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South Sudan in the Nile Basin

In 1929 a German tourist reading a local paper on the verandah of Khartoum’s Grand Hotel was surprised by a story about the recently destroyed “Pyramid of Dengkurs” in the village of the “wizard” Guek Ngundeng. Having viewed the remains of the step pyramids at Meroe and declared them debased African versions of Egyptian prototypes, his imagination raced backward and forward in time. “A pyramid!” he exclaimed. “What pyramid? Who has been buried there, thousands of years ago: demigod, priest, or Ethiopian king? And wizards? What sorcery are they practicing, what is this, what is still living there in those impenetrable swamps?” (Bermann 1931, 19).

This encounter illustrates how the history of Sudan has often been obscured by the assumptions of Egyptology. Influences flowed in one direction from the Egyptian heartland, and a conical mud shrine in the “impenetrable swamps” of the Upper Nile could only be understood as a degenerate pyramid. Yet, as the archaeologist David Wengrow reminds us, the ancient civilizations of the Nile Valley and Near East “were the products of interaction and exchange, rather than isolation.” They were “the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale” (2010, 13, 175). Recent advances in archaeology and historical linguistics now recognize that ancient Egypt, rather than being the source of all invention, often built on innovations originating further up the Nile. Exchanges and borrowings flowed both down- and upriver between the Nile’s African heartland and the civilizations along its middle and lower reaches, contributing to the spread of a shared pool of cultural ideas and practices from which Nile Basin societies drew, however distant from each other in time or space. The peoples of southern Sudan, whose geographical, political, and cultural isolation from the rest of Africa is commonly assumed, were active participants in these exchanges and interactions.

Nilo-Saharan Populations

Most South Sudanese belong to the Nilo-Saharan language family, the bearers of the ancient Sudanic civilization that originated in the Middle Nile, stretching from the Niger bend to the Red Sea coast. In the differentiation of languages and the movement of populations through and beyond the Sudanic belt over several millennia, Nilo-Saharan peoples “drew on a common fund of basic ideas about politics, social relations, and religion” (Ehret 2001a, 224).

The homeland of the ancestral Nilo-Saharan speakers straddled the two Niles from their confluence southward to Lake No. The two primary branches of Koman and Sudanic began to emerge some thirteen thousand years ago. The modern representatives of Koman include today’s Gumuz, Uduk, and Koma located along the Sudan-Ethiopian borderlands, close to their ancestral homeland. The more numerous Sudanic branch is further subdivided into Central and Northern subbranches. The modern representatives of Central Sudanic include the Bongo and the so-called Fartit (Yulu, Kresh, Aja, Golo, and so on) of the Bahr el-Ghazal basin, and the Moru, Madi, and Lugbara in the present-day South Sudan–Uganda borderlands. The modern representatives of Northern Sudanic are more widely spread geographically and more divergent linguistically. They include the Nubian languages of the Sudan-Egyptian border, Fur and Daju in Darfur, many of the languages of the Nuba Mountains, Gâmk in the Ingessana hills of Blue Nile, Surmic speakers of southwest Ethiopia and southeast South Sudan (Murle, Didinga, Larim, and Mursi), the Western Nilotes (Dinka, Nuer, Atuot, Shilluk, Anuak, Mabaan, Acholi, and Pari), Eastern Nilotes (Bari, Mandari, Lotuho, Lokoya, Toposa, Jiye, Nyangatom in South Sudan, and Turkana and Maasai in Kenya), and the Southern Nilotes of Eastern Africa (Ehret 2001b).

Geographically South Sudan connects East Africa’s Great Lakes to the sahelian steppe of Sudan. Topographically it is an “irregularly shaped basin,” elevated around its perimeters, drained in the west by the rivers of the Nile-Congo watershed and in the east by the Sobat-Pibor system, both converging on the main channel of the Nile and the central sudd swamp. South Sudan’s soils are broadly divided into alluvial clays and heavy loams in the east, and lighter laterite soils of the ironstone plateau in the west. The alluvial clays, found in the former provinces of Upper Nile and Jonglei, parts of Eastern and Central Equatoria, and much of Bahr el-Ghazal, are high in nutrients and covered by tall grass and woodlands, beneath which lie South Sudan’s known oil reserves. The eastern clay plains are flat, with almost no slope, and are prone to waterlogging in the rains and cracking in the dry season. Permanent settlements are possible only on a few slightly elevated sandy ridges. The ironstone plateau covers most of the former provinces of Bahr el-Ghazal, and Western and Central Equatoria. Its soils are better drained than the clays, with lower nutrients, covered by broad-leafed woodlands and forests, and able to support larger populations in permanent settlements (SDIT 1955, 3–4).

Table 2.1 Some languages of South Sudanese and related peoples

Average yearly rainfall increases along a north-south axis, with much drier conditions experienced along the northern border with Sudan. With its higher rainfall, its network of waterways, its waterlogging clay soils and central swamp, the southern Sudan has always been a wetter region than the northern territories of the Middle Nile, a factor influencing long-term population movements. In the wetter conditions throughout northeast Africa approximately twelve to five thousand years ago, the central swamp and the pattern of seasonal flooding covered a greater area and extended farther north than today, and this is one reason why the area was settled later than the central Nile Valley. Drier conditions began to set in some five thousand years ago, and it is likely during this period that previously inaccessible areas of the region were populated, contributing to the differentiation between languages and social groups (Harvey 1982, 14–17).

