‘Revenge’ in conceptual debates

Revenge is often portrayed as a phenomenon that explains conflict in itself (Migiro Reference Migiro2015). Revenge becomes about ancient rivalries (Kaldor Reference Kaldor2013: 4), ‘mindless’ mass action (Richards Reference Richards2005: 3), and a Hobbesian propensity to violence in the absence of the state. Outbursts of revenge in the post-Cold War era are explained by the lack of international intervention by superpower states (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1994).

Admittedly, an account of ‘revenge’ must recognize the high passions involved (Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2002), and revenge can serve a psychological function (Keen Reference Keen2007: 87). Western Dinka speak of the pain of the heart until revenge is achieved. As a man in his twenties described: ‘If you see the killer of your brother, you feel as if you want to kill him.’Footnote ⁴

Yet, ‘new barbarism’ is an inadequate explanation of ‘new wars’ (Duffield Reference Duffield, Malone and Berdal2000; Richards Reference Richards2005: 9). ‘Revenge’ cannot simply be reduced to ‘murder running rampant’ (Boehm Reference Boehm1984: xi). Anthropologists, often with reference to studies of the Nuer and Dinka of Sudan, have long claimed that institutionalized revenge has regulatory functions that provide order in the absence of the state (Boehm Reference Boehm1984; Gluckman Reference Gluckman1955). Feuds become evidence of moral order, not chaos (Boehm Reference Boehm1984: xii). In addition, peace apparently exists within the feud (Gluckman Reference Gluckman1955), and the division between law, peace and feud is artificial (Caroll Reference Caroll2006). Recent interviews among the western Dinka echo this idea:

Commentators on South Sudan have argued that revenge provides order and protection because of the current absence of the state (Copnall Reference Copnall2014: 169; Hutton Reference Hutton2014: 18; Willems and Deng Reference Willems and Deng2015: 7). However, Johnson argues that these ideas of structural feuding misrepresent the historical record among the Nuer and Dinka and ignore the history of government power becoming entangled with these normative regimes (Johnson Reference Johnson1981).Footnote ⁶

Alternatively, Stewart and Strathern claim that endless wars of feuding are a result of the presence, not absence, of the state. Feuding and revenge are in transformation through dialectic interaction with political circumstances. ‘We are dealing with old ideas recycled through new political circumstances and themselves changing rapidly as a result, often becoming heightened rather than disappearing’ (Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2002: 12). In contemporary contexts of the modern state, state structures interrupt the realization of earlier historical ritual processes that allowed violence to switch to peace making (Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2011; Reference Stewart and Strathern2002: 13). ‘It is, in effect, the result of the existence of state structures and the mutual impingement of local and national processes that feuding systems cannot realise their own larger cyclicities of violence and peace-making’ (Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2002: 13). Once killings have escalated beyond a certain point, all controls are lost and compensation and reconciliation can no longer operate (ibid.: 13). Then, revenge appears to be endless.

Governments have long interfered with the process of revenge as they struggle to claim a monopoly on legitimate violence. Historians have documented how monarchs in Europe after the Middle Ages constructed the illegitimacy of ‘revenge’ and private violence in order to build their own authority (Caroll Reference Caroll2006). For a century, governments in South Sudan have also tried to construct their authority through their control of normative regimes of revenge and compensation, war and peace. Therefore, the regimes of ‘revenge’ are partly a product of governments. They are also a product of local responses to government.

Are revenge and recent war in South Sudan inherently ‘bad’?

Since December 2013, the people of South Sudan have again been confronted with a national war that has added to the multiple government wars in the Sudans over the last century. Armed with increasingly elaborate weapons, contemporary armies have stripped people of their homes, livelihoods, livestock and lives.Footnote ⁷ The international community, including the US, Europe and China, has been quick to dismiss recent violence as illegitimate. During the 1980s and 1990s, the SPLA waged a war against the government of Sudan. By the mid-1990s, this war neatly fitted into the new European and American meta-narrative against strong Islamic governments, with these Western governments seeing the SPLA's violence as justifiable to counter a strong, centralized, Islamic state (de Waal Reference de Waal2015; Woodward Reference Woodward2013). Yet, since 2011, South Sudan has been an independent country. In this context, European and American politicians have found the contemporary violence inexplicable and inherently ‘senseless’,Footnote ⁸ especially when the violence is explained in terms of revenge. For Western governments, the apparently private violence of revenge undermines their neoliberal ideas of the state's monopoly on violence. Until 2013, European and American governments supported a state-building agenda in South Sudan that hoped, in part, to counter the proliferation of revenge.

