by Faun Rice
devastating slave raids against the Shilluk heartland (Kapteijns and Spauding
1982: 43–46; Udal 1998: 474–82). There followed some forty years of almost
continual warfare. The north battled the south; first the Ottoman regime, then
the Mahdist regime in Khartoum, then finally the British intervened, trying
to establish client governments; several reths were executed as rebels against
one side or the other; Shilluk herds were decimated and the overall population
fell by almost half. In 1899 British rule was established, Shilluk territory was
restricted and those outside it were resettled, and the reth was reduced to the
usual tax-collector and administer of local justice under a system of indirect
colonial rule. At the same time, the royal installation ritual, which had fallen
into abeyance during the civil wars, was revived and probably reinvented, and
royal institutions, along with the figure of Nyikang, became, if anything, even
more important as symbols of national identity—as, indeed, they remain to the
present day.
Today, the position of the reth remains, but, like the Shilluk themselves, just
barely. The tiny Shilluk kingdom is unfortunate enough to be located precisely
on the front-lines of a civil war between largely Nuer and Dinka rebels and
government-supported militias. Ordinary Shilluk have been victims of massa-
cres, famines, massive out-migration, and forced assimilation, to the extent that
at times some (e.g., Nyaba 2006) have argued there is a real danger of cultural
or even physical extinction.
MYTHO-HISTORY
A word on Nilotic cosmologies
In order to understand the famous Shilluk installation rituals, we must first
examine their mythic framework. This is somewhat difficult, since, as almost all
early observers point out, their Shilluk informants—much unlike their Nuer
and Dinka equivalents—were not much given to cosmological speculation. In-
stead, everything was transposed onto the level of historical epic. Still, in either
case, it would appear the same themes were working themselves out, so it seems
best to begin by looking at Nilotic cosmologies more generally.
Nilotic societies normally treat God as a force profoundly distant and re-
moved from the human world. Divinity itself is rendered little or no cult, at
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least not directly. Instead Divinity is usually seen to be “refracted” through the
cosmos, immanent particularly in storms, totemic spirits, numinous objects, or
anything inexplicable and extraordinary. In one sense, then, God is everywhere.
In another, he is profoundly absent. Creation stories almost invariably begin
with a traumatic separation. Here is one typical, Dinka version.26
Divinity (and the sky) and men (and the earth) were originally contiguous; the
sky then lay just above the earth. They were connected by a rope. . . . By means of
this rope men could clamber at will to Divinity. At this time there was no death.
Divinity granted one grain of millet a day to the first man and woman, and thus
satisfied their needs. They were forbidden to grow or pound more.
The first human beings, usually called Garang and Abuk, living on earth
had to take care when they were doing their little planting or pounding, lest a
hoe or pestle should strike Divinity, but one day the woman “because she was
greedy” (in this context any Dinka would view her “greed” indulgently) decided
to plant (or pound) more than the permitted grain of millet. In order to do so she
took one of the long-handled hoes (or pestles) which the Dinka now use. In rais-
ing this pole to pound or cultivate, she struck Divinity who withdrew, offended,
to his present great distance from the earth, and sent a small blue bird (the colour
of the sky) called atoc to sever the rope which had previously given men access to
the sky and to him. Since that time the country has been “spoilt”, for men have to
labour for the food they need, and are often hungry. They can no longer as before
freely reach Divinity, and they suffer sickness and death, which thus accompany
their abrupt separation from Divinity. (Lienhardt 1961: 33–34)
In some versions, human reproduction and death are introduced simultane-
ously: the woman needs to pound more grain specifically because she bears
children and needs to feed her growing family. Always, the story begins with
the rupture of an original unity. Once, heaven and earth were right next to each
other; humans could move back and forth between them. Or: there was a rope,
or tree, or vine, or some other means of passage between the two. As a result,
people lived without misery, work, or death. God gave us what we needed. Then
the connection was destroyed.
26. One anomalous element has been eliminated: in this version, the cord ran parallel
to the earth; in most, it is arranged vertically.
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91
Stories like this can be termed “Hesiodic” because, like Hesiod’s Prometheus
story (or, for that matter, the story of the Garden of Eden), they begin with
blissful dependency—humans being supplied whatever they need from a benev-
olent creator—to an unhappy autonomy, in which human beings eventually win
for themselves everything they will need to grow and cook food, bear and raise
children, and otherwise reproduce their own existence, but at a terrible cost. It
does not take a lot of imagination to see these, first and foremost, as metaphors
of birth; the loss of the blissful dependency of the womb, which the cutting of
the cord, in the Nilotic versions, simply makes unusually explicit.