The first peoples to spread south of the Bahr el-Ghazal flood basin were the Central Sudanic–speaking societies, with the Bongo and so-called Fartit speakers settling south of the Bahr el-Ghazal and the ancestral Moru, Madi, and Lugbara speakers reaching the northwestern part of the East African Rift. About four thousand years ago the ancestral Nilotic speakers began moving south from the eastern Middle Nile Basin as the central sudd swamp began to shrink. During the last millennium BCE the Western Nilotes separated into ancestral Dinka, Nuer, and Luo as they spread throughout the region between the two Niles; the Eastern Nilotes settling in the central Equatoria region began to diverge into ancestral Bari, Toposa, and Lotuho-speaking communities; and the ancestral Didinga-Murle entered the area of southwestern Ethiopia and southeastern southern Sudan (Ehret 1982, 22–27; 2001a, 247; 2002, 126, 388). From the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries CE there were further movements of Western Nilotic-speaking societies around, through, and out of the central swamp region as new and hardier breeds of cattle were introduced, allowing for longer-range movement (David 1982a, 54–55; 1982b, 86–88).

This compressed chronological summary might give the impression of large-scale population movements of whole peoples over a relatively short time, but the linguistic evidence reveals “a complex array of human interactions, involving often the extensive amalgamation of people from formerly separate societies” (Ehret 1982, 34), as the next chapter describes.

Sudanic Civilization, Sacred Bulls, and Symbols of Power

The Sudanic Civilization emerging out of the Nilo-Saharan tradition along the middle Nile between eleven and eight thousand years ago had a number of distinctive features. These included the domestication of cattle and indigenous wild grains such as sorghum, and the creation of a pottery tradition some two thousand years before similar developments in the Middle East. A parallel aquatic tradition, recalled in the fishing spear (bith) so symbolically important in modern Nilotic religions, involved the intensification of hunting and gathering riverine resources along the expansive networks of rivers and major lakes. A cluster of monotheistic ideas developed around a single divinity associated with the sky, rain, and lightning (the antithesis of “animism”) and the emergence of sacral chiefship or kingship where both the office and the person of the king were associated with divinity but where the king was not divine (Ehret 2001a; 2002, 61–94).

The dominant cultural features that gave the early Neolithic Nile Valley its distinctive character came from its “primary pastoral communities.” During the fifth millennium BCE human populations from Sudan’s Gezira to the Nile Delta developed a mobile pastoralism of mixed herds and shared materials and ritual practices, some originating in Sudan before appearing in Egypt. Herding mobility created a pattern of social and cultural integration, which allowed for internal variations that were later accelerated by the intensification of stockbreeding as a mode of livelihood (Wengrow 2003, 133–34; Wengrow et al. 2014).

During this early period we see the beginnings of the “bovine idiom” common to various Nile Basin societies in different epochs. Training the horns of display cattle into different formations has been practiced along the Nile from Neolithic times through the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the kingdoms of Kerma and Meroe (Wengrow 2006, 56; Welsby 1996, 154) to present-day South Sudanese pastoralists (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 45; Lienhardt 1961, 16–17; Buxton 1973, 7). Cattle burials are also a practice of some antiquity. Cattle have been found buried in early Neolithic cemeteries in middle Egypt and central Sudan, sometimes within human burials, sometimes separately (Wengrow 2003, 128; 2006, 56–59). Ox skulls and whole ox skeletons have been found in royal tombs and other important gravesites in Nubia, Kerma, and Meroe (Adams 1977, 157, 197, 407; Welsby 1996, 91). The sacred Apis Bulls in dynastic Egypt had their own burial rites. In more recent times cattle in southern Sudan have also been slaughtered and buried in the foundations of shrines, as with Ngundeng Bong’s Mound (the “Pyramid of Dengkurs”) among the Nuer, constructed in the 1890s (Johnson 1990, 53–54; 1994, 93).

Cattle burials point to the continued ritual importance of cattle among herding societies from Neolithic times in Egypt to present-day South Sudanese pastoral communities, and this, rather than some fanciful “pyramid” within the swamps, is the real point of comparison between ancient and modern societies. Insofar as modern pastoral communities have shared interests in cattle, the sacrifice of cattle becomes an “affirmation of community interests” (Lienhardt 1975, 229), an interpretation that might apply to the ritual importance of cattle burials involving sacrifice in the past. Religious shrines among Western Nilotic–speaking pastoralists are often constructed as cattle barns (luak), and even large conical mound shrines built of mud imitate this shape and are referred to as luaks (Howell 1948, 1961; Mawson 1989; Johnson 1990). Some Dinka extend the sacred image to a primordial past by claiming that their ancestors originated in the “luak of creation” (F. Deng 1980, 251). But even when detached from an association with fixed shrines, cattle become “wandering shrines” when dedicated to specific divinities (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 209).