Therefore, the situation in South Sudan has become one in which Western governments try to set up in Africa ‘a dichotomy between war as some kind of inherent “bad” (the world ruled by instincts and base desires), and peace as an ideal “good” (the world ruled by principle and law)’ (Richards Reference Richards2005: 3). In this situation, revenge becomes necessarily illegitimate. Wars in Africa have been described as disease-like and as a ‘common threat’ that needs to be countered through the imposition of a liberal peace (ibid.: 3).

South Sudanese who have again been trapped in this context of violence are also desperate for it to end. Yet, many South Sudanese have viewed aspects of the lethal violence as legitimate. International governments’ perception of the inherent ‘badness’ of this non-state violence has not left room either to understand the violence or to differentiate between the just and unjust causes and conduct of the war. Instead, since the December 2013 outbreak of violence, international commentators have been eager to apportion culpability equally to both sides. By assuming that all non-government violence is wrong or ‘criminal’, there is less space for South Sudanese to protest against the violence of their government. There is also less space to comprehend how South Sudanese themselves understand, articulate and reshape the moral and legal boundaries of the violence they experience and execute.

War is best explained not in terms of momentary causes but instead in relation to evolving patterns of violence already embedded in society (Richards Reference Richards2005: 11). The political economy and competition between elites in late 2013 undoubtedly helped cause the conflict that erupted (de Waal Reference de Waal2014; Johnson Reference Johnson2014). Yet, we also need to understand the impact of longer-term changes in regimes of lethal violence that allowed South Sudanese to perceive some of the post-December 2013 violence as legitimate. Institutional regimes of lethal violence, such as the laws governing compensation and revenge, play a part in these understandings. These ideas are contested and refashioned over time, in periods of war and peace, through violent conflict, but also through law and government. Western Dinka government elites are also entangled with regimes of revenge, not just through momentary discourse or fluid networks of patronage but also through the long-term reshaping of institutional regimes. Over time, the growing government sanction behind these regimes secularized compensation and made it vulnerable to the fluidity of government. As a result, western Dinka have found it increasingly problematic to find permanent and peaceful resolutions that satisfy spiritual obligations in cases of lethal violence through the payment of blood-wealth cattle compensation.

As documented by Hutchinson, military leaders in South Sudan in the 1990s tried to draw a distinction between the moral and spiritual consequences of lethal killings during times of ‘government wars’. In the 1980s, Dr Riek Machar (then a commander with the SPLA and now the former Vice President of South Sudan and leader of the armed opposition) argued that violent deaths during ‘government wars’ were devoid of the spiritual risks of pollution associated with acts of homicide and local feuding (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson1996; Reference Hutchinson and Werbner1998). This built on long-term attempts by governments in South Sudan to make government acts of lethal violence morally distinct (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson and Werbner1998). Dinka have also long drawn distinctions between different types of fighting and their scale, depending on whether sticks and clubs or spears were used (Howell Reference Howell1951: 263). However, Dinka still faced the same spiritual consequences of lethal killing irrespective of the type of fighting. The distinction merely changed the likelihood of peaceful arbitration and reconciliation (ibid.: 263).

The western Dinka, like other South Sudanese, have never wholly accepted the government's clear distinction between the lethal violence of ‘government wars’ and the lethal violence of local feuding. Over the last decade, the character and ideologies of government have continued to change, and the government has employed powerful weapons in shocking levels of inter-communal and nationwide violence. This has further dissolved any dichotomy that had been drawn between ‘government war’ and ‘local feud’. This has had tragic consequences for South Sudanese men, women and children.

As elsewhere, wartime elites use the discourse of revenge to mobilize immediate support (Kaldor Reference Kaldor2013: 6). Lethal violence during times of war has also reshaped understandings of the consequences of death. For the western Dinka, there is no clear dichotomy between the moral boundaries of lethal violence in times of war and peace.

