In the later nineteenth century a Nuer man named Ngundeng Bong was seized by the divinity Deng and became the greatest of the Nuer prophets. He fasted in the wilderness, healed, cursed sparingly, and preached against feud and cattle raiding, and at Wec Deang he directed the building of the Bieh, a great earthen mound raised by volunteer labour and crowned with ivory, a man made mountain joining earth to the divinity above. His songs, remembered and sung long after his death in 1906, were treated as prophecy, and colonial officers grew nervous of the authority his family inherited.
In 1928, after his son Guek took up the prophetic mantle, the British attacked, killed Guek, and dynamited the mound, carrying off Ngundeng's brass pipe and his dang, the ceremonial rod of his office, as trophies to England. The rod spent eight decades abroad before the historian Douglas Johnson, whose study Nuer Prophets is the standard account of the tradition, helped secure its return, and in 2009 it was received in Juba with national honours on the eve of independence. Ngundeng's prophecies remain live currency in South Sudanese politics, quoted, contested and claimed by leaders, and the ruined mound is still a place of pilgrimage where the songs of a prophet of peace are sung in a country that needs them.