The problem is that once separation is introduced into the world, conjunction
can only mean catastrophe. Now, when Divinity, as absolute, universal principle,
manifests itself in worldly life, it can only take the form of floods, plagues, light-
ning, locusts, and other catastrophes. Natural disasters are, after all, indiscrimi-
nate; they affect everyone; thus, like the indiscriminate violence of divine kings,
they can represent the principle of universality. But if God is the annihilation of
difference, sacrifice—in Nilotic society the archetypal ritual—is its re-creation.
The slaughter and division of an animal becomes a reenactment of the primal
act of creation through separation; it becomes a way of expel ing the divine
element from some disastrous entanglement in human affairs by reestablishing
everything in its proper sphere.27 This was accomplished through violence: or to
be more explicit, through killing, blood, heat, fire, and the division of flesh.
There is one way that Divinity enters the world that is not disastrous. This is
rain. Rain—and water more generally—seen as a nurturant, essentially feminine
principle, is often also treated as the only element through which humans can
still experience some approximation of that primal unity. This is quite explicit
in the southeastern societies studied by Simonse. The ancestors of rainmaking
lines were often said to have emerged from rivers, only to be discovered by
children minding cattle on the shore; in rituals, they re-created the vines that
originally connected heaven and eart
h; they embody peace, coolness, fertilizing
water (Simonse 1992: 409–11). Hence during important rainmaking rituals,
communities must maintain a state of “peace” ( edwar). Physical violence, drum-
ming, shouting, drunkenness, dancing, are all forbidden; even animals sacrificed
27. So too, incidentally, with Vedic sacrifice, which reproduces the original creation of
the world through the division of the body of a primordial being, or Greek sacrifice,
which constantly re-created the divisions between gods, animals, and mortals. All
these religious traditions appear to be historically related.
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in rain ceremonies had to be smothered so no blood was spilled, and they had
to be imagined to go to their deaths voluntarily, without resistance. The state
was ended with a bloody sacrifice at the end of the agricultural season. Edwar,
though, was simply an exaggerated version of the normal mode of peaceable, so-
ciable comportment with the community—within human, social space—since
even ordinarily, hot, bloody, violent activity was exiled to the surrounding wil-
derness. This was true of hunting and war, but it was also true of childbirth (the
paradigm of traumatic separation): women in labor were expected to resort to
the bush, and, like returning hunters or warriors, had to be purified from the
blood spilled before returning to their communities (ibid.: 412–16).
The legend of Nyikang
The human condition, then, is one of irreparable loss and separation. We have
gained the ability to grow our own food, but at the expense of hunger; we have
discovered sex and reproduction, but at the cost of death. We are being pun-
ished, but our punishment seems utterly disproportionate to our crimes. This is
another element stressed by Godfrey Lienhardt, and another way in which the
Nilotic material resonates with the Abrahamic tradition. None of Lienhardt’s
informants claimed to understand why wishing to have a little more food was
such a terrible crime. It is our fate as humans to have no real comprehension of
our situation. If God is just, at the very least we do not understand in what way;
if it all makes sense, we cannot grasp how. It’s possible that, ultimately, there
simply is no justice. When God is invoked, in Nilotic languages—including
Shilluk—it is ordinarily as an exclamation, “Why, God?,” above all when a loved
one falls sick, with the assumption that no answer will be forthcoming.
Now, the Shilluk appear to be one of the few Nilotic peoples for whom such
creation myths are not particularly important. The Shilluk past begins, instead,
with a historical event: the exile of Nyikang from his original home. Still, one
story is quite clearly a transposition of the other. Nyikang himself is the son
of a king whose father descended from heaven.28 His mother Nyakaya was a
crocodile, or perhaps part-crocodile: she continues to be revered as a divinity
inhabiting the Nile.29 He is sometimes referred to as “child of the river.”
28. In other versions, he traces back to a white or grey cow, created by God in the Nile.
29. Charles and Brenda Seligman (1932: 87–88) describe her as the embodiment of
the totality of riverine creatures and phenomena, and notes that the priestesses who
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
93
Originally, Nyikang and his brother Duwat lived in a faraway land by a great
lake or river in the south.
They speak of it as the end of the earth, or some call it the head of the earth. . . .