This article focuses on the western Dinka in Greater Gogrial. In recent decades, the western Dinka have been caught up in extended episodes of the civil wars fought between the government of Sudan, the SPLA and other armed South Sudanese groups. They have experienced first-hand the brute force of government and have been divided by competing political agendas. For example, Commander Kerubino Kuanyin Bol's defection from John Garang's SPLA in the early 1990s splintered communities and families. In recent politics, the lands of Gogrial have been the homelands of President Salva Kiir and many of his senior allies in the government and army of South Sudan.

The article is based on ethnographic research conducted among the western Dinka in Gogrial East between 2009 and 2013, as well as further research in South Sudan until early 2015. It looks at evolving ideas of revenge and compensation since the peace agreements signed around the turn of the millennium ended the wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The article is also informed by archival research in the South Sudan National Archive (Juba, South Sudan) and the Sudan Archive at Durham (UK).

Firstly, I discuss government capture of regimes of compensation and the subsequent secularization of these regimes. I also highlight how this has left revenge vulnerable to the changing politics and economic conditions of government. Therefore, the occurrence of revenge has often been as much a sign of government presence as of its absence. I then move on to discuss the consequences of this in the era since the end of the SPLA war with the government of Sudan. Secondly, I discuss how politicians have distorted the local cattle economy, resulting in blood-wealth being no longer sufficient to marry a valuable posthumous wife for the deceased. Thirdly, I argue that recurrent wars and government divisions have restricted the negotiating space within which local government Dinka chiefs can resolve local feuds and homicide cases peacefully and permanently.

Government capture of compensation

In 1922, the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Government finally established a permanent administrative post in Gogrial after its defeat of the religious leader Ariathdit (Cormack Reference Cormack2014: 64–70). By this time, throughout the Sudan, the government was using a system of chiefs’ courts (Johnson Reference Johnson1986; Howell Reference Howell1951). The courts promoted the legal fiction that the substantive content of the law was based on previous customs, while the system merged pre-existing social norms with government laws and procedures (Leonardi et al. Reference Leonardi, Moro, Santschi and Isser2010: 19).Footnote ⁹ The South Sudanese quickly started to use these courts regularly (ibid.).

Government officials incorporated compensation into the customary law as an alternative to revenge, and, therefore, entrenched compensation in law. The courts also established the norm that killing had collective consequences, as the government conceded that compensation be extracted collectively (Johnson Reference Johnson1986: 64). Government officials also tried to make intentional killing an act against the government itself.Footnote ¹⁰ The chiefs’ courts started imposing imprisonment and fines, as well as compensation.Footnote ¹¹ These government claims to control regimes of compensation and revenge challenged the powers of other public authorities.

Previously, bäny biths had presided over the exchange of compensation as a pre-condition to the peace-making sacrifice of an ox in order to end feuds and their spiritual consequences. Compensation was necessary as it provided cattle for the marriage of a posthumous wife for the deceased. Through the biological paternity of a close relative, the deceased could acquire legal children, who then carried his name into posterity (Deng Reference Deng2010: 131; Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961: 25–6) and provided the whole lineage with restoration (Deng Reference Deng1971; Reference Deng2010; Madut Reference Madut2013). If the deceased's brothers failed to fulfil their duty to acquire a posthumous wife for him, they risked the curse of the dead man (Deng Reference Deng2010: 131). It is through this posterity that the deceased gained his immortality and challenged the consequences of death (Howell Reference Howell1951). Therefore, cattle acted as a substitute for a man (Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961: 25), and, as among the Nuer, provided him with a second chance at ‘life’ (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson1992). With this second chance, righteous anger was cooled and the bäny bith could oversee the peace ceremony.

The compensation cattle were not necessarily used for marriage immediately; there could be a delay so that the cattle could multiply before the negotiations (Howell Reference Howell1951: 276). However, the relatives who received them were expected to contribute to the posthumous marriage (Deng Reference Deng2010). Blood-wealth was paid even for those who already had children, as death still reduced procreative capacity (ibid.: 131). In the early twentieth century, those who were killed and already had children were often compensated with fewer cattle (Titherington Reference Titherington1927).

