during school holidays. “In 1947, I was on leave from Atar School and Kar Kuei

[Cumming] told me to go to the chiefs to send their children to school. I wrote their names, about 45 children: [one of them,] Achol Deng Mabior became Ambassador to Holland, my uncle’s son. Martin Mager became a judge, studied the law.137 He was killed in that war [of

136 Or, as I mentioned in CHAPTER ONE, to punish people for dunking A British officer after he’d forced people to carry him across a river. (“[T]hey said, “You are a human being, like us. Why do you humiliate [yɔŋ] us like this? You are supposed to walk like us.”) Unmistakable foreign imports in Bor country, neem trees mark old colonial sites. 137 Martin Majer Gai is widely credited as the author of the SPLA’s “Manifesto” of 31 July 1983.

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1983-‘05].” Translating for Cumming had given him a sense of what British administrators were

interested in knowing about their colonial possessions as well as a perspective from which to

weigh his own experience against widely held attitudes toward colonial practices.

“Women—their mothers, refused—but their fathers allowed them to go to school. [Their mothers] said, their children would get lost, or be taken away from them.138 At that time there were no women educated, no girls—no nothing. Girls were not allowed to go to school.

Anyway. Dinka, themselves, they want their girls to be married with cattle. They said that girls that went to school would be married without cattle. Ha!”

Students of Southern Sudan are familiar with the deep-seated fear that young people would be captured (by force, or lured voluntarily) into schools. Cherry Leonardi (2007:396) has written about how “as far back as the 19th century, … colonial reports explained resistance to medical inspections or to sending children to school in terms of a general fear that children would be ‘eaten’ by the foreigners.” The image of predatory foreigners was rooted as much in the ivory-and-slave trade as in the concern that the social competencies one learned in school would alienate children from their parents and relatives, as Husain suggested (“They said that girls that went to school would be married without cattle”). Sanderson and Sanderson

(1981:285n.31), for instance, noted that “in 1942 an Agar Dinka boy who had caused a death in a tribal fight was ‘sentenced’ by a Chief’s Court to attend school. But ‘the boy and his sub-chief

… pleaded for … a sentence of two years’ imprisonment, after which the boy would not be lost to his tribe’” (citing Sevier, Condominium in the Southern Sudan, p 258, for photographs of Tonj

and Khor Atar schools c. 1949 see M. Langley’s No Woman’s Country (1950)).

If collecting young people reawakened memories of the slave trade, writing down lists of names for the British District Commissioner firmly associated record keeping with tribute,

138 mith ci mar ‘lost children’.

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forced labor and slavery. Throughout the colonial era, people were made to ‘pay’ tribute to the

government and to leave their gardens and cattle to clear roads, make bricks, and grow cotton

without pay. Everyone was perfectly aware that the colonial government kept track of people by

drawing up lists of the headmen of each court center. While this was not the only source of

suspicion toward writing, it was among those which were most commonly talked about. (Such

lists were also a common theme in colonial jokes, see CHAPTER ONE.)

“When the British arrived,” Husain explained, “they found that people were taken by the

Arabs and sold. General Gordon put a stop to it. What happened before just lingered in women’s minds.”

“But The British did not educate us, they did not teach us. But they taught the

Northerners, even though they did terrible things to the British. They killed General Gordon, but still the British educated them. Those of us who learned a little saw that the British were being chased away from the North. The British began to build secondary schools, to help them to stay.

But it was too late. The British were only trying to benefit from us. They didn’t want to help us.”

“I was in the school. I bought a trouser from someone in town and I began to wear trousers. But at that time there was no southerner with trousers. One of the women said, ‘Don’t wear those trousers.’”

“I said, ‘It’s mine, I’ll wear them.’

“She said, ‘I know what to do. Cut it and make it short.’ I cut the trousers, but I began to think, ‘Why? Why don’t they [the British] want me to wear long trousers?’ and that was part of

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the British politics of keeping people as they are. Not allowing them to progress. They didn’t

want us to understand.”139

I told Husain a story about a friend of mine who had attended school in Kakuma before being repatriated from Kenya to Bor, where he entered primary school and was made to wear short pants. A whole array of tiny symbolic humiliations coalesced around the short pants, which he felt marked him as a child. His teacher would have been his age-mate in any other setting, but in school he was his senior. When his teacher sent him to fetch a cup of tea, my friend refused, “he was treating me like a child.” There was a fight and, because the teacher had slapped him first, he was suspended for the remainder of the year, rather than expelled. The experience of being treated like a child made it very easy for people to draw clear lines around what was popularly considered foreign and coercive (institutions of rule like schools and armies) and what was considered to be ‘of the people’ (ka jieng). If, in some spheres of life, seniority was marked by age and experience, in others (schools, offices) it was a matter of privilege and luck and, thus, wholly arbitrary.

(My friend’s suspension was the main reason I hired him as a research assistant. I had travelled to Bor with a friend of a friend, a distant cousin of his, who introduced me to his uncle,

Mabior, before returning to Kampala. When I asked Mabior about finding someone who could show me around Bor country and tutor me in Dinka he suggested the young man, whose time, he said, would be better spent practicing his English with me than getting into trouble and fighting

139 Many narrators introduced attitudes of others directly through reported speech. The female voice here, I think, like the introduction of a gendered anxiety and memory (“lingered in women’s minds”) that I quoted above was also partially a narrative convention. An archetypal posture of authority was the soft-spoken restraint embodied by elderly men (and a few elderly women) who did not have to raise their voices to make themselves heard; younger women, in contrast, were often represented in stories as much more assertive (“women—their mothers, refused”) partially because their own conventional authority often meant telling children what not to do.

175 with teachers. After several months teaching me, Madit scored high enough on his English examination to enter high school, where he could wear long pants.)

Husain chuckled. Little had changed, apparently. I had introduced the topic of making a study of culture, but he continued with the theme he’d set up with his own story about short pants.

“I began to think and to study the British themselves. They kept us down; these people they want to keep us down… They taught me only just to be a clerk. Just A. B. C. D. and how to write—just to help them in the office.”

“In 1956, you see, what brought the trouble was that when the British left, the

Northerners took all the positions. They made a mistake. The British didn’t train us. If only the

[District Commissioner had been] a Southerner, there wouldn’t be any trouble. There were so many who were educated, who could take the position,” Husain said, but the poor quality of

Christian education in the south had provided a convenient excuse to exclude southerners from positions of authority. “And whenever we sat down, to talk, they refused. So what could we do?

We had to take up arms. They blamed us, ‘Why do you take up arms?’ But what could we do, we said, ‘Okay, give me my right.’”

The Torit Mutiny of 1955, the year before the Sudan became independent from its Anglo-

Egyptian rulers, was the start of a period of sporadic, at first largely urban rebellion and violent government repression that came to be called the “1955 disturbances.” While the mutiny was quickly squashed, writers usually date the start of Sudan’s first civil war to 1955. However, during the period between 1956 and ’62, Southern society was neither “normal” nor “at war;” it was rather marked by low-intensity conflict and sharpening tensions (Rolandsen 2011:106). For the Khartoum elite who dominated the ‘post-colonial government’ of Sudan the Disturbances of

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1955 provided a justification for “the government’s lowering of the threshold for resorting to violence and exacting punishment”—the state of emergency imposed after the mutiny was never lifted; it was, Rolandsen (2011:106) has argued, a period of “reversible escalation” that created the conditions leading to the start of the first civil war in 1963-64. After 1955, rather than address Southerners’ complaints by expanding opportunities for taking part in decisions or obtaining education, the government focused its efforts on policing and public security.

Independence did not mark a substantial change in the way the government was run. Indeed, the moral and ideological justifications for conquest that the British-dominated colonial government had developed with respect to Sudanese in general were retailored to fit southerners in particular.

In the 1950s, Husain was working as a clerk in Malakal, the provincial capital of the

Upper Nile Province (UNP). “The clerks were southerners, the office headmasters were from the north,” he said. The following complaint against Joshua Malwal, a member of the first parliament of 1954-58, written by Osman Gad El Rab, the Deputy Governor of the Upper Nile

Province in 1958, two years after Sudan’s independence, provides a picture of the tensions

Husain described. It also helps to capture the particular texture of the period as it must have seemed to those who lived it without a definite foreknowledge of what would come after. Also striking is how closely the language of postcolonial administration resembles the language used by British officials only a few years earlier.

Complaint by Deputy Governor U.N.P vs. Sayed Jaswa Malwal Complaint against Sayed Joshua Malual, Member of Parliament. UNP / 41.B.924

One feels always hesitant and thinks twice before lodging cases against Southerners irrespective of their social or political standing for the obvious reasons, to be frank, that ruling parties wish to win them to their side; but any Southerner, be he a house-boy or otherwise, can find immediate redress against any unlucky Northerner who loses his temper and slap[s] him. This policy has become wide[ly] known to all Southerners and there will soon come a day when they will all be spoilt and come up

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against Northerners who will most likely take up the law in their hands and retaliate in their own ways. Bearing this political connivance policy in mind, Southerners—especially those who can read and write—have become swollen-headed, self conceited and most insolent. As to those members of Parliament, and who were until very recently nothing more than junior clerks or holding posts of similar status, they can now dash into senior officials[’] offices smoking their cigarettes and pretty well under the influence of drink. They give the impression that they may have become rulers and demand that officials of whatever rank should receive them standing on their feet. Joshua is in no way wiser than any of his people; he always interpret[s] courtesy extended by us to him as cowardice, leniency as flattery and truth as sheer lies.140 He once declared to me that Northerners and Southerners cannot and will not agree on any point and that he has no confidence in Northerners. To implement the leniency policy and to recreate the confidence already lost in the South Disturbances [of 1956], I have rightly or wrongly filed two assault cases that were raised by the Steamers Staff and by Postmaster Malakal against this particular Joshua Malual. I have always received him with much courtesy and respect, seated him and gave him some sort of hospitality whenever he called at my office. It never happened that he came sober nor was he able to depart without shouting loudly hitting my table with his fists and talking nonsense.

Osman Gad El Rab, the Deputy Governor, described Joshua’s “latest aggression,” which occurred on the 5 of May, 1958: “He rushed into my office without warning. I accorded him the usual decent reception and asked him to sit down until I could finish with other business men who were then in my office and ordered coffee for him.” El Rab asked after Joshua’s “health, children, people etc. etc.,” but, he wrote, Joshua’s answers were very brief and cold.”

He rudely started enquiring about a case lodged by him against Sayed Hassan Dafalla, District Commissioner, and against his Police for searching his lorry for stolen property. I began explain the position to him, but he stopped me with a knock on the table and said, “Osman, this is not speech. Hassan Dafalla is a dictator, he is your friend and you all do not want to see your work”. I swallowed this and gently asked him to be patient, stop knocking the table and talk quietly. At that time, Commandant of Police

140 Variations on this line were reproduced endlessly in travel books, memoirs, and official documents. Grogan (1900:358), for example wrote: “Gratitude or pity in others they attribute to fear, or the desire to get the better of them. They look upon kindness as a thing suspicious, a move to cloak some ulterior design. Nor can they understand leniency, but consider it weakness. They themselves are either abject grovelers or blustering bullies.” Both attitudes, it is worth noting, are common human responses to scary encounters with dangerous rulers. If southern Sudanese in 1900 were suspicious of Grogan’s kindness they had every reason to be—because it was meant, no doubt, to “cloak some ulterior design.” It is also worth pointing out that when slave-traders and violent imperialists kill you for resisting oppressive rule they call it “justice,” when they let you go, it’s “leniency.”

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Sayad Hussaien Hamo was working on another table in my office and listening. He shouted again with a knock on the table and said, “You said you will discuss this case with me at 6 p.m. on 25.4.58 and why you did not come?[”] I replied that I did come to [my] office but did not find him and called in my office Murasla [assistant] to confirm. He retorted “Nonesense [sic], you did not come and this is mere talking. You must work”. Despite this, I asked the Murasla to speak about my coming to office at about 6 p.m. solely to see Joshua. On hearing the Murasla’s confirmation, he shouted at him brandishing his hands and started talking loudly in local languages, and then in English and Arabic; Joshua did not believe in either of us. He said that was sheer lie. By that time, Muraslas, Officials and about 17 Southerners were looking at us through doors and windows. He became furious, extremely insolent and proud of himself. At this juncture, I stopped him and warned him not to come to my office any more if he could not behave himself and talk politely and directed him to go to Governor if he liked. He furiously got up wavering his fists at my face and shouting at his full voice and said “I will not go to Governor and will sit here”. He then sat down and crossed legs and then suddenly stood up talking in all languages known to him and went towards Governor’s Office. I followed him, and while talking to Governor, Joshua loudly shouted in Arabic “He is liar, he is liar”. I then informed Governor that I was going to lodge information against him to Police. On coming out of Governor’s Office, I asked Joshua to go with me to Police. He said he would not go as he has work more important than my work. He then went into the Accounts Office to get warrants. At the Accounts Office I repeated my request to him to accompany me to the Police Station but he continued in his unabated shouts and insults and pointing with his hand at my face he said in Arabic “Osman, I know you as secret police investigation]. I enquired what] ي —Police—repeating was wrong with that. He said, Police ……….. and suddenly stopped murmuring to himself. [-3-] I then left him and went to the Police station. He followed me on his bicycle and found me filling my information in my own hand-writing. In presence of Police he shouted sarcastically, “What are you writing, this is not Government, this is play, you cannot work like this”. I continued filling the form, and then turned back and saw him cycling off towards the town with a good number of Southerners who were apparently looking very happy and rejoicing at their Member of Parliament’s open defiance to the Deputy Governor. I am extremely lucky that I did not lose my temper and assault or insult or give provocation to Joshua as he did to me though I feared him to blow off my nose and was very careful to avoid him using physical force with me in front of officials and Southerners. Had I molested this M.P. as he did to me, I very much doubt whether I would have been at large until this moment. This was not my first experience with Joshua; I have always been trying to be friendly with him but he is not the sort to be won as a good citizen. I have verbally reported his previous insolence with me to Governor. Commandant of Police Sayed Hussien Hamo was also a witness on a previous occasion. In conclusion, I do not blame Joshua for all that he did as he is apparently expressing his people’s views and latent ill-will not towards me in person but towards all Northerners in the South in general.

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In my humble opinion, the prestige and dignity of public servants—especially those entrusted with the duties of law and order in this part of the Sudan—should invariably be protected and fortified at all times against the malicious and destructive activities and conspiracies which are not being brewed opening and u[n]der ground in the South.

[signed] O. GAD EL RAB, DEPUTY GOVERNOR UPPER NILE PROVINCE

A few days later this telegram was sent by an office clerk like Husain.

TELEGRAM 6.5.1958 PARLIAMENT KHARTOUM DAKHLIA KHARTOUM

126 SAYED JASHWA MALUAL HAS BEEN CHARGED UNDER SECTIONS 446 COMMA 298 AND 4444555 S.P.C AAA WILL BE TRIED ON SATURDAY TENTH INSTANT

CHARGE U.N.P GINAYAT

FOR DISTRICT COMMISSIONER MALAKAL DISTRICT MD/41.E.1

Copy to:— Governor, U.N.P reference his wire No. 1301

“You see,” Husain continued, “now the same thing is going to happen with this CPA.”

He described how those in power in the North and the South used the endlessly deferred referendum and national elections, rural insecurity, disarmament campaigns, and ongoing border disputes to justify more and more repressive actions.

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Husain’s particular vantage as a colonial office clerk working in the mid-1950s provided the basis for a comparison between Sudanese independence and the referendum on Southern independence that ran counter to much of what has been written about Sudan’s civil wars. Many scholars of Sudan’s civil wars (with the notable exceptions of Douglas H. Johnson (2004),

Øystein Rolandsen (2011), and M. O. Beshir (1968)) have focused on the root causes or preconditions of conflict and conflated the years between 1956 and 1962 with the subsequent civil war.141 Khartoum’s elite has found it useful to date the war to 1955, when Sudan was still an Anglo-Egyptian colony; and Southern Sudanese authors have dated the start of Sudan’s civil war to 1955 as evidence that “a unitary Sudan was doomed from the outset” (Rolandsen

2011:108). Husain’s idea was that if the disturbances of 1955 had provided a pretext for unequal or inadequate guarantees of participation (“whenever we sat down, to talk, they refused”), and the escalation and expansion of militarism, the conflict of 2005-’10 had the potential to escalate into a conflict between the government of South Sudan and ordinary southerners. “Those who are big people, who are in the offices, they refuse to talk to us.”

Husain described continuities of governing practices that were not defined by the political periods into which Sudanese history has been conventionally divided, the nationality of its rulers, nor by Southern Sudan’s relations with other states as a colony, a part of a post-colonial country, or a semi-autonomous region. This perspective was partially afforded by his age. But clerks like

Husain also occupied a particular location in the process of government. He was, on one hand, a minor functionary and representative of the colonial government who was integral to the day-to-

141 This is partially because of limited access to primary sources like Husain, say, or the complaint I’ve reproduced above, as Rolandsen (2011:107) has noted. Indeed, Rolandsen (2011:106) argued, “analysis of events and processes within such periods of escalation may produce more convincing explanations of civil wars than the search for structural ‘root’ causes.”

181 day practice of what Ilana Feldman (2005) has described as “everyday government;” on the other, he was also a member of a subject population.

Indeed, Sharkey (2003) and Feldman (2005) argue, attention to ordinary routines can produce important theoretical insights into the actual production of governance—about how to relate conceptions of legitimacy, hegemony, and governmentality, say, to coercion and colonial violence. While anthropologists have tended to ignore the presence of people like Husain— because they were thought to be unrepresentative of their wider ‘communities’—, Feldman

(2005:868) has shown that attention to “apparently marginal people and seemingly insignificant moments” can contribute much to an understanding of how the “the authority and tenacity of

[colonial] government …[has] derived, not so much from legitimacy, authenticity, or even from

“good policy,” but from the form, shape, and habits of its daily practice.”

Husain considered the knowledge and skills that he learned in school to be valuable. But, he said, the colonial system of education was designed to produce minor functionaries (“they taught me only just to be a clerk …—just to help them in the office”) who would work in settings (offices, armies) organized by particular forms of social relations and characterized by inequality and clearly defined chains of command (“I began to think, ‘Why? Why don’t they want me to wear long trousers?’”). These were techniques of repression, organized around the competences and ‘habits of daily practice’ that coordinated the colonial state, an apparatus of coercion. Indeed, as Feldman (2005) suggests, by training people in specific forms of organization (how to sit in a class room, follow orders, take dictation, carry out office routine), the colonial system helped to ensure the “tenacity of government” and commonsense appeal of its forms of authority and organization. In the end, whenever people trained in these methods of mobilization got together to organize any kind of collective project (whether a rebel militia like

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the SPLA, a church group, or a hometown association to negotiate with the government) it ended

up looking very much like a colonial institution.142 Indeed, while it has become a commonplace of the literature on protracted conflict, nowadays, to note that warlords, the IMF, World Bank, multinational corporations, and other NGOs have assumed many of the roles that were once thought to characterize the parceled sovereignty of the territorial nation-state (Riehl 2001); one irony of what was widely considered to be the “collapse” of state authority in Southern Sudan in the 1980s was that, in Bor country, the reorganization of the chiefs’ court system by the SPLA greatly expanded and entrenched the everyday practices and forms of colonial rule.

Another theme that emerged regularly in the conversations I had with elderly government officals in Bor country was betrayal. While the British had justified colonial rule by claiming to protect southerners from northern domination, they had relied on northern civil servants, soldiers, and police to run the colony. It often seemed that those who “did terrible things to the

British”—northerners, southern allies of the Mahdi army—ended up ruling on behalf of the

British; after all, they had an enormous advantage in the kinds of knowledge and know-how

(Arabic and English, an understanding of military discipline and other techniques of rule) that colonial and post-colonial regimes relied upon.

• • •

I asked Husain about the mission school in Malek.

142 It is also of course very convenient for colonial and neo-colonial governments when rebellions take the shape of recognizable, bureaucratic armies with identifiable structures of authority: because such things are much easier to squash or manage—there were people with whom to negotiate and co-opt. At the same time, however, people recognized that when dealing with colonizing armies it was sometimes useful to invent ‘chiefs’ with whom colonial agents could sit down and discuss matters if only because the alternative was often a violent colonial response. This may not seem like a very remarkable point, but when we speak of “the invention of tradition” it is useful to remember that sometimes the colonized were doing the inventing. I am also drawing on David Graeber (1996), here, who points out that shaping people’s organizational and social competences is much more important to the perpetuation of inequality than creating new needs or introducing abstract ideologies.

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“In 1942 I was in Malek—Malek was a boarding school,” Husain said. “Archdeacon

Shaw had a small garden: lemon trees, oranges, vegetables. They used to give us lemons—but the students didn’t work in Shaw’s garden, he had workers for that. Those who worked for

Archdeacon Shaw had gardens: durra, groundnuts. I used to listen to Shaw. But when my brain began to work, I no longer believed this Bible and this Koran. They are just political books. It happened with Nimaeri, one man, a ma’ mūr [junior civil administrative official in charge of a sub-district]143 was a man like me, and he was hanged—because he left Islam. They think Islam is the last religion, Muhammad the last prophet.”

“Have you heard about the earthquake in Haiti?” he asked after a short pause.

I said I had seen pictures on CNN.

Husain continued, “If I had twelve children I would love them all. I will protect them. I cannot kill them. Three hundred thousand in Haiti. In one day. In New Orleans. So many lives.” His wife, whom he had married in 1983, was working as a midwife in a hospital in

Malakal. Husain told me about the birth defects that his wife had described. “Two children born with one skin—two heads, two bodies. Terrible.” He laughed, “A clumsy god? This is what people believe.”

He said he couldn’t believe that there was a god, Christian or otherwise.

“I never believed in those jok [divinities]. My father he didn’t believe it either. There were so many people like that. No one in this area believes in a second life. If you say that you will live again, they will say, ‘Where?’. Once you die, you die like the tree. So you try, when you are born just to live nicely. When you die, just try to die nicely. You are not going to live again. Some people thought ‘maybe’… that this is not true. When they caught Lirpiou, that was

143 The post was held by Egyptians and “Sudanese,” a term which as late as the 1930s, “denoted racial and class (rather than national) status. They were mainly of southern origin, but were all from Arabic-speaking, Muslim black, ex-slave class” (D.H. Johnson 1995:5).

184 when they said, ‘No this is not true.’ So they began to listen to the [District Commissioner], and thought maybe god is there with the British.”

“So fundamentalists, they just deceive people. But there is no paradise, because there is no god there. These Christians and Muslims are all sons of Abraham, people who tried to make peace. But the message was misunderstood. It was fratricide.” He laughed, “They call me an infidel, or what? I don’t mind.”

Husain looked in the direction of the generator which had suddenly gone silent. He began to speak again but interrupted himself to order two glasses of coffee from the young woman who sat by a low charcoal stove.

“These people do not understand me,” he said again. “When I talk to my people, I say,

‘Our world is just like the moon. You see it hanging up there? We are the same, just hanging up there.’ They don’t believe me when I say that,” Husain said laughing.

Husain Mac was atypical in his attitude toward ‘belief’ not because he was skeptical— skepticism was a part of ordinary attitudes toward the various ways that Power (jok) manifested in people’s lives—but rather because he wasn’t. He was certain. Or, perhaps, I should say, he was unusual because he talked about participation in sacrificial practices as if it were evidence of an underlying belief concerning the supernatural.

Attending mission schools had provided Husain with a lesson in a privatized Christianity that gave priority to “belief” as a discernible inner state rather than as a constituent of practice

(Asad 1993:47; Keane 2008; Barber 1981). What set Husain apart from others in Bor was his rejection of a conception of religion which few others had been exposed to in any systematic way.

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There is a large literature on the missionary encounter and conversion. If it can be said to exist at all, the anthropology of disbelief, skepticism, and confusion makes up a much more fragmentary literature. To take just two examples: Deborah Durham’s (2002:141-42) work on citizenship in postcolonial Botswana takes “puzzlement” as an analytic resolution to the complex situation presenting itself to people living “in the midst of multiple modes of citizenship [and] multiple possibilities for political participation;” David Graeber (2001:240-54) notes that anthropologists have tended to downplay skepticism and uncertainty and, by taking it seriously, raises important issues about old approaches to ‘magic’ and new ones to politics.

It is easy enough to understand how the imagery of oppression of the 1840s-1920s may

have been incorporated into ritual, harder to account for the explicit themes of mock hostility and

humor—and the suggestion that everyone was aware that power derived from the attention

humans gave to it—, alongside Madit’s suspicion that … “maybe there is still some power left.”

Most people described the relations between people and Powers in terms of the relations between people; their Power was maintained and augmented by the attention given to them by human beings. Like the power of “big people” and ancestors, Powers depended, in the end, on the acknowledgement of those who could be recruited to enlarge their influence. To become a

“big person” in life, or to be remembered as an ancestor in death, one not only had to keep ones sons (and sometimes daughters) from moving away. It also helped to enlarge your circle of followers by attracting dependents and semi-dependents: poorer brothers and sisters and their children, in-laws, friends, adopted children, and so on. To become an ancestor, one needed to found a new settlement and give it a name. This would ensure that one’s memory endured, since there were a thousand different circumstances when people would talk about the place where they lived or where they were going or coming from. (My friend Mabior, for example, was

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endlessly annoyed by the fact that a place called Mayual in Gakyom, in Biong country, was most

widely known as Paandengkut, ‘land of Deng Kut’, after a settler (abokok) who had a car and whose house was near the road. It was near a primary school and had become a prominent landmark for private taxi passengers.144) As a result the politics of descent and authority

(‘bigness’) were a politics of place-names, food, and movement. Attracting followers was largely a matter of feeding them and providing them with a place to live. If sons or followers felt oppressed or slighted, they could always move away. And without followers a person is no longer “big”; without descendants, an ancestor is no longer an ancestor. This does not mean that an ancestor’s or a big person’s power is an illusion—quite the reverse, a big person with a lot of followers can get things done. It only means that power is reciprocal and depends upon the recognition of others for its reality.

All this also provided a useful lesson in the provincialism of my own atheism—that it was a stance internal to a genealogy of eastern Mediterranean and north African monotheisms, marked by “universalizing a definition of religion that tended to privilege belief as a cognitive and ultimately private or subjective phenomenon” (Keane 2008:S116). (Creeds—or, explicit propositions that believers assent to—are generally a feature of evangelizing, scripture-based religious traditions like Christianity and Islam (Keane 2008:S112).145 However, this does not mean that the world’s religions can be divided into two groups: scripture-based religions with liturgies and creeds, whose followers adhere to a set of beliefs so coherent as to constitute a systematic theology; and the localized ritual systems that characterize African indigenous traditions, which unevenly distribute knowledge and whose followers lack a coherent set of

144 Deng Kut Alier, from Anyakeui, was a minister of parliament for Baaidit in 2010 [see NB2, last pages]. 145 “Proselytizing religions such as Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism are predicated on at least one shared assumption: since their truth-claims are universal, it follows that, at least in principle, all humans are potential converts. Unlike local cults and ancestral rituals, these religions are highly portable: their scriptures and liturgies, creeds and modes of pedagogy are constructed to circulate” (Keane 2008:S112).

187 beliefs. What this means, rather, is that definitions of “religion” which privilege states of mind—“belief” as opposed to cooperative activity—tend to exaggerate the particularity of religious traditions. This may contribute to the seeming diversity of Nilotic religious traditions, which share an emphasis on the maintenance of wellbeing and moral community and the alleviation of human hardship and suffering.)

