South Sudan

The peoples of the White Nile plains built some of the most closely studied religious worlds in Africa. The Dinka address Nhialic, divinity above, through clan divinities, cattle dedications and the hereditary masters of the fishing spear, whose prayers accompany every crisis of the community. The Nuer know Kwoth, spirit, at once one and many, and their prophets, seized by named divinities, could gather feuding sections into a single moral community. Christian missions arrived up the Nile in the early twentieth century, Anglican, Presbyterian and Catholic, and the colonial government assigned each a sphere; but conversion was modest until the civil wars with the north.

In the long displacement after 1983, Christianity spread rapidly, its scriptures and hymns in Dinka and Nuer giving a language for suffering and identity against an Islamising state, and by the 2011 referendum the new nation understood itself as broadly Christian with deep traditional roots. The churches were among the only institutions to survive the wars intact, brokering local peace covenants and the people to people processes that ended some of the worst feuds. Since 2013 they have played the same role inside the new country's own civil conflict, while prophets of the old divinities have again risen to prominence in the cattle camps.

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.