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a secondary occupation. Famed for their fierce egalitarianism, their social life
revolves largely around their herds. The Shilluk are not entirely different—like
Nuer and Dinka, they tend to see their lives as revolving around cattle—but
in practice they have, for the last several centuries at least, become far more
sedentary, having been fortunate enough to find themselves a particularly fertile
stretch of the White Nile that has allowed intensive cultivation of durra, a local
grain. The result was a population of extraordinary density. By the early nine-
teenth century there were estimated to be around two hundred thousand Shil-
luk, living in some hundred settlements arranged so densely along the Nile that
foreigners often described the 200 miles of the heart of Shilluk territory as if it
consisted of one continuous village. Many remarked it appeared to be the most
densely settled part of Africa outside of Egypt itself (Mercer 1971; Wall 1975).
“Fortunate,” though, might seem an ill-chosen word here, since, owing to
the density of population, a bad harvest could lead to devastating famine. One
solution was theft. Lacking significant trade-goods, the Shilluk soon became
notorious raiders, attacking camps and villages for hundreds of miles in all di-
rections and hauling off cattle and grain and other spoils. By the seventeenth
century, the 300-mile stretch of the Nile north of the Shilluk country, unsuit-
able for agriculture, was already known as their “raiding country,” where small
fleets of Shilluk canoes would prey on caravans and cattle camps. Raids were
normally organized by settlement chiefs. The Shilluk reth appears to have been
just one player in this predatory economy, effectively one bandit chief among
many, and not even necessarily the most important, since while he received the
largest share of booty, his base was in the south, closer to the pastoral Dinka
rather than to the richer prey to the north (Mercer 1971: 416). Nonetheless, the
reth acquired a great deal of cattle and used it to maintain a personal entourage
of Bang Reth, or “king’s men,” who were his principal retainers, warriors, and
henchmen.
Actual y, it’s not clear if there was a single figure cal ed the “reth” at al in
the early seventeenth century, or whether the royal genealogies that have come
down to us just patched together a series of particularly prominent warriors.16
The institutions of “divine kingship” that have made the Shil uk famous appear
to have been created by the reths listed on most royal genealogies as number
16. Frost (1974: 187–88) suggests the institution might ultimately derive from military
leaders referred to as bany, who, at least among the neighboring Dinka, also have
rainmaking responsibilities.
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nine and ten: Tokot (c. 1670–90), famous for his conquests among the Nuba
and Dinka, and, even more, his son Tugo (c. 1690–1710), who lived at a time
when Shil uk successes had been reversed and the heartland itself was under
attack by the Dinka. Tugo is said to have been the first to create a permanent
royal capital, at Fashoda,17 and to create its shrines and famous rituals of in-
stallation (Ogot 1964; Mercer 1971; Frost 1974; Wal 1975; Schnepel 1990:
114). Ogot was the first to suggest that Tugo effectively invented the sacred
kingship, fastening on the figure of Nyikang—probably at that time just the
mythic ancestor of local chiefly lines—and transforming him into a legendary
hero around which to ral y a Shil uk nation that was, effectively, created by
his doing so. Most contemporary historians have now come around to Ogot’s
position.
There is another way to look at these events. What happened might well be
considered a gender revolution. In most Nilotic societies, matters of war (hence
politics) are organized through male age-sets. By the time we have ethnograph-
ic information, Shilluk age-sets seem to have long since been marginalized (P. P.
Howell 1941: 56–66).18 Instead, political life had come to be organized around
the reth in Fashoda, and Fashoda, in turn, was a city composed almost entirely
of women.
How did this happen? We do not precisely know. But we do know that at
the time Fashoda was founded, the status of women in politics was under open
contestation. Tugo’s reign appears to have been proceeded by that of a queen,
Abudok, Tokot’s sister.19 According to one version of the story (Westermann
17. The name is an Arabization of its real name, Pachod. It is, incidentally, not the same
as the “Fashoda” of the famous “Fashoda crisis” that almost brought war between
Britain and France in 1898, since “Fashoda” in this case is—however confusingly—
an Arabization of the name of a rather desultory mercantile town called Kodok
outside Shilluk territory to the north.
18. Among the eastern Nilotic societies considered by Simonse, the chief warrior
age-set was also responsible for representing the people against, and ultimately, if
necessary, killing, the king. Among the Shilluk, this role seems to have been passed
to royal women.