What set Husain apart from others was not that he felt that the idea of an afterlife was ludicrous (this was broadly shared), nor even his recognition that if one took the question posed by questions about the nature of god seriously it was hard not to come to the conclusion that God is evil or, perhaps, simple indifferent. This was the conclusion which many theologians in

Southern Sudan and elsewhere in Africa had arrived at much to the dismay of European missionaries. What set Husain apart was that having been educated in mission schools where the problem of theodicy had been regarded as a matter of religious belief—rather than a more multifaceted aspect of collective practice, an immanent sociology of power, a part of a skeptical attitude toward efforts to deal with human misery, …—, he had come to disbelieve in a manner quite foreign to Bor country.

A number of scholars have critiqued the term ‘belief’ (Needham 1972; Keane 2007,

2008; Luhrmann 2012; Favret-Saada 1977, 2012; Pouillon 1979; Barber 1981; Sperber, 1982).

But I liked Husain immediately not because he offered a useful lesson about the provincialism of my atheism or, even, the provincialism of the idea that a universally applicable category of

‘belief’ can be said to anchor a domain called ‘religion’ (Asad 1993). I liked Husain because he was good-natured and funny; our shared atheism gave us something to chat and joke about. I was a regular visitor to the coffee stand where Husain usually sat and listened to the BBC because we got along and he obviously liked having me around.

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Husain was one of a cohort of elderly men who were educated during the colonial period.

He had traveled widely after leaving his post as a typist so he could manage well in Arabic,

Dinka, and English. After he left his post in Sudan as a clerk, he worked for a while for a Mr.

Kemer at Sudan Mercantile selling Morris and Austin cars. During the 1960s, British-trained clerks were much in demand; he found work in Kuwait, Beirut (“In Beirut, I was working with

Arabs, and the company in Kuwait belonged to a Libyan, but in every company there must be an

American or British.”), and Egypt. In Abbasiya, in Cairo, he met the descendants of slave soldiers, Dinka from Aliab country, who had been taken there by Muhammad Ali. “They knew their names [lineages], but now they have become Egyptians, they have forgotten [how to speak]

Dinka,” he said. It also happened the other way around. “Zubir Basha, from Egypt, he was a soldier, a trader, he came to Bahr al Gazal as a soldier and a trader—and he brought so many

Fallata to Diem al-Zubier. They became southerners. They still live there; they are southerners, they marry with us. They register themselves as Southerners” [6 June 2010]. Husain got as far as Istanbul, where he tried to get passage to Germany but was told that he couldn’t go. So he went to Syria instead.

’gerit ‘monkey ,(ز) ’Everywhere he went, he said, he had been called zange ‘negro

and ‘abd ‘slave’ (). “Why did they use these words? He just wants to lower your ,(د) conduct, make himself better. Ah, but we are stronger than them, so I don’t become angry. He just wants to show me that he is better than me. But he isn’t.”

If Husain saw himself as somewhat above the divisions of Bor and Sudan it was partially because he saw himself as a bit of an outsider. The oral historian Neal Norrick (2006:86) has written about how “diversities in life experience can strike us as funny and tellers may use them

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as a basis for narrative humor.” I already mentioned how my friend M.G. used the differences

between our lives to temper painful subjects and voice a critique with humor (“we still have 30

or 40 centuries between us”). Many people I spoke to highlighted the differences between the

United States and Bor country as a resource for communicating criticism about negative attitudes

held by Americans toward Southern Sudanese without criticizing me directly (“The Dinka are

called warriors,” Daniel said. “But that isn’t true.”); and the incongruity of perspectives is a resource for humor (“A clumsy god? This is what people believe”). For instance, in June 2010,

I was talking to a young man from Bor about the upcoming referendum on Southern Sudanese independence.

Omar Bashir says, “I will not leave Southern Sudan, they are tribal. They will kill themselves. When the world blames me for letting these tribe people [gabila] kill themselves, What will I say?” So we [southerners] say, “okay, let us kill ourselves, we want to leave [viz., to have independence]” [nb8, 30 June ‘10].

To interpret this statement as fatalistic is to rather badly miss the point. I heard a number of

variations on this joke while I was in Bor. In all of them Omar Bashir appealed to the bigotry of

“the world”—the U.N. and humanitarian NGOs—which, as everyone was aware, viewed

Southern Sudanese as unchangeably “tribal” and violent. The implication was that the imagined

pathology of Southern Sudanese was held out to justify violence against them, often in the guise

of reconstituting centralized government authority.

Ultimately, Husain saw Sudan’s divisions as the result of racism and ignorance spurred

on by those who profited from it. “Some people do not want this thing called ‘peace’, they want

to sell their machines, their guns. They make a lot of money that way,” he said.

When he returned to Sudan, in the late-1970s, Husain got a job as a bookkeeper for a

government store attached to the Jonglei Canal project, “keeping spare parts, water pumps, ….”

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He worked with a British man: Edgar Sutton, a bachelor, older than Husain and, Husain thought,

an alcoholic, “he used to drink a lot of whiskey.”

I asked him what he remembered about Bor town, when he was younger.

He said that people from Aliab, across the river, used to come to Bor to work for wages.

People had across the river, and groundnuts. There was a steamer dock and a rest house

for the District Commissioner’s guests. At the D.C.’s office there was a kind of fan, “a big

circle,” covered with cloth and attached to a frame, like a see-saw, with a rope that ran out of the

window. “All day a prisoner would pull on that rope, to fan the D.C.”146

“You see,” he said, “the town was started a long time ago, 1905, but those who stayed— merchants, laborers, …—were temporary people. So when they got their money, they left. They just built tukuls [mud houses with grass roofs]. And those of us who came to the medina [

‘town/city’] didn’t want to stay—they wanted to stay in their villages. So Bor remained a place for temporary people. So the only old buildings you see are the D.C.’s office and the small hospital near the D.C.’s house.”

When he was a young man, Husain was telling me, things were different. “When the

British were here there was no trouble with the Arabs, even a few Dinka women were circumcised before the government outlawed it.”

The experiences and memories of many of the oldest cohort of men and women I spoke to in Bor troubled the linear narratives of change that the SPLA leadership voiced when they spoke about overcoming the past. Indeed, Husain said that Sudan’s civil wars weren’t rooted in

146 Kayaking the length of the Nile with Andre and Jean, John Goddard stayed in Bor from 2 February to the 12, 1951. “Major Cummings, the commissioner, … was seriously ill with a virulent combination of malaria and amebic dysentery” (1979:126). Goddard doesn’t mention the fan, but he says that Cummings gave him some lettuce, lemons, and grapefruit from his garden and let them use the guesthouse. This fan came up in a number of conversations with people who lived in Bor during the colonial period.

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antagonisms between northerners and southerners at all, but produced by foreign techniques of

rule, existential insecurities, and inequality. Low level northern clerks were placed in positions

which left them anxious about their authority (“He just wants to lower your conduct, make

himself better”), fundamentalists could raise a following and war profiteers could raise money by

playing on people’s uncertain circumstances. One reason that intergenerational conversations

with people like Husain were so striking to many in their late teens and early twenties was that

the experiences of their elderly grandparents tended to resonate much more than the stories told

by their parents.

Allow me to make a broad generalization. While many in their 40s who had come into

early adulthood during the second civil war tended to speak about the dramatic changes wrought

by the war and the conversion of many people in Bor country to Christianity; people in their late

70s, who could remember the early years of Sudan’s independence tended to emphasize that,

really, the underlying issues had not been solved—there had been no dramatic breaks. Many of

the oldest cohort of former civil servants I spoke to reflected back on their earlier selves and

perspectives and told me that the problem, really, was ‘this government war’, tɔŋ akuma—as opposed to a conflict rooted in some sort of ‘clash of identities.’ Middle-aged officials sometimes expressed this point of view, but they almost always distanced themselves from it by ascribing it to “uneducated people in the villages.”

These are also themes that animate much of the literature on the ‘root causes’ of conflict in Sudan and South Sudan.

While simplifying complex situations can provide greater clarity, I have tried to keep my account of Bor country close to everyday life and to the people I met there in order to complicate easy generalizations. I have included a number of personal sketches in order to suggest that

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people like Madit, say, or Hussain or Fatinadït (whom I introduced in the last chapter) or Mabior

(CHAPTER EIGHT) did not simply play out the roles assigned to them by a patrilocal, patrilineal, cattle-centric, war-torn society divided between “Arabs” and “Africans.” Still, I am not trying to use a writing-against-culture claim to release myself from the obligation to weigh the experiences of people in Bor against those of other people in comparable circumstances elsewhere. The appropriate level of comparison, I think, is not found in a sphere of already constituted knowledge (or ‘identities’) but rather through an examination of the ways in which knowledge is objectified and circulated—interpreted, debated, understood, rejected, considered compelling or boring, or found to be confusing. Husain felt a little out of place in Bor society, but he was no less “representative” because of it. Indeed, the question of representativeness in this context is meaningless, as Lilia Abu-Lughod (1993:23) has shown. There are people everywhere who feel out of place.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THIS LAND WILL FINISH US

In 2009-2010, continuous, sporadic rural insecurity had led many people to relocate their families closer to the places where soldiers and police were posted: closer to rural roads and junctions where people could quickly assemble to defend themselves. Bor town was a place where parents raised their children in difficult circumstances while struggling in everyday life to build for them a secure future. It was also a place where almost everyone had spent a good deal of time away from their rural villages, and most people were aware of the opportunities that existed elsewhere as well as the attitudes that foreigners held about Southern Sudanese.

Ambitious students knew that the best places to study were in Khartoum, Uganda, and Kenya.

For many people the most visible expression of inequalities of wealth and influence within

Southern society was the ability of “big people” to relocate their families safely to Uganda and

Kenya, where there were better schools and hospitals and fewer risks from rural insecurity.

“You’ve heard the children? ‘Pariak! Pariak! Pariak!,’” Mabior was saying to me, speaking of the little children who worked as turn-keys and barkers for the taxis that ran between

Bor and Pariak on the road to Juba. “And they may get a pound—they are even sleeping in the bus park and eating left-over food” [25OCT09].147 It was not hard for Mabior to imagine his own children reduced to sleeping under a van in a roadside bus park. Shortly before leaving Bor

147 These children were occasionally called man agoro ‘child of Agoro’ [pl. meth kagoro]. This term for ‘street children’, who have parents someplace where they are unable to care for their children—such as the child of a mokoyo drunkard or a soldier posted far away, comes from the trading center of Agoro, a ‘black market’ at the Ugandan border “for guns and stolen property, stolen government guns and bullets, cows, clothes, suk mujaramin market of criminals’],” Mabior said. I wrote “…cows, clothes, suk…” in my notebook as Mabior‘ وق رن] continued, “There was no government there, the person carrying a pen [viz., looking like a government official] would be killed” [NB8, 14 July 2010; see Akabwai and Ateyo (2007:20-4) and Walraet (2008:60-2) for a description of the gun-trafficking hub in Agoro, northern Uganda]. 194 in August 2010, Mabior asked me to carry a message to his eldest son, Makuei, who was attending primary school in Uganda, where he was staying in a house rented by a young man living in the United States. “Tell him to stop playing around.” Mabior said. “You see Brendan, education at this time is very important. The leaders put their children in the best schools. But they want our children to be soldiers like us, and that is not right. The village schools are no good; they just push the students to the next class [without teaching them anything]” [13 August

2010; see also 19 Nov. 2009].

Most people who remained in Bor country wanted more secure land and greater tenure security. People also wanted to decide for themselves who their neighbors would be to be able to make their own choices about whether to remain or move elsewhere without the choice being made for them by armed conflict or government soldiers.

Attachments to historical ancestral localities in Bor country long predated Sudan’s 1983-

2005 civil war as well as what Geschiere and Gugler (1998) described as the “villagization of national politics.” In 2009-2010, the importance of rural kinship networks as ‘fallback resources’ for urban migrants and refugees (Ferguson 1999) only partly explained the salience of ancestral localities; but the gamble one took by making a living in towns no doubt figured powerfully into people’s sense of the importance of maintaining rural attachments. At the same time, if someone did manage to find a job that paid cash wages, he or she felt obliged to contribute to family in the countryside. Kristen Cheney (2007) has pointed out that many attempts to understand the complex relations that crisscross “dichotomized domains such as urban and rural, traditional and modern” have understood kin relations principally through the lens of material relations and interests. But when Ugandan schoolchildren described their feelings about family and community obligations to her, Cheney found that “material reciprocity

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was intricately linked with emotional reciprocity” (2007:148). The economic logic of self-

interest, she noted, with its blindness to affective sentiments, tends to falsify people’s actual

motivations and attachments. At the same time, if anthropological accounts of rural-urban

relations suggested that people’s motives were ultimately matters of rational self-interest, it was

partially because they were framed to respond to the conventional stereotype of Africans as

maintaining rural attachments because they were primordial, ‘irrational’ and ‘backward.’ What

tended to get lost in this discussion, Cheney suggests, was that rural-urban connections were

founded as much on the ground of people’s stubborn social “obstinacy” (Frykman 1997:79)—

their insistence on continuing to love their grandparents and hold weddings and funerals, and

help each other to build houses or send their friends’ children to school, …—as it was rooted in

the knowledge that everything they had built up could disappear overnight.

orphan life

In 2006, B.P.—a tall, square faced man in his early forties—was transferred to the office of the Jonglei Ministry of Physical Infrastructure’s town survey and planning division in Bor.

The money for the “demarcation and survey” of Bor town had run out, he said, and “we, as the native personnel, took over from TSG Mukunda [a private Kenya-based company that the

Government of South Sudan had contracted to survey].”

In April of 2010, a week before Sudan’s general elections, I was talking to B.P. in the

office he shared with two other men. The room was small and dimly lighted by a naked, low-

watt bulb hanging from a rafter. Bound documents, computer printouts, three

TOTALSTATIONs in their protective orange cases, and several computers covered the three

desks. People called this part of town “the ministries” or “Degroot,” after the name of a French

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construction company that had cut the road from Juba to Bor and, during the war, abandoned the

buildings where the ministry offices are now located. The sporadically fenced block of squat,

white and yellow stucco buildings were tucked away, on a side street off Macuar Junction,

beside the high-walled UN-Habitat compound. Each morning when B.P. walked to his little

office, the UN compound—boxy and simplified like a child’s drawing of a castle, with thick

steel gates, razor-wire, and guard boxes—was a reminder that he was being pushed around. His

planning efforts were continually being “undermined,” he said, by decisions made at “higher

levels” of the administrative hierarchy, by Government of South Sudan (GoSS) level bureaucrats

whose decisions were made for them by “private companies like UNDP and TSG and Sabina [an

Egyptian contractor].”

On a large sheet of paper B.P. had laid out a multicolor picture of what he hoped to accomplish in Bor. The principle thoroughfares were already in place, dividing the town’s plat into ‘blocks’ separated by wide unpaved avenues. On the map, each block was color-coded

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according to the size of the residential plots that would be located there: green for “first class,”

low-density neighborhoods composed of 200 plots; yellow of medium density, “second class,”

sections; red for small plot, high-density “third class” neighborhoods of 400 residential plots; and

blue to indicate “unallocated” districts.148

“Neighborhoods,” B.P. corrected when I said ‘grid.’ “The grid system is contrary to this, but it can be applied to the rural areas—to the payams and bomas. The modern way is the neighborhood. When you design, you need a full set of utilities.” He described how each block would form a self-contained “modular neighborhood” with its own public utilities, central marketplace, school, and police post. It will ease traffic and distribute services. “You know this system was adopted in Kenya because there is insecurity within the town,” he said. B.P. described the violence that had been triggered by the outcome of Kenyan presidential and parliamentary elections at the end of 2007 and early 2008. Mwai Kibaki’s narrow victory over

Raila Odinga, the reports of counting delays and charges of vote-rigging and fraud, televised images of police attacks and government helicopters no doubt weighed on him that afternoon.

Sudan’s general elections were one week away. “It is like a siege, for security, [you] can control each block—one entrance, one exit.”

B.P. printed out a copy of the map for me and used a ruler to make a little compass arrow to indicate north. “When you are done looking at it just tear it up. We do not give maps to the people.” Anyway, he said, it was not an “official map.” The placement of its most prominent features could cause conflicts. (My friend Mabior’s house was located on a loop of an ‘S’ in a large block labeled STADIUM.) It was a preliminary sketch of the bare outlines of a vision for the town. B.P. doubted it would be realized: because the state-level town planners didn’t control the various financial departments or the national-level ministries of public works (Irrigation,

148 I’ve reoriented this map detail away from north.

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Urban Water, Roads, and so forth) that contracted with NGOs and construction firms, B.P. said.

And, of course, the town planners had no control over what the GoSS or UNDP or USAID did,

and no way of redressing the fact that “state-level technocrats” never saw the contracts or

progress reports or funding formulas that the national government arranged with foreign NGOs

and construction companies, and which often “undermined” his office’s planning efforts.

When B.P. spoke about his work for the ministry, it was in terms of his service to the

“development and security of South Sudan.” There were things that were not right. Like the

placement of the UNDP-funded prison right across the road from the main police station, built by

a Chinese construction company contract by UNDP. “For security,” he said, “you need to scatter

forces. Police should not be next to the prison, they should be at least five kilometers away.”

And there were all the informal markets and little neighborhoods which had been built without

planning or official “allotment letters,” “sporadically,” B.P. said. A string of shops which had

been demolished to make a roadway for the new water treatment plant: “that area was crowded, a

bus station—so automatically shops appeared, a market without legal documents” blocking the

way to the water station. “All of them are illegal,” he said. All of the buildings in the area had

been cleared away, not only those on the planned route, because “you cannot just tell some people to leave,” people would suspect corruption [B.P. 1 April 2010].

Whatever the reason, the sudden removal of the “unlicensed” market was a very visible expression that the town was paanakuma ‘government-land’, and that living on land there did not confer rights to it. This was one reason why many people referred to the town plat as

“Jonglei state” to distinguish it from of the surrounding countryside, paanjieng, ‘people’s land’, where decisions about land tenure were made by processes of consensus. This popular perception also helps to explain the anxiety many people expressed about the expansion of the

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town plat into areas of communal land rights. The land bill passed by the Jonglei State

parliament in 2008 added 152 square miles to the town plat and relocated control over a form of

property in which co-residence had entitled multiple individuals to overlapping claims from

paanjieng, ‘people’s land’ to paanakuma ‘government-land’, or ‘the state’.

Indeed, a popular piece of sociology in Bor held that the expansion of the town amounted

to turning people into ‘orphans’ abɛ r (sg. abar). Others related the individualizing relations and hardships of town life to piir abɛ r ‘orphan life’; raan ëbën anɔŋ thok leckë ‘everyone has their own teeth’, a young man told me, ‘everyone must survive alone,’ “because, my friend, if you don’t have teeth, you will suffer” [TB, 13FEB2010]. “In the village people depend on each other, but in town, people depend on their own pockets,” another man said [16 September 2009].

In March 2010, I was sitting in Merol Market when a man limped past on crutches, singing a funny drunkard’s lament.

Na ci nhom weu ke yiin bi cieŋ piny If (you) don’t have money your surroundings will be nuan impoverished Piny acï ciɛn ŋï kaman a kënë, You! Land without your mother this one, Oh! Cieŋ ci nhom mor ke yiin bi cieŋ piny Living without your mother then you’ll have poor nuan surroundings149 Piny de ke miou. Akënë, You! Land with beer. This one, Oh! Cï nhom miou-du kë yiin bi cien piny Without your-beer your surroundings will be nuan impoverished indeed!

As he sang he lifted his crutches and, holding them like a gun, executed a little quickstep march in a circle before returning to his comical act of lameness. Then, pulling a huge roll of bills from his tattered coat pocket, he jokingly (aleŋ) begged money from laughing passersby [25 March

2010].

149 I translated cieŋ ‘surroundings’ here because it implies one’s social and material situation; cieŋ is related to piny ‘land’, in the sense of ‘community’. I’ve translated mur ‘vagina’, as “mother” because that is how Madit glossed it. (He wasn’t avoiding a vulgar term, the song implied this meaning rather than sisters, say, or lovers.) I don’t mean to make light of people’s difficulties here, I only mean to illustrate that people were able to laugh about them. I offered the man 1SP for his song and he gave me a pound and sang it a few times while I jotted it down.

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This impression that town-life turned people into motherless orphans was reinforced by ordinary people’s experience of wage-labor and the uncertainty of land tenure. Most of the town’s plots had been surveyed, but few plots had been assigned. What this meant was that no one who started a family in town would be able to keep their children from moving away. In the end, even the wealthiest and most well connected residents of Bor town could only manage to acquire half-a-dozen scattered plots, which meant that they would be unable to locate more than one generation of their families on adjoining land. Even if you managed to acquire an officially registered plot of land, you could not bury your parents or children there; there was a ‘public cemetery’ near the town’s border on an outlying block which had been designated for that purpose. This was not only a public health measure, B.P. told me, it was meant to prevent the burial places of ancestors and from becoming place markers for those who could claim kinship or descent from them.

terra nullius

Most people’s images of ‘the bureaucratic state’ were forged in offices like B.P’s, of land record keepers and other bureaucrats, and in county courts, elementary- and extension-schools, and through interactions with the various “companies”—the term for NGOs and private contractors large enough to possess offices—that drilled wells and did business in the region. I suggested in CHAPTER ONE that what made this bundle of symbols (writing, paper) such a potent symbol of government authority was the fact it was based, ultimately, on a moral fraud.

Everyone was perfectly aware that the power of writing and paper—town maps and plot

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assignment slips, paper ballots, identity cards and travel permits, …, contracts and leases—was

ultimately rooted in the threat of violence posed by armed men.

Understandings of akuma, (‘government’ > ), were also rooted in stories about the

colonial past. Few people may have known much about the details of the 1905 Anglo-Egyptian colonial Land Settlement Ordinance or the 1925 Land Settlement and Registration Ordinance—

‘all waste, forest, and unoccupied land shall be deemed to be the property of the government, until the contrary is proved’—but almost everyone knew the spot where there was a length of narrow gauge rail driven into the ground and could tell stories about how the colonial-era ‘tribal boundaries’ had been defined by it, or how the setting of prairie fires to cultivate pastures150 had been outlawed by the British who punished anyone who crossed them with a heavy hippopotamus-hide whip, like the one schoolchildren called Macar, ‘Mr. Black’.151

At least since the early 1900s, governments have tried to turn the places where people gathered together to reach decisions and discuss matters of common concern—marriages and communal assemblies (luk or a kut nhom), cattle villages (wut), the dhien, ‘herd groups’, that make them up, and so forth—into institutions of state governance. Douglas Johnson (1997:329) has argued that the obligation to make decisions and settle disputes in government courts (rather than through the mediation of ‘prophets’ or communal assemblies) ultimately amounted to a claim that every agreement people reached was also an agreement to have a colonial government, whose authority guaranteed each court decision. Colonial authorities had mixed

150 The British were perfectly aware that people set fires to make pasture. 151 Hutchinson (1996:285-6) has written about how ‘paper’ was initially considered to be a kind of wal ‘medicine’, and “was initially perceived, like other indigenous ‘medicines,’ as a source of secret healing powers. Indeed,” Hutchinson says, “during the early 1980s I often heard nonliterate Nuer compare the hidden forms of knowledge conveyed through ‘paper’ with the powers of ‘Divinity.’” Though accurate, Hutchinson’s emphasis on how the exchange of novel forms of knowledge and power were being discussed through occult discourses may obscure the extent to which the comparison was rooted in a skeptical meditation on mistrust and unwanted authority.

202 success convincing people to go along with this; and, Burton (1981:128) noted, the colonial state for most of its history was really mainly an apparatus of systematic raiding, with the British seeing tribute as “a symbol of subject status” and Dinka, Nuer, and Atuot understanding it according to the logic of sacrifice, “as buying government protection and goodwill”—a token that purchased the right “to settle their own affairs by their own fashion.” In actual practice, he

(1981:126) said, colonial politics often amounted to a politics of hiding, with colonial agents complaining, that “time and time again … the people they claimed to govern simply could not be found, or if they were, their cattle were inevitably some distance off in the temporary care of political allies.” The result was chieftainships that took on many of the roles of the colonial state but which people also looked to for protection against its actual representatives (Leonardi

2009:67-8). This understanding of colonial chiefs did not come out of nowhere, as Leonardi’s

(2007) historical research which places this attitude in the long term of Nilotic history has shown: the legitimacy of ‘colonial chiefs’ in the early 1930s was rooted in experiences with

‘cargo chiefs’ in the 1850s, individuals who acted as the local agents for slave-and-ivory companies, but also provided some protection against the traders’ predations (Leonardi 2009;

Simonse 1992).

Between the 1850s and the colonial chieftaincy of the 1930s lie eighty years of uneven predatory rule, and another eighty years separated the 1930s from the time when I was there. It might be useful, then, to sketch out the more immediate reasons why land access had become the center around which a whole series of other concerns had coalesced (Leonardi 2011; Hutchinson

1998). The popular perception that land access was the principle cause of Sudan’s civil wars was also one of the main reasons why many in Bor felt that land tenure should have been

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resolved by the terms of the 2005 peace agreement. After all, if the most common grievance in

2005 among southerners was the “alienation of land by government,” the peace agreement must

have addressed it, people told me (Leonardi 2011:219 citing Johnson 2009: 176).

In the 1970s, countries like Sudan were encouraged to take out loans for development

projects, which, in Sudan, meant the encouragement of private investment and the expansion and

intensification of export-oriented mechanized agricultural schemes. The Unregistered Land Act

of 1970 (ULA) allowed the government to lease large tracts of land to wealthy Khartoum

merchants. “Since virtually none of the lands held by communities in the peripheries of the

country had been registered with the central lands registry in Khartoum,” Deng (2011:8-9) points

out, “the ULA effectively eliminated any legal claims that communities may have had to their

community lands” and allowed the government to grant access to foreign companies to resources

within Sudan. In 1974, Chevron began prospecting for oil and the Sudan Penal Code was

passed, in part, to justify the government’s impunity in the use of arbitrary violence by the

designation of ‘customary landholders’ as trespassers and whole regions as terra nullius—and

their inhabitants, lawless squatters.152 By 1976, Sudan was insolvent and began to default on debt service payments. In 1978, the IMF ordered austerity plans that cut food subsidies and social services, and the World Bank halted funding for food production—instead, “offering

Sudan a massive rehabilitation plan to rebuild the cotton producing infrastructure” to generate foreign exchange and encourage export-led projects such as the huge Gezira Scheme

152 “There is almost no terra nullius, or no man’s land, in Southern Sudan. Virtually all land in the region is owned, in the sense that one or more communities retain the right to regulate its usage under customary law (Rolandsen 2010: 5). Areas that appear unoccupied may in fact be designated for seasonal use by people and livestock. Many communities also practice shifting cultivation, and an area that looks like natural forest may actually be a field that is left fallow for a number of years, sometimes up to a decade or more, until it is ready to be planted again” (Deng 2011:1-2).

