by Faun Rice
herd of cattle, his own personal band of retainers. If he had tried to exterminate
the lineage of a real village chief, not one he had made up, he would likely have
found himself in very serious trouble. What’s more, a reth’s power in fact was
almost entirely dependent on his physical presence.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
77
Here’s another story, about the death of that same bad king Nyadwai, here
seen as having getting his commeupance for taking such high-handed behavior
altogether too far:
Story 2: There was once a cruel king, who killed many of his subjects, “he
even killed women.” His subjects were terrified of him. One day, to demon-
strate that his subjects were so afraid they would do anything he asked, he
assembled the Shilluk chiefs and ordered them to wall him up inside a house
with a young girl. Then he ordered them to let him out again. They didn’t. So
he died. (Westermann 1912: 175; cf. P. P. Howell n.d. SAD 69/2/57)8
The story might even serve as a story of the origin of ritual regicide, though it
isn’t explicitly presented as such, since this was precisely the way kings were said
to have originally been put to death. They were walled in a hut with a young
maiden.9
Stories like these help explain a peculiar confusion in the literature on Shilluk
kingship. Nineteenth-century travelers, and many twentieth-century observers,
insisted the reth was an absolute despot wielding complete and arbitrary power
over his subjects. Others—most famously Evans-Pritchard (1948)—insisted
that he was for most effective purposes a mere symbolic figurehead who “reigned
but did not govern,” and had almost no systematic way to impose his will on
ordinary Shilluk. Both were right. As divine king, reths were expected to make
displays of absolute, arbitrary violence, but the means they had at their disposal
were extremely limited. Above all, they found themselves checked and stymied
whenever they tried to transform those displays into anything more systematic.
True, as elsewhere, these displays of arbitrariness were, however paradoxically,
seen as closely tied to the reth’s ability to dispense justice: nineteenth-century
reths could spend days on end hearing legal cases, even if, under ordinary cir-
cumstances, they were lacking in the means to enforce decisions and appear to
have acted primarily as mediators.
8. Though we should probably make note of the denouement, at least according to
Westermann: they elected a new king, who promptly accused them of murder and
killed them all. It’s only Howell’s notebook that gives his name.
9. The custom was discontinued, it was said, when once the maiden died first, and the
king complained so loudly about the stink that they agreed from then on to switch
to suffocation (C. G. Seligman 1911: 222; C. G. Seligman and B. Z. Seligman
1932: 91–92; Westermann 1912: 136; Hofmayr 1925: 300).
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ON KINGS
Evans-Pritchard was writing in the 1940s, at a time when displays of arbi-
trary violence on the part of a reth would have been treated as crimes by colonial
police, and when the royal office had become the focus of Shilluk national iden-
tity and resistance. So he had every reason to downplay such stories of brutali-
ty.10 Indeed, in his lecture, they are simply ignored. Nonetheless, they are crucial;
not only for the reasons already mentioned, but also because, under ordinary
circumstances, the arbitrary violence of the king was central in constituting that
very sense of national identity. To understand how this can be, though, we must
turn to another part of Sudan during a more recent period during which the
police have largely ceased to function.
The Shilluk as seen from Equatoria
Here let me turn to the work of Dutch anthropologist Simon Simonse on rain-
makers among a belt of peoples (the Bari, Pari, Lulubo, Lotuho, Lokoya, et al.)
in the furthest South Sudan. Rainmakers are important figures throughout the
area, but their status varies considerably. Some have (at one time or another)
managed to make themselves into powerful rulers; others remain marginal fig-
ures. All of them are liable to be held accountable in the event that (as often
happens in the southern Sudan) rain does not fall. In fact, Simonse, and his
colleague, Japanese anthropologist Eisei Kurimoto, are perhaps unique among
anthropologists in being in the vicinity when these events actually happened.11
What Simonse describes (reviewing over two dozen case studies of histori-
cally documented king-killings) is a kind of tragic drama, in which the rain-
maker and people come to gradually define themselves against each other. If
10. In a broader sense, he was doubtless aware that the colonial perception of Africa
as a place of arbitrary violence and savagery had done much greater violence to
Africans—that is, justified much worse atrocities—than any African king had ever
done. This is the reason most contemporary Africanists also tend to avoid these
stories. But it seems to me there’s nothing to be gained by covering things up:
especially since the actual arbitrary violence performed by most African kings was
in fact negligible or even completely imaginary (what mattered were the stories),
and even those who even came close to living up to Euro-American stereotypes,
like Shaka or Mutesa, killed far fewer of their own subjects than most European
kings during the period before they became figureheads.
