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Trees and Wandering Bulls

Describing the environment of southern Sudan in the 1870s, the nineteenth-century naturalist Georg Schweinfurth declared, “It has been a land without chalk or stone, so that no permanent buildings could be constructed; it has consequently reared a people which have been without chiefs, without traditions, without history” (1874a, 145). Neither traditions nor history are confined to permanent buildings, and what the naturalist overlooked was that southern Sudanese had numerous natural landmarks on which to construct both tradition and history.

A large tamarind tree used to stand in the western Nuer village of Kot-Liec in what is now Unity State. Many Nuer myths identify it as the place where the ancestors of the Nuer and other peoples first appeared. Even though the original tree no longer exists, the site is still sacred, a place for offerings and sacrifices (Crazzolara 1953, 8–9, 66–68). For some Nuer, stories of their historically datable migrations begin with the tree at Kot-Liec. A Gaawar man described how the Gaawar ancestors came down from the sky to settle in the west “one by one,” just as their people later crossed the river to settle in the east “bit by bit” (Johnson 1994, 50–51). One twentieth-century Nuer prophet even described it as “the cradle of the human race. Mohammed El Rasul (Prophet Mohammed), Kerek (Kerec tribe [the Baggara], Bel (Jur Bel tribe), Kutet (Shilluk tribe), Kunuar (Nuer) and Jang (Dinka tribe) were born and dispersed at ‘Liic’” (Ruei Kuic quoted in Johnson 1994, 312).

The reconstruction of the internal history of South Sudanese societies must analyze such indigenous accounts. Considered simultaneously as myths and legends, they contain both religious and historical explanations about their societies (Lienhardt 1975, 213–14). Recurring motifs found across many South Sudanese societies include ancestral trees, lost spears, stolen beads, and wandering bulls. Set in an unspecified past, these stories offer distilled versions of historical experience rather than a factual record of events. In addition to explaining the origins of societies, they explain processes of incorporation, differentiation, separation, and migration.

Stories of Separation and Migration

Trees are associated with founding ancestors in origin stories or are commemorated as clan divinities among many communities. Large shade trees such as the tamarind (Tamarindus indicus) and fig (Ficus sycomorus and Ficus platyphylla) often figure in this way. As such these trees are communal symbols, symbols of communities past, present, and future, and are seen as creating communities by gathering people under and around them.

Stories of trees are sometimes combined with the myth of a rope connecting the earth and the sky. The rope and the tree were the means by which humans descended to earth and returned to the sky to be rejuvenated when old. Cutting the rope or destroying the tree, preventing humans from returning to the sky, is a religious explanation for the separation of humankind from divinity and for the permanence of death. But the cutting of the rope or the destruction of the tree also evokes historical experiences of how communities are created as well as divided.

Among the Nuer the tamarind tree is a symbol of social and genealogical incorporation, where ancestors were brought into the community on earth and retained, a mythological representation of the Nuer practice of incorporating foreigners into their lineage system (Johnson 1994, 45). Elsewhere the severing of the rope or the cutting down of the tree explains not incorporation but separation and loss. Among the Eastern Nilotic Mandari, a quarrel between the people on the earth and in the sky, or between Mandari clans, results in the severing of the rope and people separating (Buxton 1963, 20–25). Among the Koman-speaking Uduk and Western Nilotic Mabaan of the Ethiopian foothills, the mythical tree has the Western Nilotic–sounding name “Birapinya,” echoing the Western Nilotic imperative for “come down,” for instance, biä piny in Shilluk and bir piny in Nuer. Its destruction has a more poignant ending. The tree is burned and people are stranded in the sky, all except those who are able to carry others on their backs as they jump down to earth. Caught between powerful kingdoms along the Sudan-Ethiopian borderland as they were, the Uduk have had the historical experience of being scattered by raiders: survival depended on mutual protection in common flight, but survivors lost all contact with those left behind (James 1979, 68–73). The Mandari and Uduk might have borrowed details of the myth from Western Nilotes, but they refashioned the themes to express different historical experiences. Yet the association of the tree with separation is found even among the Western Nilotic Jo-Luo of Bahr el-Ghazal. They locate the historical division between the ancestors of two major Luo groups at Wuncwei, “the place of the tamarind tree,” northeast of Tonj (Santandrea 1968, 114–15, 160–61).