As well as the exchange of compensation, the end of the feud needed the bäny bith to oversee the sacrifice of a young ox (muɔr adɔɔr or ‘ox of peace’, or muɔr de yuom or ‘ox of splitting’: literally, ‘ox of the bone’) in the presence of the warring families (Madut Reference Madut2013: 83–4). The bäny bith would make invocations over the muɔr adɔɔr before a member of each family threw the muɔr adɔɔr to the floor and speared it to death. The animal would then be cut into equal halves and shared between the families. The entrails were thrown over the families. The bäny bith placed the spears in the ground among the remains of the entrails, and representatives of each family bit the spears. The bäny bith would end the ceremony by sprinkling ash on their knees. The splitting of the right leg of the muɔr adɔɔr took place during this process (Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961: 287–8). Spiritual sanctions would be threatened against those who reopened the feud.

With the government incorporation of compensation into the customary law of the chiefs’ courts, the government claimed for itself authority over compensation, feuding and peace making. However, compensation was not secularized immediately. In Gogrial, many of the first chiefs appointed by government were either close relatives of the bäny bith or were the bäny bith themselves (Cormack Reference Cormack2014: 70–5). For example, Giir Thiik, the first government-appointed paramount chief of the Apuk Dinka in eastern Gogrial, was the son of a bäny bith. As late as the 1940s, while Lienhardt was researching among the Dinka, despite over a decade of government involvement, a Dinka elder described compensation and the ability to reconcile as being under the authority of the ancestors (Lienhardt Reference Lienhardt1961: 286).

However, the government's creation of an association between the bäny bith and the government chiefs subordinated the spiritual powers of the bäny bith to the powers of government. Proximity to government also withered spiritual powers among the Nuer (Johnson Reference Johnson1997). When describing the situation among the Nuer, Johnson argues that there was ‘a progressive secularisation of Nuer leadership and justice’ that left ‘a legal system very much dependent on government force as its main support’ (Johnson Reference Johnson1986: 68).

Through the courts, governments sought to both restrict the legality of lethal, non-government violence and claim the government's power to kill with impunity (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson and Werbner1998). Refusal to accept compensation, and to instead seek revenge, became as illicit as the initial act of killing.

From the 1940s onwards, during a series of government-initiated chiefs’ meetings, the government encouraged the standardization of western Dinka laws including compensation rates; these common laws and rates would become known as the Wanh-Alel. This initiative followed a conflict between people from Tonj and Rumbek.Footnote ¹² Western Dinka chiefs understand these laws of Wanh-Alel not only as a common code, but also as a governmental insistence on judicial redress as opposed to self-help justice. As one executive chief in Greater Gogrial explained:

Government officials denied that previous authorities (such as the bäny bith) had been capable of enforcing compensation. They claimed that previously people had only agreed to compensation because of expediency (Howell Reference Howell1951: 275). Officials thought that religious leaders did not have executive authority (ibid.: 275) or that slave raids had disrupted their powers (Titherington Reference Titherington1927: 160). Officials claimed that the government allowed the evolution of Dinka law as it had created a new central authority capable of demanding compensation.Footnote ¹⁴ This ignored the previously active role of religious leaders such as the bäny bith in enforcing puk between sections.Footnote ¹⁵

At the same time, the government did not enforce the designation of muɔr adɔɔr nor insist on a cow for the bäny bith’s mediation services. The lack of a muɔr adɔɔr detached compensation from the spiritual power that enforced reconciliation. Instead, the final cow of the thirty-one paid in compensation was now given to the government (Mijak Reference Mijak2002: 29). Additional cattle could also be demanded by the government as fines and fees. The government's taking of this payment reflected its assumed role as peacemaker.

Therefore, despite being legally bound to pay or accept compensation, a family might still not be willing to split the bone and seek reconciliation, which meant that compensation payments were no longer guaranteed to meet the spiritual demands needed for peace. Receipt of compensation often only delayed revenge for a generation; the children of the deceased (including those from a posthumous wife acquired with the compensation) would have the duty of revenge. This made matters even worse because children became reimagined as future avengers of their parents’ deaths and were themselves legitimate targets of lethal violence.