11. If nothing else, one can say the question “Do they really kill their kings?” can now
be said to be definitively resolved; though, at the same time, it is also clear that it is
the least powerful of these figures who are the most likely to fall victim.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
79
rains are delayed, the people, led by the chief warrior age grade, will petition
the rainmaker, make gifts, rebuild his residence, or reinstate taxes or customs
that have fallen into abeyance so as to win back his favor. If the rain contin-
ues not to fall, things become tense. The rainmaker is increasingly assumed to
be withholding the rains, and perhaps unleashing other natural disasters, out
of spite. The rainmaker will attempt stalling techniques (blaming others, sac-
rificial rituals, false confessions); if he is also a powerful ruler, the young men’s
age-set will begin to rally more and more constituencies against him to the
point where, finally, he must either flee or confront a community entirely united
against him. The methods of killing kings, Simonse notes, tend to take on the
gruesome forms they do—beatings to death, burials alive—because these are
ways in which everyone could be said to have been equally responsible. It is the
community as a whole that must kill the king. Indeed, it only becomes a unified
community—“the people,” properly speaking—in doing so: since the creation
and dispatching of rainmakers is about the only form of collective action in
which everyone participates. All this is, perhaps, what a Girardian would pre-
dict, except that, far from being the solemn sacrificial rituals with willing victims
that Girard imagines, king-
killings more resembled lynch mobs, and rainmak-
ers fought back with every means at their disposal. This was especially true if
they held political power. Often one hears of a single lonely, armed rainmaker
holding off an entire incensed population. During a famine between 1855 and
1859, for instance, one Bari king who had acquired a rifle (no one else had one)
used it on three separate occasions to disperse crowds assembled to kill him. In
1860, one of his subjects told a French traveler:
We asked Nyiggilo to give us rain. He made promises and demanded cattle
as a payment. Despite his spells the rain did not come. So we got angry. Then
Nyiggilo took his rifle and threatened to kill everybody. We had to leave him be.
Last year the same thing happened for a third time: then we lost patience. We
slit Nyiggilo’s stomach open and threw him into the river: he will no longer make
fun of us. (Simonse 1992: 204)
It is easy to see why rainmakers in this context might wish to acquire a monop-
oly on firearms, or to develop a loyal personal entourage. In fact, Simonse argues
that, throughout the region, when state-like forms did emerge, it was typical y
when rainmakers, caught in an endless and very dangerous game of bluffing and
brinksmanship with their constituents, successful y sought means to reinforce
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ON KINGS
their position: by intermarrying with neighboring kings, al ying themselves with
foreign traders, establishing trade and craft monopolies, building up a perma-
nent armed fol owing, and so on—al in way of ensuring that, when things next
came to a showdown, they would be more likely to survive (2005: 94–97).
In such polities, “the people,” insofar as such an entity could be said to have
existed, was seen essentially as the king’s collective enemy. Simonse (1992: 193–
95) records several striking instances of European explorers encountering kings
in the region who urged them to open fire into crowds or to carry out raids
against enemy villages, only to discover that the “enemies” in question were re-
ally their own subjects. In other words, kings often really would take on the role
attributed to them in rain dramas: of spitefully unleashing arbitrary destruction
on the people they were supposed to protect.
Simonse compares the opposition between king and people with the seg-
mentary opposition between lineages or clans described by Evans-Pritchard
among the Nuer (ibid.: 27–30), where each side exists only through defining
itself against the other. This opposition too is necessarily expressed by at least the
potential for violence. It might seem strange to propose a segmentary opposition
between one person and everybody else, but if one returns to Evans-Pritchard’s
actual analysis of how the Nuer segmentary system works, it makes a certain
degree of sense. Evans-Pritchard (1940) stressed that in a feud, when clan or lin-
eage A sought to avenge itself on clan or lineage B, any member of lineage B was
fair game. They were treated, for political purposes, as identical. In fact, this was
Evans-Pritchard’s definition of a “political” group—one whose members were
treated as interchangeable in relation to outsiders.12 If so, the arbitrary violence of
divine kings—firing randomly into crowds, bringing down natural disasters—is
the perfect concrete expression of what makes a people a people—an undifferen-
tiated, therefore political, group. All of these peoples—Bari, Pari, Lolubo, etc.—
became peoples only in relation to some particularly powerful rainmaker; and
owing to the rise and fal of reputations, political boundaries were always in flux.