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(Prendergast 1989:44).153 In June 1978, a French consortium, Compagnie de Constructions

Internationales (CCI), whose machinery and employees were guarded by heavily armed soldiers, began construction on the Jonglei canal—a deep, 75-meter wide waterway which was planned to run from the Bahr el Jebel at Bor through 360 kilometers of village- and pasture-land to Malakal on the , in order to divert 20 million cubic meters of water per day from the Upper

Nile’s floody grasslands to irrigate an extra 3-4 million feddans of agricultural land in central

Sudan and roughly the same area in Egypt (Howell, Lock, and Cobb 1988).154 By 1979, Sudan’s compounding debt had accumulated to US$1.2 billion (Brown 1992:123). Soldiers stationed in

Bor mutinied in 1983. Bread riots began in Khartoum in March 1985. Elsewhere in Sudan, such was the demand for empty land and cheap labor that several scholars—noting the renewal of the slave-trade in the 1980s—argued the large-scale population displacements in the 1980s and early-2000s were “not an incidental outcome of the fighting but one of its objects” (Johnson

2004:155). Insecurity was meant to force rural people off their lands and into the cash and wage- labor economy; and because they were in an unfamiliar place with few rights and subject to continual police harassment, displaced people became a pool of easily exploited workers for

World Bank-funded sugar and cotton agricultural schemes (Abusharaf 2009:71-75).155

153 The IMF lifted his 1990 declaration of non-cooperation against Sudan in 1999. Talisman Energy Inc. had enabled the government to develop its oil sector for export and to resume payments to the IMF. Talisman also directly and indirectly provided the infrastructure and capital to purchase weaponry and finance Sudan’s war in the South (see below). In 2000, Sudan began using oil revenues to develop a domestic arms-manufacture industry. 154 The canal was a source of considerable anger among people whose houses and fields were destroyed and routes to riverine pastures blocked. The SPLA flattened the CCI base camp at Sobat on February 10, 1984, and (120 kilometers short of Bor town) disabled the ‘bucketwheel,’ a huge excavation machine adapted from equipment used for iron-strip mining in Germany. Consuming 40,000 liters of fuel per day, the bucketwheel could shift 3,500 tons of earth every hour as it crept along at a rate of about 2 kilometers every 6 days (Collins 2000; Howell, Lock, and Cobb 1988). 155 See Douglas Johnson’s (2004:145-6) discussion of ‘peace villages’ which were part of a program to produce “a dependent and portable labour reserve who serve a double purpose: 1) to implement the government’s ‘pacification’ programme through resettling and reclaiming territory formerly contested by the SPLA, and 2) to extend political and economic control over the resources of these groups through agricultural schemes owned and

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One of the ironies, perhaps, of the “collapse” of state authority in Southern Sudan in the

1980s, was that, in Bor country at least, the reorganization of the chiefs’ court system by the

SPLA constituted what Stepputat (1999) has described as “everyday forms of state formation” which spread outward, like an inkblot, from towns into the rural hinterlands (cf. Burton 1988).

SPLA-held areas were divided up into zones headed by Commanders who passed edicts that concerned everything from marriages to tooth extractions.156 A Brigadier General headed a

“high court” where cases settled in “lower level” chiefs’ courts could be appealed [27 April

2010]. A former Civil-Military Administrator explained to me how on six occasions during the four years between 1987 and 1991, for example, when Kuol Manyang was the Bor country’s zonal commander, the SPLA collected 500 bulls from each administrative payam and 3 people from each buluk, “headman” (of maybe 250-300 people), in Greater Bor as a kind of “tax” [27

April 2010].157 The current Civil Administrator of the same court center explained that it was the contributions of food and children to the SPLA during the war that gave rural people their

“right” to vote, to take part in the referendum, and—especially—to community lands, and to take part in decisions about its use [1 May 2010].

If long term residence confers rights, the main right which war-time suffering was said to anchor was to community lands. David K. Deng (2011) has noted that the phrase ‘the land belongs to the community’ has popularly come to refer to two principles. The first is that the government should consult “the community” before granting access to any territory, since

operated by interest groups currently represented in the army and government.” For a longer-term analysis of the “business of slavery” see Spaulding (1988). 156 I do not mean, here, to disregard how heavily the painful memory of this period weighed on people in 2009- 2010. Sharon Hutchinson (1998:58-59) has written about how the SPLA sought to convince ordinary Nuer and Dinka, “villagers as well as active … recruits,” to disregard their memories of those people whom they lost or killed in the course of the ‘government war’, “for acts of inter-ethnic homicides carried out under orders from their military superiors,” military leaders claimed, carried no moral consequences. .’sign, marker, learned‘ م buluk ( < Turkish, ‘quartermaster’). Government “chief” (alama), derives from from 157 206

‘virtually all land in the region is owned’; the second, that everybody who lives in a particular

locality should have the right to gather together to discuss matters of local concern, whether the

placement of a water pump, the resolution of a dispute, or, say, the terms of a 99-year lease for

several hundred-thousand hectares of land to a foreign company for a carbon-credit transfer

scheme or teak-wood logging enterprise. These principles obviously did not originate with the

SPLA, though the phrase is credited to John Garang. Instead, the principles of communal land

tenure provided the ground for an older counterposed discourse—a kind of fulcrum against

which ordinary people could bend back the SPLA’s most compelling arguments for forming an

army against its characteristic modes of military rule and authority. While people seem to have

ignored many of the edicts passed by the SPLA’s “government in the bush,” as it has come to be

called (“…the community disagreed and [the zonal commander] Kuol said, ‘okay, leave it’”

[27April2010]), one thing which everyone did take seriously was land. This makes it easier to

understand the popular attitude that while the ‘SPLA government’ akuma SPLA, was an

institution based on fear and violence it could nonetheless serve a legitimate, protective purpose

in so far as it remained outside the bounds of moral community: the domain of everyday

relationships held together by the habits of consensus people developed by living close

together.158

158 On 15 May 2010, after the election results were announced, General Deng warned Bor’s residents to leave before he attacked. “Well, my warning to all citizens is that they should leave Bor immediately and any place with military bases, they should leave it, because our target is only the military,” he told Sudan Radio Service (Sudan Tribune, 15 May 2010). Everyone was aware that the main reason that Bor civilians were targeted was because of their proximity to the security forces that were meant to protect them. Pradeep Jeganathan (2004) has described the relationships between “checkpoints,” political identities, and the anticipations of violence that constitutes the margins of the state. “The checkpoint lies at the boundaries of a target,” Jeganathan (2004:69) writes about the irony of checkpoints which “focus … attention on the target. If the logic of the anticipation of violence creates a plethora of shifting targets that flicker and move like shadows across the landscape with each explosion or threat, then the checkpoint is an attempt by an agency of the state to control that flickering movement, to announce in no uncertain terms: ‘This is a target’.”

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• • •

In 2009-2010, people experienced the world of akuma (‘government’, NGOs, and foreign companies) as distant, arbitrary and unpredictable not because they were “isolated” from that world’s effects, but rather because they were marginalized from decisions made in international arenas. GoSS “government officials [felt] entitled to forgo community consultations until the

[foreign] investment reaches a stage where the local community’s cooperation is absolutely necessary,” Deng (2011:18) writes; and “the GoSS Ministry of Agriculture … is not likely to begin considering issues of consultation and compensation until it becomes apparent that people will need to be relocated from the land.” Part of the problem, Deng (2011:12) argues, was that while the establishment of the GoSS in 2005 involved a process of decentralization, neither the

CPA nor the interim constitution of South Sudan addressed the question of land tenure. The main reason popular anxieties about land access did not stop with the signing of the CPA, then, was because the fundamental issues of the relation between paanjieng, ‘people’s land’, and paanakuma ‘government-land’, had not really been resolved by the peace agreement.159

Indeed, in some respects, peace has brought greater insecurity for ordinary people.

Between 1983 and 2005, foreign investment was limited to a few mineral producing regions and garrison towns were small and clearly defined by checkpoints. The SPLA depended for the provisions of its soldiers on the farms and cattle that rural people tended and, therefore, was obliged to take their opinions into account. However, after 2006, when the region appeared more stable, foreign investors arrived. Two US global financial firms, Jarch Management (probably a

159 Arguably, as James Ferguson (2006) has pointed out, this ability is really the main meaning of “sovereignty” in many places. If South Sudan “fails”, though, Tsing’s (2005:55) question may surface: “Might deregulation and cronyism sometimes name the same thing—but from different moments of investor confidence?”

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‘general partner’ of Jarch Capital,160 New , NY, USA; registered in the Virgin Islands) and

Nile Trading and Development (, TX, USA)161 acquired long-term leases on nearly a million hectares of land in South Sudan. Other foreign “robber barons” have also taken part in massive transfers of land from local control to private leaseholder ownership: Canadian

Economic Development Assistance for Southern Sudan, CEDASS (12,000 hectares hectares);

Citadel Capital, Egypt’s largest private equity company (105,000 hectares); Mauritius

Agribusiness (24,300 hectares); Prince Budr Bin Sultan, the son of His Royal Highness Crown

Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia (105,000 hectares); Eyat Oilfield Services, a northern Sudan energy company (162,000 hectares); and so forth.

While much has been written about rural violence, “tribalism” and the emergence of

“ethnic fiefdoms” in South Sudan, a major source of insecurity for many people today is the they are no longer in a position to take part in decisions about land tenure. Indeed, in Lainya county,

Central Equatoria State, for instance, “ethnic fiefdom” is a misleading and simplistic description of the association that was created by an agreement between the “Mukaya Payam Cooperative” and the Texas-based Nile Trading and Development Inc. for a lease on 600,000 hectares of land.

“Mukaya Payam Cooperative” consisted of a single government Chief, one “2nd class” judge, and a Minister of Housing, and the lease was signed “without the knowledge or input of the

160 Jarch Capital and Jarch Management are both owned by a single entity—probably an umbrella company that owns the equity of each—perhaps with Capital and Management set up as a limited partner and general partner structure, where Jarch Capital is a limited partner investment fund that houses the money and Jarch Management is the general partner that acts as the management/investment company. On Jarch Capital’s “board [are] former state department and intelligence officials, including Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador and expert on Africa, who acts as vice-chairman; and Gwyneth Todd, who was an adviser on the Middle East and north Africa at the Pentagon and under Bill Clinton at the White House” (Sudan Tribune). 161 Nile Trading and Development “is an affiliate of Development, LLC, an Austin, Texas-based “global business development partnership and holding company with decades of experience in international business, finance, and diplomacy.” Kinyeti’s managing director, Howard Eugene Douglas, was the United States Ambassador at Large and Coordinator for Refugee Affairs (1981-1985) during the Administration of President Ronald Reagan. Christopher Weikert Douglas, who in 2008 worked at the United States Consulate in Dusseldorf, Germany, serves as Secretary of the company. The two are also directors of the Texas incorporated company, Orbis Associates LLC, and the Singapore registered firm, Orbis Orient Ltd.” (…oaklandinstitute.org/files/OI_Nile_Brief_0.pdf).

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community affected,” according to a 2011 petition to the Governor of Central Equatorial State in

Juba which began, “We the chiefs, elders, religious leaders and the youth of Mukaya Payam

unanimously with strong terms condemn, disavow or deny the Land Lease agreement reached on

11th march/2008 between the two parties” (Chief Dickson Lenga Surur et. al. 2011).

The distinctions between “grassroots” and “global” are often as hard to draw as between public and private, regulated and unregulated, charitable and profit-seeking, agricultural development and mineral extraction, legal and illegal, and military and civilian.162 In early 2009, for instance, Jarch Capital purchased a 70% stake in Leac, a company controlled by Gabriel

Paulino Matip Nhial, the eldest son of the SPLA deputy commander, General Paulino Matip, as well as 400,000 hectares of land controlled by General Paulino, “with options to acquire more”

(Sudan Tribune 16 April 2009; GRAIN Jan2012:51; Blas and Wallis 2009; Davis 2009).163

Paulino took a seat on the advisory board of Jarch as vice-chairman in 2007; Gabriel joined in

162 In 2009, U.S. sanctions against the Government of Sudan in Khartoum prohibited many forms of investment and imports and exports. Companies wishing to circumvent these restrictions presented themselves as charitable organizations providing development assistance. This is one way that robber barons create a “gray zone,” as Nordstrom (2007) notes. Jarch Capital’s website, for example, is headed: "Because It Is YOUR Land, YOUR Natural Resources!" [jarchcapital.com/, accessed 20 August 2012, emphasis in original]. 163 Paulino Matip was central to the Khartoum government’s divide-and-rule strategy after the split of the SPLA into warring factions in 1991. “Matip had maintained an autonomous military and economic base in his Bul Nuer territory near Bentiu, building up a small trading empire dealing in sorghum and cattle” (DH Johnson 2004:124). Khartoum’s military and financial support for Matip’s “empire” enabled the government to maintain access to oilfields in the region, and thereby to generate oil revenues to finance its war in the South. “The [Khartoum] government used Nuer commander Paulino Matiep, to whom it referred as a “friend” of the army, as its primary surrogate force to keep to a minimum the presence of the SPLA in Blocks 1, 2, and 4. Cmdr. Paulino Matiep, then leader of the II (government-aligned) forces, had never joined the SPLM/A. His role was to become ever more important in the years that followed. He was strategically placed, in Bul Nuer territory including Mayom and , to provide a buffer against SPLA incursions into the oilfields from the Dinka and SPLM/A stronghold in Bahr El Ghazal” (HRW 2003:114-115). “The government [in Khartoum] promoted Paulino Matiep to the rank of major general in the Sudanese army” sometime before March 1998 when he formed the Unity Movement/Army (SSUM/A), based in Mankien, where he built up his forces with 5,000 AK-47s, nine 12.7mm AAAs (heavy machine guns), and sixty PKMs (machine guns) from the government (along with ammunition) and “the recruitment (forced and voluntary) of Bul Nuer boys and men from his own area. … His troops numbered perhaps as many as 10,000” (HRW 2003:135). Clashes between Matiep’s forces, Rek Machar’s break-away faction (also supported by Khartoum), and the SPLA-mainstream were held out by Khartoum as evidence of “tribalism,” an “ungovernable south,” and as a justification for the government’s war on southern civilians. Matip joined the SPLA after the 2005 peace agreement (Sudan Tribune 16 April 2009).

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2009, and was followed by General Gabriel Tanginye in 2010 (GRAIN Jan2012:50-51). One

could perhaps call this heterogeneous alliance a public-private partnership; or one could analyze

it as an example of “primitive accumulation” by a New York private equity group (Harvey

2005), “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007), “capitalizing on chaos” (Funk 2010), or “franchise

cronyism,” as Anna Tsing (2005) has elsewhere observed.

"There's always an issue of instability," Philippe Heilberg, the chairman and CEO of Jarch Capital, told Reuters’ Megan Davies. "There's no perfect scenario. We're not investing in the U.S. This is more frontier land. It’s also extremely fertile land" (Davies 2009).164 "You have to go to the guns: this is Africa," Heilberg had told the Financial Times of London, explaining why his affiliate company in the Virgin Islands made a deal with Gabriel Matip. “In contrast to land deals between foreign investors and governments, Mr. Heilberg is gambling on a warlord's continuing control of a region where his militia operated in the civil war,” Javier Blas and William Wallis, noted. “This is Africa. The whole place is like one big mafia. I’m like a mafia head. That’s the way it works,” Heilberg told McKenzie Funk on another occasion (2010:60).

Despite Heilberg’s repeated, candid admissions that he aimed to profit from the misery of others by “gambling on a warlord,” many people in the United States resist the idea that American private equity firms and “development assistance” companies have engaged in what Robert Fox described as “development in reverse” (OXFAM 2011).165 This reluctance springs from many sources. It is easier, perhaps, to attribute ongoing violence in South Sudan to things that are imagined to be more indigenous to East Africa. ‘Ethnicity,’ ‘endemic violence’, ‘rampaging youth violence’, the ‘inevitable’ violence of poverty, ‘cultural’ factors such as ‘brideprice,’ or

‘age-old cattle vendettas,’ ‘blood feuds,’ …: these factors are often invoked to “explain” South

164 http://uk.reuters.com/article/2009/01/12/jarch-sudan-idUKN1233921220090112 165 Funk, McKenzie. (2010) Capitalists of Chaos: Who’s Cashing in on Global Warming? Rolling Stone, 27 May 2010, p.60.

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Sudan in the same ways in which earlier generations would have used the concept of “race”

(Allen 1999:31).166

For instance, after reports that the government of Khartoum was using the roads and airstrips of a Canadian oil company, Talisman, to launch aerial bombardments on civilian targets from helicopter gunships and Antonov bombers, Talisman’s CEO, James W. Buckee, wrote a letter to shareholders explaining that

because Sudan presents significant challenges, we realized that this project would attract questions from varied sources [e.g., the United Sudanese African Parties, the UN Special Rapporteur for in Sudan, , Christian Aid, …]. However, careful study last summer [1998] persuaded management that this is a sound business investment and our involvement could be carried out in a responsible, ethical manner. Experience to date confirms that judgment. We recognize that Sudan's chronic troubles, including poverty and conflict running along political and tribal "fault lines," create special challenges [James W. Buckee, Talisman CEO, “President’s Letter to Shareholders,” March 10, 1999, http://www.Talisman-energy.com/ar98pres.html, (HRW 2003:61, emphasis added)].

Heilberg’s explanation was simply “this is Africa.”

Globe-spanning il/legal economies (Nordstrom 2007) are not only created by the work of charismatic robber barons like Heilberg and generals like Paulino Matip, nor only a manner of spectacular accumulation and dramatic settings. Vast networks are composed of the most ordinary things—a child selling a package of cigarettes, for instance, or food, clothing, books,

...—as Nordstrom (2007:8) has shown. Often, accounts of the intersections of crime, finance, and power focus on the most exciting and dramatic aspects of disposition, but it is also important to explore the meanings and implications of day-to-day practices and ordinary places that are linked together by a vast network of markets and routes. Focusing attention on the most

166 BBC News Africa, “South Sudan horror at deadly cattle vendetta” (16 January 2012, accessed 15 August 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16575153).

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dramatic and obscene aspects of profiteering, in order to criticize it, runs the risk of reinforcing

the idea that “Africa” is exotic.

Depicting South Sudan as “frontier land” is partially a matter of learning to see it as

exotically different from the rest of the world.167 Anna Tsing (2005) has written about the

“conjuring act” required to make the Meratus Dayaks of the Kalimantan landscape disappear, transforming their homes into an empty wilderness, a “lawless frontier.” Doing so is a matter, first, of delegitimizing the perspectives and human attachments of the people living there.

Making “frontier land” available for the fantasies of financial speculators like Philippe Heilberg or James Buckee is a project of unmapping—an act of deliberate cartographic, social, cultural, and historical amnesia; it is also an aesthetic project that formats how Southern Sudanese people are perceived by others.

In April 2010, I was in the Bor town office of TotalFinaElf (“TOTAL”)—at the time one of the four largest integrated oil companies on earth which, in 1980, gained the mineral concessions for 158,113 square kilometers in the Bor, Pibor and Kapoeta districts of Southern

Sudan—a region known as “Block 5,” the largest oil concession in Sudan (HRW 2003). The office was in a prefabricated trailer that rested on cinder blocks. Outside there was a satellite dish and big diesel generator to power the air conditioner. Inside, a large map of Block 5 hung beside ‘tribal maps’ and close-up photographs of Dinka wrestlers. The director—a middle-aged

Parisian with a pair of nice, soft calfskin boots who had worked for a charitable NGO that provided wheelchair-bicycles to handicapped people—was showing me some photographs that he had taken. His subject matter was mostly wrestlers, decorated steer, and naked breasts; this

167 Ferguson has written about the role of narratives of “isolation” in the construction of development “problems” in The Anti-Politics Machine (1994), named for an institutional apparatus that translates “all the ills and ailments of the country into simple, technical problems” which are just the kinds of apolitical, technical problems that ‘development’ agencies are in the business of solving (1994:87).

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last interest had led, by-way of proximity, to his interest in navel scarification (“always four

lines, never three”) and what he described as “the symbolic of beads,” which women wore

around their necks.168

He was also fascinated, he said, by the “collision” of an “8,000 year old iron age and the modern world.” He showed me an image of a woman stirring a pot of soup in an aluminum pot.

“This [spinning] gesture is maybe 10,000 years old. And here is a modern aluminum pot, a plastic container, here”—he said, pointing first to a bright yellow container and then scratching his nose (two gestures which Bruno Latour noted are of greater antiquity than stirring).169 He scrolled through a number of images and stopped on another photograph: a man holding a spear walks along a sandy path ahead of a woman carrying a bundle of clothes rolled up in a foam mattress on her head. He described seeing women laboring under heavy bundles while men strutted about unencumbered. “[A Dinka man walking this way] appears like an animal society next to these modern things,” he said. He asked whether I’d seen the baboons that sat by the airstrip. He clicked at his computer until an image of a potbellied baboon appeared on the screen. Baboons are also “patriarchal,” he told me [10 April 2010; 11 April 2010].170

Thus baboons, women, and the aesthetics of ‘national geographic’ (Lutz and Collins

1993) were enlisted in the transformation of South Sudan into a place where the laws of physics were suspended and time had stood still since the iron-age (cf. Abu-Lughod 2002; Fabian 1983).

168 I explained that the decorative scars were floral motifs but he wanted an entire cosmology—when I asked a woman about the patterns she said, ‘it’s a tree.’ His interest in the anthropology of South Sudan sprang from reading Levi-Strauss, he said, and Jon Holtzman’s (2000) Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives. 169 “I may use an electric drill, but I also use a hammer. The former is thirty-five years old, the latter hundreds of thousands. Will you see me as a DIY expert ‘of contrasts’ because I mix up gestures from different times? Would I be an ethnographic curiosity? On the contrary: show me a gesture that is homogeneous from the point of view of the modern time” (1993:75). 170 Redmond O’Hanlon brilliantly satirizes the idea that Africa has persisted unchanged for 65 million years in his book No Mercy (1996) about his trek into “the Heart of the Congo” in search of a dinosaur (a sauropod) called Mokélé-mbembé, that was said to be swimming around in Lake Télé.

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If making South Sudan into “frontier land” was partially a matter of gender, it was also a matter of enlisting young people from Europe and North America who were eager for excitement and an opportunity to do good.171 (People like me.) Gender could also scaffold another set of triangular moral distinctions between “the West,” “Sudanese,” and “the Chinese,” and between

“Europeans,” “the community” and “corrupt government officials.” For example, in September,

2009, I was talking to a second TOTAL director. (Unlike smaller NGOs, TOTAL’s expatriate, in-country directors worked in rotation, ‘one month on, one month off’.) Sitting at a table in the hotel compound that housed the TOTAL office, he was telling me why he worked for a petroleum company. I hadn’t suggested that there was anything wrong with working for a company like TOTAL, but as he talked I got the strong impression that he assumed I thought he was an ecological villain.

“Every time I see a [government] minister, he has a list of things he wants—a house in Kenya, a car, …. But I am proud to work here. I wouldn’t work for TOTAL if I wasn’t.” He said that he hadn’t spent years working for NGOs to throw it all away. The Southern Sudanese, he said, are much better off working with a “western company” because western companies are held to account for their actions by the media and NGOs. “China can pollute. China can spill oil in the water and nobody gives a shit—but if TOTAL or SHELL or BP spills oil the world press will be all over it. And people in western companies will care. They have the idea of democracy—not like China or India. Europeans give a fuck about pollution. The Chinese don’t give a shit about anything-- pollution, human rights, women’s rights…”

171 Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1992:45) has written about how scientific “racial thinking developed not in spite of but rather because of its success, and in response to the situation created by the questioning of the legal status of slavery.” Though I rarely interacted with NGO workers in South Sudan, I got the impression that the desire to “do good” was what animated European humanitarian workers’ racism. From their point of view, they were there to help people; and when people resisted their charitable efforts, NGO workers tended to project their difficulties onto what they thought was a profoundly alien mentality among “the locals.” The most common themes (laziness, “primitive culture,” and patriarchal attitudes) were mostly a jumble of things that fell outside the narrow timetables and bureaucratic practices set by the NGO-workers own projects. Men and women from Bor country often resisted efforts to reform ‘customary law,’ because they tried to separate hierarchical government spheres from ones defined by processes of consensus, for example. NGO-workers always ascribed this reluctance to “Dinka men’s” misogyny and “Dinka women’s” victimization by “their” culture, or what one might call “false consciousness.”

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“Right now,” he continued, “[TOTAL] is just doing community outreach,” using the same methods of “community participation” that the other NGOs use—building schools, drilling boreholes, and “the people” decide what they want. He was complaining about how “the people make outrageous demands,” he said, they were asking to be compensated for their land at a rate per square meter equal to a “square meter in Paris!” I pointed out that there wasn’t petroleum under Paris. There is only a 10% chance that TOTAL will even find oil in the block, he said. And, “obviously,” TOTAL’s work in Southern Sudan was ultimately “profit driven,” he said, but its activities were held in check by the NGOs and the need for “community support.” After all, he explained, the CPA had designated all land except that under the principle towns—Bor, Juba, and so forth—as “community owned” and the support of “the community” was therefore very important to TOTAL and part of the (albeit self- interested) politics of building trust. “Look,” he said, the GoSS could refuse to honor the agreement made between Khartoum and TOTAL, “we had to sue to [reclaim] the concession from White Nile;” that’s why “the support of officials and the local community” is so important.172 It was why TOTAL encouraged him to cultivate good will through favors to anyone with influence or prestige—hence the boreholes and schools and the bribes. “Okay, it is profit driven” but it benefits the “local community,” he said. “And the Chinese don’t give a shit about pollution or anything,” he said, for the fifth time. But the problem, he explained, was “aid dependency. The people don’t want to work. This government is totally corrupt. The [SPLA] officials all say, ‘I’ve been fighting for 21 years. Now it is my turn to get paid.’” He listed a number of well-known officials who had taken bribes and talked about “ethnic favoritism.” The TOTAL sub- office had been located in the compound of a Nuer-owned hotel, he said, because he was always trying to explain to Nuer why TOTAL’s “humanitarian work” was mainly in Dinka areas. The compound’s location was meant as a kind of political gesture, he said. The SPLA government has lost “the people’s trust”—which was, he said, why some people had told him that they would vote for the National Unity Party, against the SPLM, in 2011. “The Nuer think the SPLM is a Dinkatocracy,” he told me [26 September 2009].

In 2009-2010, the international press commonly portrayed Southern Sudanese as victims, and usually suggested that they were victimized by their own nepotism, patriarchal attitudes, or pathological violence. The suggestion that “the Nuer think the SPLM is a Dinkatocracy” was also a common theme that projected a foreigner’s prejudice onto ordinary Southern Sudanese who were portrayed not only as bigots, but bigots whose prejudices were rooted in backwardness, their own “tribalism” and the failures of their own corrupt SPLM government

(and elided the role of petroleum companies in supporting those supposedly “tribal fault lines”).

172 White Nile is a petroleum company owned by a British footballer.

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The idea that “western companies” were more accountable to “the community” was, of course,

absurd—but the idea gave credit to the “western press” (and the “western idea of democracy”)

whenever the malevolence of a predatory company, such as Nile Trading and Development Inc.,

was uncovered and publicized.173

Again, what I want to emphasize is how EuroAmerican foreigners living in Bor and Juba have defined themselves and their projects through an effort to carve out a narrow path of virtue in South Sudan between “African corruption” (warlordism, aid-dependency, laziness, corruption, chronic violence) and Chinese irresponsibility (they “don’t give a shit”). Even if they inflicted as much cruelty on “local communities” as the Khartoum government, or “the Chinese,” or warlords had, “westerners” could distance themselves from that cruelty by displacing it onto the

Sudanese themselves. Again and again they pointed to “Sudan's chronic troubles,” claiming that it was the warlords, or ordinary people’s primordial attachments to ethnicity, or the Chinese, who were irresponsible, not “the west.”

• • •

173 For one thing, defining a petroleum company in the bifurcated terms of “East” and “West” is a bit tricky. In 1993, a small Canadian company, Arakis, acquired concessions (Blocks 1, 2, and 4) in Western Upper Nile; in 1996 Arakis partnered with three state oil companies—China National Petroleum Company (40% stake), Petronas (Malaysia, 30%), Sudapet Ltd. (Sudan, 5%)—retaining a 25% stake in the company created by the partnership, Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Corporation (GNPOC). In 1998, Talisman Energy Inc., Canada's largest private petroleum company, acquired Arakis and thus 25% of GNPOC. Rone (2003:504) notes that prior to 1998, GNPOC had “produc[ed] only for local consumption,” and Sudan imported most of its petroleum. Talisman’s “superior technology and experience” did, indeed, enable the war-stressed government to “develop” its oil sector for export and to finance attacks on civilians in the south (HRW 2003; Rone 2003). Companies like Lundin, Talisman, Chevron, and TotalFinaElf occupy a transnational, neoliberal political-economic geography which, while totally dependent on the presence of state borders, is more complex than can be captured by any spatial notion of “the west,” and too reliant on specific point-to-point networks to be called “global.” One could further point out that the whole idea of “the west” (and the idea that “the idea of democracy” emerged from it) is an incoherent, provincial, and racist idea to begin with, as Graeber (2007) has shown. My point is simply that the popular press has not guaranteed the accountability of these companies.

