by Faun Rice
very purposes of royal power.
35. This sort of behavior was occasionally noted even in colonial times. According to
P. P. Howell and W. P. G. Thomson (1946: 76), there used to be ceremonial drums
kept in Fashoda for royal funerals with special guardians, until reth Fafiti, annoyed
that his predecessor had not used them to honor the previous reth, threw them in
the Nile.
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ON KINGS
RETURN TO FASHODA
At this point we can return to those institutions themselves.
First of all, a word about the role of violence. Godfrey Lienhardt (1952) in-
sists Nyikang (and, hence, the king) has to be seen only as a continuation of the
Shilluk conception of God. God is ordinarily seen as neither good nor evil; any-
thing extraordinary contains a spark of the divine; above all, God is the source of
life, strength, and intelligence in the universe. Similarly, according to Lienhardt,
Nyikang is the source of Shilluk custom, but not, necessarily, of a system of eth-
ics; and kings—who are referred to as “children of God”—were admired above
all for their cleverness, and for the ruthless ingenuity with which they played
the game of power.36 Royals regularly slaughtered their brothers and cousins in
preemptive strikes; assassination and betrayal was normal and expected; suc-
cessful conspirators were admired. Lienhardt concludes that intelligence and
success (the latter typically reflected in prosperity) are the main social values:
“Kings, and all others inspired by juok [divinity], are sacred because they mani-
fest divine energy and knowledge, and they do so by being strong, cunning, and
successful, as well as appearing to be in closer touch with the superhuman than
ordinary men” (1952: 160; so too Schnepel 1988: 449).
All of these ideas are definitely there in the source material, but taken in
isolation this is a bit deceptive. The situation appears to have been rather more
complicated. God was also spoken of as the source of justice, the last resort of
the poor and unfortunate. The king of course dispensed justice as well. The ap-
parent paradox is, as I’ve emphasized, typical of divine kingship: the king, like
God, stands outside any moral order in order to be able to bring one into being.
Still, while a prince who successfully lured potential rivals to a feast and then
massacred them all might be admired for his cunning, this was hardly the way
ordinary people were expected to behave. Nothing in the literature suggests that
if a commoner, or even a member of the royal clan who was not a prince, decided
to act in a similar fashion to head off later quarrels over his father’s cattle, this
would be regarded as anything but reprehensible—by the king (if the matter
was brought before him) or by anybody else. It was, rather, as if ruthlessness
36. Schnepel (1991) seems to agree with Lienhardt when he argues that the ingenious
application of violence was valued in itself—or, at least, valued insofar as it was seen
to contribute to the “vitality” of the Shilluk nation as a whole.
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
103
of this sort was to be limited to the royal sphere, and the royal sphere carefully
contained and delimited from ordinary life—in part for that very reason.
Father Crazzolara, for instance, insists that this was precisely what the com-
moner chiefs (called Jago) who elected the king wanted: to ensure that every-
thing surrounding kings and princes remained shrouded in mystery, so that it
had no effect on ordinary life.
Disputes and intrigues among members of the royal family were known to exist
and were shared by the great Jagos and their councilors, but seldom affected the
people at large. . . . Strifes and murders in the higher social ranks were settled
among the great men, in great secrecy, and could never imperil the unity of the
country. (Crazzolara 1951: 129)
Indeed, he observed, most ordinary Shilluk would never have dreamed of ap-
proaching the royal residence at Fashoda, and when the king did set out on a
journey, “most people used to go into hiding or keep out of his path; girls espe-
cially do so” (ibid.: 139).
At the same time, the organization of the kingship those chiefs upheld, with
no fixed rule of succession, but, rather, a year-long interregnum during which
dozens of potential candidates were expected to jockey for position, plot and in-
trigue against each other, more or less guaranteed that only very clever, and very
ruthless, men could have much chance of becoming reth. It also guaranteed that
the violence on which the royal office was founded on always remained explicit,
that reths were never too far removed from the simple bandit-kings from which
they were presumably descended.
Everything is happening as if the reth’s subjects were resisting both the in-
stitutionalization of power, and the euphemization of power that seems to in-
evitably accompany it. Power remained predatory. Take, for example, the matter
of tribute. The king’s immediate power was based in the Bang Reth, his personal
retainers, a collection of men cut off from their own communities: orphans,
criminals, madmen, prisoners taken in war. He provided them with cattle from
his herds, along with ornaments and other booty; they minded his cattle, ac-
companied royal children, acted as spies, and accompanied him on raids against
Arab or Dinka neighbors. They did not, however, collect tribute. According to
one colonial source, there was no regular system for exacting tribute at all. In-
stead, the king would intervene in feuds between communities that had resisted
his attempts at mediation:
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ON KINGS
The Reths . . . were extremely rich in cattle. They acquired these largely in the
following way. Whenever one settlement waged unjustified war upon another
or refused repeatedly to obey his order, the Reth would raise as a “royal levy”
the adjacent settlements, who would go and drive off the malefactors’ cattle and
burn their villages. The strength of the levy would vary with the readily calculat-
able strength of the opposition but a good margin of safety would be allowed to
ensure that the levy would win. It is said that such levies were in fact seldom re-
sisted, the victim being glad to save their skins at the cost of most of their cattle.