Simonse’s analysis strikes me as important. True, in the end, he does appear
to fal into a Girardian framework (this may wel be unavoidable, considering the
nature of his material), seeing scapegoat dramas as the primordial truth behind
12. So today, an American citizen might be so little regarded by her own government
that she is kicked out of hospitals while seriously ill or left to starve on the street;
if, however, she then goes on to be killed by the agent of a foreign government, an
American has been killed and it will be considered cause for war.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
81
al politics. So he can say that ritual king-kil ing of the Shil uk variety can be best
seen a kind of compromise, an attempt to head off the constant, unstable drama
between king and people by institutionalizing the practice,13 while the state, with
its monopoly on force, is an attempt to eliminate the drama entirely (Simonse
2005). Myself, I would prefer to see the kind of violence he describes not as some
kind of revelation of the essential nature of society, but as a revelation of the es-
sential nature of a certain form of political power with cosmic pretensions—one
by no means inevitable, but which is very much stil with us today.
Three propositions
The core of my argument in this essay boils down to three propositions. It might
be best to lay them out at this point, before returning to the Shilluk material in
more detail. The first I have already outlined; the second is broadly inspired by
Marshall Sahlins; the third is my own extrapolation from Simonse:
1. Divine kingship, insofar as the term can be made meaningful, refers not to
the identification of rulers with supernatural beings (a surprisingly rare
phenomenon),14 but to kings who make themselves the equivalent of gods—ar-
bitrary, all-powerful beings beyond human morality—through the use of arbi-
trary violence. The institutions of sacred kingship, whatever their origins, have
typical y been used to head off or control the danger of such forms of power,
from which a direct line can be traced to contemporary forms of sovereignty.
2. Sacred kingship can also be conceived as offering a kind of (tentative, im-
perfect) resolution for the elementary problematic of human existence pro-
posed in creation narratives. It is in this sense that Pierre Clastres (1977) was
right when he said that state authority must have emerged from prophets
13. It’s also important to note here that, as Schnepel emphasizes (1991: 58), the Shilluk
king was not himself a rainmaker; rather, he interceded on the part of his subjects
with Nyikang, who was responsible for the rains.
14. As I mentioned earlier, the Egyptian Pharaoh is one of the few unambiguous
examples. Another is the Nepali king. But the latter case makes clear that
identification with a deity is not is in itself, necessarily, an indicator of divine
kingship in my sense of the term. The Nepali king is identified with Vishnu, but this
identification either originated or only came to be emphasized in the nineteenth
century when the king lost most of his power to the prime ministers; it was, in fact,
the token of what I’ve been calling sacred kingship, in which the king became too
“set apart” from the world to actually govern.
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ON KINGS
rather than chiefs, from the desire to find a “land without evil” and undo
death; it is in this sense, too, that it can be said that Christ (the Redeemer)
was a king, or kings could so easily model themselves on Chr
ist, despite his
lack of martial qualities. Here, in embryo, can we observe what I have called
the utopian element of the state.
3. Violence, and more specifically antagonism, plays a crucial role here. It is a
peculiar quality of violence that it simplifies things, draws clear lines where
otherwise one might see only complex and overlapping networks of human
relationship. It is the particular quality of sovereign power that it defines its
subjects as a single people. This is, in the case of kingdoms, actually prior to
the friend/enemy distinction proposed by Carl Schmitt ([1922] 2005). Or,
to be more specific, one’s ability to constitute oneself as a single people in a
potential relation of war with other peoples is premised on a prior but usu-
ally hidden state of war between the sovereign and the people.
The Shilluk case, then, seems to be especially revealing, not, as I say, because it
represents some primordial form of monarchy, but because—in the attempt to
build something like a state in the absence of any real administrative appara-
tus—these mechanisms are unusually transparent. I suspect the reality behind
divine kingship is also unusually easy to make out here because of the particular
nature of Nilotic cosmology, and, most notably, Nilotic conceptions of God,
who manifests himself in mortal life almost exclusively through disaster. One
consequence is a peculiar relation between the transcendent and utopian ele-
ments, where it is the hostility of the people that makes the king a transcendent
being capable of offering a kind of resolution to the dilemmas of mortal life.15
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF SHILLUK HISTORY
The Shilluk are something of an anomaly among Nilotic people. Most Nilotes
have long been seminomadic pastoralists, for whom agriculture was very much
15. Though, as we shall see in the last chapter, the scenario where kings vanish and
become immortal gods at precisely the moment when their subjects betray or
express hostility to them traces back at least to Semiramis, the mythic queen of
Assyria, and is commonplace throughout East Africa. One theme of this volume—
my own contributions to it anyway—is precisely the relation between antagonism
and transcendence, which appears to be structural.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