The points of comparison go beyond the physical treatment of cattle in life or death and are found in the symbolism associated with the divine. The Nuer often refer to divinity by the “poetic epithet” of Tutgar, an ox-name derived from a majestic bull with wide, spreading horns, sometimes represented as holding the universe or the earth between them (Evans-Pritchard 1956, 4). Like Tutgar, the sacred Apis Bull of New Kingdom Egypt was also often depicted with spreading horns embracing not the earth, but the sun. The comparison between Tutgar and the Apis Bull goes beyond horn formations and takes us directly to the Sudanic religious color symbolism associated with divinity, the sky, rain, and lightning.

The Apis Bulls were black with a white mark on their heads, said to be conceived by a lightning bolt and to have the image of an eagle on their backs. These symbolic associations with the divine are part of the cluster of ideas expressed in ancestral Sudanic religions and are found in many modern South Sudanese societies. Lightning is associated with divinity. The combination of black and white colors in cattle as well as in birds and other animals evokes the image of rain and rain clouds, also associated with divinity. Dinka and Nuer name an animal with a white head and black (or dark) body after the fish-eagle (kuei) because of its similar black and white markings (Lienhardt 1961, 11–14, 162; Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 41; 1956, 31–32, 53–54, 81; Buxton 1973, 6–7, 385).

In the color symbolism of South Sudanese cattle keepers the alternating pattern of light and dark is evocative of rain clouds, lightning in a dark sky, or stars in the night, all manifestations of divinity in one form or another (Lienhardt 1961, 12; B. Lewis 1972, 49; Buxton 1973, 385). Just as a black bull with a white head is named after the fish-eagle, so a spotted beast will be named after the leopard (kuac), and leopard skins have had royal or priestly associations as emblems of authority not only in ancient Egypt, which imported leopard skins from lands further south (Trigger 1976, 39, 56, 111; Baines 1995, 120; Williams 1997) but among such modern South Sudanese communities as the Dinka, Nuer, Anuak, and Acholi (Bedri 1948, 50, 57; Evans-Pritchard 1940a and 1956; Crazzolara 1953, 11; Lienhardt 1975, 224–26).

Recent interpretations of archaeological and historical evidence now suggest that the kingdoms of the Middle Nile were built on the foundations of the Sudanic Civilization and that, far from being replications of the Egyptian Pharonic model, the Nubian kingdoms of Kerma, Napata, and Meroe were early examples of Sudanic states (Edwards 1998, 2003; Fuller 2003; Ehret 2001a, 240–42, 245; 2002, 92–94, 149). These multiethnic, polyglot kingdoms with multiple centers of power derived their position more by gaining social influence over people than by absolute control over territory, a building of “wealth in people” that was later replicated in southern Sudan. The territories of Napata and Meroe extended just south of the confluence of the Niles, into the northern fringes of the proto-Nilotic homeland, with pastoralist groups located both within the state’s heartland and along and just beyond its periphery. Both states and nonstate peoples shared essentially the same systems of production, and the two lived in symbiotic tension as states attempted to expand relationships of power built on exchange, trade, and local alliances. It was through the ancient trading networks of the Nile Valley that valuable commodities from the peripheries, including animal skins with their symbolic value, found their way north, and it was through the economic means of trade that the relatively powerful Middle Nile states attempted to exert their influence over peripheral societies—patterns later repeated in recent times (James 1977, 107–8). To what extent the activities of the early Sudanic states contributed to the southward movements and internal differentiation of the proto-Nilotic-speaking societies has yet to be determined.

Forms of Sudanic sacral chiefship or kingship were practiced by states and by nonstate peoples. Among Western Nilotes both kings and sacral chiefs are associated with divine power. The Shilluk reth is seized by the spirit of the first reth, Nyikang, upon his installation (Howell 1953). The sacral chiefs of the Dinka, Atuot, and Nuer are imbued with ring—the priestly divinity Flesh (Lienhardt 1961, 135–46, 172, 227–30; Burton 1987, 84–85; Johnson 1994, 57–59). The human sacrifice associated with the burial of early Sudanic kings developed into socially sanctioned regicide in the country of the two Niles, where the king was not allowed to die a natural death lest the spiritual power inherent in the institution be diminished. Regicide was practiced not only among the Shilluk but also in the territory of the kingdom of Sinnar, once widely populated by Western Nilotic Luo speakers related to the Shilluk (Evans-Pritchard 1932, 60–61), and among many Dinka groups who bury alive their sacral chiefs, the bany bith spear masters (Lienhardt 1961, chap. 8). The Eastern Nilotes of Equatoria also practice regicide, dispatching their rainmaker kings in times of drought (Simonse 1992, chap. 17 and conclusion; Angok 2015).

It is important to reemphasize the point that the foregoing comparisons do not establish a direct unbroken relationship between modern and ancient Nile Basin societies (Wengrow 2003, 132). What they do establish is that Nile Basin peoples have been drawing on a common pool of ideas and symbols in a variety of ways over several millennia, often reinforced by two-way exchanges between societies of unequal power. They also further undermine the assertion of South Sudanese cultural isolation and reestablish South Sudan’s place within the broader range of African history.