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