19. Actually, it is not entirely clear when Abudok ruled. Some genealogies leave her
out entirely. Hofmayr places her before Tokot, and this has become the generally
accepted version. Westermann (1912: 149–50) is ambiguous but appears to agree;
however, his version also seems to make her the founder of Fashoda, which should
place her closer to the time of Tugo, and elsewhere, in his list of kings (ibid.: 135),
he places Abudok after Tokot. Crazzolara (1950: 136, n. 4) insists that she ruled
after Tokot, as regent while Tugo was still a child. Howell’s unpublished notes call
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
85
1912: 149–50), after Abudok had reigned for some years, the settlement chiefs
informed her she would have to step down because they did not wish to be ruled
by a woman; she responded by naming a young man in her care—Tugo—as her
successor, and then, proceeded to the site of Fashoda with a bag of lily seeds to
warn that henceforth the royal lineage would grow larger and larger until it en-
gulfed the country entirely. This is usually interpreted as a spiteful prophecy, but
it could just as easily be read as a story about the foundation of Fashoda itself
(an act usually attributed to her former ward Tugo) and a sober assessment of
the likely results of the institutions that developed there.
Later oral traditions (P. P. Howell n.d.: SAD 69/2/53–55) claim that Queen
Abudok was responsible for “most of the Shilluk laws and customs” relating to
the creation of reths.20 Could it be that the entire institution of what came to be
known as “divine kingship” was really her creation, a compromise worked out
when she placed Tugo on the throne? We cannot know. But certainly the com-
mon wisdom of contemporary historians that these institutions were simply
the brainchild of Tugo cannot be correct: it is very difficult to imagine a ruler
who decided entirely on his own accord to deny himself the right to name his
own successor, or to grant his own wives the right to have him executed. What
emerged could only have been some a kind of political compromise, one that
ensured no woman ever again attempted to take the highest office (none did)
but otherwise, granted an extraordinary degree of power to royal women.
Here is a list, in fact, of such powers:
1. Where most African kings lived surrounded by a hierarchy of male officials,
these were entirely absent from Fashoda. The reth lived surrounded only
by his wives, who could number as many as a hundred, each with her own
dwelling. No other men were allowed to set foot in the settlement after
nightfall (Riad 1959: 197). Since members of the royal clan could not marry
each other (this would be incest), these wives were uniformly commoners.
2. The king’s senior wife seems to have acted as his chief minister, and had the
power to hold court and decide legal cases in the reth’s absence (Driberg
her Tokot’s sister, who took over on his death, but hid the identity of his male
offspring (she dressed them up as girls—P. P. Howell n.d.: SAD 69/2/54–55).
20. This from an unpublished manuscript in the Howell papers; the customs listed
specifically center on rituals surrounding the “discovery” and creation of the effigies
of Nyikang and Dak.
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1932: 420). She was also responsible for recruiting and supervising second-
ary wives.
3. In the absence of any administrative apparatus, royal women also appear to
have become the key intermediaries between Fashoda and other communi-
ties. Essentially they played all the roles that court officials would otherwise
play.
a. Royal wives who became pregnant returned in their sixth month to their
natal vil ages, where their children were born and raised. They were, as the
saying goes, “planted out” and al ied themselves with a local commoner
chief (Pumphrey 1941: 11), who became the patron of the young prince
or princess. Those sons who were not eventual y either elected to the
throne or kil ed in internecine strife went on to found their own branches
of the royal lineage, whose numbers, as Queen Abudok predicted, have
tended to continually increase over the course of Shilluk history.
b. Royal daughters remained in their mothers’ villages. They were referred
to as “Little Queen” and “their counsel sought on all matters of impor-
tance” (Driberg 1932: 420). They were not supposed to marry or have
children, but, in historical times at least, they became notorious for tak-
ing lovers as they wished—then, if they became pregnant, demanding
hefty payments in cattle from those same lovers to hush the matter up
(P. P. Howell 1953b: 107–8).21
c. Princesses might also be appointed as governors over local districts
(Hofmayr 1925: 71; Jackson in Frost 1974: 133–34), particularly if their
brothers became king.
4. Royal wives who had borne three children, and royal widows, would retire
to their natal villages to become bareth, or guardians of royal shrines (C. G.
Seligman and B. Z. Seligman 1932: 77–78). It was through these shrines
that the “cult of Nyikang” was disseminated.22
5. While, as noted above, it was considered quite outrageous for a king to kill a
woman, royal wives were expected to ultimately order the death of the king.
21. They, not the fathers, remained in control of the offspring of such unions. Colonial
sources (C. G. Seligman 1911: 218; Howell 1953b: 107–8) insisted that in the past,
princesses who bore children would be executed along with the child’s father.