In that land death was not known. When a person became feeble through great
age, he was thrown out in the cattle yard, or in the road near it, and the cows
would trample him until he had been reduced to the size of an infant, and then
he would grow to manhood again. (Oyler 1918a: 107)
Other versions gloss over this element—probably because the story that follows
turns on a dispute over royal succession, and it is difficult to understand how
this would come up if no one ever died. In some versions, the people are divided
over whom to elect. In others, Nyikang is passed over in favor of his half-brother
Duwat; he seizes some royal regalia and flees with his son Cal and a number of
followers. Duwat follows in pursuit. In the end the two confront each other on
either side of a great river. In some versions (Hofmayr 1925: 328), Duwat curses
his brother to die, thus bringing death into the world. In others, he simply curs-
es him never to return. Always, though, the confrontation ends when Duwat
throws a digging stick at his brother and tells him he can use it to dig the graves
of his followers. Nyikang accepts it, but defiantly, announces he will use it as an
agricultural implement, to give life, and that his people will thus reproduce to
overcome the ravages of death (ibid.; Oyler 1918a: 107–8; Westermann 1912:
167; Lienhardt 1979: 223; P. P. Howell n.d.: SAD 69/2/41–42).
Obviously, this is just another version of the creation story: the loss of a
blissful deathless paradise where people were nonetheless permanently infanti-
lized by their dependence on higher powers (in this version, arguing over suc-
cession to the kingship when the king in fact will never die). Even the dig-
ging stick reappears. This is a story of loss, but—as in so many versions of this
myth—also a defiant declaration of independence. Nyikang’s followers create a
kind of autonomy by acquiring the means to reproduce their own life. Turning
the symbol of death into an instrument of production is thus a perfect metaphor
for what is happening.
maintain royal shrines also maintain her cult. Offerings to her are left on the banks
of the Nile. She is also the goddess of birth. When river creatures act in unusual
ways, they are assumed to be acting as her vehicle; when land ones do the same, they
are assumed to be vehicles of Nyikang.
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Nyikang’s first sojourn is at a place called Turra, where he marries the
daughter of the local ruler Dimo and has a son, the rambunctious and unruly
Dak. Conflicts soon develop, and there are a series of magical battles between
Nyikang and his father-in-law, which Nyikang always wins. Dak grows up to
become a scourge of the community, attacking and pillaging at will. Finally, the
entire community joins together to kill him. They decide they will sneak up on
him while he’s relaxing outside playing his harp. According to Riad’s informant,
“They were very afraid that Nyikang would avenge his son’s death if only a few
people murdered Dak, so they decided that all of them would spear him and
his blood would be distributed upon all of them” (1959: 145). In other words,
having been victims of arbitrary predatory violence, they adopt the same logic
Simonse describes in the killing of sacred kings. “The people” as a whole must
kill him. In this case, however, they do not succeed. Nyikang (or in some ver-
sions Dak) receives advance warning, and comes up with the idea of substituting
an effigy made of a very light wood called ambatch, which he places in Dak’s
stead. The people come and one by one spear what they take to be the sleeping
Dak. The next day, when the r
eal, live Dak appears at what is supposed to be
his own funeral, everyone panics and runs away (Westermann 1912: 159; Oyler
1918a: 109; Hofmayr 1925: 16; Crazzolara 1951: 123–27; P. P. Howell n.d.:
SAD 69/2/47).
This is a crucial episode. While neither Nyikang nor Dak is, at this point, a
king (they are both later to become kings), the story is clearly a reference to the
logic described by Simonse: that both king and people come into being through
the arbitrary violence of the former, and the final, unified retaliation of the lat-
ter. At the same time it introduces the theme of effigies. Nyikang and Dak are,
indeed, immortalized by effigies made of ambatch wood, kept in a famous shrine
called Akurwa, north of Fashoda. These play a central role in the installation of a
new reth, and, since Evans-Pritchard at least, have been seen as representing the
eternity of the royal office, as opposed to the ephemeral nature of any particu-
lar human embodiment. Here the first effigy is created literally as an attempt
to cheat death. Even more, as we’ll see, it seems to reflect a common theme
whereby the people’s anger and hostility—however paradoxically—becomes the
immediate cause of the king’s transcendence of mortal status.
To return to the story: Nyikang, Dak, and their small band of followers de-
cide the time has come to move on and seek more amenable pastures. They have
various adventures along the way. During their travels, Dak serves as Nyikang’s
advance guard and general, often getting himself in scrapes from which Nyikang
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
95
then has to rescue him. The most famous is his battle with the Sun, in which
Nyikang again confirms his aquatic character. Dak is the first to pick a fight
with the Sun, and at first, he and his father’s followers are scorched by the Sun’s
terrible heat, forcing Nyikang to revive many by sprinkling water over them. In
the end Nyikang manages to best the enemy by using water-soaked reeds to
slash—and thus “burn”—the legs of the Sun, who is thereby forced to retreat
(Westermann 1912: 161, 166; Oyler 1918a: 113–14; Hofmayr 1925: 18, 55; see
Lienhardt 1952: 149; Schnepel 1988: 448). Finally, he enters Shillukland, settles
his followers, brings over existing inhabitants, even—in many stories—discov-