There are other explanations for segmentation and separation more rooted in everyday experience than in a mythical connection with the sky. A recurring motif repeated among the Jo-Luo, Shilluk, Anuak, Dinka, and Nuer; the Lotuho, Pari, and Bari of Equatoria; and even the Alur and Acholi of Uganda is the story of the lost spear and the stolen bead. The common theme is the breach of relations between neighbors or relatives. A borrowed spear is lost and the owner insists on the return of the exact same spear rather than its replacement, forcing the borrower to go to extreme lengths to retrieve it. The child of the spear’s owner is accused of swallowing a bead belonging to the borrower, who retaliates by insisting on the return of the exact same bead and the evisceration of the child. Because of these acts the groups of the two protagonists are unable to live together and part company (Lienhardt 1975, 221–33).

The story is repeated in so many versions among so many societies over such a large area that it cannot, of course, be attributed to a historical event. It accounts, for instance, for the separation of Nyikang and Dimo, the founders of the respective Shilluk and Anuak royal dynasties, that some say took place at Wuncwei. As with the myths of the tree, the interpretation of the symbolism varies. For the Nilotic kingdoms—the Shilluk, Pari, Anuak, Acholi, Alur, and Lotuho—the myth represents dynastic politics, the spear and the bead becoming royal emblems with one branch of the royal house attempting to absorb or destroy the other. For the Dinka and Nuer, the sequence of events threatens to upset the balanced system of exchanges on which their segmentary political systems depend, alternating between the extremes of total assimilation of one group by another and total separation (Lienhardt 1975). For others, such as the Lokoya and Lopit in Equatoria, it accounts for the separation of related groups (Simonse 1992, 53, 303–6). Among the Bari the story explains the origin of a taboo between two clans (Beaton 1936, 114–15).

The myths of the spear and the bead may be schematic versions of the historical experiences of dynastic rivalries or segmentary opposition, but there is a moral point that is of broader relevance to all communities within South Sudan today. In his analysis of these myths the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt pointed out that “the common moral theme is obviously that getting your very own back, a kind of reciprocation without exchange, leads to the permanent alienation of neighbours so that they can never again live together as members of the same community” (1975, 216).

There are other remembered causes of separation and migration that might in fact be rooted in historical events, though told in stereotypic forms. Given the importance of primary pastoral communities in the ancient history of the Nile Valley mentioned in chapter 2, it is not surprising that the peopling of the Nile Basin is often attributed to people following their cattle. Wandering bulls, thematically the opposite of trees as fixed points of communal origin, have had an actual as well as a mythical role in history.

Fights between bulls of the same or neighboring herds are commonly recalled as the reason for lineages splitting up and moving apart, or for establishing the seniority of one chiefship over another (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 33–34; F. Deng 1980, 269–70). They even figure in the foundation myths of kingdoms, and the founding of two royal capitals are attributed to wandering cattle. The first Funj king of what became the Muslim sultanate of Sinnar is said to have followed a bull from his home on Jebel Moya to the site of his new capital on the Blue Nile (Holt 1973, 76). Similarly Reth Tugo of the Shilluk followed his favorite hornless ox (cod in Shilluk) to the site near the White Nile that became known as Pachodo (Fashoda), “the village of the hornless ox” (Westermann 1970, 138). The Ngok Dinka adapted the Sinnar founding myth to explain their own migration from the region between the Niles to the Ngol river in what is now the disputed Abyei region between Sudan and South Sudan (F. Deng 1980, 256). Of these stories, probably only the founding of Pachodo can be considered historically true and datable to the end of the seventeenth century, but they are consistent not only with what we know of the transhumant patterns of movement of all cattle keepers in the Nile Basin but of the gradual penetration of southern Sudan by pastoral communities during the transition from wetter to drier periods.

There are links to be made between different stories of migration, but weaving them all into one grand narrative has produced varying results. The closeness of the different Luo languages in eastern Africa suggests a very recent spreading of peoples and languages, but attempts to locate a Luo cradle land from different versions of the spear and the bead stories have produced no consensus. Father J. P. Crazzolara, who worked among Luo speakers in the southern Sudan and northern Uganda, located his cradle land along the border of the two countries. The Kenyan Luo historian B. A. Ogot placed his cradle land firmly in Kenya, while Evans-Pritchard and Simon Simonse, working in eastern Equatoria, postulated a Luo homeland there (Crazzolara 1951; Ogot 1967; Simonse 1992, 56–57). Tracing the itineraries of the Luo migrations through southern Sudan, the Great Lakes, and East Africa does at least highlight southern Sudan’s engagement with, rather than isolation from, neighboring regions and is why, for instance, a Kenyan Luo guest at the independence celebrations could say, “This is our home.” The itineraries are not necessarily only mythical. The Pari, an offshoot of the Anuak, established a route from lowland Ethiopia to Jebel Lafon in eastern Equatoria several centuries ago. It was through this route that they acted as middlemen in precolonial trade between western Ethiopia and the equatorial Nile, expanding their links in the nineteenth century to include the Great Lakes (Kurimoto 1995). The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) later followed this same route when infiltrating eastern Equatoria from its Ethiopian bases in the 1980s.