In addition, compensation became reliant on the government's political will and capacity. As Nuer chiefs explained in relation to Nuer–Dinka border courts:

At certain points, governments did promote Dinka–Dinka and Dinka–Nuer compensation and peace. By the 1940s in the western Dinka and Nuer, the Sudan government had formalized various cross-ethnic border courts and annual chiefs’ meetings (Johnson Reference Johnson1986).Footnote ¹⁷ Similar policies in Upper Nile allowed Nuer to start to speak of their relationship with the Dinka as only an intermittent ‘ter’ (feud) as opposed to a ‘kor’ (war) (Johnson Reference Johnson2003: 171). However, others in government had a growing concern that peace through government compensation did not end feuds. By the 1940s, there was Dinka frustration at the speed with which courts reached decisions, often long before people were willing to reconcile (Johnson Reference Johnson1986: 74).

The government asserted its own legitimacy to kill with impunity (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson and Werbner1998). As Hutchinson documents among the Nuer, this meant that Nuer government officials were to be devoid of the moral and spiritual consequences that usually resulted from Nuer–Nuer violence (ibid.). Dinka chiefs and government officials faced the same conundrum. However, the government's power to kill with impunity has never been accepted universally, and the government itself could be the legitimate target of revenge. In recent years, one Dinka elder explained that only if someone is killed by Nhialic (God), through lightning or illness, is there no obligation to demand revenge, because ‘we don't know where Nhialic lives’.

Compensation and revenge since 2005: elite interference with the cattle economy and Dinka–Dinka peace

One significant change made by government officials to compensation since the 1930s, as mentioned above, was the attempted standardization of payments imposed by the chiefs’ courts (Leonardi et al. Reference Leonardi, Moro, Santschi and Isser2010). It was hoped that standardization would ease the exchange of compensation and promote the peaceful redress of grievances. Deng's and Makec's writings about these common Dinka laws in the 1970s and 1980s further entrenched the standardization of compensation.

The western Dinka had never agreed compensation based only on bride price: rates varied depending on the moral outrage caused by the killing. Accidental killings had long resulted in reduced compensation (Deng Reference Deng1971; Reference Deng2010: 132–5), and dheng piny (death after a surprise attack) had been contrasted with weec (which included negligent and accidental killing). However, government-imposed standard rates of compensation detached compensation rates from fluid bride prices completely (Howell Reference Howell1951). Previously, the main purpose of puk had been as a bride price for a posthumous wife (ibid.: 275). Standard compensation rates disconnected compensation from the certainty that death would be challenged through marriage and posthumous procreation (Deng Reference Deng1971; Reference Deng2010). Over time, compensation rates were amended, but without reference to the fluidity of bride price.

Under the government, customary law differentiated compensation rates based on the form of homicide. For example, in the 1940s, government officials prescribed different rates for accidental killing and culpable homicide.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, blood-wealth also evolved over time: for example, among the Ngok Dinka, it increased from twenty cattle in the 1950s to thirty-one cattle by the 2000s (Howell Reference Howell1951; Mijak Reference Mijak2002). However, compensation rates did not vary with bride price: for example, in 1951, Howell noted that Ngok Dinka blood-wealth was fixed at twenty head of cattle while bridewealth had risen to about thirty cattle. At other times, blood-wealth exceeded bride price (Deng Reference Deng2010: 153). Therefore, there was no longer certainty that compensation would satisfy spiritual demands following a killing.

In 1951, Howell posited that the disparity between bridewealth and blood-wealth might be overcome as the family of the deceased often kept the cattle for a few years before marriage so that the herd could multiply (Howell Reference Howell1951: 276). However, since the wars of the 1980s, growing insecurity and conflict in the grazing lands has decreased the safety of herds, and thus any confidence that waiting will result in a larger herd.

In recent years, some Dinka chiefs have been proactive in their creative application of the law to ensure that compensation is capable of ending a feud, irrespective of government reshaping of compensation. For example, in 2012, a state governor created a special customary court headed by a western Dinka paramount chief to oversee cases after a series of lethal clan clashes. The court's mandate was limited to unintentional killings. If there had been intention, the court would have had to adhere to the governor's interpretation of the penal code and refer the cases to the statutory High Court. The High Court at the time favoured the death sentence over the payment of compensation. The paramount chief perceived that such a sentence would only add to the dead and create further demands for revenge, as opposed to offering a spiritual and moral solution. Therefore, the paramount chief employed a very narrow interpretation of ‘intention’. If people gave a warning before they attacked – even if they shot and intended to kill during that attack – the chief interpreted this as a lack of intention to kill; the principal intention had been to raid cattle and not cause death. This allowed the chief to keep these cases in his court and demand compensation. The paramount chief thought this more likely to absolve the demand for revenge and keep the peace.