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What should be clear by now is that one thing that gave the assertion that the ‘land

belongs to the community’ its moral urgency was that conflicts over land had not ended with the

CPA (Leonardi 2011; Deng 2011; Rolandsen 2009). After all, if the war had been about land, the

CPA ought to address it. Instead, piny ya a bɔ wä-thö[k], ‘this land will finish us all [be our end]’, many people said. “That star will kill us,” others remarked, referring to the SPLM ballot symbol.

I need to introduce one important qualification here. Restraining people from fighting has long been a way of asserting authority—the only form of authority many people considered really legitimate. Indeed, the role of government courts in separating people who were quarrelling somewhat redeemed those intuitions (Johnson 1997). Lienhardt (1961:179) long ago pointed out that among Dinka-speakers in Southern Sudan “wide-range peace making is a sign of a claim to wide political influence,” and peacemaking was mainly a matter of separation (puɔ k) and restraint.174 The literal meaning of puɔ k is “to part with” or “to separate;” but the term also refers to ɣɔk puɔk , cattle received as ‘bloodweath’.175 The same notion of separation occurred in common speech when people talked about the peace process.

174 As a result, Johnson (1997:329) observed, “the clash between [the colonial] government and the prophets [in the 1930s] was in part a conflict over who had the right to make peace.” This helps to explain the great lengths to which the colonial government was willing to go to dynamite shrines and kill prophets who stubbornly continued to try to meliorate the effects of colonial rule through the establishment of wider and wider “moral communities,” which amounted to settling feuds and setting up prohibitions against fighting backed up by spiritual sanctions. The colonial government “feared the potential unity of the people it tried to rule,” Johnson notes, “because unity meant the possibility of united action” on people’s own terms, which could form the nucleus of an “incipient rebellion” (1997:329). 175 I discuss ‘bridewealth’ and ‘bloodwealth’ elsewhere—each acknowledged an act that could never be compensated, forgotten, or undone. Kɔc aacï thor ku acïï bɛny puɔk yic, ‘The people fought and have been separated by the chief’ (Nebel 1957). The literal meaning of puɔk is “to part with” or “to separate.” The term also refers to the cattle ɣɔk puɔk received by the people of a person who was killed. For instance, Kɔc ke A akör bi raanden guɔr B, ‘the people of A want to take revenge on the person of B’. Group A refers to the cattle of separation as ɣɔk puɔk, while group B refers to the cattle they give by the phrase ɣɔk kou ‘cattle of the thorn’, “because it catches everybody” [2 MAY 2010].

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In May, 2010, shortly after the national election results were announced and (as I

mentioned above) as episodes of the campaign were being turned into folklore, one of the most

popular stories was about the simple choice that ‘the people’ had presented to SPLM candidates:

‘carry the CPA to its natural conclusion by separating [puɔ k yic] South Sudan from the north’, they said, ‘or bring back all the people you have taken from us,’ restore [puɔ k] all those people who died in this ‘government war’ tɔŋ akuma [1 May 2010].

corralland

People’s ideas about the relationship between the government and its citizens were also rooted in their daily encounters with those who could not be sure of their own relationship with the government in Bor. In Bor town, in 2009-2010, displaced people (IDPs) from Darfur and other regions of Sudan, refugees from Somalia, and migrant laborers from Uganda provided a continual reminder of what life had been like in IDP settlements near Kosti and Khartoum and in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda. In settings marked by common hardships, cross-cultural, religious, and linguistic differences often came to seem no more important than the differences that existed among individual human beings. The affinity many felt probably sprang as much from common circumstance as from the fact that it was easy to identify with the position of displaced people living in Bor town. (It was also easy to imagine one’s friends and relatives living in similar circumstances elsewhere.) Short of marrying into a local family—which was by no means unheard of—, it was difficult for foreigners and IDPs to create enduring ties in Bor country. Non-citizens were barred from buying land, but so were many citizens. Most Bor

Dinka ‘citizens’ lived in permanent villages or had a claim on ancestral land in one; poor IDPs and foreigners—as opposed to foreign NGO-workers—lived in rented shacks (rakuba > Ar.

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‘outdoor pantry’[?]) near the marketplace and shared quarters with a handful of more or less

distantly related men, or slept in their shops. Indeed, one reason why locality was such a salient

element of self-identification for many in Bor was that displaced people living there provided a

continual reminder of the painful experience of placelessness.

Of course, life was hard for many Bor Dinka living in ‘town’ (panrɔ k ‘fenceland’ or

‘corralland’) too. Many people discussed life’s hardships with gracefully crafted expressions of town life:

wuɔk yiɛr acuoth ‘we are eating’ (wuɔ k (we all) + yiɛ r (braid a rope from strands of leather) + acuoth (scorched)). We are braiding together a meal of burnt leftovers—of the sort that would, in better times, be tossed to dogs.

ajoŋkur cɔk? ‘did you sleep hungry?’ (a shortening of yin (you) niin (sleep) ajoŋ kur (lit. ‘dog (jöŋ) + lion (kur)’, donkey or horse) acɔ k (foot or hunger, cɔ̈ k), ‘you slept on a donkey’s leg?’ A donkey doesn’t eat when it is standing around or working, which was almost all anyone ever saw a donkey do [17 Oct 2009].176

The descriptive specificity of proverbs, song lyrics (the focal example, I think177), toponyms, dog’s names, and personal- and nick-names shared a poetic economy that people referred to as ka kuɔm ‘something covered/hidden/buried’ after the way that spoken proverbs often dropped their morphological constituents (noun + noun + noun) and contained within themselves an endless set of meanings which one had to slowly unearth. “Like the black box of Garang,”

Madit said, referring to the ‘black box’ from the helicopter that mysteriously crashed, killing

John Garang, which many believed to be in the possession of the American government. A proverb (ka kuɔ m) expressed a meaning that was open-ended, mysterious, important, and, ultimately, inaccessible and therefore surrounded by a great deal of talk [NB4, 20 September

2009].

176 joh ciir kor ‘a dog like a lion’, the term for a small donkey is akaca [24March2010]. 177 Though personal names provided children with their first examples.

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mac köör ajuoŋ (mac (fire) + kör (man-eating lion) + ajuoŋ (blacksmith). This horripilate phrase evokes a huge pool of fire, where captives were thrown. It was the site of a zar’ib (slave corral) built in the 1850s by the Agat Company of Khartoum on the Bahr El Jebel’s eastern bank at the confluence of a small khor which protected it on two sides. The site is remembered as the spot where Turkiyya soldiers (Turco-Egyptian period, 1840-85) executed a number of pre-colonial ‘chiefs’. In 2009-2010, while it was often identified with a cattle site called Listic, Mac köör ajuoŋ was probably a few hundred yards to the east at the edge of a place called aciɛŋdiir , [aciɛk dït] ‘big creation’, so-called after ‘a great gathering of big people’ there. Aciɛk is a term that is typically applied to light-skinned foreigners (and other people with physical deformities), and is sometimes used as a synonym for akuma, ‘government’. The raised site along a seasonal swamp is littered with the remains of mud bricks, evidence of a colonial era brickmaking scheme on the site where the fort was located at the turn of the last century. A second fort, roughly four miles to the south, was known by the same name. J.G. Maxwell wrote in 1898 that that southern fort was stockade and surrounded by a ditch (SIR No60 1898:104). Collins gives the dimensions of 400 yards by 700 yards, “containing at intervals loopholed watch towers” (1962:167). Ewart Grogan described the moldering earthworks of a “fort … of very considerable extent,” when he passed by in the late 1890s. “About five hundred yards by six hundred yards, the long side lying on the river. There are still signs of a primitive effort at drainage” (Grogan 1900:267).178

ŋɔth gon ‘desirous vultures’ (ŋɔ th (hope) + gon (vulture)). An old battlefield where a passing vulture might alight, hoping for another conflict [see nb8, 6 July ‘10].

Lienhardt’s idea in Divinity and Experience (1961) was that what Dinkaphone people

called jok, ‘powers’, objectified inchoate impressions and experiences in such a way as to make them available as objects of social knowledge, ‘feelings endowed with meaning’ or what

Collingwood called ‘ideas’. Lienhardt’s argument (1961:170) was that the experiences surrounding people’s collective efforts to manage these powers provided them with a way to pivot back and forth between their experiences of themselves and their experiences of others and of an unpredictable outside world, “between experience of the self and of the world which acts

178 Collins got the “loopholed watchtowers” from Lieut.-Colonel Count Gleichen’s (1905:144-45) Compendium: “At mile 390 the Dervish ‘Deim‘ is visible, situated on the east bank. This is the place held for so long by the Emir Arabi Dafaalla. The spot is well chosen for defence, as the river sweeps round it on two sides. The bank all round has been cleared of bush for a long way. The ‘Deim’ is surrounded by a mud wall forming a rectangle, of which the river forms one side. The enclosure is some 400 yards deep by 700 yards in length. The mud bank, fast disappearing, is about 4 feet 6 inches high, with an outer ditch 3 feet deep by 4 feet wide. At the corners are small watch towers, and in other places remains of loopholed houses.” Grogan seems to have confused the fort’s defensive outer ditch for “a primitive effort at drainage.” The northern site is also sometimes called paancieth ‘shit field’ because it is secluded and many people living in the nearby neighborhoods lack pit latrines.

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upon it.” Elaine Scarry (1985) noted that one effect of torture was to dissolve this division so

that the self is collapsed into the confines of the hurting body. Without this division of

experience, Lienhardt (1961:170) said, “suffering … can be merely ‘lived’ or endured.”

Experiences which we cannot share with or communicate to others tend to affect our lives in

ways over which we have little control. We merely suffer them. What powers (jok) provided

was a collection of “images [or ‘representations’] corresponding to complex and various

combinations of Dinka experience which are contingent upon their particular social and physical

environment,” he said, by which “the Dinka can grasp [suffering’s] nature intellectually …, and

thus to some extent transcend and dominate it in this act of knowledge” (1961:170). Therefore,

Lienhardt (1961:246) says, even if what people most commonly spoke about when they told

stories to one another or performed the oral rites of a sacrifice was their own sense of

weakness—“men are mere ‘ants’ which can be crushed; they are ‘like game’ to be hunted and

scattered; they are neglected children; they are ‘like the Nile cabbage’ carried willy-nilly in

submission to the force of the river,” …—the ability to do so together provided them with some

sense of mastering their own fate.179

Keith Basso (1996:75) has written about how landscapes “can be ‘detached’ from their fixed spatial moorings and transformed into instruments of thought and vehicles of purposive behavior.” In Bor, knowing the histories of places was partially a matter of privilege. There was a deeply rooted feeling that only those who lived near a place could really know its history. This perception helps to explain why the expression kɔ c pan tök, ‘people of one land’, was the most common way people referred to kindred. The broad geography of Bor country, its main

179 Lienhardt’s metaphor here (‘dominate’) owes something to R.G. Collingwood’s aesthetics (“we must fix ‘our attention on the very feeling which threatens to dominate us, and so learn to dominate it’ [1938:218]” [quoted in Ridley 1999:7]) but is also meant to suggest Arendt’s (1958) observation that human intersubjectivity emerges as one becomes both actor and sufferer, at the intersection of ‘actions’ and ‘passiones,’ which constitutes our sense of existence through others (Lienhardt 1961:151).

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landmarks and divisions, was well enough known by everyone who lived there to provide the

terms of reference for people to position themselves and others. But only people who lived for a

long time in a particular territory knew its more localized landscapes of histories and landmarks.

Relatedness, in other words, was a skilled activity; and descent was as much a lifelong process of

accumulating the experience of living with others and moving through a landscape, as a matter of

one’s recruitment at birth.

An illustration might be useful. Many scholars have made a great point of the many

color-configuration terms which Nilotic people used to refer to cattle (for instance, Lienhardt

1961:11-17; Evans-Pritchard 1940; Turton 1980). Lienhardt noted that children learn the terms

for colors and combinations of light and shade with reference to cattle before seeing the

configurations “in wild nature” that provide the basic terms. “Almost the whole extensive colour

vocabulary of the Dinka is one of cattle colours,” Lienhardt (1961:12-13) wrote, and “the

Dinkas’ very perception of colour, light, and shade in the world around them is ... inextricably

connected with the recognition of colour configurations in their cattle.” A child seeing a leopard,

kuac, for the first time will recognize it from his experience with a spotted bull called makuac

(1961:12). But seeing cattle color-configuration is not just a matter of memorizing a long list of terms. A cow’s coat changes in predictable ways; a bull that is white as a cue ball, mabior, may not look particularly white if it is sick, mangy, or very young, or seen from the wrong angle— hiding a black spot on its tail—as young Dinka-speakers who grew up in refugee camps in

Kenya were not-very-subtly reminded whenever they mistook one sort of white cow for another.

“Here [in town], I will say, ‘This one is yär [white]. But if we take it to the village, the people

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will say, ‘no, that one is ayɛn [yellow],’” Madit said, wryly, looking at a whiteish cow, after he was corrected by his uncle [NB5, 17 May 2010].180

Other shared experiences provided the ground for sociability in Bor. For instance, in Bor in 2009-2010, there were a handful of northern merchants who had been a part of the Sudan

Armed Forces that captured Bor town in 1992 and—like retired soldiers everywhere who enjoyed the comradeship of army life, I suspect—would sit in Marol market and chat with SPLA soldiers who were old enough to remember Bor in the 1990s, comparing their recollections of the town’s wartime geography of machinegun positions, barracks, and helicopter gunship landings, which had been erased when Marol market was built on a swampy site near the hospital. I knew a few people with relatives who had fought on opposite sides of the war.

Migrants from western and northern Sudan made up the majority of Bor’s petty merchants. A few merchants had ties to the town that extended back several generations into the past: grandfathers who were former slaves and had worked in the town during the colonial era, or fathers who had been itinerant merchants there; a few had been soldiers posted in Bor during its occupation and were remembered by those who had remained in Bor town (or visited) a decade

,(peace quarter”, formerly called aciɛŋ diir“ , م) earlier in a district called Hai Salaam where they earned a little money from the soldiers billeted there by running errands. In 2009 and

’10, many Somali and northern merchants hired local youth, whom they relied on to do odd jobs, translate, and to mind their stores.

There were also squabbles of course. In late 2010, for example, several shop-owners—

Farrah, a Somali trader from Kenya, Jol, a Dinka trader, and a few other shopholders—pooled their money to hire shovelers and porters to fill in the deeply rutted access roads that divided up

180 I was able to identify crocodile-colored cattle immediately. Not because I had ever seen a wild crocodile, but rather because my cat is streaked like a crocodile, nyaŋ (pl. nyɛŋ).

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their quarter of Bor’s main market. They hired a dump truck and a load of soil. Farrah paid two

young porters to fill the deep ruts. As they were working, a heavy truck approached. The driver

disregarded their shouts, tried to pass and, spinning its wheels, the truck promptly sunk down to

its axles.

“Why are you building the road,” the driver asked, jumping down from the cab, “are you

the government?”

Farrah laughed. “If you take this seriously you will go insane. There is no justice in this

world. There is no government in Bor” [3 August 2010].

we gamble for life

I do not want to romanticize the situation; everyone was also perfectly aware that the

reason why someone from Bor country might decide to hire a young Hausa man (or someone

from Darfur or northern Uganda to mind his graining mill, say, or to run his motorcycle as a

boda-boda taxi), was because a foreigner couldn’t return to his family, assuming that he still had

one, or be confident of fair treatment by the police. A young man from Bor country might

disappear with your motorcycle, or feel secure enough to ‘eat’ more than his share from the

graining mill. But a young man from Darfur would be trustworthy because he was desperate for

a job and had to fend for himself. He had to survive by his own teeth.

“Your relative will not make the good thing for you. If he eats you he’ll say, ‘no

problem, that one is ours.’ But the foreigner will fear. If it comes to fighting he will fear you

will kill him or arrest him” [NB8, 26JUNE2010].

In CHAPTER ONE, I mentioned that the memory of the trade in ivory and slaves was evoked in experiences of school discipline (‘Mr. Black’) and carrying heavy things (kethiek), and

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street’, as opposed to dhöl ‘path’) came to be identified with the‘ رع > how town roads (cär sphere of akuma ‘government’, the oppression of forced labor, and what Orlando Patterson

(1982) described as the “social death” of enslavement. “Aci ciɛn kuat ee raan adhiëëth ku waan mande cäric,” people would say, ‘a person without a lineage is a person born and left by his mother in the road’. Raan ci nhom paanden, raan ciit akuma, ‘without a place a person is like government’, others added, like an orphan left in a basket—a person without a place was ‘a nobody’; like government (ciit akuma), an orphan was something without relatives [19 October

2009]. One reason these memories remained so persuasive was that many recognized the hardships of piir abɛr , ‘orphaned life’ in their parents’ war stories and the stories people told about the slave trade and colonial era.

A young man from Darfur was also a foreigner: an orphan, nobody’s relative. While people entrusted many things to family members—cattle, little shops, graining mills, …—a close relative usually also felt entitled to some of your earnings. This was one reason why many shopkeepers whose families lived in the vicinity of Bor country entrusted the work of keeping accounts and collecting money to their sisters’ husband or his relatives—because: there was a deeply rooted feeling that one’s sister’s husband was someone to whom you owed a great debt

(cf. Hutchinson 1996:79, 85-7, 179, 255-258).181

At the edge of town, not far from the house where I stayed in Bor, there were a few restaurants and hotels which had been built by kɔc aɣ eer ‘outside people’—members of the Bor country diaspora and wealthy government officials and businessmen who lived in Juba. A young man who was born in Bor and gained refugee status in Australia— whom I will call A.D. Joseph—was building a large, concrete restaurant, “Cold-inn & Comfort Rich Nation Hotel,” that he hoped would generate enough income to pay back a loan he had taken out and to support his college education in Australia. I’d met him a few times in town, and stopped by one morning in November to see how the building was coming along. Later, as I was leaving, I asked who would manage his restaurant in his absence, when he returned to Australia, “a relative?”

181 You could even go to him and ask for something and say, emani na mioc cien ka ci kuen thik-ic… ‘what you give me now cannot be counted in the marriage’ [4 May 2010], though it would be a little rude.

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“No,” he said, “here in Africa we have this idea of communal property. Capitalism hasn’t reached.” Handing over management to a relative would be a “mistake,” he said, because the person would feel entitled to everything the restaurant earned. “It would lead to mismanagement,” he said. A.D. Joseph would entrust the restaurant’s management to an educated friend. “I trust him,” he said, “because he is not a relative” [27 November 09]. In January, 2010, Madit and I were walking through the central market when we saw A.D. Joseph loading a car. We chatted awhile and helped him load a few cases of soda into the back of his cousin’s hatchback. He insisted that we accompany him back to his restaurant, which had just opened. “I’ll give you a ride,” he said. He pressed. We squeezed into the car. At the “Cold-inn & Comfort” restaurant, Madit and I sat down and A.D. Joseph brought two bottles of cold water and two sodas, apple Stim and Coca-Cola. Then he brought a platter of Kewote (Qey Wot) and sour cabbage on a bed of thick injera and a small dish of salt and berbere. After we had eaten and rinsed our hands, I was copying the menu into my notebook.

Kewote 7 SP Alisha 8 SP Mixed [vegetables] 9 SP Soda 2 SP Beer [Pilsner, Bells, Heineken, Tuskar] 4 SP Water 1 SP

Joseph cleared the table. He returned and wiped the table with a cloth and then laid down a bill. “20SP.” Madit and I looked at the bill. “According to real Dinka culture,” Madit said dryly, “you shouldn’t charge a person the first time.” “Well, maybe…,” I said, “maybe he was having trouble finding customers?” “He isn’t Dinka,” Madit said, “he has become an Australian man” [NB2 30JAN2010].

The feeling that a non-relative was more likely to pay back a debt was also why I was so often asked to be the intermediary in the small loans that people were always making out to one another.

I had few expenses in Bor so I was able to loan a large part of my research budget to my research assistant, Madit, for the purchase of a motorcycle, which he in turn entrusted to one of the young men who made up the majority of Bor country’s motorcycle-taxi-drivers. Motorcycles

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in Bor were the center of a largely informal economy of little repair shops, license forgers, and

riverside washing stations where 8 or 9 little boys with buckets and dish soap would wash and

rinse a motorcycle for 3 pounds each.182 The motorcycle provided a steady cash income which

Madit used to pay his school fees and buy clothing and notebooks for his uncle’s children. On the afternoon in March when he paid the first installment on the loan, Madit counted out the money he earned from the motorcycle into three piles. One pile he gave to me in exchange for a receipt. He folded the second pile and put it in his pocket—he would give it to his aunt, who held money for several men in the family. He handed me the third pile of five 10SP notes, telling me to loan it to a friend of his. (The friend needed the money to open a court case too complicated to describe here.) His friend would probably never return the loan to him, Madit said, or “it would take a very long time”—but if I lent the money, well, “maybe something little will come back again” [22 March 2010].

People in Bor loaned things out and saved in a variety of overlapping ways. Many removed wealth from the demands of their spouses, children, friends, and from their own temptation and others’, so that it would be available for an emergency. What this often meant in practice was converting money into livestock, crops, jewelry, motorcycles, and other goods.183

Livestock, especially, were often entrusted to relatives and friends for months or years. This was

182 Near ɣöt ŋuoŋ agai ‘the house of ŋuoŋ agai’, a little cement house which was said to have been built by the British and afterward occupied by Nguoŋ Agai, and later chosen as an execution house during the occupation of Bor town because it was near the riverside and bodies could be easily disposed of [NB1, 5MAR2010]. The house is located near the town’s south port where the riverbank slopes gently, making it ideal for washing clothes, bathing, and filling buckets for washing motorcycles and trucks.. 183 Traders converted Sudanese Pounds into dollars for the same reasons that many people invested in expensive watches. During periods of rapid inflation, or in places like Sudan where currency was unstable, ‘durable goods’ (like US dollars, watches, and motorcycles) not only provided a stable form of savings or an investment that could be put to social purposes, they could also travel across borders. (In Kampala, for example, you can turn Shillings into Sudanese Pounds but you cannot turn Sudanese Pounds into Shillings.) The popularity of expensive Seiko “eco-drive” (batteryless) watches was often held out by NGO workers as proof of ‘Dinka frivolity.’ People told me about how their ‘nomadic life’ disposed Dinka to improvidence: they couldn’t handle liquor or responsibility, a French TOTAL manager told me, they wasted their money as soon as they got it without laying up anything for lean times. And what did people who never showed up on time for anything need watches for?, he asked me.

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done for a number of reasons. Mainly it provided borrowers with milk and manure. Another

was that it reduced pressure on grazing land and, by scattering livestock among a wide network

of kin and friends, you could reduce the risk that your entire flock would be wiped out by an

epidemic of West Nile Fever or stolen in a raid. (“Here, a rich person doesn’t put all his eggs in

one basket,” Benjamin said. [NB1.1].) Lending out livestock also strengthened relationships

between lenders and borrowers, and acted as a “placeholder” (Ferguson 1985:658) in rural areas

for people who lived elsewhere, providing a continual reminder that absent livestock owners, kɔc

aɣeer ‘outside people’, have not forgotten about their rural kin. (Motorcycles were often similarly entrusted by itinerant Dinka merchants to young men in towns, who would safeguard earnings and organize maintenance.)

What I want to emphasize here is not that people’s decisions were without a certain degree of economic calculation, but rather that people’s motives for lending could not be reduced to self-interested calculations. Madit wanted to loan money to his friend, but he also wanted to see some of it return. By placing me in the middle of the loan, he injected a little bit of social distance between himself and the borrower. Likewise, when people entrusted livestock to friends and family they did so not only to ensure that they would have a ‘place’ to retire later in life, but also because they were anxious about the wellbeing of their loved ones.

• • •

In August 2010, I was sitting with a young man named Majur in Juba’s suq sitta ‘market six’, drinking tea and waiting for another man, Mabil, to say that he was going home for supper.

Life in Juba for young men from Bor who had gone there looking for work or an education, was centered around the households supported by remittances or by government officials (like Mabil)

229 that formed little islands of stability and normalcy for a floating population that found money and lodgings hard to come by. “When one of us gets fifty pounds,” Majur was telling me, “we give it to Mabil’s wife.” Things were unpredictable. At any given time few of the young men in his circle had any money, but since it was always different people who had it, they always pooled their resources for meals. “You see, we gamble for life,” he said, describing a kind of informal rotating credit association that centered around Mabil’s wife. If someone was lucky enough for a windfall—if a distant cousin sent a remittance from the United States, say,—he would take everyone he knew out for a big meal. Everyone would remember his generosity.

Majur put several pounds on the tea tray to cover our tab and said, “for example, I don’t know where I will get money for transport to Kampala” [15 August 2010].

Later that evening I gave him the money he needed for the bus ticket and border-fee, and a little extra, “for your tea,” I said. Majur’s oblique request was so beautifully set up by the kind of abstract sociology that he knew I liked to hear, and made with such a “resonating ellipsis”

(Basso 1996:77), that I couldn’t refuse.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

MABIOR MAKUEI

Mabior Makuei was born in 1966. His birthplace was Baiyiɛu184 near the village of Makolcuei, the central court of a boma of the same name and the terminus of Carkau (“Akau [Deng]’s road”), a few kilometers from its junction at Baidit Road to the northeast of Bor town in Jonglei

State, South Sudan.

A large part of Mabior’s extended family lived together there—his paternal grandmothers and their sons’ wives and a number of children, including several sons and daughters of deceased relatives. Mabior’s paternal grandfather, who had at one time a great many cattle in his possession, married two women, Anai Piel (from Koyo, Patang) and Akon Kec, a woman from

Alian, in Jalle, Mabior’s paternal grandmother. The homestead was mainly lived in by married women and young children, for during the agricultural off-season their sons were often away, living in cattle villages or in Atuot country across the river or near Juba pursuing work looking after cattle or engaging in petty commerce of one sort or another, trading charcoal, or otherwise looking for money. Their unmarried sisters lived most of the year in permanent cattle villages

(wut), only returning with their brothers to Baiyiɛu during the planting and rainy seasons.

Mabior’s father Makuei was earning a little money in the late 1960s by buying tobacco in

Atuot and selling it in Bor country. “In Atuot, you cannot urinate randomly. You have to ask the owner of the home.” Makuei had perhaps urinated someplace where he shouldn’t have or else, maybe, the person who sold him tobacco had stolen it.

184 The site where those of Aguar Nyuöth (below) resettled.

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Anyway, that wäl ‘medicine’, “followed” Makuei home to Bor country where it took up residence in a dried pumpkin. It was named AGUT MAJOK (‘killed Majok’, after a bull called Majok which was sacrificed for it) and remained in Makuei’s household until 1992. It used to speak from the wall of the house. “It spoke the language of Atuot. It just talked alone and it always needed a chicken,” Mabior said. “If someone steals something it will follow that person and kill him [or demand chickens], it will appear in his house. That wäl protects all your property at home, like a dog.” AGUT MAJOK received a heifer through each of Mabior’s sister’s marriages and so, by 1990, the power had perhaps twelve cows.

