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ABSTRACT
This article examines an attempt to build a memorial to local victims of civil war in South Sudan. The memorial commemorates the mass execution of civilians in 1964, close to the town of Gogrial in a rural part of South Sudan. During this massacre, local people were killed and their bodies piled up into a macabre structure by the side of the road, as a warning against supporting the Anya-Nya insurgency. This is an example of non-state memorialisation, which sheds light on the repertoires and regimes of memory that memorials draw on and their local and political resonances. Particularly striking is the way the memorial builders have incorporated global technologies of memory and put them in dialogue with local recollections of a massacre, historic Dinka myths about building out of bodies, and the politics of the dead and post-liberation memory in South Sudan. This has produced a fascinating – but ultimately unrealised – memorial which complicates some of the major themes in academic understandings of memorialisation in Africa, especially the stress laid on tensions between ‘official’ and ‘vernacular’ regimes of memory. The memorial is not a site of ‘counter-memory’; rather, it inserts a local event into an official national narrative of liberation.
Acknowledgements
This research would not have been possible without the help and generosity of many people in Kuajok and Gogrial, including Akol Wek Kuanyin, Nyang Geng Akier, Bona Bek, Jok Madut Jok, Adut Madut Akec, Deng Mariak Deng, Aciec Kuot Kuot and Makuc Aruol Luac. I benefitted enormously from discussions at the conference ‘Legacies of Struggle in Eastern and Southern Africa: Biography, Materiality and Human Remains’ held at the BIEA, 18–20 March 2015. I am grateful to all the participants, especially Joost Fontein and Justin Willis, whose comments opened new angles on a chapter of my Ph.D. thesis. Two anonymous peer reviewers provided further thoughtful suggestions. My ideas have been shaped through ongoing discussions with Cherry Leonardi, Nicki Kindersley and Katie Hickerson.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Zoe Cormack http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1794-4775
Notes
1. Verdery, The Political Lives.
2. Fontein and Harries, “The Vitality,” 116; Krmpotich et al., “The Substance,” 375.
3. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11.
4. Werbner, “Introduction,” 1.
5. Rolandsen, “A False Start.”
6. Ibid.
7. See the entry for Bernadino Mou Mou in Kuyok, South Sudan.
8. Deng, War of Visions, 143–4.
9. See, ‘Juba Death Toll Rises to Over 1400: Massacres a Deliberate Army Plan’, The Vigilant, 13 July 1965; ‘76 Southerners Slaughtered in Wau: Plan to Kill Educated Southerners Started’, 14 July. Available in Sudan Archive Durham (SAD) SudA++PK1500VIG.
10. Human Rights Watch, Civilian Devastation, 96.
11. Jok and Hutchinson, “Sudan’s Prolonged.”
12. Medley, “Humanitarian Parsimony.”
13. Deng et al., “New Beginning,” 9.
14. Deng, “Memory, Healing”; Jok, “South Sudan.”
15. Deng et al., “New Beginning,” 56.
16. IGAD, Agreement, 40–5.
17. Kindersley and Rolandsen, “Prospects for Peace.”
18. Peter Lokale Nakimangole, 2011. “EES Commemorates 56th Anniversary of Torit Uprising.” Gurtong Media, 20 August. http://www.gurtong.net/ECM/Editorial/tabid/124/ctl/ArticleView/mid/519/articleId/5609/EES-Commemorates-56th-Anniversary-Of-Torit-Uprising.aspx (accessed January 2, 2017).
19. Mayen Deng. 2014. “Update: Kiir Visits Wau, Opens Its headquarters.” Eye Radio, 14 July. http://www.eyeradio.org/kiir-visits-wau/ (accessed January 2, 2017).
20. “South Sudan: Remembering the Ones We Lost. ” http://rememberingoneswelost.com (accessed January 2, 2017).
21. Werbner, “Introduction.”
22. Werbner, “Smoke.”
23. Marschall, “Commemorating.”
24. de Waal and Ibreck, “Alem Bakagn,” 196.
25. Giblin, “Post-Conflict Heritage”; Coombes et al., Managing Heritage.
26. Jok, “The Political History.”
27. Rowlands and de Jong, “Reconsidering Heritage,” 22.
28. Nora, “Between Memory.”
29. Basu, “Palimpsest Memoryscapes.”
30. Malwal, People and Power in Sudan, 84.
31. Khalid, The Government They Deserve, 192.
32. Archivio Comboniani, Rome (ACR) A.85.26 Speech delivered by Southern Front at Gogrial during the visit of Sayed Clement Mboro, Minister of Interior, December 1964.
33. John 9:25 (King James Bible) ‘He answered and said, whether he be a sinner or no, I know not: one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see’ (emphasis mine).
34. Berridge, “Under the Shadow,” 212–13.
35. Interview with Nyang Geng and Bol Lual, Kuajok, 22 March 2012.
36. ACR A.85.26 Speech at Kuajok Mission Station (28 November 1964) to the Minister of the Interior.
37. Interview with Nyang Geng, Kuajok, 22 March 2012.
38. Interview with a former teacher from Gogrial, Kuajok, 27 March 2012.
39. Interview with a former teacher from Gogrial, Kuajok, 27 March 2012.
40. Bona Malwal, personal communication, Oxford, 13 June 2013.
41. Saeed, “The State,” 214.
42. Ibid., 214–18; Johnson, “Why Abyei Matters,” 5–7.
43. Interview with Nyang Geng and Bol Lual, Kuajok, 22 March 2012.
44. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 11–12.
45. Willis, “Violence, Authority,” 93.
46. Johnson, “Ngungdeng,” 127.
47. Johnson, “Evans-Pritchard,” 236
48. Majak, “The Northern Bahr Al-Ghazal,” 240–2.
49. Johnson, Nuer Prophets, 200.
50. Willis, “Violence, Authority,” 96.
51. Vaughan, Darfur, 76.
52. LeRiche and Arnold, South Sudan, 84.
53. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, 168; Cormack, “The Making,” 255.
54. Lienhardt, “Burial Alive,” 133.
55. Howell, “‘Pyramids’,” 52–3.
56. Johnson, “Fixed Shrines,” 48.
57. Ibid., 49; Mawson, “The Triumph of Life,” 131.
58. Mawson, “The Triumph of Life,” 102–7.
59. Luak Mayual, also known as Luak Makuer Gol, has remained politically significant since Mawson’s research. It was used by SPLA in the civil war, and after the CPA local politicians visited it during their mobilisation campaigns. It is a sad sign of the deteriorating state of local relationships in Rumbek that the luak was burnt to ashes during inter-sectional fighting in Lakes in 2015. Gabriel Mayom. 2015. “Rumbek Sacred House Torched by Arsonist.” Gurtong Media, April 8. http://www.gurtong.net/ECM/Editorial/tabid/124/ctl/ArticleView/mid/519/articleId/16480/categoryId/1/Rumbek-Sacred-House-Torched-By-Arsonist.aspx (accessed January 2, 2017).
60. Lienhardt, Divinity and Experience, 315.
61. Viejo-Rose, “Memorial Functions,” 473.
62. Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 432.
63. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 12.
64. Meskell and Scheermeyer, “Heritage as Therapy”; Meierhenrich, “Topographies.”
65. Leonardi, “‘Buckets of Blood’.”
66. Interview with elderly woman in Barpuot, near Kuajok, 7 November 2011.
67. Interview with MP for Alek South in Kuajok, 21 October 2011.
68. Hutchinson and Pendle, “Violence, Legitimacy.”