However, since 2005, elite interference with the cattle economy has made it increasingly difficult for even the most proactive Dinka chiefs to interpret the law in a way that makes compensation adequate. One of the most direct ways in which the Dinka experience the power of global money is through the restructuring of cattle ownership and the elite acquisition of large herds of cattle.

In 2005, the Sudan–SPLA civil war was formally ended through the CPA. This CPA also created the nascent government of South Sudan and funded it with half of Sudan's oil revenues. Politico-military elites circulated the majority of this revenue among themselves, creating a ‘new aristocracy’ that spent money on large houses and cars in Juba and internationally (de Waal Reference de Waal2014; Pinaud Reference Pinaud2014). This opulent wealth was invisible to most South Sudanese who never travelled to Juba.Footnote ²⁰ Instead, the western Dinka most clearly saw the elite's oil wealth through their acquisition of thousands of cattle in their own grazing lands. Elites armed their kinsmen to defend their herds, while cattle herders believed that there was an implicit expectation on them to raid to ensure that each herd remained large. The elite leadership used these herds to build relationships, for patronage and to secure wealthy futures.

These shifts in the cattle economy have had an impact on the relevance of compensation. When compensation is owed from such large herds, for the kinsmen of the deceased the set rate of thirty-one cattle is minimal and meaningless; the loss of these cattle brings no real suffering to the kinsmen of the killer.

The elites’ cattle wealth has also inflated bride price (Sommers and Schwartz Reference Sommers and Schwartz2011). Using their vast herds, the elite seek wives to reinforce their status in the community, extend their personal networks of socio-political power, and construct a legacy through which their name will survive their death. At the time of writing, cattle alone still legally confer paternity and are adequate for bride wealth among western Dinka.Footnote ²¹ However, the inflation in bride price means that the static puk rates are now far below the contemporary bride price for a valuable wife. For example, in 2013, government leaders in Gogrial were paying bride price of as much as 400 cattle, while community members in the diaspora were paying with 200 cattle. It was routine for bride price to be between fifty and 100 cattle. Compensation for homicide at the time was just thirty-one cattle. Therefore, compensation cannot either resource a wife for the deceased or reduce the spiritual and social consequences of his death. As described in the introduction, this has reduced the cattle exchanged in compensation to nothing more than a material benefit for the milk they give. Therefore, the dead are just for their family to drink from, and compensation does not appease the need for revenge.

In 2013, after the death of his daughter, a chief described his ongoing demand for revenge:

Since the CPA, politicians have also used the excuse of ‘tradition’ to demand contributions to compensation from poor kinsmen irrespective of their involvement in the violence, even if the killing occurred during ambitious and aggressive attempts by the more wealthy to expand their herds. This egalitarian obligation ignores disparities in wealth and responsibility for violence. Poorer kinsmen are often reluctant to pay for the spiritual consequences of the militarized actions of their elite relatives, while any hesitancy to pay can further agitate the family to whom the compensation is owed.

Elites have snubbed the spiritual and moral basis of compensation, and have taken advantage of its minimal, static rates under the law. As a result, bitter Dinka–Dinka feuds have arisen.

Compensation and revenge since 2005: the lack of political space for Nuer–Dinka compensation

In relation to Nuer–Dinka revenge, further obstacles have arisen to the restoration of peace through compensation. As discussed above, since the early twentieth century, governments have undercut the spiritual elements of homicide and blood-wealth, making compensation increasingly dependent on government will and sanction. During some periods, governments showed that their political will was in favour of compensation. However, over the last two decades, western Dinka have found it politically difficult to exchange compensation with certain groups, especially with the western Nuer.