Anai Piel’s eldest son died, leaving his widow at an early age with two sons and two daughters. Akon, Mabior’s grandmother, had four sons—Ayom, Deng, Angeth, Makuei—and two daughters, Akor and Nyarec. Ayom, the eldest son, died in Bari country, leaving behind a son, Maker. Deng died in childhood. Being relatively cattle-poor, when Angeth married Akor

Aluong Bior Deng the couple was “divided” so that when Angeth died in Juba of a disease that was rife in those days there, Akor was left with three sons—two of whom were Angeth’s, Achiek and Atem, and a third, Riak, was Deng’s son.185 Makuei, the last born and Mabior’s father, inherited seventeen cattle from his mother when she died. He used them to begin his marriage to

Anyieth Deng, from Dɛr, the daughter of a woman from Patang (Biong, Koyo) near Makolcuei.

Makuei raised some cash to buy more cattle by selling tobacco that he brought from Atuot.

Anyieth’s first child, Jol, died when he was five or six years old. Jol’s death was followed by the birth of two daughters, Achol186 and Lou, and then three sons, Agau, Mathiang,

185 I will return to this practice later. I have found Marilyn Strathern’s (1988) notion of the “partible” or “multiple” person useful for naming what is happening here. Most people I spoke to described the genitor and genitrix as each being “divided” (tek)—as opposed to the children simply being sorted into groups according to a particular paters. 186 Children born after a death are generally given a name indicating this event. Some common ones are Awoi an onomatopoetic word meaning ‘wailing’, Dhieu ‘cry’, Col (Macol or Acol as a name), meaning ‘black’ or ‘dark blue’, and Tiop (Matiop as a name), meaning ‘soil’ or ‘mud’. In Bor country, names are very explicitly regarded as highly compressed miniature stories. While each of these terms has a fan of conventional associations, names do not come with their meanings already attached, nor do they mean the same thing for different people. Lienhardt remarked (1961:149) that places and traumatic events were said by Rek Dinka to “follow” people. “A man who had been imprisoned in Khartoum called one of his children ‘Khartoum’ in memory of the place, but also to turn aside any possible harmful influence of that place upon his later life. The act is an act of exorcism, but the exorcism of what, for us, would be memories of experiences.” This does seem to be the Dinka commonsense

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and Deng. When Agau was killed by soldiers in 1965, Anyieth was pregnant with her seventh

child, her fifth son, Mabior Makuei.

One memory of childhood, Mabior’s first experience with soldiers, was vivid to him

more than forty years later when he related it to me.

The time of Anya-Nya One, Barac Awi [1963-‘72], the Sudan Army came to my father’s home in the morning hours. I was a small boy. The children were taken to the place of satan. There is a place of satan for baany deng. So they collected all the children in that one place, because the people were afraid. Maker Deng was the tiir [“minor priest” is an adequate translation in this context] at that time. It was outside, around the long poles. When the soldiers came, they just asked the people questions. But a lot of people could not understand Arabic. And when the army spoke, they just spoke Arabic. So there was confusion. I couldn’t understand. At that time I couldn’t speak a word of Arabic. So the soldiers just talked to the women, because the men were running away, because they would be killed. The men were running. They were running, some youth, too, they ran also. Everyone ran except for the women and some children. We remained at that home of BANY DENG [AJOH]. So I don’t know if it was that BANY DENG who protected us, or if it was god. I think it was god; really [—Mabior said, laughing—] BANY DENG is a tree—a collection of trees. And the horn of the cow is there. So [the soldiers] called that thing ‘kujur’— that arabic [word] I remember. [The soldiers] said, ‘Ah this is place of kujur.’ At that time I was still small. I just listened. We didn’t know the reason why the soldiers came. We just knew Anya-Nya; sometimes they passed near my father’s home, because it was close to the road. When Anya-Nya came, when the soldiers of Anya-Nya came, they just entered my father’s home. Then they went on their way. So I knew the difference between Anya-Nya and Arab. You see—at that time—[the Arab soldiers] described Anya-Nya: they said, “Anya-Nya have big ears—tawiiladaan” [tawiil adaana, Juba Arabic, ‘long ear’]. Anya- Nya are black people and Arab also, but when then they came, [the Arab soldiers] always asked, ‘Where is Anya-Nya?” That was how I knew the difference.

Mabior burned BANY DENG AJOH and AGUT MAJOK in 1992. Like many other men of his generation who had taken part in the burning of the paraphernalia of the various divinities of

Bor country, he often spoke to me about the event. I asked him once whether he had been afraid to burn AGUT MAJOK.

about naming practices. By naming children after the memory of some painful experience, one ensures that the memory is transformed—since the child will not only serve as a continual reminder of painful memories (the death of a loved one, the fear of living in a tiny cell in a Khartoum prison), he or she will also ensure that those memories are turned into something else, with different associations.

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One of AGUT MAJOK’s cows was stolen by Nuer raiders in 1991, Mabior said, “so maybe I just burned the stick [the shrine] and the shadow [atiɛ p] was in Nuer [country].” On the other hand, it had been hard to burn another emblem of AGUT MAJOK, so maybe some power remained still…. That pumpkin used to rattle itself alone, “yik-yik-yik-yik- yik-yik”—he said, laughing—“there were seeds inside.” And when the jok were being burned AGUT MAJOK kept jumping out of the fire, “yik-yik-yik-yik-yik-yik,” and people had to chase it around like a chicken and catch it and throw it back into the fire [nb1, 17 March ‘10].

Following the Bor Massacre in 1991 a conversion movement grew up around a prophet named Joseph Kon Ajith, whose followers were called joŋ wa lieec ‘god/power-of-our-father glance [back at us]’.187 Many were drawn from the junior ranks of the SPLA. It began in 1989 with the burning of small household divinities and culminated during three days in December,

1992, with the imprisonment of Bor’s major divinities near his great church called Dhion

(“zion”), where the divinities were burned. Kon Ajith was captured by Khartoum Government soldiers and killed. His body was cut into pieces and scattered around town to demonstrate his powerlessness and to traumatize the people there.

While almost anyone in Bor could tell you this story, there was as little agreement about how Kon Ajith had managed to gain such a following as what the eventual consequences of burning the shrines would be. Many said Kon Ajith was insane, always wandering around naked and staring up at the sun. Others claimed that he had been led by the Holy Spirit; still others said that he was an ordinary sort of beny jok, ‘master of power’, with a divinity called MAKUƐ̈N

188 THÖN. Foreign missionaries who have written about the movement usually say that in the

187 Or, more idiomatically, ‘power-of-our-father, heed us’. Mabior had named his dog Joŋwalieec, playing on a pun between jö ‘dog’ (pl. jok) and jok ‘power’ or ‘divinity’. 188 What I think that this claim was meant to imply is that the name MAKUƐ̈N THÖN was evidence that Kon Ajith’s relationship with his Power was more akin to a Master of Power’s relationship to a divinity than a Christian convert’s relationship with his or her bible. The name MAKUƐ̈N THÖN implies an agentive subjectivity to the practice of “reading scripture” itself (masc.+ read/count + promise) [5 June 2010]. Recall that in CHAPTER FOUR, Philip Awow said of his great-grandfather, “[Riak Wai] practiced Islam in a traditional way,” partly to distance himself and his

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aftermath of the Bor Massacre, the failure of the indigenous divinities to protect their followers

from its carnage had been taken as evidence of their powerlessness (Wheeler et al. 2000; Nikkel

2001:253-254).189 Many people I met in Bor expressed the opposite as an alternative explanation: after what they had seen human beings do, no one was afraid of god anymore.

Many accounted for Kon Ajith’s success at gaining followers by explaining that with the theft of cattle and the famine of 1992-’93, the divinities’ gluttonous demands for sacrifices of cattle and chickens seemed obscene. People were starving. Bor had been colonized by its own divinities, people told me, and so they burned them up. After all, the Christian jok was “free,” it didn’t demand any sacrifices at all.190

After Kon Ajith’s death, the movement was taken over by his former secretary Isaiah

Malԑk. By most accounts, in 1988, he began preaching that Bor would be destroyed by a great flood and that only those who travelled to a place called Tot would survive the deluge. Isaiah

Malԑk’s followers left everything and traveled to Tot. “They said there would be a disaster and the only thing left would be Tot, the high place, everything else will be flooded. So everyone sold their cattle, their houses, everything. They went to Tot on the side of Yerol” [5 June 2010,

23 May 2010]. There was no flood. And most of the people returned to Bor country, where they formed the core of the Seventh Day Adventist and Pentecostal churches in town.

The Tot incident had become a kind of running joke in many circles in Bor Town; when I went to interview Isaiah Malԑk in 2009, I was warned against bringing it up. Isaiah Malԑk told

ancestor from Islam by holding out the Power, ALAKBAR, as evidence of “traditional” practice, whereby an object or act (as opposed to “belief” apart from sacrifice) itself had agency. 189 (see Wheeler, et al. 2000; Nikkel 1998b, 1999) One man told me that because the divinities had not protected the people from the Nuer, the burning of the jok “was a kind of revenge—some Christians saw it that way—they said, ‘you divinities did not protect us; now we do not have any cattle. So we will not give any to you” [AC, 8 April 2010; see 18-19 MARCH 2010]. 190 Ahava (2011:39) phrases this from a slightly different perspective, writing that “the jak now threatened their followers with death, because they were not being respected. …[And] many people felt that the jak had turned against their adherents, delivering death rather than life to the faithful; the Christian God, in contrast, was seen by converts as a life-protecting entity.”

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me how Kon Ajith had organized groups, each with two “teams,” the first for burning shrines

and the second, a team of pastors following behind, for baptizing people. “Seven out of ten were

young people,” Isaiah told me, “the burning teams were all youth: because the work of burning

shrines required a lot of energy. But it was not done by force,” he said, without being asked to

clarify the movement’s methods [1 November 2009; nb8, 25 June 2010, ws500245—dhion

church building song, two rules].

When I was in Bor in 2009 and ‘10, many people told me that the burning of the

divinities had been a mistake. “When the divinities were burned, the people were collected

together and baptized without even knowing who this ‘Jesus’ is,” another man told me. “Now

crime is spreading around, everyone is stealing cows. Before: the divinities would not harm you

unless you caused a problem: stealing, and what? and what? [viz., etc etc]. The lower ranks of

the SPLA were there, as the force behind the Christians. They said, ‘If you refused to burn your

divinities, we will call the SPLA, you will be put in prison.’ But it was the lower ranks—the

junior soldiers. Oh, it was very bad! The divinities should have been taken and kept to be put in

a museum” [8 April 2010]!

On one occasion, Mabior and I were waiting at the government court in town. He was

telling me about how, when a young woman got her first period, she was given a particular heifer

(woŋ aciec nya) by a senior male relative. Menstruating women were said to pose a risk to cattle—for this reason a woman would not milk any but this particular heifer during menses.

Some ghee would be mixed with some seeds after they had been charred and pounded. The mixture was smeared onto the heifer’s neck (ŋ iee[c] alath dɔ u ‘menses + clothes + heifer’) to protect it against a certain sickness (called thiääŋ, a sort of pollution) caused by contact with

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menstruating women. This was how it had been done when he was younger anyway, Mabior

was telling me.

There were a number of people sitting nearby, listening to our conversation. Mabior

turned to the most elderly among them, and asked him whether people still did that sort of thing.

“That one was rejected,” the old man said, “because now the people belong to the word

of [the Christian] God.”

Mabior regarded the ancient-looking man, who had knobby calloused feet and wore a

thin gray robe in the fashion of elder men in cattle villages. “You see,” Mabior said, “the young

generation doesn’t know the rule of the Dinka. They’ve forgotten. So now the cattle are getting

sick. The cattle are all dying. We drank that mokoyo [moonshine] of God and burned

everything!” Mabior laughed, “We were like those people who went to Tot” [nb8, 21June2010].

* * *

Mabior belonged to a ‘hearth group’ dhien (pl. dhiëën), called Paluɔny, which was named for the small game animals, luɔny , that a young man named Alith used to hunt for (pa- < pan

‘abode, country, land’ + luɔny ‘small game’). The story centers on two women. The first is

Ador, a young woman from the family of Panak, the owners Biong-land, kɔ c piny, who resided on the Koyo side of Biong country. Those of Paluɔny generally referred to those of Panak as

“nɔrnɔr” (brother of my mother) because Paluɔny’s claim to land was bound by their anchorage there through the marriage of Ador. The second is Ajoh Liang Deng, the wife of Ador’s son, a woman from Anyakuei and the first priest of DENG AJOH. I heard several versions of this story.

Here is how Mabior told it to me.

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Mabior: Diing Apiɔk [Ahiar Chol Abui Keileny], from Palek [an area which is now a part of Anyadi Payam]. He settled in Biong. Brendan: Why did he stay in Biong? Mabior: When a person finds a good place, he just settles there. Do you think all those people who went to America will return to Bor? Anyway, he was without kin. Diing was from Luol Tiok.191 He only had a few cattle when he married Ador. They were not enough. So Panak [the family of Ador] went to the judge with Alith, Diing’s son, to claim the boy as their own. But the judge sided with Diing. Diing had no other relatives, so he entrusted his heifer and some other cattle to Ador’s brothers, who looked after them. Ador’s brothers [feeling entitled to a greater share of cattle than they had received], took them from him in another way: whenever one of Diing’s cows gave birth to a female calf the brothers swapped it for a male calf. Diing could not get them to stop [since they would not admit to stealing his calves and Ador denied any knowledge of it. It was all very frustrating.] Diing considered what to do. Diing sent [their son] Alith, who was a small boy then, to fetch some milk from his heifer. Diing cut his own leg with a knife and mixed the blood the milk that Alith brought to him. Then—[in the fashion of an oath (mël, pl. mëël) or a poison ordeal (mɛth wal)]—he gave [the mixture of blood and milk] to Ador and told her to drink the milk. She denied the theft again. Diing was so enraged he cursed her [wai; lit. rebuke]. He said, “Your lies will kill you.” Diing also gave the mixture to Alith. Diing said [blessing Alith], “This will protect you. You will become numerous in this place.” Ador died in childbirth because of that curse. And the child died inside her. The only remaining son was Alith. Then Diing died and Alith remained alone. So Alith went to the family of his mother and stayed with Rian Ayom [his maternal grandfather on the Ayom-thii side of Biong]. [Having no cattle,] Alith got three dogs and went to the forest to catch small animals—people call those small animals luɔny [sg. lony. lit. game (animals).] Alith sold [ɣ aac] those little animals away and bought cattle. So the people talked, “Where has he got the money for those cattle?” and the people said, “selling luɔny.” Brendan: So you mean there was money then? Mabior: Eh, ɣɔk ka luɔ ny [‘cattle of game animals’]; there was no money then: he traded—maybe ten small animals for a goat or something, then a goat for a cow. Maybe he dried the meat or traded the skins. So that was why Alith’s family was called Paluɔny. Alith married Ajoh with those ɣɔk ka luɔny —Ajoh Liaŋ Deng, from Anyakuei, who was swept up by a wind. Liaŋ Deng had two daughters, Ajoh was the small one. Alith made himself like a poor man and went to the byre [luak] of Ajoh— her father’s luak. Alith had big hair and a big beard [like a lunatic]. Alith said, “I want water,” and Liaŋ’s elder daughter—she thought Alith was insane—brought

191 Luol Tiok was introduced in CHAPTER THREE (page 116), where he cut a goat’s tongue into pieces and mixed them with grass, which he tossed into the wind.

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him a dirty cup. Ajoh brought a clean cup with good water. Ajoh’s father told Alith to take the goats and sheep into the forest to care for them. After finding Ajoh, Alith shaved his beard and long hair and put on a good necklace. During the dry season [February to April], Ajoh would stay in Aguar Nyuoth [‘collection of dreams’, original Palony place] and collect water at little dams. She found a small hole with water inside and she took the water and returned home. And she kept finding the hole full of water, for a few months.192 The wind came in the afternoon. It was a very big wind. It blew. And people saw Ajoh taken up by the big wind—she was gone for nine months. People didn’t know where she went. When she returned, she was pregnant. The child was born and named Garang Ajel Abek, the next son was Deng Kuac Alith, the girl was named Aliet [the founder of Paciriong]. The wind returned Ajoh and set her on a geer [a sort of thatch awning over a doorway], that people used to make. Ajoh became a tiir, her eyes were opened, and her jok was BANY DENG, there was a lec. Ajoh lived a very, very long time [Mabior, NB5 11 May 2010].

* * * When Mabior was six years old, his maternal uncle wanted to bring him to Dɛr but his mother prevailed upon her brother to support her decision to remain in Biong country. Mabior’s father had died a few weeks earlier, in Werekok, where he had gone to settle a dispute at the government court under Aguila Manyon. “The Sudan Army came with a tank—and that area is very flat; there are no trees—so when people saw a lot of vehicles coming, with those guns, they informed the Commander, someone called Aguila Manyon, ‘Now the soldiers have arrived.’ So they came out. And they started shooting. And my father came out and was shot.”

“Then that commander was running, very fast, and the vehicle was sent after him—until they killed that commander of Anya-Nya. Then they captured all those documents—because [the court] had those cases, everything, because he was an educated man—they collected all the documents for Aquilla, all the cases, and they took them away.”193

192 This image is drawn from the Aiwel Longar corpus and usually associated with his mother or daughter (see Lienhardt 1961:193-204). 193 Images of stolen or destroyed government documents were very common in stories about sudden military attacks. This is not surprising since these were the media of communication with government and main evidence of history—the main ways that people had of pressing claims to land, for instance. The feeling was that by stealing court records, soldiers were able to prevent southerners from making any future claims to the positive rights of citizenship.

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“When the report of the death of my father came,” Mabior said, “we were four— because my elder sister [Achol] had married [Gai, Koyo, in 1970-1]; she was followed by Lou, [who] married into Abii [Nyicak; her husband Aɣɔk]; then she was followed by Mathiang, then Deng, and then me—and my mother.” “So at that time, when the death of my father came, my [maternal] uncle came from Dɛr—because I am son of the girl of Dɛr, the Dɛr girls. So he came and asked the people, our community—eh, … clans—, ‘The husband of my sister was killed, so who will be responsible to the children? I am the one. I want to take them to my home. Then I will take care of them. I will become responsible to the children and will take care of them. And when they have become grown, I will send them back to you.’”194 “My mother refused, she said, ‘This one is not true. When you say that, you just bring trouble. You have food for me, but my children will not be taken to my father: because I am responsible to them.’ So she refused. And he agreed. He said, ‘Okay, I will just make support.’” So he came during cultivation time. He came also to help my mother and our uncle’s sons—there were two,” Anyeth’s son, Aciek, and Ayom’s son, Maker, who took over his father’s role.

Once, when Mabior was eight or nine years old, a disease called “aruor-rour” appeared.

“And when that aruor-rour came, there was an announcement, a drum, when aruor-rour appears.

Aruor-rour. It just means something that kills you, immediately, something that snatches you away. So when you hear the drum, you just take the tin [lid] and you hit it to make a drum, and that aruor-rour will run away. I heard it from the old people. The old people made that announcement. So when we heard the announcement, we took that tin and we hit it, it made a lot of sound in the village. Thum. Thum. Thum. Thum. We made a lot of sound in the village.”

As Mabior told me this story, he laughed at the memory of banging metal pots and pans.

And the thought that the noise could scare away cholera, “That is another treatment: because that aruor-rour is a disease,” Mabior said laughing. “It just kills people like cholera; it just kills people randomly, the time it came it came like an outbreak, it came like the cholera—just killed people like cholera, a lot of people died. I think it was cholera.”195

194 Mabior was switching freely between Dinka and English during this conversation. He used the English terms “community” and “clans” here to specify what a Dinka speaker from Bor would assume: that his maternal uncle had spoken to the several small families that composed “the people” of the “community.” 195 It should be clear by now that the “treatment” for arour-rour was based on an onomatopoetic relationship between the name of the jok and the sound of metal drums. Talking to slightly older people in Bor country, I got

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Mabior entered the Comboni primary school in 1979, at the ECS church in Bor which everyone called “the cathedral” because it was the biggest wattle-and-daub building in town.

After his mother died in 1983, Mabior joined the SPLA. In 1984 he went to Itang, Ethiopia, where the SPLA had a training camp and began to train as an infantryman. He was promoted to training to disarm landmines. His elder brother, Deng, had not yet married in 1991 when he was killed in Pochalla, near the Ethiopian border. Mabior returned to Bor country from the frontlines shortly after his brother Deng’s death.

After his brother’s death, Mabior, then twenty-five years old and working as a logistics officer for the SPLA, returned to Biong country. In Pochalla he received ten cartons of fishhooks from SRRC, the SPLA’s humanitarian arm. He sold the fishhooks and some other provisions that were too heavy to carry to a Murle merchant in Pibor and used the proceeds to buy seven head of cattle. Two were stolen and he took the remaining five to Biong country near

Bor Town where he gave one to his sister’s daughter, who had married a fisherman named Ajith, to whom Mabior also gave eight fishing nets to feed the family of Gai Kurwel Dhal Akol Ajok, his sister Achol Makuei’s husband, whom he was attempting to incorporate into his own dhien; he gave another cow to his mother’s brother’s son in Dɛr. He also gave one to Chol Liet, a relative of his maternal grandmother (Biong, Koyo). He slaughtered one bull and the last cow he kept [25 March 2010].

the strong impression that there was a wider fan of associations, centering on the terms arɔɔ̈ r̈ ‘sound’ and ror ‘forest’ (pl. ruor), and perhaps connected to the sounds of guns in the forest of the “war in the bush,” Anya-Nya 1. Mabior’s identification of arour-rour with cholera may simply indicate that he was too young at the time to put this together or that he was thinking about naturalistic explanations drawn from medical discourse used by European to ridicule “kujurs,” and so he simplified his account of arour-rour to make his own life trajectory parallel a story about a change in attitudes toward jok by assuming the footing of a “modern” skeptic: how, in the past, people had foolishly taken all manner of wal seriously. On the other hand, it may also suggest something about how historical events are transformed by the memorial practices which objectify them. Consider, for instance, BӒӒR, which was in many ways a condensed history of the slave trade but also, because it was a kind of commentary on relations of coercive rule, a totem, and a great many other things as well. Ultimately, it is simply impossible to know all of Mabior’s reasons for identifying arour-rour with cholera. Maybe it was cholera.

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* * *

Figure 16. Schematic representation of Mabior’s narrative with recipents of cattle in gray and hearth-group names in boxes.

Earlier I noted how, when people shared genealogical information with me, they usually did not rattle off the names of their male ancestors in a lineal sequence. It might be best, then, to end this chapter with a consideration of gender and genealogical stories. In CHAPTER ONE, I suggested some of the intertextual relations between ordinary storytelling and jokes and the language ideologies associated with powerful discourses of curses and oaths as well as the highly regulated speech of matrimonial negotiations (the topic of the next chapter).

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In this chapter, I have tried to relate Mabior’s life history in the mode that he told it to me, giving a sense of what Tim Ingold (2009:202) has called “storied knowledge”—the way in which the past “merges into life in an active process of remembering rather than being set aside as a passive object of memory.” As I have already indicated, this is very different from genealogical lines of transmission through ancestors arranged in strict sequence—Mabior

Makuei Mabior Ayom Bior Diing Apiɔk Ahiar Chol Abui Keileny &c.—(see Bamford and

Leach 2009).

Earlier (CHAPTER ONE, pp 48) I reproduced a story, related to me by Madit, about how

Agumut (Owl) had tricked Adolcɛrec (Hamerkop) out of her house and how Awan (Fox) had subsequently tricked Agumut out of her eggs. I suggested, there, that one way to read the story is as a meditation on the nature of social power and its basis in persuasion. But—as I said earlier—this idea is implicit in the narrative. The point of such a story is to entertain; even if the funny world of hamerkops and owls and foxes represents a new insight, no story should be asked to state such a thing abstractly in conceptual terms, since its purpose is to cultivate intimacy

(Cohen 1978) and “involvement” (Tannen 2007).

The story of Luol Tiok and Abɛi Gɛu (CHAPTER THREE, pp. 116) was organized around a similar set of poetic inversions (Luol Tiok:goat::Abɛi Gɛu:dog and so on) and a pairing of episodes so that each story serves as a commentary on the other. That story was, perhaps, more explicitly a commentary on the actions of each man but, like the story of Hamerkop and Agumut, it was also meant to entertain. The intertextual linkages in the story of Luol Tiok and Abɛi Gɛu and the pairing of episodes acted as familiar framing devices in the particular genre of genealogical narratives, adding to the story’s drama by arousing the audience’s expectations.

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Figures of loss and dispersal were a constant theme in Mabior’s stories, which centered on women who had—by great effort—managed to hold a family together and secure its continuity. Belonging to the same genera, Mabior’s intergenerational narrative about Diing and

Alith and Ador and Ajoh unsurprisingly contains a similar narrative structure and set of inversions. The episode of Alith making himself out like a poor man wanderer and going to the luak (cattle byre) of Ajoh’s father, Liaŋ Deng, drives home the association of Alith’s father,

Diing, with servitude—recall the term aluak that I discussed in the introduction and has come to mean “slave”, which was used to refer to young men who, lacking cattle for some reason or another and needing a place to live, stayed on in someone else’s household and looked after their cattle—as well as Ajoh’s good character. That Diing was a descendant of Luol Tiok and

“without kin” only underlines his status as a non-person, whose memory was overshadowed by

Ajoh.

Diing’s efforts to marry Ajoh by hunting small animals provided the name “Paluɔny” to

Mabior’s dhien, but Ajoh, the master of its Power (Deng Ajoh), was the founder. Ador’s death in childbirth, and the death of “the child insider her,” resulting from Diing’s misuse of bitter words emphasized just how horrible was the whole affair and how badly Diing had mistreated his wife, Ador, to whom he owed his right to live in that country (because she was a daughter of

Panak, the “owners of the land”). The inversion between Diing and Alith turns on Diing’s prophetic curse, which leads to his own death and his son’s memory overshadowing his own.

Mabior’s story about his mother’s refusal to send her children to Dɛr country after the death of her husband relates a similar situation where the family was nearly dispersed. To tell the story of Paluɔny, then, was also to relate the occurrences of the past to the present of listeners

(“When a person finds a good place, he just settles there. Do you think all those people who

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went to America will return to Bor?”). The story’s dramatic structure gives it the quality of the

here-and-now as it must have seemed to those who lived it—that is, to enter the past as the open-

ended present, as without definite foreknowledge of future but with, perhaps, an inkling.

I have emphasized that these stories center on women and define relatives by reference to

the commitments that they had made—their feelings of mutual responsibility and the desire to

create and maintain the kinds of ongoing relations upon which any community is ultimately

founded—partly because Southern Sudanese societies are famous for having patrilineal descent

groups, clans and lineages. When Mabior returned to Bor country from the frontlines he

distributed cattle to those to whom he felt he owed the greatest debts: his sister’s daughter, his

sister Achol Makuei’s husband, his mother’s brother’s son in Dɛr, and Chol Liet, a relative of his

maternal grandmother. But, mainly, I have presented Mabior’s story in this fashion in an effort to show the self-reflexive insight and humor which he brought to matters that deeply concerned him.

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CHAPTER NINE

OBLIGATIONS AND OBJECTS

In early February 2010, I was in the office of the Chairman of the Commission of Traditional

Leaders, talking to the Chairman, Isaac Dian Gel, who was explaining that Article 175 (2) of the

Interim Constitution of Southern Sudan committed legislators to “provide for the establishment, composition, functions and duties of the Councils of Traditional Authority Leaders.”

“Representatives from Jonglei State’s six tribes—the Anyuak, Nuer, Dinka, Murle, Gee,

Kacipo—will tell us exactly their customs and traditions.” A panel of customary judges and lawyers would “take the culture and take out the bad and just keep the good,” he said, looking at the letter the Bor County Commissioner had written for me to put an end to my periodically being arrested by the town’s security forces. Printed on official Jonglei State letterhead and signed by the Commissioner it said in part that I was there to study “Dinka Language and culture.”