22. Another key medium for the spread of the cult of Nyikang appears to have
been mediums loosely attached to the shrines, who had usually had no previous
attachment to the court. According to Oyler (1918b: 288), these too were mainly
women.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
87
A reth was said to be put to death when his physical powers began to fade—
purportedly, when his wives announced that he was no longer capable of sat-
isfying them sexually (C. G. Seligman 1911: 222; P. P. Howell and Thomson
1946: 10). In some accounts (e.g., Westermann 1912: 136), the execution is
carried out by the royal wives themselves.23 One may argue about the degree
to which this whole scenario is simply an ideological façade, but it clearly
happened sometimes: Hofmayr, for instance, writes of one king’s affection
for his mother, “who had killed his father with a blow from a brass-ring”
(1925: 127, in Frost 1974: 82).
I should emphasize here that Shilluk society was in no sense a matriarchy.
While women held extraordinary power within the royal apparatus, that ap-
paratus was not in itself particularly powerful. The fact that the queen could
render judicial judgments, for instance, is less impressive when one knows royal
judgments were not usually enforced. Governance of day-to-day affairs seems
to have rested firmly in the hands of male settlement chiefs, who were also in
charge of electing a new king when the old one died. Village women also elected
their own leaders, but these were much less important.24 Property passed in the
male line. The reth himself continued to exercise predatory and sometimes brutal
power through his personal retainers, occasionally raiding his own people as a
mode of intervening in local politics. Nonetheless, that (divine, arbitrary) power
seems to have been increasingly contained within a ritual apparatus where royal
women played the central political role.
Insofar as royal power became more than a sporadic phenomenon, insofar
as it came to embed itself in everyday life, it was, apparently, largely through
the agency of the bareth and their network of royal shrines, spread throughout
Shillukland. Here, though, the effects could hardly be overestimated. The figure
of Nyikang, the mythic founder of the nation, came to dominate every aspect of
ritual life—and to become the very ground of Shilluk social being. Where other
Nilotic societies are famous for their theological speculation, and sacrifice—the
23. Charles and Brenda Seligman (1932: 91) say there were two versions of how this
happens: in one, the wives strangle the king themselves; in the other, they lay a
white cloth across his face and knees as he lies asleep in the afternoon to indicate
their judgment to the male Ororo who actually kill him. They believed the latter to
be older.
24. Oyler says they acted as “magistrates,” but their jurisdiction was limited to disputes
between women (1926: 65–66).
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ON KINGS
primary ritual—is there dedicated to God and cosmic spirits, here everything
came to be centered on the “cult of Nyikang.” This was true to such a degree that
by the time Seligman was writing (1911; C. G. Seligman and B. Z. Seligman
1932), outside observers found it difficult to establish what Shilluk ideas about
God or lineage ancestors even were. To give some sense of the “cult’s” perva-
siveness: while Nuer and Dinka who fell ill typically attributed their condition
to attack by “air spirits,” and sought cures from mediums possessed by such
spirits, most Shilluk appear to have assumed
they were being attacked by for-
mer kings—most often, Nyikang’s aggressive son Dak—and sought the aid of
mediums possessed by Nyikang himself (C. G. Seligman and B. Z. Seligman
1932: 101–2). While most ordinary Shilluk, as we shall see, assiduously avoided
the affairs of living royalty, dead ones soon came to intervene in almost every
aspect of their daily lives.
The obvious historical question is how long it took for this to happen. Here,
information is simply unavailable. All we know is that the figure of Nyikang did
gradually come to dominate every aspect of Shilluk life. The political situation
in turn appears to have stabilized by 1700 and remained stable for at least a
century. By the 1820s, however, the Ottoman state began attempting to estab-
lish its authority in the region, and this coincided with a sharp increase in the
demand for ivory on the world market. Arab merchants and political refugees
began to establish themselves in the north of the country. Nyidok ( reth from
1845 to 1863) refused to receive official Ottoman envoys, but he kept up the
Shilluk tradition of guaranteeing the safety of foreigners. Before long there were
thousands of the latter, living in a cluster of communities around Kaka in the far
north. Reths responded by creating new trade monopolies, imposing systematic
taxes, and trying to create a royal monopoly on firearms.25 They do not appear
to have been entirely unsuccessful. Foreign visitors at the time certainly came
away under the impression they had been dealing with a bona fide monarch,
with at least an embryonic administration. At the same time, some also reported
northerners openly complaining it would be better to live without a reth at all
(Mercer 1971: 423–24).
The situation ended catastrophically. As the ivory trade was replaced by the
slave trade, northern Shilluk increasingly signed up as auxiliaries in Arab raids
25. Already in the 1840s, foreign sources begin speaking of an annual tribute in
cattle and grain, sometimes estimated at 10 percent (Frost 1974: 176). This seems,
however, to have only been an early- to mid-nineteenth-century phenomenon.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
89
on the Dinka; by 1861, a foreign freebooter named Mohammed Kheir thus
managed to spark a civil war that allowed them to sack Fashoda and carry out