The main historical point to emphasize here is that stories of migration do not tell the whole story, and possibly not even the most important story. People move, but not necessarily all at once. A people can expand its population and territory through the incorporation of smaller groups, through intermarriage, and through the adoption of individuals. Ethnic identity is not fixed; a person from one group can become a member of another. The clan histories of the Anuak, Pari, Bari, and Mandari, among others, record many with foreign origins (Evans-Pritchard 1940b, 31–33; Simonse 1992, 54–56; Buxton 1963, 18–19, 32–33; Leonardi 2013a, 22), and a number of Shilluk clan names are shared with more distant peoples (Westermann 1970, 128–33; Crazzolara 1951, 156–59; 1954, 391–92). Languages also spread, sometimes farther and faster than people. As Noel Stringham acutely observes, “‘Nilotic migrations’ had more to do with people changing who they were than where they were” (2016, chap. 1). The Western Nilotic words for village or territory, pa and pan, are found in a variety of forms (fa/fam/fan, and possibly ba/bam/ban) well beyond the current area inhabited by Western Nilotes: Fanyar in Kordofan, Basham in White Nile, Fazoqli and Bani Mayu in Blue Nile, and Bambashi, Fadasi, and Famaka in western Ethiopia. Mabaan is currently classed as a Western Nilotic language related to Shilluk, Dinka, and Nuer, yet the Mabaan are socially and culturally closer to their Koman-speaking Uduk neighbors (they are both matrilineal) than to the nearest Western Nilotic speakers (who are all patrilineal). The as yet unanswered question is: Are the Mabaan an offshoot of the ancestral Western Nilotes who were influenced by the surrounding Koman people, or are they Koman-speakers who adopted a Western Nilotic language? And could the answer be: a bit of both?

There have been many other types of reciprocal influences and borrowing between language communities. The Luo-speaking Pari and Acholi of eastern Equatoria, along with the Anuak of the Sobat-Pibor system, might at one time have formed a near-continuous band of Luo peoples before becoming separated from each other by, and intermingled with, Eastern Nilotic (Bari and Lotuho)-, Central Sudanic (Madi)-, and Surma (Murle and Didinga)-speaking groups. “Far from being a collection of neatly arranged, different ethnic communities each with its own language, culture and migration history,” Simonse proposes, “the east bank of the Nile proves an area where processes of cultural assimilation between various groups of peoples have gone on for a considerable period of time” (1992, 50–59). Chief among these exchanges have been age-class systems and forms of kingship.

The peoples of eastern Equatoria have complex and sophisticated systems of age-classes and age-grades, unlike age-sets among the Dinka and Nuer that established a loose hierarchy of generations creating social solidarity between men of a specific age-range, provided a limited structure for the exercise of political power by older age-sets over younger ones, and created a basic military organization whereby age-mates joined together when called on to fight. But both the political and the military roles were minor, there was no formal progression of age-sets from junior to elder status, and there were no rites for the transfer of authority. The monyomiji age-class system that originated among the Lotuho involved more structured age-grading in the allocation of military and political tasks within a society and a more formal advance from one stage in a generation’s life to the next. It has been adopted and adapted by many other Eastern Nilotic communities, including Lokoya and the eastern Bari, but also by the Central Sudanic Madi-speaking Lolubo, the Surma-speaking Tenet, and the Luo-speaking Pari and Acholi (Simonse 1992, 46–47; 1998, 52; Kurimoto 1998).

States and Antistates

Southern Sudanese peoples have been described as living in “pristine anarchy” (Collins 1962)—archetypical models of stateless societies, totally unprepared for their encounter with powerful states to the north (Gray 1961, 8–9). There was in fact a more dynamic set of power relations along what is now the borderland between South Sudan and Sudan. From the sixteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century this region was dominated by a series of kingdoms: the Funj Sultanate of Sinnar on the Blue Nile, the Shilluk Kingdom on the White Nile, the Kingdom of Taqali in the Nuba Mountains, and the Darfur Sultanate in the west. A network of nonstate southern Sudanese societies along the waterways flowing into the White Nile both challenged and contained contemporary states, even offering sanctuary to refugees from state demands. The cultural, social, and political distance between the peoples of what are now known as two different countries was then very narrow. Further south other nonstate peoples lived sometimes in opposition to and sometimes in symbiosis with a variety of kingdoms.