“I am a Nuer,” he said, and apologized that since his main duties were bureaucratic, he couldn’t speak with any authority on “Dinka culture.” He sent me to talk to Mabior Arok, the

Executive Director of Ayot County. He wasn’t brushing me off. I was a foreign researcher;

“Dinka language and culture” was, in foreign books at least, largely a matter of “local folklore, tribal customs and traditions.”

A man of nearly sixty years, Mabior Arok was in Bor drafting the bill on traditional authorities in a temporary office set up near the commissioners’ in Bor Town. On his desk was a legal pad, a brochure from a meeting of traditional leaders, a booklet of “local administration,”

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ى ان ا and a copy of the South African Constitution. He said that a copy of

.The customary law among the Dinka of Sudan”) would arrive any day“) ادان ا

Around sixty years old, Mabior had a sister living in Florida. He was born a few years before the disturbances of 1955, when a state of emergency was imposed on the South. Mabior entered the Malek School in 1961, “when Anya-Nya I was organizing.” There had been a strike among secondary and intermediate students a year earlier, in 1960, when the government changed the weekend holiday from Sunday to Friday, followed by a second strike in 1962, when many students left. By 1964 “the fighting became furious.” His father was a government chief in

Twic East at the time. In 1967 he was executed along with a number of Bor’s chiefs. The soldiers piled up their bodies in a great heap, soaked them with gasoline and burned them. “Our fathers were being killing like cats on the road.” His brother took him to the place and Mabior identified his father by his teeth. “I am proud that he died on this land,” he said.

Mabior returned to school two years later and, in 1981, he had been among the first to graduate from Juba University. He got his start as an administrator in Kordofan, where he worked for seven years. “They are good people,” he told me. “They are Muslim but they have their culture—they drink for celebrations.” He was separated from his family when the war began. In September of 1984 he arranged for his wife and children to fly to Malakal and did not see them again until 2006, twenty-two years later. He saw to it that his son would also have an education (“I told him to delay his marriage”), and it had worked out well; his son was studying to be a veterinary doctor.

I spoke with Mabior a number of times over the course of the following months in 2010 when he was drafting Jonglei State’s “Traditional Authority Leaders Draft Bill.” His task, he told

247 me, was “to transform a system of administration into a legal system,” a structure of governance in which local assemblies, chiefs, and kings would be institutions of the state.

“The Arabs have Emirs, which are like paramount chiefs. The emirs form a council which is a kind of advisory group to the President. We will take that underlying system and apply it to the

South. So we are taking the system of Emirs, that old English system of Native Administration and the old Indian system [e.g., Indirect Rule], and making it our own. We are the natives,” he said, laughing.

“Before the war there was a system of Districts. Each district had a paramount chief down to head chiefs. So we are reviving that system of Boma and Payam. You see, people respect their chiefs more than politicians. Chiefs are more respected even than the governor.” To begin with it was partially a matter of “collecting the minds of different people, senior chiefs—all the old boys who knew about the lives of our people before. So, you see, it is very complicated…”

As for “traditional law,” he said there were three basic divisions: (1) “Dinka and Nuer can be treated as one; they marry with cattle”; (2) Anuak “who are different from everyone.

They have a king;” and (3) Murle, Gee, and Kacipo, whose customary laws can be lumped together, he said. “And by the way, the question of cows is a headache to this society. Anyuak have dropped keeping cattle. Now it is only Dinka, Nuer, and Murle.”

This is a good place to continue a discussion of talk about talk if only because it illustrates a common way of talking about difference in terms of matrimonial practices and that when people spoke to me about “traditional law” they did not necessarily mean something that was cut off from personal biography, time and change, or even something whose whole genealogy had its origins in Southern Sudan. Webb Keane (1995) has written about the

248 suspicion that ethnographers bring to pictures of “tradition” and “culture” that present a

“totalizable object that is cut off from action” (1995:103) The suspicion is warranted since such things are so often obviously the products of colonialism. The problem, Keane notes, is that even this skepticism tends “to reduce [reflexive discourse] to the service of a single function, usually that of talking about the world” as opposed to doing things (1995:103, emphasis

Keane’s).

Matrimonial talk is central to the creation of multi-generational debts and obligations that stretch across the countryside, linking hearthholds in rural Southern Sudan and Bor Town and other places, and knitting together a “common economy” (DH Johnson 1998) that spreads resources and risks in a way that allows a sharing of fate, bi lo ku bi bo (“comes and goes” or give and take), in times and places when adversity hits unpredictably. Following Keane’s lead

(1995, 1997), what I would like to do in this chapter is to examine some talk about talk: about what words can do and what the limits of speech are. Keane’s (1995) argument, in part, was that reflexive talk was often a precipitate of practices whose object might not be to portray a reified picture of “a culture” at all. I will begin with a discussion of material things in order to provide the context for a discussion about promises and oaths. After laying out these themes, I will turn to matrimonial speech, which is often held out in Bor as focal representation of “traditional practices” or, in the phrase of one man I spoke to, “Dinka democracy.”

One reason why I emphasize metapragmatic talk about the repercussions of speech is that accounts of Nilotic marriages tend to focus on bride-wealth exchanges and what changes hands.

That matrimonial negotations are mainly negotations about the repercussions of speech—as opposed to haggling over cattle—serves as an illustration that “the meaning of marriage payments” (J.L. Comaroff 1980) “cannot be reduced to the transfer of objects,” as Webb Keane

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has shown, “for the act of negotiation itself plays a crucial role in making an alliance” (Keane

1991:311).

There is another reason to examine matrimonial speech. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

(2009:257) once pointed out that “to argue affinity is socially constructed would be deemed

redundant;” given the obviously “constructed” character of affinity, the social constructivist

model of kinship tends to problematize relations of consanguinity. And the problem is that the

assumption that no argument needs to be made for the construction of affinity tends to assume

the very distinction between “blood” and “law” which the constructivist model set out to show

was a Euroamerican “folk model” (Schneider 1980).

the sensuous properties of things

In the last chapter, Mabior described BANY DENG as “a tree, a collection of trees,” and speculated about whether, in burning the shrine of AGUT MAJOK, a stick and a pumpkin, he had done anything consequential. AGUT MAJOK had been created by a theft, so the theft of one of

AGUT MAJOK’s cattle may have meant that the Power had already followed after the thief.

Expressions like this, that Power was a tree, say, a drum or a meteorite were remarkably common. The most common was “tree” or a wooden stick or peg, since the most common emblem of any particular Power was the collection of pegs which animals dedicated to it were tethered to before being sacrificed.

“Tree” (tim) referred to a particular peg (piot) or lec (“stick”) or ɣ oro (a tall, slender pole), some combination of which were the material emblems of a particular Power or jok. DENG

AJOH’s “stick” was a large peg of hard wood about a meter in length that was anchored securely in the ground at the “center of a compound-yard” (baai ciɛ l yic) and surrounded by smaller pegs

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(“a collection of trees”) to which cattle were tethered in preparation for sacrifice. The horns of

sacrificed cattle are generally prominently displayed on a ɣoro or on the roof of a nearby house.

A lec is a shrine—a sign that works by resemblance in the manner of a Peircian icon. What a lec resembles most is a small wooden tethering peg for livestock. It is also a metonym and diagrammatic icon of the whole practice of sacrifice which surrounds sacrifice. An emblem’s size and the number of horns displayed on or near it were also a rough index of the number of its adherents (Lienhardt 1961:265).

Drawing on this popular identification of shrine and trees in CHAPTER SIX, Husain Mac used it to illustrate his atheism by saying that human beings were merely material, “you die like the tree.” (“I never believed in those jok [divinities]. My father he didn’t believe it either. There were so many people like that. No one in this area believes in a second life. If you say that you will live again, they will say, ‘Where?’. Once you die, you die like the tree. So you try, when you are born just to live nicely. When you die, just try to die nicely. You are not going to live again.”)

C.S. Peirce used the term “qualisign” to refer to the relevant sensuous properties of resemblance possessed by an object that gave it the potential to operate as a sign. Lienhardt

(1961:257) gave as a focal example the healing cucumber (kuoljok, cucumis prophetarum). “The rationale of the healing powers attributed to [kuoljok] is that they are intensely bitter (kec, like effective invocations) and that, when ripe, they turn a greenish-blue colour suggesting to the

Dinka a stormy sky, and hence, Divinity.” Evans-Pritchard (1956:128) had earlier described the substitution of bitter cucumber for a cow in Nuer Religion: “When a cucumber is used as a

sacrificial victim Nuer speak of it as an ox.” Certain cucumbers have sensuous properties of

bitterness and color that resemble the “bitterness” of effective speech and the color of a stormy

251 sky, the source of things like divinities, lighting and tornadoes, that arbitrarily blast and snatch people away (see Kurimoto 1992).

In Bor Town there was a policeman named Kot Panthum whom everyone called

“Network” [20 October 2009]. “I’m everywhere!,” he said, laughing, when I asked him about his nickname; “It’s a surprise-name.” Network explained that he had a bull, Majer, whose bluish-gray and white color pattern suggested a stormy sky. And the sky is everywhere. Also, being a policeman, he was “everywhere” in the sense that he connected people together from distant places and was liable to pop up unexpectedly just about any-place, just like a cellular telephone aerial (a “network”), which is also in the bluish-gray and cloudy white sky. This name was a constellation of images and associations which likened a policeman to the kind of stormy sky that unexpectedly blasts hapless ants, an attribute of a violent, arbitrary god. Here is a picture that Network drew for me.

Figure 17. Majer. Many humorous stories about ‘divinities’ drew attention to their material qualities and the material risks that their materials exposed them to. The general term for these divinities is jok or yäth (sg. yath), which Lienhardt describes as “clan divinities” and other writers have translated as “totems.” In everyday speech, a yath is simply a ‘wooden handle’, as of an axe or malota.

There are quite a few stories about how people accidently (and deliberately) set yäth on fire.

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Here is an example from a corpus of stories about BӒӒR, the psychotic drum that I introduced in

CHAPTER ONE.

BӒӒR was a drum by nature. There was a fire set by those of Nyap Agou [to cultivate forage], from this Laik Abei community. Nyap Agou lit the fire and the fire spread until it burned the luak [byre] of BӒӒR. Then the top of the drum was burned. BӒӒR was worried—of course!—he cried, “My head burned!” So ten cows were paid [by Nyap Agou]—compensating what? the burning of the head of the BӒӒR. And every year a bull was given to BӒӒR—doing what?—compensating the burning of the head of the drum. And the people of Nyap Agou were not very many, even then. And, afterwards, BӒӒR was trying to fight with those people, killing them one by one by one. So those of Nyap Agou are very few now. Now there is only one left: the son of the daughter of Nyap Agou is alive. So, the community of Nyap Agou is no longer there: because of that enmity of BӒӒR [WS500228, 14:15].

Many of these stories turn on the arbitrariness of material things and unpredictable consequences of ordinary human actions—burning grass for forage, eating, preparing food: all these things could lead to disaster. This was a theme shared by jokes, proverbs, parables and allegories as well as serious historical and genealogical narratives.

A recurring theme in cosmological stories in Bor is the emphasis on the plight of tiny human-beings (called “ants” in these contexts) in their encounters with an unappeasable force immanent especially in violent storms, lightening, sicknesses, and inexplicable events and objects. Daniel Beaumont (2002:159, 163) has shown how this attitude—what Slavoj Žižek

(1993:46-47) described as a “force of culpabilitization totally incommensurable with our actual responsibility”—lends itself very well to jokes, if for no other reason than that it brings into relation two things which are totally incommensurable.

Here is a typical version of a well-known origin myth from Lienhardt (1961:33-34). In it the mundane (land, grain, the act of grinding millet) is joined to the fantastic (the creator god, the sky), and comedy and terror are tangled together when Divinity gets poked.

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Divinity (and the sky) and men (and the earth) were originally contiguous; the sky then lay just above the earth. They were connected by a rope, stretched parallel to the earth [because they were so close as to be conjoined]. By means of this rope men could clamber at will to Divinity. At this time there was no death. Divinity granted one grain of millet a day to the first man and woman, and thus satisfied their needs. They were forbidden to grow or pound more. The first human beings, usually called Garang and Abuk, living on earth had to take care when they were doing their little planting or pounding, lest a hoe or pestle should strike Divinity, but one day the woman ‘because she was greedy’ (in this context any Dinka would view her ‘greed’ indulgently) decided to plant (or pound) more than the permitted grain of millet. In order to do so she took one of the long-handled hoes (or pestles) which the Dinka now use. In raising this pole to pound or cultivate, she struck Divinity who withdrew, offended, to his present great distance from the earth, and sent a small blue bird (the colour of the sky) called atoc to sever the rope which had previously given men access to the sky and to him. Since that time the country has been ‘spoilt,’ for men have to labour for the food they need, and are often hungry. They can no longer as before freely reach Divinity, and they suffer sickness and death, which thus accompany their abrupt separation from Divinity [Lienhardt 1961: 33-34].

Why is there pain and suffering in the world? Why is divinity so distant? The answer is obviously absurd: “Because Abuk poked God, a little bluebird cut the cord.” It is absurd because it is only an answer to the question in the most literal sense; it explains—sort of—why God kills people, why the country is spoiled, and why people suffer and starve (Beaumont 2002). This explains (sort of) why god is beyond any human or moral judgment, but it fails as an explanation for the same reason that it succeeds as a story: because it only leads to more questions. It is also sort of a joke. Said Lienhardt (1961:53): “The image of striking Divinity with a hoe or pestle often evokes a certain amusement, almost as though the story were too childish to explain the consequences attributed to the event. But it is clear that the point of the story of Divinity’s withdrawal from men is not to suggest an improving moral judgment on human behavior.”

Here is another popular story told to me in Bor Town by a man from Duk country, where the Ayuel corpus (see Lienhardt 1961) is widely known. We talked about one thing and another, and he told me about how Ayuel had been transfixed by god. I had read a similar version in

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Lienhardt’s ethnography (1961), but it was thrilling to hear it from someone who had the facts

firsthand.

Ayuel had an agreement with god. He had a jok which god had given to him: aköp [couscous], the brother of wala-wala, but dry. God planted a mud pot, a bowl with a lid, and added some oil. The pot was very small, but Ayuel used to eat the food would not be finished: because when he covered the pot it would be full again. The food was delicious, very sweet [amiet arac], but it could never change. So Ayuel said to himself, “Why is this? Why is the food always the same?” And god said, “If you waste this food I will kill you.” Ayuel was afraid for a few years, but then he made a plan to throw the food away. He threw it by the riverside among the papyrus. God said, “Have you thrown away my food?!” So god ordered the sun to kill Ayuel. So, naturally, Ayuel hid inside all day, in the shade, only creeping out at night. God laughed at him. [Because he tried to cheat death or fool god, which here amount to the same thing. Also because Ayuel presented a comical picture, slinking around like that in the dark.] God went to the moon and gave him a long fishing spear [bith]. And the moon speared Ayuel when he came out at night—pak!, from the top of his head out through his anus into the ground. That spear was very tall, connecting the sky to the earth. The people tried to dig it up, to free Ayuel, but even though they dug very deep, they couldn’t reach the end of the shaft. They tried to climb up, but couldn’t reach the moon either. So they made a yïk [a tomb with a fence, as a verb it means to thatch a pointed roof and suggests, here, a great mound]. It was a big pile of the bones of cattle on top of that Ayuen—like Wundeng’s [Ngungdeng’s mound], which still exists today [nb3, 26 April 2010].

The narrator took the trouble to supply a precise description of couscous without ever satisfying us about god’s motive in giving it to Ayuel or pinning him to the ground. The whole picture is rather like a parent saying, “Finish your peas, or else.” Lienhardt’s (1961:210) idea was that the vacuum created by this lack of an answer was the whole point—“from this point of view [god] is as motiveless as nature itself”—the story can only draw people in.

Both of these myths can be read as a meditation on the unintended consequences of ordinary human actions. What these two stories share is that humans had to take the ability to create consequential promises from a creator god. In each the offense involved food, that is, the

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basic “stuff” of human relationships and the material out of which human beings create

friendships and consanguinal and affinal relations. (Since Dinka-speakers sometimes use idioms

of blood to describe the sorts of relationships that produce incest, I should point out that food is

what produces blood, thus people who eat together share the same blood. Certain foods are said

to increase one’s blood or strengthen it, others are said to diminish it.) The centrality of food in

the creation and maintenance of human relationships helps to place the salience of taste in

common metaphors of the temporality and truth of speech. The phrase “bitter body” (kec guop)

was a common way of saying that a person’s words were effective and persuasive. The

expression “lucky body” (miet guop) is as close a translation of “lucky” as there is in Dinka,

having the sense that one was effective without foresight. The moral of the second account is: if

you’re wholly dependent upon another even the sweetest food will become bland; you can only

be lucky because you can never deliberately do anything of consequence.

Bor is a place where metaphors of sociality revolve around food. Witches and corrupt politicians “eat” people’s sweat and blood, causing them to wither away. Food is a source of power. It is also one of the things that promises are made of. Threatening someone is spoken of as a “mouthful” (cuak). One can say “I know” (Ɣɛn nyiɛc < nyii + ic ‘inside’) or “I’m chewing”

(nyii)—it is the same word. Of course, these expressions may not mean much in themselves.

Partly this just reflects the coherence of food and eating metaphors in talk about talk and agreement. But these ways of speaking draw on a broadly shared sense of the value of relationships that are rooted in relations mediated by food and feeding, which are central to the ways people imagine their relationships with one another.

consensus and arbitrary restrictions

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When I introduced the cannibalistic drum BӒӒR, in CHAPTER ONE, I reproduced a story about how BӒӒR was persuaded to enter into “a common regime of personhood” by being made to speak and to take part in an extended negotiation in which human beings set the terms. But the message was always that speech was insufficient by itself to maintain binding agreements; rather words should be accompanied by some additional, more visible material token. This seemed to underline the point that as much as the power of agreements was always rooted in human action, those agreements (oaths, promises, and so forth) were always subject to the uncertainties of material things—human action being mediated by materials. For instance, another short story about BӒӒR is quite explicit on the point that BӒӒR’s power was ultimately a product of its relationship with human beings and depended upon their attention.

Every summery season, when the crops are ripe, you take some of the first harvest to BӒӒR. First—before you begin to eat. Then your sorghum will continue to grow. And some of that sorghum will be sold, and you’ll buy a cow, and that cow will be given to Laik Abei, because they are the owners of BӒӒR. So this is how BӒӒR generated the wealth from the people. Like that. Every rising moon the women brought aköp [couscous]. This is how BӒӒR generated wealth from the people. So BӒӒR was given powers like that [WS500228, 10:15].

Entering into what Sahlin’s called a “common regime of personhood” meant human beings and BӒӒR shared a common fate. If people had a good year, BӒӒR would have a good year. If people had a bad year, BӒӒR had a bad year too. Persuading BӒӒR to eat couscous, rather than people, had been a matter of persuading BӒӒR to share with humans the uncertainties of rainfall and drought.

Powers themselves were almost always portrayed as having been brought into a relationship with human beings by some accident (careless urination, absentmindedly plucking a leaf) and arriving like enraged maniacs, albeit with the same sort of volitional capacities as

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human beings. For human beings, dealing with Powers was a matter of coaxing them into a

dialogue in order to get them to accept some kind of sacrificial compensation to “cool their

hearts.” Their power always depended upon human attention, though sometimes they needed to

be reminded of this. For example, the origin story of AWӒLPEEN (lit., the ‘medicine of Peen’ or the ‘grass of destruction’) describes how she was brought by a man named Deng Ngong Gumbiir from a people called Jur Col (‘black foreigners’) in Bahr al-Ghazal, from Wau, to Abodit in

Jalle.

AWӒLPEEN used to kill all the beautiful daughters of Peen. She had sons—if one of those sons impregnated a girl, the father of the girl would pay six cows to AWӒLPEEN. When you went to the house of AWӒLPEEN you couldn’t touch anything! If you took even a single piece of grass, AWӒLPEEN would follow you and ask, “Why did you take my grass?” That single piece of grass would require a cow [to compensate AWӒLPEEN]. The men were suffering. MAŊUK JUET, the senior Power [yath] of a nearby community, asked her, “Why do you kill your people? The people are your food [kɔc ee cuen-du]. Let them marry and bring cattle! Then you can collect one bull and one heifer.” So AWӒLPEEN reformed herself according to the word of MAŊUK JUET [24 March, 7 & 23 April 2010].196

As much as Powers such as BӒӒR, AWӒLPEEN, and MAŊUK JUET were violent foreign creatures and archetypal Others, they were the source of life and vitality at the constitutive centers of Bor country’s most important networks of genealogical, matrimonial, political,

196 AWӒLPEEN’s particular mayhem (killing her daughters, collecting child-wealth from her sons) derives from her being matrilineal and thus jealous of the attention that they received—her daughters were competitors for power. MAŊUK JUET (ma- + pluck + juet, a green vine that grows on thɔu trees (heglig), with a bright green, egg-sized fruit that can be eaten if it is soaked in water) was a leaf from a vine. A long time ago a man named Bior Thioŋ was visiting Patuonai in Aliab country. Along the way he had plucked a leaf which he carried awhile before dropping it near Patuonai. That night people saw a bright light in the distance. “What shall we do about this?,” they asked themselves. They went to a diviner who said, “Where is the man among you who brought the leaf, which is now shining?” When Bior Thioŋ stepped forward the diviner told him to make it a yath; so Bior killed a lot of cattle and cut some logs to build a luak. MAŊUK chose a tiir named Alith Kuerot and after that Kur Deng, who used a gourd to make his divinations. But the people of Juet couldn’t agree with Kur Deng, so they took him to a Government court in an effort to chase him away: because they thought he was a fraud. “MAŊUK isn’t there with Kur Deng,” they said. They chose Kelei Alith, who was 95 years old, to be the new tiir. The court said that the case was too complicated, “Sort it out yourselves!,” the court said. So the people divided the shrine (a circle of posts) into two: one-half went to Kelei Alith and the other went to Kuer Deng [nb2, Lual Bol Yot, 3-4 Feb 2010]. (The division of MAŊUK JUET, here, can be read as account of the division of two families barred from married by the rules of exogamy (generally nine generations deep).)

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economic, and religious relations. (At least, that is, until they were burned.) I mentioned earlier

that Godfrey Lienhardt, author of the classic ethnography of Dinka religion (1961), referred to

powers like BӒӒR, AWӒLPEEN, and MAŊUK JUET as “clan-divinities”—because what made people members of the same clan was their shared “respect” (thek) for the restrictions imposed upon them by the emblem of their clan divinity. Someone of the clan “giraffe,” say, would not kill giraffes. “Those who respect trees of various sorts refuse to cut them down and try to avoid any homestead in which they are being burnt or damaged” (Lienhardt 1961:131-32). Emblems can be almost anything: giraffes, particular species of trees or grass, kinds of snakes, lions, hedgehogs, and so forth. Most of these prohibitions are phrased as things which one cannot eat because they are respected.

All this also helps to make sense of the initial rage of AWӒLPEEN and the arbitrariness of the restrictions that she placed upon those people who respected her. Powers generally arrived angry because they had been insulted somehow, with the insult depending on the particular

“body” of the Power, which could be almost anything: a drum, a species of grass, a bitter fruit.

In fact the very arbitrariness of material emblems often seemed to be the whole point. In as much as these objects were the basis for creating new social relations and new communities, they could only come into existence through the creation of some kind of consensus, which had to be periodically renewed by human attention. It didn’t really matter what form this renewal took, what mattered was that everyone acted as though the Power really existed. One could say that the lesson here is that human actions always have unforeseen consequences; even picking a leaf can harm someone. Since people cannot help but do things, they should take care to try to limit the harmful consequences that their actions may cause somewhere down the line. And the

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best way to do that is to consult everyone who might be affected by ensuring that they take part

in the formation of agreements.

That such a consensus oriented discussion was accompanied by some token was not

incidental, but rather can be seen as governed by the logic of the oath (mël, pl. mëël). Mabior once illustrated it for me like this: “If you and Madit make an agreement and kill a bull and mix the food together and eat it, then you will have created mël. People will say, ‘Brendan ku Madit aloŋ mël’ [Brendan and Madit share an oath between them]. And if you break it you will die.

When you kill a bull at the end of a marriage, that one is mël, because the girl will not belong to

that family again” [9 nov 11 nov 09]. Consequential promises often involved the creation of a

dangerous force which would ensure that people lived up to them. This force was often

contained in some object having some connection with the act. This was exemplified by the

soldier who told me:

Ba raan riɛm-bil të cin kɔc nɔ k juec [the person tastes-blood at the place where a lot of people were killed]. Otherwise you will go insane.” The practice was largely ended in 1990, when the war turned inward with the split of the SPLA, he said. This was why there were so many insane people now. “The Murle have the same thing: they put a ring on a finger for each person they kill,” he continued. “They stop at ten.”

“this is aciema”

In July 2010 I was shopping around Bor for a mason to build a cement grave for the father of a friend of mine from the United States—whom I will call Matiop—who was visiting his natal village near Bor. The reason I was talking to masons was that Matiop’s father, who had died several years before, had spoken to an elderly aunt in a dream. “Why are my kids not taking care of me?” he was said to have said in the dream [24 April 2010; 12 July 2010].

It was all very painful. After his father’s death, Matiop had taken over responsibility for his father’s family and wives. He was supporting his mother and his father’s youngest wife

260 along with his own wife and son in an apartment he had rented outside Southern Sudan. Now, he said, his family was making excessive demands on his income. He couldn’t believe that his father would be demanding an expensive grave. Matiop told me about talking to his father on his deathbed. He said, “We know what our father would say if he were still alive. We know his priorities: he would have taken care of his family first. Those people just want to eat: you know, because to do it properly, we’d have to buy beer and soda. We have to kill something, a bull….”

All the same, he admitted, they were probably more concerned about him leaving Sudan and forgetting about his extended family. It wasn’t really just that the old woman was dreaming about his father because she wanted him to buy a cow. It was mainly that they couldn’t see what a burden it was on Matiop, who was just barely scraping by on his meager income in the United

States, to take an active part in family life. He wanted very much to return to Southern Sudan, but couldn’t afford to if he had to build costly graves in addition to supporting his father’s family.

He talked like this, turning it over from one side and then the other.

Events like these also opened up debates about practices of mourning and people’s obligations to the dead, and these debates eventually turned into discussions about family commitments. Over the months, I had come to meet a cross section of Bor Town’s laborers and merchants in the market’s tea stalls and shops. We discussed all manner of subjects—from

George Bush’s “war on terror” and the bombing in Uganda to remittances and school fees and the poor quality of the market’s Chinese-made shovels and the price of cement. One afternoon I was sharing tea and discussing graves and masons and widows and the demands which the dead made on the living with the night guards from the unfinished diesel power station.

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In Bor, widows generally take their husband’s “place” (nyen amoic, lit. ‘eye of the man’ or ‘point of view’) in the management of his herd and the marriages of his sons and daughters.

In any given generation group women not only tend to outnumber men, they also tend to outlive them; and death and widowhood, generational succession, and the redistribution of the properties of the deceased bring out tensions within families in Bor country just like they do elsewhere.

One of the guards was telling me about how when a widow, acting as the head of a family, received cattle from a marriage or as any other sort of compensation, the cattle generally had to be accompanied by a small gift called aciɛ̈ ma, which was meant to mollify and restrain her late husband’s jealousy.

He put his glass to his lips and took a sip. “Without aciɛ̈ ma, he said, “if that widow drank any milk from the cows [she had received] or collected their manure, she would die—or the cow might die—because of the jealousy (tiɛl ) of her late husband,” who might spoil the entire family.

“If the widow takes the place of her husband without that aciɛ̈ ma, the dead man will say, ‘Who put you inside [my place] without doing anything [Yeŋa a-tɔu yïn thin ka cïn ke ca loi]?’”