In 1991, Riek Machar (from the western Nuer) defected from John Garang's SPLA. These warring commanders militarized ethnic relationships to mobilize support for their government wars (Jok and Hutchinson Reference Jok and Hutchinson1999; Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson2000). Commanders encouraged revenge against the ethnically identified ‘other’. These politicians built on previous splits between areas controlled by the Bul Nuer and SPLA dating back to the early 1980s. The violence between the Nuer and the Dinka made their borderlands into a no-man's land and prevented peaceful meetings and inter-ethnic courts (Pendle Reference Pendle2017).

From 1997, the western Nuer erupted into an intra-Nuer civil war, following the military rivalry of Riek Machar and Paulino Matip (Johnson Reference Johnson2003). Western Nuer sought refuge among the western Dinka, creating a new appetite for Nuer–Dinka peace. The famous 1999 Wunlit peace meeting has become renowned as a local leaders’ initiative (Bradbury et al. Reference Bradbury, Ryle, Medley and Sansculotte-Greenidge2006; Santschi Reference Santschi, Hellmuller and Santschi2014). However, the meeting was not a court,Footnote ²² and nor was it a time to revisit specific grievances nor exchange compensation. When, for example, Chief Rec Ater Biar suggested at the meeting that cattle compensation be exchanged to uphold a 1978 peace agreement, his suggestion was dismissed. The large number of deaths made payment unrealistic.Footnote ²³ A white bull was sacrificed at the opening of Wunlit to symbolically cool hearts.Footnote ²⁴ However, no puk, not even of a symbolic nature, was exchanged.

As Wunlit excluded compensation, chiefs missed the opportunity to refashion compensation to tackle the new patterns of lethal violence. For example, new patterns of violence had included polarized ethnicities and had created new, larger political groupings. This gave rise to the question of whether a whole ethnic group was liable for compensation. And, if not, which part of the group was responsible? As Chief Gardial Abot Majak explained at Wunlit:

Chief Gardial used the story of the birds and the bat to illustrate the ambiguity over who was responsible for the lethal violence of the 1990s, and who should now have the responsibility of paying blood-wealth. For this chief, the question related to the Nuer and whether they were collectively responsible and politically aligned.

There was also the question of the responsibility of military leaders to pay compensation. The chiefs who raised this at Wunlit touched on a much more politically sensitive question, implying that the SPLA was responsible for the killings. At the public Wunlit meeting, the dominant discourse was of Nuer–Dinka violence, with only occasionally people speaking out about the negative role of the SPLA and formal forces.Footnote ²⁶

Crucially, no compensation was exchanged at the Wunlit meeting. This lack of compensation meant that western Dinka found it increasingly impossible to imagine a future time when exchange of compensation with the Nuer would be possible. This growing impossibility of Nuer–Dinka exchange of compensation made it harder to imagine the end of revenge and violence.

Nevertheless, the discussion at Wunlit recognized the need for a future legal space for exchange of compensation.Footnote ²⁷ Chiefs highlighted how, historically, compensation had been exchanged between Dinka and Nuer. As Chief Gaijal Dor explained:

Yet, since Wunlit, the border courts between the western Dinka and Nuer have not been recreated as a regular judicial mechanism. Chiefs blame this on a lack of political will in Juba. Some chiefs have attempted to create ad hoc Nuer–Dinka courts. For example, in 2010, the western Nuer gave thirty-one cattle as compensation to the family of a Dinka fisherman. The fisherman was from Duk (to the east of the Nile) and the cattle travelled by boat. The family of the deceased and the chief of Duk had travelled to Ganyliel to threaten revenge if there was no compensation.Footnote ²⁹ Yet, the national political allegiances between Duk Dinka and Nuer have been closer in recent years than those with Dinka to the west, and, therefore, there was more political space for compensation.

Other peace meetings since Wunlit have also failed to reinstate a relationship of compensation. The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium Government, in the early twentieth century, used local meetings, including inter-ethnic peace meetings, in order to enact local government and government justice, making these meetings the ‘negotiation tables’ of state–society relations (Leonardi Reference Leonardi2015). Recent peace meetings have often happened on an ad hoc basis, at the whim of NGOs and government, and not on a regular, institutionalized basis. The absence of compensation in these meetings has forestalled any hope of justice and has made it harder to imagine peace.