The kingdoms of Sinnar, Shilluk, and Taqali shared many characteristics of their population and their royal customs. The founding of the Sinnar sultanate might have been part of a Nubian revival, but some historical traditions credit the Shilluk with either founding the sultanate or contributing greatly to its expansion (O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 24–26). The populations of both the Funj and Shilluk kingdoms included many peoples indigenous to the region along and between the two Niles: Koman, Nuba, Luo, and other Western Nilotes, among others. In all three kingdoms royal succession depended on the support of the maternal kin of the new king (Lienhardt 1955, 29–30; Ewald 1990, 68–69; O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 46). The Nuba of Jebel Fungor are classificatory “sister’s sons” to the Shilluk reths through an ancient marriage into the royal clan and continue to play a role in the investiture of each new reth (Lienhardt 1955, 35; Howell and Thompson 1946, 38; Ewald 1990, 36).

A number of royal systems devolved from the separation of the Shilluk and Anuak, represented above as resulting from a quarrel between two founding kings, Nyikang and Dimo. Each of these systems displayed some aspect of sacral kingship mentioned in chapter 2. In both the Shilluk on the White Nile and the Anuak along the Sobat-Pibor system, kingship descends through a single clan (Lienhardt 1955, 30–31). No Shilluk reth can reign until formally installed at Pachodo, where the spirit of Nyikang enters his body. The reth is not allowed to die a normal death, being either assassinated by a rival or “helped” to die when ill. The Anuak kingship is more symbolic than political and is determined by the possession of certain royal regalia, whose transmission was often decided by regicide (Evans-Pritchard 1940b, 87). In eastern Equatoria kings (Acholi rwot and Pari rwath) were often associated with rainmaking, and there are also Luo rainmaking clans among the Bari, Lulubo, and Madi (Simonse 1992, 54–56).

A far different form of kingship was introduced by the Azande from the Mbomu river system in what is now the Central African Republic. Their kingdoms were organized around families of Avongara aristocrats who created assimilationist states, built on the strength of converting subject peoples into servants of the king and the court as conscripts into the king’s regiments and as cultivators enabling the king to amass surpluses of food for redistribution. Internal justice was maintained through the kings’ monopoly of a type of poison obtained in long-distance trade and used as an oracle to determine guilt or innocence in life-or-death issues. The Azande began moving out from between the Mbomu and Shinko rivers in the first half of the eighteenth century, entering the Nile-Congo watershed region around the beginning of the nineteenth. A king’s son would be given his own frontier province, and the princes expanded their holdings or created new kingdoms by destabilizing and conquering their neighbors. The terror the disciplined Zande regiments inspired was enhanced by their reputation—whether deserved or not—of being cannibals, a reputation physically reinforced by the practice of filing their teeth to sharp points. Conquest brought assimilation, and the Zande language spread as the kingdoms incorporated communities originally speaking Sudanic, Bantu, and Nilotic languages throughout territories now contained within the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan (Evans-Pritchard 1971a, 23–25, 269–78).

The most powerful kingdoms and states had a severe impact on their neighbors. Both the sultanates of Sinnar and Darfur were slave-raiding states, making regular forays into the hills of the Blue Nile hinterland, the White Nile plain, and the forests of western Bahr el-Ghazal. Along the White Nile the Shilluk countered and even at times checked the advances of Sinnar through fleets of canoe-borne raiders (Mercer 1971). An alternative to all these states was provided by the Padang Dinka.

The Padang Dinka tribes (including the Abialang, Paloich, and Dungjol on the White Nile and the Rueng and Ngok along the Bahr el-Ghazal and Kiir/Bahr el-Arab systems), being segmentary societies, had an ability to form social alliances across communities and developed as antistates, providing alternatives for peoples fleeing state authority. The Abialang, Paloich, and Dungjol established themselves on the east bank of the White Nile throughout the seventeenth century and by around 1775 had decisively defeated the forces of Sinnar as far north as present-day Renk and Jebelein (Westermann 1970, lv; Hofmayr 1925, 66–68; Bedri 1948, 40–42; O’Fahey and Spaulding 1974, 61–63, 98). Farther west, Rueng sections dominated the grazing areas between the Bahr el-Ghazal and lakes Keilak and Jau/Abiad, while the Ngok Dinka settled along the Ngol and Kiir/Bahr el-Arab rivers toward the end of the first half of the eighteenth century, assisting the Humr Baggara Arabs in clearing the area of its original inhabitants and offering refuge to both the Rizeigat and Humr Baggara when they fled the demands of the sultan of Darfur (El-Tounsy 1845, 129–30; Henderson 1939, 58–59, 61–64, 76; O’Fahey 1980, 99). By the beginning of the nineteenth century the main powers along the northern waterways were not the Muslim sultanates of Sinnar and Darfur but the states and antistates of the Shilluk, Anuak, and Dinka.