In the past, he told me, this had been a token, usually a brass or iron ring, but a small bracelet of woven grass was fine, as long as you said, “this is aciɛ̈ ma.” “But then it became a wristwatch, it increased! Then it went to the goat. Maybe it will become a calf,” he laughed.

The dead were becoming more and more insistent and demanding—needing cement graves and calves.

Charms and medicines (wal), oaths (mel) and aciɛ̈ ma, matrimonial pledges (thiek), and the sacrifices “tied” to particular deities (mac): Lienhardt (1961) noted that there was a continuum of objects used in making agreements that bind people together which could be

262 arranged in a hierarchy. He (1961:282) gave as an example of how divinities could be extrapolated from smaller powers a practice called thuic, which involves knotting a tuft of grass in the hope of bringing about some kind of future constriction or delay. A person might tie a knot of grass around a small stone, for instance, to assist in the hunt of a lion. “This ‘mystical’ action is not a substitute for practical or technical action,” though, Lienhardt wrote:

The man who ties such a knot has made an external, physical representation of a well- formed mental intention. He has produced a model of his desires and hopes, upon which to base renewed practical endeavor. … A Dinka who could send a message by the driver of some car going ahead of him would not find it necessary to knot grass when hoping that supper might be kept for him.

In order to act upon the world, one generally first objectifies it in some fashion, by imagining it as a particular configuration of agents and goals and their relations. A small stone trussed up in a tangle of grass is a diagrammatic icon of a situation which a hunter wishes to bring about—a lion tangled up in a net.

A general term for such objects is wäl (pl. wal). The word wäl is usually translated as

“medicine” or “amulet.” In everyday speech wäl just means “grass,” but these objects could be just about anything—a gourd, a key, a collection of roots, and so on—without any formal distinction between aspirin and antibiotic tablets, preparations of leaves or an object meant to protect against theft. Their particular purposes ranged enormously—protection against bullets or success in a lion-hunt, or to cause someone to feel guilty about something (1961:150). Many turned on memory in one way or another. For example, in the corpus of stories about a master of power (bany jok) called Ajak Kur, who founded a cattle village in Koc country that used to be called Pakau Akon (now it is called Ayaah), there are a number of episodes in which, when someone intended to kill him, he tied a knot of a certain root, ‘ruk dɛ̈ ɛ̈ l’, and tossed it away,

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causing his potential murderer to forget all about his plans.197 But the most common purpose to which people put the practice of knotting grass in recent years was to compel the return of soldiers from the army (and sometimes others from farther abroad). If someone wished to cause a soldier to remember his home, to become “homesick,” he or she would knot a tuft of grass [20

April 2010].

The efficacy of these objects was a common topic of discussion and speculation in Bor country when I was living there. Soldiers preparing to go to the border wondered whether wäl amac dhaŋ, ‘anti-bullet medicine’, a little padlock sold by people in Bhar al-Ghazal, would be affective against bullets or whether it was just a trick dreamed up by SPLA commanders to prevent soldiers from running away and deserting. “Like those Arab soldiers who are given a key,” one soldier was telling me, describing how soldiers were told that that key would unlock the door to paradise. “Ha! They tell those soldiers, ‘don’t worry, you will live forever’. That thing called ‘gina’ [> , ‘paradise’] has killed a lot of people” [17 May ‘10].

knotty speech

I introduced tying speech in CHAPTER ONE. A common way of telling someone to “shut up” in Bor is by saying “ader thok” (lit. ‘tie your mouth’). To speak of “hush money” one could say weu ader thok (money [that] ties your mouth).

The first time I heard this expression was in September 2009, when I was sitting in

Mabior’s compound in Bor Town. Mabior’s six-year-old daughter was crying loudly, complaining because she had not been allowed to go to the market alone and scolded for trying to sneak off. Madit was telling her to ‘shut up’ ader thok. When I asked him about it he wound a piece of string tightly around my index finger—to illustrate the knot as well as its relevant sensuous properties. The knot was tight and constricting.

197 dɛɛ̈ l̈ (pl. dël) the rootball of a tuft of grass.

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The general term for a knot is ruk, which as a verb simply means ‘to tie, bind, fasten,’

‘clothe’ (with a wrapped cloth) or, depending on the inflection, to ‘tighten’ or ‘loosen’ a snare for wild animals. The term ruk (morph. ruŋ) refers to binding knots and generally implies that two cords cross over each other to form a loop, as in ruk ruŋ arɔ t ‘tie with a bow-knot’—ruŋ cɔc and aruɛt are ‘slip knots’, ruŋ cuec is a ‘reef knot’, and ruŋ arɔ t, lit. ‘knots itself’, is a bow-knot

(shoelace knot or double reef knot).

The term “der,” as in “shut up,” refers to friction knots, in which the threads are tightly coiled. The most salient of these is the whipping knot used to prevent the fraying of livestock tethers. The term is also used to refer to bandaging or rolling up something, like a bolt of cloth; arresting a person, or annoying someone, as in der nhom, lit., ‘winding (the) head’. These two general terms, ruk and der, refer to the two categories of knots used to make ‘livestock tethers’, yuën, which consist of a long lead with two slip knots at each end.

Another general verb for ‘restraining, tying and fastening’, mac. In everyday speech one can use the same term for tying a cow (mac weŋ loc) to a peg and putting someone in prison, whom subsequently would be referred to as ‘a prisoner’, raan cï mac. It is also used to refer to cattle dedicated or “tied” to a particular divinity. It generally refers to coercion of some kind or another. Madit once illustrated the term for me with a story about a certain “Mr. X.”

Say that Mr. X owes something to someone else. “Let me die,” Mr. X tells that man [his creditor—viz., if you collect on your loan I will be left with nothing, I will starve, or— more emphatically—if you collect, then I will kill myself]. “Yeŋö yïn na mac thok [why do you tie/arrest my mouth]?,” the other man replied [17 June 2010]. matrimonial speech

Tying speech refers to a bundle of concepts having to do with persuading others and making binding agreements, backed up by deadly Powers. (Making social ties and binding

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agreements—the metaphor also works in English.) What I would like to do in the remainder of

this chapter is to examine how people talked about matrimonial negotiations when they were

speaking abstractly. I have already begun to lay out a number of themes: how people talk about

talk, how speech can be used to accomplish things, and the characteristic limits of words.

As I have already mentioned, matrimonial speech was often held out to me as an emblem

of “tradition” and evidence of a distinctive culture. By bringing two distinct groups fully

together, the major event of matrimonial encounter created a kind of model of society in

miniature. For its participants, though, what was most important about matrimonial speech was

its efficacy.

Matrimonial negotiations ideally take place between two “generation groups” (dhien, usually), one of potential wife-givers and one of potential wife-takers. Ideally, the setting of the negotiations is the ancestral cattle village of the groom. In size and composition the two were usually symmetrical, with each consisting of all the named male and female recipients of cattle and their exchange partners, along with other members of their households and visitors to act as witnesses. Each of the two parties was arrayed in a semi-circle facing the other so that the two groups form a circle. Each side had a spokesman (agomlong) who sat in the middle of the circle

with his back to his side so that he could “pass” what was said by the people sitting behind him.

The size of each group is a rough index of the influence of the groom’s family, the number of

cattle which they are prepared to offer, and the importance of the event. The number of speaking

roles in the formal negotiation is a further indication of the groom’s family’s wealth.

Negotiations generally last several days. Most of the talk concerns laying out a

description of the negotiation itself, its participants and their relationships with participants there

and with absent others whom might be represented, the state of everyone’s household, and so

266 forth—in other words, most of what was said concerned forming a consensus on what was actually happening and what its ramifications might be. Speakers describe other matrimonial negotiations, quoting speeches given during those negotiations and discussing the cattle and other objects exchanged, who the exchange partners were; this talk often involves discussions about things that the participants’ grandparents had done and said, since the exchanges and counter-exchanges that gradually cement a marriage often run several generations in depth.

Everyone had a chance to speak.

I attended dozens of these negotiations. I recorded several in full, often at the insistence of its participants since matrimonial speech was meant to be widely repeated and remembered.

Someone always provided me with a chair. Partly this was because hospitality is such a core value in Bor country and partly because of I am a white male from the United States. Like most anthropologists I was uncomfortable with the status accorded to me; and my chair was a very visible emblem of a power dynamic that was only slightly overcome by taking an active role in matrimonial negotiations as a participant and giving and receiving goats and counter-gifts of cash. Once I could minimally follow Dinka and make short speeches, it struck me how little speech was actually devoted to negotiating the number of cattle that would be exchanged. I had thought that was supposed to be the point.

What people were negotiating was a consensus about how this particular marriage fit into numerous other past and ongoing agreements that people had made. In fact, the number of cattle that would change hands and the people who would receive them (mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, and so on) was generally known by each party beforehand. The actual negotiation is an effort to situate the moment of speaking itself amid chains of speakers and

267 networks of speech events (other marriages and earlier stages of matrimonial negotiation), hence the importance of forming a consensus around what is going on.

I mentioned earlier that matrimonial negotiations take the form of a stylized conversation between two parties, helping to construct as agents two social entities that are larger than any particular individuals. Within the frame set by the speech of negotiation, principles do not address one another directly; instead a spokesman (agomlong) “receives” each person’s words and passes them on to the opposed party. The repetition of dialogue draws attention to the repeatability of words and their detachability from particular contexts of talk, providing a continual reminder that for a negotiation to have any wider effect it must be widely recounted across space and time.

All this attention also serves as a continual reminder of the hazards of speech: the susceptibility of words to be misunderstood, misquoted, forgotten or poorly paraphrased.

The agomlong not only repeats but also frequently rephrases and corrects the speech of others. This also makes the proceedings fun to listen to. Since each speaker knows that what he or she says will be repeated, they tend to choose their words with great care. One person speaks, pausing every ten words or so in order to allow the agomlong to repeat what they have said. This is not only practical—ensuring that everyone can hear what is said—but also has some more subtle effects. It discourages rambling; and since phrase is broken up into short, very direct points, it encourages everyone to listen carefully to what is said.

Failures of repeatability sometimes occurred when an incompetent speaker caused the ritual frame to collapse. Occasionally, if a speaker was particularly meandering or zigzaggy in his or her talk, the agomlong would simply stop repeating and look on in amusement. In this excerpt [ws500180, 36:14, trans.pp.112-113], the first speaker (S1), a young Wildlife-Police

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officer, was defending another man against the charge that he had misused some money meant

for the purchase of cattle for another marriage. The speech broke down when he used the word

“calculation.” The police officer had a primary school education and spoke some Arabic and

English, which he had picked up in the army and used in his job. Like many men of his age,

education, and military experience he frequently used Arabic and English terms in everyday

speech. The agomlong (AL) here, an elderly man of perhaps seventy-years, was a monolingual

Dinka-speaker.

S1: ka ëke ceke ɣɔc aci wɔ-ke lɔ-thin …[and of] that money put into his purchase [of ku loi ku kalkulacon de cin ë ɣɔce kaŋ cattle] we’ve done the calculation and there’s no- thing left with him [that could have been stolen] AL: aah? ɣɔc ke-lɔ-thik? huh? ‘cattle that was bought into the marriage’? S1: kalkulacon. aciɛ̈ [t]. aciɛ̈ calculation. It’s like. It’s like… [S1 interrupted by laughter and cross-talk—a discussion about how to translate “calculation” into Dinka]

AL: …ku eke ceke ɣɔc aci wɔke lɔ-thin …of that money put into his purchase [of ku loi ku ajuɛr de cin ë ɣɔce kaŋ cattle] we’ve arranged it properly [against the purchase] and there is nothing left

In CHAPTER ONE, I suggested that the term kec (bitter) referred to the agency of words themselves, which have the capacity to outrun their speakers’ intentions; “a sensation at once painful and pleasant,” Lienhardt (1961:209) said, destructive and healing. After all, where consequential promises were made, words had great Power and required considerable care.

Matrimonial negotiations are themselves little dramas by which problems of bitterness are reflexively staged. The two speaking groups face each other across a gap that is only partially bridged by the two agomlong. This distance serves as a continual reminder to the participants of

269 the risks posed by misunderstanding and the potential for destruction which a failure to situate the act of speech and exchange can potentially bring about.

Given the stakes that are at play and that the two sides may not know very much about each other’s particular positions within a wider web of obligations and exchanges, principals in the negotiation cannot assume that anyone knows the full context of the negotiation.

Matrimonial speech consists of a great deal of talk about talk, speech that announces the purposes and goals of the discussion. The participants and how they are to act toward each other must be put into words.

S1: I am saying this S1: Aluԑl alë ë AL: I am saying this AL: Aluԑl alë ë

S1:the name of this talk isn’t ‘competition’ S1:kë cɔl jam acii tɛr [struggle] AL: never compete/struggle in talk AL: acii tɛr yen jam

S1:if you’re told to be patient by your people, S1: na jany kɔc kuɔn yi, ke yin käc [slow/stop] then you do so because we are here to hit it acän këne ekë bë bë tiiŋ precisely [tell the truth, guess well] AL: if you’re told to be patient by your people, AL: na jany kɔc kuɔn yi, ke yin käc [slow/stop] then you do so because we are here to hit it acän këne ekë bë bë tiiŋ—ace bë bë luel ë precisely—to say the truth lueth.

S1:we are not here to spoil it S1:ace kë bë bë riɔk AL:we are not spoiling it AL:ace riɔk

S1:I am saying this S1: Aluԑl alë ë AL:I’m saying AL: Aluԑl alë

S1:I will talk about two things S1:ɣɛn abï jam ne kaŋ ke rou AL:I will talk about just two things AL: ɣɛn abï jam ne kaŋ ke rou abac

The following excerpt dramatizes the risks that a failure to fully articulate the situation of the negotiation can pose. Here the speaker addresses the “spirit” (nhialinydë) of a deceased

270 member of one of the families, a General named Aguto, foregrounding his absence as a speaking participant while at the same time underlining his importance as one who is affected by the eventual conclusion of the negotiation. The question the speaker is addressing here concerns the exchange of some cattle bought with money that the government had paid out to Aguto after his death. Another man had taken over responsibility for Aguto’s family, and if he had misused the money or taken it for himself (“destroying the family of Aguto”) then the exchange itself could have serious ramifications. The speech itself takes the form of an oath (“that money is the blood of Aguto, the cattle are the blood of Aguto”), with a similar principle: his speech consists of an address to an invisible Power which is asked to kill anyone who speaks falsely.

S1:If there is a person whose hate sleeps in his S1: na cԑ ran riän abe niin ne ran piɔu heart AL: If there is a person whose hate sleeps in AL: na cԑ ran riän abe niin ne ran piɔu his heart

S1: But he has nothing with him S1:eka ciin ke tɔ kene ye AL: He has nothing with him AL:acen kë tɔ kene ye

S1: and if he has something with him S1:kun a nɔŋ ke tɔ kene yen wen AL: and if he has something with him AL: kun a nɔŋ ke tɔ kene yen wen

S1: and you have remembered that, we hate S1: ke wen ye wɔ ye mane edë ca jam la Alier him so, I would have talked like Alier Biar Biar AL: and you have remembered that, we hate AL: ke wen ye wɔ ye mane edë ca jam la Alier him so, I would have talked like Alier Biar Biar

S1: Alier Biar has this to say, “Garang are S1: Alier Biar e jam ele, “ye, Garang, can yin (you) dead absolutely? Open your eyes, here lo buɔt pinye? kɔc riäk bai eke, lar ekë.” are those who are against your vision, take them [drag them off].” AL: Alier Biar has this to say, “Garang are AL: Alier Biar e jam ele, “ye, Garang, can yin (you) dead absolutely? Open your eyes, here lo buɔt pinye? kɔc riäk bai eke, lar ekë.” are those who are against your vision, take them [drag them off].”

S1: so, if there is anybody who is against or S1:Ke yen na nɔŋ ran riäk pan de Aguto de ŋɔ̈ŋ destroying this family of Aguto of Ngong

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AL: so, if there is anybody who is against or AL: Ke yen na nɔŋ ran riäk pan de Aguto de destroying this family of Aguto of Ngong ŋɔ̈ŋ

S1:Then we are likely to talk in the fashion of S1: Ke ka luel ke cïmën de Alier Alier Biar AL: Then we are likely to say what Alier Biar AL: eka luel ku cïmën de nhiɛ Alier de Biar??? has said

S1: The money that we are now talking about S1: Ke weukë, aye weu ke riim ke Aguto is the money of the blood of Aguto AL: The money that we are now talking about AL: ke weukë, aye weu ke riim kë is the money of that blood.

S1: if they are misused, we have to talk S1: na riäk ke etëne aka luel ku AL: we (have to) say how it was spoiled AL: ëka luelku te riɛ̈ ke

S1: if they are misused, then we have a right to S1: na riäk ke enë eka luel ku eyin, ‘Aguto, pel say, ‘you Aguto, just watch our cleverness and kony däi [dän] tɔ në wuɔc ku ebani loi luɔi du.’ act accordingly.’ [Aguto (our) clever contributions, observe how we (are at fault?) and (then) do your doings…]

AL: if they are misused, then we have a right AL: na riäk ke enë eka luel ku eyin, ‘Aguto, to say, ‘you Aguto, just watch our cleverness pel kony dän tɔ në wɔic ku ebani loi luɔi du.’ and act accordingly.

S1: and if there is anybody who is destroying S1:ku na nɔŋ ran den riäk pandu your family AL: and if there is anybody who is destroying AL: ku na nɔŋ ran den riäk pandu your family

S1: let your spirit watch (and punish) the S1: ke yin ce lɔ ya nhialinydë ke yin däi ye eye wrongdoers rane AL: let your spirit watch (and punish) the AL: ke yin ce lɔ ya nhialinydë ke yin däi ye wrongdoers eye rane

S1: watch the true person from the one who S1: däi ye ne ran luel yic ku ran luel lueth speaks falsehoods.

AL: watch them (to distinguish) the true person AL: däi ye ne kek ran luel yic ran luel lueth from the one who speaks falsehoods. [page 110] [186] S1: you, we’ve left nothing of yours behind. S1: yen e ecïn kecïne-kum wan AL: we’ve left nothing of yours behind AL: e ecïn kecïne-kum wan

S1: and that’s why I said we cannot lie about S1: ku kë weu yan jam ëka ya lueth ???? be tör

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the money we’ve spoken of: because the cows [lies] ke ɣɔ̈ k gԑm ku kekë aye rim ke Aguto we are giving you now are the blood of Aguto.

This last speech was quite explicitly about cattle. I have emphasized the attention given to explicitly forming a consensus about what repercussions the matrimonial speech event might have because accounts of Nilotic marriages tend to focus on bride-wealth exchanges and what changes hands. All this talk about talk is a reminder that “the meaning of marriage payments”

(J.L. Comaroff 1980) “cannot be reduced to the transfer of objects, for the act of negotiation itself plays a crucial role in making an alliance” in Bor and elsewhere (Keane 1991:311).

So far I have been discussing the most focal stage of matrimonial negotiations. The major stage presupposes a series of smaller discussions leading up to it—generally beginning with a young man’s visit to his girlfriend’s homestead—but it is mainly an important way of reproducing such negotiations in the future.

During my stay in Bor, I was continually being asked to tag along on these visits to young women’s homes on the theory that my presence would impress her parents, since a “white man” would imply that her suitor had a steady income and access to a network of powerful friends. (I mentioned earlier that I was uncomfortable with the prestige accorded to me on the basis of my gender and nationality. Tagging along with suitors at least restaged this power dynamic by making me an emblem.) We would approach the young woman’s compound and stand at a respectful distance beyond the perimeter of its cleared yard. The suitor would clap, announcing his presence. Then we would wait for the young woman’s mother or a younger sibling. After a short greeting we would explain our presence there and the young woman would be called. There would be a short, pleasant talk. Then we would politely depart.

These visits would be repeated until the couple decided to involve their parents, at which point messengers would be sent back and forth between the two families and negotiations would

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begin. The next stage involved a visit of young men of the prospective bride’s family to inspect

the familial herd of the prospective husband. After reporting back to the bride’s father, more

messengers would be sent back and forth to set a date and place for more formal negotiations.198

The progression of named stages provides a ready-made narrative structure for later re- telling, which is another one of the features of marriages which allow people to “objectify” particular negotiations and exchanges and evaluate them against one another. Men tended to dominate the most dramatic aspects of the process, particularly those which are seen as most likely to lead to fighting or failure. I heard countless stories about a young man sneaking into his girlfriend’s bed at night, only to be chased the following morning naked through the village by her irate father and brothers. These were usually narrated with great glee and anatomical detail.

Many other stories were about angry brothers burning down their sister’s suitor’s houses, and so on. As larger and larger groups become involved in negotiations, older and older men figured more and more as the key protagonists of these stories. In the absence of systematic coercive force, the influence of “big people” depended in large part on their ability to hold others’ attention by “holding the floor,” as it were—to get people to listen to them and repeat what they had said.

The spatial and temporal structure of matrimonial negotiations makes the

“entextualization” of marriages as verbal objects fairly straightforward. For instance, when I went to speak with Kon Ajith’s secretary, Isaiah Malԑk, he showed me a thesis that he had written for a degree in theology titled “A comparative study of Dinka and American Marriage.”

While I copied out one of his illustrations, which charted “the stages of Dinka marriage” through

198 I should probably explain here that by “formal” I do not mean “sedate,” I mean set apart from the ordinary world during which certain rules were observed. The arc of matrimony tends to begin with a rather dramatic show of mock hostility which culminates in joking abuse during the main negotiations. At any stage of the process, negotiations can break down and, occasionally, turn into actual hostilities.

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an arc, he drew an arrow, saying, “Now people are tired of all these procedures; they are taking a

short-cut” [2 November 2009].

“shortcut” Figure 18. Isaiah's diagram of a Dinka marriage. Isaiah Malԑk’s diagram and “comparative study of Dinka and American Marriage” indicates the availability of matrimonial negotiations for reflexive talk about what is distinctive about Dinka culture. And by adding an arrow—while saying, “Now people are tired of all these procedures; they are taking a short-cut”—illustrates how much talk about matrimonial negotiations is also talk about change and tradition as well as the character and direction of that change. By using the phrase “procedures,” Isaiah was also drawing a comparison with bureaucratic domains having procedures where the performance is essentially empty.

“We don’t want those ‘human rights’”

In this chapter I have not tried to provide any kind of typology of Dinka marriages: ghost marriages, women-women marriages, competition marriages, and so forth. Neither have I focused on the ways in which matrimonial negotiations reproduce relations of inequality that tend to benefit senior, cattle-wealthy men. While all this obviously matters a great deal, my argument concerned efforts to create a consensus around what kind of act its participants were engaging in.

What I would like to discuss here to bring around a conclusion to this chapter is why

Isaiah Malԑk chose as the topic for his thesis “A comparative study of Dinka and American

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Marriage.” I heard comparisons like this all the time in Bor; in the United States, debates with

Americans about bridewealth were a topic of daily conversations. And the NGO and human rights literature and popular media were full of discussions about “forced marriages” and suggestions—based on no evidence whatsoever really—about how inflated bridewealth had led to a dramatic increase in the severity and violence of cattle raids and related violence in Jonglei

State during the years since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) (see

Rolandsen and Breidlid 2012 for a critical overview of this literature).

All this has a long history. British colonial administrators and visitors to Africa south of the Sahara pointed to “bride-price” as evidence of Africans’ lack of normal human emotions, holding out matrimonial exchanges as proof of an African “traffic in daughters” (Torday 1929, quoted in Tambiah 1989:414). Foreign humanitarian-workers I spoke to in Bor believed that fathers there were regularly auctioning off their under-age daughters to the highest bidder. The image of “”—impoverished fathers selling their school-aged daughters to elderly government officials—had become a symbol of Southern Sudan’s moral and financial corruption. The Lutheran World Federation even printed up hundreds of tee-shirts with the words “Pel ku thieng ye rit” (lit., “Leave the marriages that are pressured”) as a part of its

Kakuma Refugee Assistance Project.

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Figure 19. LWF/DWS, The Lutheran World Federation/Department for World Service, Kenya—Sudan Programme. Kakuma Refugee Assistance Project.

I also need to emphasize that it would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which the colonial chiefs’ courts and police have, since the 1930s, provided senior men with new ways to exercise power over junior men and women. In a 1958 issue of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, the anthropologist Jean Buxton wrote about how

The introduction of courts based on European concepts of law, has made the situation much more difficult for young people who want to defy their [parents’ wishes with respect to marriage partners]. Customary procedure can now be enforced in a court of law. Formerly in a simple society without “police” or “executive authority,” and where chiefs only had “influence,” or where one party was able to exercise superior strength, custom was [unenforceable] in many cases, and loopholes were many. With the introduction of European style chiefs, “police,” a prison sentence may enforce custom. Runaway girls may be returned to their fathers, and the abductor may be fined or imprisoned. Courts may uphold the right of the father to bridewealth for his daughter, particularly if the father is an important chief. That foreign influence has made custom repressive is substantiated by Dr. Lienhardt, who tells me that among Dinka he has evidence of a youth being imprisoned for abduction. It also appears to be supported from evidence among the Shilluk, where the rights of certain chiefs to certain girls may be supported in the courts [Buxton 1958:69].

In fact, rather than taking “a short cut,” many young people in Bor country have in recent years responded to this by prolonging the series of discussions that gradually cement an alliance with the addition of a stage referred to as “youngster marriages” (thiiŋ [ka] röörthii or thiiŋ

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riënythii). These discussions are negotiated by junior age-mates (riënythii) and concluded with

the sacrifice of a bull—often greatly to their senior generation’s great consternation.

* * *

The first time someone said “we don’t need these ‘human rights’” to me I wrote it down in my notebook, thinking that it would make a good chapter title. I heard it again and again.

Partly it was just a way of expressing frustration about the post-war reorganization of the government, a process which seemed to many to be led by foreign NGOs. At any given time, there were always quite a few obviously well paid foreigners in Juba working on “legal reform.”

They would periodically visit Bor Town and the surrounding countryside to interview lawyers, officials, traditional leaders, and “women’s groups,” which had been organized for their visit.

This had gone on for several years without any discernible improvements in the legal system: the courthouse was still a dilapidated old colonial building, case-files were piled up in heaps, there were bribes; the police still beat people up for objecting to their houses and shops being torn down or trying to make a living by distilling alcohol. Most people avoided the courts if they could and worked out their problems among themselves or, failing that, “in the community” with the help of a government chief.

I don’t think that I should have to underline this, but let me add that people did not want to be subject to human rights abuses. I never met anyone who wanted to live in a place where murder, rape and torture were sanctioned and killing carried no consequences when it was undertaken by government soldiers or police. Neither did anyone feel oppressed by Article 25 of

the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of

278 living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” (www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/).

“We don’t need human rights” was a common way of voicing a critique of the idea that

Southern Sudan’s troubles were primarily an expression of Dinka, say, or Nuer “culture.” It wasn’t the most common; the most common phrase was “… aren’t we human beings too?”

Probably this pair of expressions should come as no surprise. Sally Engle Merry (2003:62) pointed out a few years ago in a paper titled “Human Rights Law and the Demonization of

Culture” that in an understanding commonly found in human rights law, “culture” is an impediment to human rights, standing in the way of women’s equality, and “relegated to the domain of the past, to religious extremism, and to irrational ‘taboos.’ Its opposite is modernity and the norms of human rights.”

Merry (2003) shows that deeply embedded in human rights law is the idea that “rights” and “freedoms” are an escape from all constraint, human attachment, and self-subordination.