Political leaders from the western Dinka and Nuer have been divided at the highest levels in the post-CPA government. As one Dinka chief described: ‘There is no good government to make peace between us.’Footnote ³⁰ Local leaders, including chiefs and spiritual leaders, feel that they have little space to act without higher-level government consent. ‘People are afraid to call for an important elders’ meeting because of fear of repression from the authorities.’Footnote ³¹

The unwillingness to restore non-violent justice and compensation is indicative of a lack of common government as experienced in the daily lives of South Sudanese since the CPA. While the government in Juba appeared to be unified until December 2013, local South Sudanese experienced its ongoing reluctance to reconstruct enduring inter-ethnic relations. ‘The problem is from Juba.’Footnote ³²

On 15 December 2013, fighting erupted in an SPLA barracks in Juba. The soldiers’ lethal violence was enacted in the spatial and political heart of the South Sudan government. Yet, the South Sudanese knew that there was little hope of compensation or peaceful redress for the grievances that confronted them. Self-help justice through lethal, violent revenge was a remaining option. The demand for revenge shaped the violence of those in and out of uniform and echoed western Nuer and Dinka violence since the 2005 CPA.

Shifting patterns of revenge in the rural homes of the western Nuer and Dinka are directly linked to national conflicts. For example, during western Nuer–Dinka fighting in 1997, an old Dinka man was killed. His son was already in the army and progressing rapidly through the ranks. Nearly two decades later, the man's son played a senior role in coordinating the pro-government SPLA violence in Juba in December 2013 in which Nuer civilians were targeted (International Crisis Group 2014; Human Rights Watch 2014). In private, this senior government commander cited the raids that killed his father in 1997 and the need for revenge as a justification for the violence against the Nuer in Juba in 2013.Footnote ³³ Many of those who were involved in the violence in December 2013 that targeted the Nuer used this national, political conflict to further private demands for revenge. The political leadership also used narratives of revenge (African Union 2015: 239). There has been a ‘politicization of private lives’ but there is also a ‘privatization of political violence’ (Kalyvas Reference Kalyvas2006), as the South Sudanese take advantage of the national conflict for their own private wars. Therefore, the wars since December 2013 are not a disjuncture but a continuation of shifting patterns of violence.

However, some local leaders have taken risks to try to reclaim the power of compensation to forge peace. For example, in 2014, a group of men from the western Dinka were hunting near the western Nuer. A group of Nuer young men happened upon them, attacked them, and killed one of the group. Both groups then fled. At the time, this blurred border between the lands of the Nuer and Dinka was also the boundary between the SPLA-IO (SPLA In Opposition) and the Juba government in the ongoing South Sudanese civil war. There was no de facto common government between the groups of the killed and the killers. The warring parties did not insist on compensation; instead, they prohibited peace making.

In fact, the man who was killed had maternal family among the Nuer. His parents’ marriage had occurred at a time of Nuer–Dinka peace and cooperation. Upon the son's death in 2014, his family did not want to end this relationship despite the macro politics and demands for division along Nuer–Dinka lines. Therefore, they opted to make the potentially hazardous journey to the Nuerlands to seek compensation and avoid revenge. The killer's family initially refused compensation, suggesting that the context of war ended any obligation, but still brought the case to a chiefs’ court.

When the case reached the chiefs’ courts, the SPLA-IO local government was informed. At the time, the SPLA-IO leadership was not willing to hold a court case with people from government-held areas. The local government leader made it clear that he did not want to be part of the case, nor would he let the SPLA-IO authorities rule on it. The chiefs interpreted this as permission to hold the case out of sight of the local government, and moved the hearing to a secret location away from the usual court tree adjacent to the local government office. The chiefs’ court found in favour of the family of the deceased and insisted that puk should be paid to the petitioning Dinka family. A relationship of compensation and reconciliation could be reconstructed irrespective of the wars of the government.

Despite no common government and the ongoing war, the family and chiefs reconstructed a relationship of peace. In doing this they took the risk of crossing front lines. The grieving family and chiefs used compensation to dilute people's everyday experience of government and its blunt, relentless violence. Therefore, compensation has the power to appease the moral and spiritual consequences of death even in opposition to the power of governments.