South Sudan. Douglas H. Johnson
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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.
3
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