The fantasy that people could live without others’ help perhaps arose from the way theories of political liberty emerged in counterpoint to chattel slavery, where to be unfettered was to own oneself (Graeber 2011; Finley 1998). The idea is certainly tangled up with self-definitions of modernity and multiple historical developments of neoliberalism, new reproductive technologies and other modes of self-fashioning that help to make this fantasy of total independence imaginable. In human rights law, Merry (2003) writes, as among missionaries, “identity” is conceived of as adherence to a system of beliefs. But if what people conceive of identity as a

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nexus of relations, as something based upon the risky work of mutual incorporation rather than a

thing defined by its edges?

Isaiah Malԑk’s comparative study of Dinka and American marriage belonged in part to a discourse concerning “traditional law” and its relation to human rights law. But by arguing that

“Dinka and American marriages” were comparable, he was making a larger point. He was arguing that Dinka were human.

Earlier I cited two myths about how human beings had unintentionally acquired the capacity to create consequential promises from a creator god. Each offense involved food, the basic “stuff” of human relationships and the material out of which human beings create friendships and consanguinal and affinal relations. Wrote Viveiros de Castro (2009:264en.24), with whom I began this chapter: “‘Mythology’ is the name we give to other people’s discourse on the innate. Myths address what must be taken for granted, the initial conditions with which humanity must cope and against which it must define itself by means of its power of invention.”

Isaiah’s argument, in other words, involved a universalizing notion of humanity marked by the capacity to live within self-imposed limits of respect, responsibility, and accountability; he was making an appeal really: what defines human beings is that they can become kin.

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CHAPTER TEN

LIFE IS PRICKLY

Mobility in independent South Sudan is inextricably linked with land rights and access.

Town populations have grown with the return of refugees and other displaced persons, as well as people seeking the safety of proximity to army barracks and compounds of international non- governmental organizations (NGO). This demographic shift has generated tensions around the expansion of towns into areas of communal land rights (Leonardi 2011) and cannot be divorced from the region’s political history (Johnson 2003). In the summer of 2008, for example, a land bill passed by the Jonglei State Legislative Assembly increased government landholdings five- fold, increasing the plat of the town from 8 by 5 miles to 24 by 8. MPs from Kolnyang, Anyidi,

Makuach, Baidit, and Jale payams walked out on the land bill debate in disgust to visibly register their protest (Aleu 2008; Adol 2010). Surveyors for the Ministry of Physical Infrastructure were chased off by residents of the land expropriated by the new legislation.199 The government

“overreached,” a Land Allotment Committee member told me [A.P.A., 18JULY2010,

WS500258]; it had “eaten” more than its fair share, others said.200 “Of course, ‘the land belongs to the community,’” an official charged with town planning told me. “But only John Garang knows what ‘the community’ is,” he added dryly (NB3, 29April2010, M.J.; for a discussion of the vagaries surrounding customary land rights see Deng 2004, Leonardi 2011, and Rolandsen

2009).201

199 “Those people were saying, ‘You Arabs!, You want to steal our land’, and we weren’t even Arabs,” a Ministry of Physical Infrastructure surveyor was telling me later. “They called us ‘black Arabs’” [nb8, 11 July ‘10]! 200 Or, it ‘had gobbled up more than its fair share’, if you prefer a metaphor nearer the American-anglophone idiom of consumption. 201 “The phrase ‘land belongs to the community’ can be traced to public statements of the late SPLM/A leader Dr John Garang who, throughout the 22-year civil war, used it to rally support for the SPLM/A. As peace talks that

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This chapter argues that, in order to understand return migration in South Sudan, one also has to understand something about the meanings and implications of other kinds of mobility and immobility. “Return” to South Sudan has not only presented migrants with challenges similar to those of arrival in other parts of South Sudan and East Africa as well as the United States,

Europe, and Australia; it has also been marked by “unsettling” experiences of unforeseen social distance (Markowitz and Stefansson 2004). Indeed, if the experience of traveling between places where one rarely feels fully welcome can lead to a “re-discovery” of “home”—and new sense of attachment and belonging—, one of the most painful “aspects of homecoming is the cool welcome, if not downright hostility, that homecomers often receive from the population that stayed behind” (Stefansson 2004:9).

The theme of “prickly” receptions emerged regularly in my informants’ discussions as an idiom of social distance. Ciɛŋ acï lɔ nyathath (“life is prickly”), was a common phrase used to indicate the imposed hardships of daily life that many perceived to be akin to an inhospitable reception in another’s home, and was associated with the individualizing properties of money and the alienation of land (cf. Leonardi 2011; Shipton 1989). Students of South Sudan are familiar with the term cieŋ, which as a noun refers to the domain of everyday life and practices,

“habits and customs” (Nebel 1979), “land” (Burton 1987), and, as a verb, means “to live.”

Evans-Pritchard famously translated the Nuer cognate as “home” (1940:135-6; but see Burton

1987:27-28); in Dinka the term can also mean “to wear.” Bilingual speakers of Dinka and

English commonly translate nyathath as “prickly,” but the word is also used to mean dry, stale, or tasteless, and often indicates a strained relationship. “When you are very tired, on a very hot

eventually culminated in the CPA got underway in Naivasha, Kenya, ‘land belongs to the community’ was a key component of SPLM/A’s negotiating posture. By asserting community ownership of land, the SPLM/A set itself in direct opposition to state-centric land ownership policies of the northern government. … Perhaps because of high- profile support, the Southern Sudanese commonly held the misperception that the CPA and interim constitutions enshrined the principle” (Deng 2011:8).

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day, you cannot see properly. You say, Ɣɛn acï dhɔ r nyathath [I’m weary of prickliness]” my research assistant told me. He continued.

When you go to someone’s home, and they do not tell you to leave but they don’t welcome you. You go to the house but no one greets you. No one says, You sit here. You see—the good word is like water. It’s like, water is life [a slogan painted on tanker trucks in Bor]. Ciɛŋ acï duac is ciɛŋ apieth [“the relationship is wet” is “good surroundings”]. But ciɛŋ acï lɔ nyathath: there is a relation but the relationship is dry. It is like bad posho [stale, buthuth (“tasteless”) polenta].

mere survival

In June of 2010 I was talking with a man named M.G. who had returned to the edge of

Bor town to retire. By the time I knew him in Bor, M.G. was nearly fifty years old, a stout man, almost bald, always clean shaven. He had attended primary school in Bor as a child, then SPLA training courses in Ethiopia where he had read widely (“those Marxists had the best slogans...”).

“We don’t have money but we can live only—you can live and your children can live,”

M.G. told me when I asked him about Bor town’s growing population. He described how rural insecurity had prompted many people to relocate to towns and reduced everyday life to a precarious hand-to-mouth existence, mere survival. He said:

MG: You are only surviving—that is only environmental living, not modern and not cieng pieth [good surroundings]; it is survival only. Now we’ve tasted the awan Turuk, awan Jalaba [foreigner’s salt, merchant’s salt], so now everyone is coming to town. We need medicine, but before we had these herbal medicines. It was available [— he reached up and plucked a low-hanging leaf for emphasis—]. Everyone had his father’s medicine. Now we have technology, but it does nothing for us. But, at that time, the salt was very sweet [miɛt (“tasty”)] because it wasn’t in our blood.”

I asked him when it had changed.

MG: In 1962. There was salt in town a very long time ago, before, but it wasn’t in the villages, only in town. Before that our meat was very good, even the fish. But now, it is bland: because we’ve tasted that salt. Ah. Ciɛŋ acï lɔ nyathyath,

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he said, “life has become prickly,” coarse and tasteless.

M.G. voiced the ambivalence that many expressed to me. Like many others, M.G. talked about the promise embodied by medicine, schools, and new commodities. While many said schools and hospitals opened up possibilities that would otherwise have been unavailable, these institutions were also seen as essentially foreign and, as such, opposed to the moral standards and characteristic relations of paanjieng, the rural countryside (lit. Dinka(home)land), and baai (a term meaning”‘home” or “land,” referring to inhabited territory). New foods and medicines afforded a vision of a desirable life, but at the cost of making what was most familiar seem bland and provincial, providing a continual reminder of inequality and marginality.

Many of the personal narratives I collected in Bor expressed the importance attached to spaces of everyday interaction with others. Like many, M.G. admired those who had remained in Bor’s countryside and kept up ordinary routines in the midst of war. Although most of my informants were exposed to violence and deprivations in rural South Sudan, staying in besieged places was not mainly a matter of armed resistance. Instead, it was a kind of “obstinacy,” as

Maja Frykman (1997:79) put it, “aimed at preserving everyday integrity” by maintaining a

“material link to [a] prior life in peace.” The maintenance of ordinary routines, standards of generosity and lifecycle processes (marriage, parenthood) “incorporated the promise of the persistence of normality and the hope for a peaceful future” (Frykman 1997:154-6).

Frykman describes how the smell and warmth of a fresh loaf of bread can evoke an entire world, the totality of the life in peace, underlining the importance of food for anchoring experiences of “everyday integrity” in the midst of imposed fragmentation. The smell of fresh bread can become an example, a symbol, or even an experience of wholeness and integrity.

Sutton has described how for displaced Greeks, “eating food from home becomes a particularly

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marked site for the re-imagining of ‘worlds’ displaced in space and/or time” (2001:102). Food

can restore a sense of wholeness because it “evokes a whole world of family, agricultural

associations, place names and other ‘local knowledge” (Sutton 2001:83). But food can also

evoke absence. Indeed, M.G.’s description of tastelessness as marking a temporal rupture

between sensory landscapes was both intensely personal and widely shared (cf. Seremetakis

1994). What stands out in Hutchinson’s description of the lived experience of civilians during

civil war in Sudan is an image of domestic sentiment and protection suddenly transformed into

an image of death and destruction—encapsulated in the phrase “food itself is fighting with us”

(Hutchinson 2005). Resisting violence was more often spoken of as a matter creating a sense of

the ordinary in everyday life than as a matter of armed resistance, however; and it was phrased in

terms of protective affection: the ordinary courage of, for example, feeding and nurturing

children.

In September 2009 I was talking to a woman named Awoi about thɔ u fruit, which contains a bitter peanut-sized kernel called kuarjuac.202 Awoi had returned to Bor from Kosti five years earlier and settled in town. “Kosti was all mixed up: Hausa, Funj, , Nuer, mixed up, Arabs, Fallata—very mixed up, people from all over,” she said. A Nubian woman had taught her how to distill alcohol and make perfumes. For money she sold clear home-distilled spirits, bottles of amber perfume, and chips of incensed wood to passersby and neighbors. Her mother brought sorghum from her granary in the village which Awoi pounded into flour and fluttered into little balls for aköp—pearled, toasted sorghum couscous garnished with savory sun- cured fish or bitter kuarjuac. She offered me a bowl of aköp and told me about how people had

202 The fruit of Balanites egyptiaca (manthou), known elsewhere as lalloba or by the Arabic name heglig. The term for the oily, bitter seed, kuarjuaac, freely translates as “gather (kuar) + frying oil (juaac).” The image that the name evokes is of gathering up the scattered fruit after children have nibbled off the pulp and discarded the fibrous husks [NB4 13 to 15SEP09; 1SEP09]. The term juaac is onomatopoetic—after the sound made by meat when it is dropped into oil, ‘juaac-juaac-juaac-juaac’ [18 March 2010].

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come to eat the fruit. “A long time ago, the mother and father of a little baby sat together under a

thɔu tree. The baby crawled and took the thɔ u fruit [wënthɔ u] and ate it and the mother was afraid and cried, ‘Oh! My baby will die. I will eat this fruit and die too.’ She ate the fruit and the father did too. And they didn’t die.”

If remaining while many others fled expressed affection and a hope for the restoration of normality, it could nonetheless be boring. (One reason people said they liked having me around was that I helped to ‘finish time’ thiök dhaman (lit. to ‘close time’ like the door of a house)).

Indeed, rather than making life more exciting, many people described the anxieties of insecurity as making it tedious and bland. You cannot just sit back and daydream through monotony when you are always worrying about whether your family is safe, or whether you will have enough to eat. Rather than producing a sense of connection, the process of becoming entangled in world- spanning networks produced a sense of disappointment, of marginality and isolation.203

a politics of movement and immobility

Voter registration for national elections in Sudan began in November of 2009. These elections were held in early April of 2010 when Salva Kiir was elected president of Southern

Sudan. In Jonglei State, gubernatorial candidate General George Athor lost to Commander Kuol

Manyang Juuk. Athor attacked the SPLA garrison at Doleib Hill a few weeks later and over the next months clashed with SPLA forces and issued repeated warnings over the Sudan Radio

203 John Holtzman has described how analytic conceptions of time and space have been shaped by “a long-standing Western folk model dichotomizing here and there—the country and the city, the periphery and the core, the colony and the metropole, the provincial and the cosmopolitan” (2004:61). This progressive, chronotopic narrative is much more available to Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya as a perspective from which to view one’s place at the margins of ‘global society’ than as a means to access English-language education and modern hospitals. As a result, while anthropologists have gotten into the habit of pointing out that even the most ‘out of the way places’ have been transformed by world-wrapping processes (and indeed everyone is ‘global’ inasmuch as no one lives on the moon, as Gil Scott-Heron once said in another context), for many ‘the global’ remains an ideal that ‘the local’ has disappointingly failed to live up to.

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Service to the civilian residents of Bor Town, telling them to evacuate in advance of his impeding attack.

I’ve told you this to put a point on a conversation I had in June of 2010. I was talking with two young men in Bor, one—whom I will call Mathiang—from the nearby countryside and the other, a carpenter from Uganda, about the upcoming referendum. The carpenter was saying that his family had telephoned, begging him to return to Uganda. But he needed the money, so he would remain. Many foreigners had already left, Mathiang said, and they were probably justified in concluding that things were taking a turn for the worse: bandits had killed a foreigner, a Ugandan, on the road from Juba. Southerners were leaving too.

“These big people are already moving their families to Kenya and Uganda,” Mathiang said. “If I were President, I wouldn’t let them return. If you [referring to the Ugandan laborer] are still here we’ll give you a Kalashnikov.”

“But I’m not Sudanese,” the carpenter objected.

“If [someone] is shooting at you, will you tell him that? You will be South Sudanese like me.”

Admittedly this was a dramatic way of putting it. But conversations like this were common during my stay in Bor. (Especially since the question of whether or not Southern Sudan would become an independent country was very much on everyone’s mind during the run-up to the referendum, generating many discussions about citizenship and the definition of a South

Sudanese citizen: Did it depend upon one’s genealogy or one’s place of birth, or one’s commitments to a particular place?) A vision of a community created by common circumstances did not come out of nowhere. It was rooted in daily experience. One of the principle ways that

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South Sudan’s continuous, sporadic conflict made itself felt in the everyday lives of Bor’s

residents was through anxieties about the well-being of loved ones living elsewhere in the

region—and this was what gave such urgency to the circulation of news about rural violence.

For many in Bor, living side by side with struggling foreigners while “big people” relocated their

families safely elsewhere was making an enormous impression as an expression of growing

disparities of wealth and influence within Southern society.

The fact that Ugandan laborers, for instance, came to stay in the difficult surroundings of

Bor was not only seen as an expression of a kind of solidarity, but also a display of hope for the

restoration of normality. This popular perception helps to explain the irritation many people

expressed about certain returnees and missionaries, and many NGO workers and journalists, who

paid only very short visits to the region. It is also why many attached such importance to foreign

merchants and laborers who learned to speak Dinka and remained year after year.204 And, often, in settings marked by common hardships, cross-cultural, religious, and linguistic differences came to seem no more important than the differences that existed among individual human beings.

But if the roads, schools, concrete buildings, hospitals and assistance projects of international NGOs were among the most visible ways that the promises of global interconnection, “human rights,” and membership in the “global community” were expressed, the architecture of fortified aid compounds provided a very tangible sign of the pessimistic attitudes about South Sudan held by well-connected aid workers (Duffield 2010). Mark Duffield has written about how South Sudan is increasingly composed of a point-to-point network of

204 I occasionally met a Kenyan whom people called Tɔŋpiny ‘peanut’. He was a young man who did carpentry jobs around Merol Market and usually wore a bright orange jumpsuit and a black “Dewalt Racing” baseball cap [nb8, 13 July ‘10]. Two or three merchants in town from the north spoke Dinka fluently and had multi-generational links to markets in Bor.

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“fortified enclaves,” scattered in the manner of an archipelago but linked together (and to the

“international community”) by light aircraft (Duffield 2010). Justified by the fear of violence,

these spatial forms are part of broader trends in East Africa (SID 2006), and elsewhere (Ferguson

2006; Caldeira 2000), toward the construction of elite enclaves and the militarization of the

civilian aid industry (Duffield 2001, 2010). The result, in Bor, has been the construction of two

very different towns: one, near the airstrip where aid compounds are concentrated—“a visible

island of modernity where vehicles, diesel, electricity, medical supplies, safe water and

telecommunications are concentrated” (Duffield 2010:456)—, and another one which has been

built, largely without planning or modern amenities, by people seeking the security afforded by

proximity to military garrisons and fortified aid bunkers.

Paradoxically, practices ostensibly meant to provide protection have instead produced a

sense of greater danger, insecurity, and uncertainty. Fenced compounds not only indicated

pessimism and distrust but also seemed to many born in the 1970s and ‘80s to belong to the

dismal geography of their grandparents’ stories about zara’ib of the 1870s and ‘80s, the fortified

corral’ or ‘boma’) where captured slaves were held. This was not‘ زر ,enclosures (sg. zariba only my impression; the town’s ‘peace-time’ geography caused people to remember earlier times. Young people told me about grandparents who had worked in Bor town during its colonial occupation and were forced to sleep far away from the town’s center: because “the

[British] District Commissioner said, ‘those local people attract flies.’” Older people mentioned the site of a zariba established in the 1850s by the Agat Company of Khartoum: a cattle village called listic after the strong material used to bind prisoners’ arms (probably from ‘fasten, glue’). Not surprisingly, speculation about what, exactly, aid workers were up to—what they carried into Bor, and what they took away (“maybe their bags are full of gold or guns”)—was a

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topic of daily conversation in Bor town’s “second-” and “third-class” neighborhoods—as

residents and town planning maps described them.

If, for many people living in Bor, earlier times of intense fear and uncertainty have

reverberated, it is because such experiences did not stop with the signing of the CPA. Siege,

bombing, fear, and displacement during Sudan’s civil wars and subsequent post-CPA

administrative decentralization have made locality a salient element of self-identification.

Indeed, many have noted that proximity “to the struggle” has gained importance in setting the

measure of other forms of inclusion and exclusion (John 2010). What I want to draw attention to

here is the fact that most people did not participate directly or regularly in armed conflict. This

much people in Bor have in common with other people in comparable circumstances elsewhere,

as Tobias Kelly has noted. Much more time was spent struggling to make ends meet or waiting,

both bored and anxious, to hear what had become of family members, than was spent shooting

guns or running away (Kelly 2008).

The lived experience of “steadfast suffering” (guɔ m) in the face of insecurity is significantly rooted in the arbitrariness of place. Mac edoŋ( a cin raan) juur cïk ŋ i[c], some people will say, “the bullet does not know the foreigner;” the Ugandan laborer’s own self- identification is of no significance to the soldier who will shoot him, Mathiang observed. The wartime actions of Government soldiers were meant to control and humiliate; ultimately, to crush rebellion by creating a situation of crisis and instability as a technique of impeding organized resistance. When people talked about the politics of identity in the 1980s and ‘90s, they stressed that their locality and assumed affiliation—what Wendy James (1994) has called

“ethnic visibility”—was the main reason for their predicament (see also Johnson 2013:157). But while these “identities” were imposed upon people forced ‘to go into the bush,’ for many, such

290 experiences have also come to be understood as a kind of “rite of passage,” associated with status, authority, and responsibilities (cf. Peteet 1994). It has often become a prerequisite for political leadership, as the local elections of 2010 illustrated. In November of 2009, for instance,

I travelled with a ministry official during his campaign for a seat in Juba. “The Professor” had received a Ph.D. in physics from a university in England, and later taught at universities in

Kenya and South Africa before returning to Sudan with his family, after the signing of the CPA, and gaining a respected government position in Juba. Though he emphasized the money and support he had given to the SPLA while living abroad in England and Kenya, his accomplished biography ultimately cost him the position. His “home community” refused to support his nomination, I was told, because he had not suffered the hardship of life in South Sudan.

Broadly, this attitude—or Mathiang’s way of phrasing it at least—also has a cosmological dimension rooted in Nilotic ideas about divinity and the transcending reality of death. In speaking about their place in the world, Atuot, Dinka, and Nuer commonly refer to themselves metaphorically as tiny black ants that can at any moment be squished by god. The origin stories of these traditions almost always involve some minor human mistake which results in their being blasted by god and their descendants made to suffer. Indeed, “God kills us” is a common proverb across Nilotic South Sudan; and whenever I mentioned there that I didn’t believe in god, people would reply, “oh yeah, then who kills you?” All this is to say, that

Mathiang’s expression—“If [someone] is shooting at you, will you tell him that?—was a vivid way of phrasing a “realist” attitude: saying that ultimately one’s ethnic and national affiliation was imposed by violence.

For many, experiencing insecurity and war meant struggling to survive. For most it also meant struggling to gain control and to keep or regain the ability to make choices in everyday

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life. And when people spoke to me about choice, they often referred to the possibility of the

rejection of categories of ethnicity as their primary categories of identification. This possibility

was generally spoken of as embodied by places and settings where decisions were made by

consensus and where those decisions were not backed up by force.

Rather than being produced through participation in armed violence, for many

Southerners, abstract claims to land, belonging and authority were rooted in the experience

gained through practical responsibilities of daily life and kinship. This may not seem like a very

remarkable point, but it is one that tends to get lost when scholars focus on participation in armed

resistance, as Kelly (2008:370) has observed. Although the “real” events of historical and

political change seemed to happen in the dramatic acts of violence and the ceremonial signing of

peace agreements by government leaders that captured mass-media attention, it is also important

to explore the meanings and implications of day-to-day practices and ordinary places,

experiences, and affects. Mundane hardship, boredom, and ordinary anxieties, though often far

from centers of dramatic action or apparent political significance, are crucial for the public

staging of claims to more abstract principles such as political authority, land rights, and

citizenship (Winegar 2012).

In a fascinating essay, Cherry Leonardi argues that the use of a market-place

measurement (bucket > backat, or safia ‘tin’) in rhetorical claims to land based on its

purchase by “buckets of blood” reveals anxieties about the “commodification of human life by the war” (2011:217). My own findings support her claim that these moral concerns are long- standing and broadly shared across ethnic divisions. What I want to underline, here, is that this image of a bucket of blood is a “vivid expression of loss and suffering”—in Leonardi’s phrase

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(2011:217, emphasis added). The loss of friends and family defines individual and collective experiences, making “blood” into an idiom for attachments to land and livelihood.

checkpoints and stalled life trajectories

In late-August 2010, I was sitting with a young man whom I will call James in Juba’s suq sitta ‘market six’, and talking about elderly Government of South Sudan (GoSS) officials.

“No, no, you can’t go to Bor with that black hair”—James was saying. “After the SAF

[Sudan Armed Forces] captured Bor, people needed a pass to enter town. You could only enter at a certain time and your name was recorded in a ledger book…. The soldiers questioned everyone thoroughly.”

If you wanted to enter town, to go to the market or visit relatives, you went : you had to take the precaution of wearing a bed sheet and bleaching your hair yellow and shaving it in a small circle, in the fashion of a cattle-keeper. A young man, especially—James said—if he tried to enter town with clothes and black hair “or shoes, even,” would be arrested as a rebel soldier, accused of being SPLA. He would be questioned and maybe killed. “So, you see, it is people that don’t allow you to be a modern person; ruling you as backward, they will never allow you to advance.”

James was telling me about a certain government office where he had waited each day since graduating from Makerere University. He showed me a letter from the Ministry Director assigning him to an internship position there. An elderly and illiterate general occupied a position there, James said. He was a “big man” in the military, but feared for his job when he encountered university-educated returnees. He described how young men were collected together by the SPLA and made to walk to Ethiopia and Kenya (“‘Ethiopia is just beyond that

293 hill,’ those soldiers said. It was always ‘the next hill’”), where they attended schools in refugee camps. “Like I told you,” he said, “when they see that you have gone for education, even the old men regret sending you away [for education].”

James’s comparison between the checkpoints surrounding occupied Bor in the 1990s and the elderly “big men” who guarded their government jobs against educated youth knits together the temporal and spatial dimensions of young people’s experience of insecurity, unemployment, belated adulthood, and boredom. Rather than being enthusiastic participants in rebellion, many young people doubted the prudence of armed struggle and the wisdom and credibility of their militarized leadership. If you presented yourself in an office as a “modern person,” James said, you put yourself in danger and encountered barriers that made your life seem to stand still.

James’ complaint was common and shared by other young men in similar circumstances elsewhere (see Prince’s (2006:121) discussion of “tarmacking,” for instance). When young men described their struggles for an ordinary life, they described the enforced “idleness” of unemployment, the boredom of endlessly coming and going (loi leplep).

• • •

Sudan’s civil wars have had implications for gender, class, and generational structures and relations, which take their shape within the particular intersections of individual and collective histories and wider global connections. The literature on gender produced by scholars of East Africa’s pastoral regions has often focused on the ways in which gender has been militarized and reproduction stratified. Jok (1999), for instance, has suggested the phrase

“‘nationalization’ of the womb” to describe the of women’s sexuality and reproduction by violent young men in the context of civil war (cf. Hutchinson 2005). My point

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is not to challenge the importance or validity of this work; instead, I want to emphasize that,

rather than being produced through participation in violence, for many young South Sudanese

men, masculinity and adulthood are rooted much more in practical responsibilities of care and

kinship (Leonardi 2007). Most of the men and women I knew in Bor aspired to create a sense of

the ordinary. This goal organized everyday decisions and “pragmatic” conceptions of “home”

(Stefansson 2004:174) as a place where one could build for future livelihoods. What is

problematic about the focus on conflict is that it risks pathologizing young people by

understanding them only through the lens of violence while ignoring the informal and ordinary

practices and experiences which anthropologists have typically associated with the sphere of

“everyday life” (Kelly 2008; cf. Johnson 1981). I have argued that rather than a “root cause” of

violence, attachments to “home” can be seen as one of its evolving consequences. Indeed, many

young men complained that the more militarized and commercialized relations came to dominate

southern society, the greater the marginalization of young men and the longer they would have to

wait before being able to achieve full adult status, a wife, employment, children, and a

or röörthii ‘small men’, people used ,ب household. The result was that youth—or, shabab the terms interchangeably—came to be experienced as a suspension of social adolescence, defined by an individual’s inability to take on the responsibilities of adulthood (Willis 2002) and his frustrated aspirations for a normal life.

Attachments to home in South Sudan have been linked to the rise of what has been described as the emergence of “ethnic fiefdoms.” Many argue that what Southern Sudanese hold in common is not an ethnic identity or common language or culture but rather a shared history of marginalization, under-development, and exploitation. Others link localized attachments to the weakness of national unity and the formation of the SPLA and earlier rebel armies (such as

295

Anyanya) by a “Khartoum-educated … elite rather than through the spontaneous expressions of some self-evident sense of regional identity” (Young 2003). My point has not been to debate the merits of these arguments or to focus on the preconditions of conflict. There is no single explanation for people’s diverse experiences and attachments. Instead, I have tried to draw attention to other experiences of place and belonging that are often neglected by a focus on violent conflict.

This may not seem like a very remarkable point, but people’s experiences of a domain of

“home”—called baai or panjieng in Bor—did not come out of nowhere. They were rooted in everyday experiences of moral community: of ordinary cooperation, conversations, joke-telling, and marked events like consensus making in the course of a matrimonial negotiation. It is out of such common place experiences that larger, more abstract oppositions between “hakuma” and

“home” and “foreigner” and “South Sudanese,” are constructed (Leonardi 2007).

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