The participants in the levy got a percentage of the cattle taken but the majority
went to the Reth. (Pumphrey 1941: 12; cf. Evans-Pritchard 1948: 15–16)
Significantly, it was precisely in the 1840s, when Shilluk kings, emboldened by
an alliance with foreign merchants, began trying to move beyond raiding and
create a systematic apparatus for the extraction of tribute, that many ordinary
Shilluk began to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the institution of kingship
entirely, and to throw in their lot with a different set of predatory freebooters
(Mercer 1971: 423–24). As it turned out, the results were catastrophic. The Arab
slave-traders with whom they aligned themselves turned out to be far more
ruthless and destructive than anything they had previously encountered. But
the pattern remains clear. As in the stories a
bout the mar, popular resistance
appeared at exactly the point where royal power tried to move beyond mere
predatory raiding, and to formally institutionalize itself.
The kings’ rather unsavory retainers lived at the margins of Fashoda. Its
center was composed of his own compound, and the houses of his wives. All
sorts of dark rumors surrounded the place. According to Seligman’s account,
quoted near-verbatim in The golden bough:
During the day the king surrounded himself with his friends and bodyguards,
and an aspirant to the throne could hardly hope to cut his way through them
and strike home. It was otherwise at night. For then the guards were dismissed
and the king was alone in his enclosure with his favourite wives, and there was
no man near to defend him except a few herdsmen, whose huts stood a little way
off. The hours of darkness were therefore the season of peril for the king. It is
said that he used to pass them in constant watchfulness, prowling round his huts
fully armed, peeping into the blackest shadows, or himself standing silent and
alert, like a sentinel on duty, in some dark corner. When at last his rival appeared,
the fight would take place in grim silence, broken only by the clash of spears and
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
105
shields, for it was a point of honour with the king not to call the herdsmen to his
assistance. (Frazer 1911a: 22; Fraser 1990: 200–201)
This was to become one of Frazer’s more famous romantic images, but in the
original edition, it was immediately followed by a footnote explaining that
Seligman also emphasized that “in the present day and perhaps for the whole
of the historical period” succession by ritual combat “has been superseded by
the ceremonial killing of the king” (Frazer 1911a: 22 n. 1). This would suggest
we are not dealing with a Victorian fantasy here—or not only that—but with a
Shilluk one, a legend about the ancient past.37 Even here things are confusing:
Seligman also contradicts himself by simultaneously insisting (i.e., 1911: 222;
also Hofmayr 1925: 175) that even in his own day, reths did tend to sleep during
the day and keep armed vigil at night, and that the drowsy behavior of the reth,
the one time he did meet one, would appear to confirm this. In fact, such stories
seem to be typical of the mysteries surrounding royalty. Very few people knew
what really went on at Fashoda, and everything concerning kings was tinged
with doubt and peril.38
All evidence suggests that, except perhaps during periods of civil unrest
or when the reth had concrete evidence of some particular conspiracy, life in
Fashoda was distinctly more relaxed. True, many observers do remark on the
eerie quiet of the place, much in contrast with other Shilluk settlements. But
this is for an entirely different reason: Fashoda was entirely lacking in children
(e.g., Riad 1959: 197). As the reader will recall, not only was the settlement oc-
cupied almost entirely by women, the king’s wives were sent back to their natal
37. Curiously, Evans-Pritchard (1948) ended up arguing exactly the opposite: that
stories of ritual king-killing were the myth, and that in most cases one was really
dealing with assassinations or rebellions. Mohammed Riad (1959: 171–77),
however, went through all existing historical information and could only find two
examples of important rebellions in all Shilluk history, only one of which was fully
successful. Of twenty-six historical kings, he noted, fifteen “surely met their death
in the ceremonial way” (ibid.: 176). Of the others, two were killed in war, three
executed by the government in Khartoum, and six died of causes unknown. On
the other hand, he includes the four known cases of murder by rival princes as
ceremonial deaths, which does rather muddy the picture. At least it makes clear this
did happen, but only rarely.
38. On both sides: Hofmayr writes “at night he [the Reth] is awake and walks heavily
armed around the village. His hand is full of spears and rifles. Whoever comes close
to him is doomed” (1925: 175, in Schnepel 1991: 50).
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ON KINGS
villages in order to give birth, and royal children were not raised in Fashoda. It
was a place where there was sex, but no biological reproduction, no nursing, no
child-rearing—but also, no old age, grave illness or natural death, since the king
was not allowed to grow frail and pass away in the normal fashion, and his wives
normally returned to their parents’ settlements before they grew very old.
All of this very much recalls the villages described by Simonse further to the
south, where birth and killing—or anything involving the spilling of blood—
were considered “hot,” violent, dangerous activities which should be kept en-
tirely outside the confines of inhabited space. Even sacrificed animals had to be,
like the Shilluk reth, smothered so that no blood was spilled. These restrictions
were especially severe during the agricultural season, since they were the key to
ensuring rain. Rain, in turn, was the temporary restoration of that happy con-
junction of heaven and earth that was severed in the beginning of time. It seems
hardly coincidental, then, that almost all of the reth’s ritual responsibilities in-
volved either presiding over ceremonies appealing to Nyikang to send the rains,
or conducting harvest rituals (Oyler 1918b: 285–86; C. G. Seligman and B. Z.
Seligman 1932: 80–82)—or even, that it was considered a matter of principle
that the king and his wives did work at least a few symbolic fields, and followed
the same agricultural cycles as everybody else (Riad 1959: 196).39
These, at any rate, were the things that an ordinary Shilluk was likely to
actually know about Fashoda. The overall picture seems clear. Fashoda was a
little image of heaven. It was the closest one could come, in these latter days,
to a restoration of the primal unity which preceded the separation of the earth
and heaven. It was a place whose inhabitants experience neither birth nor death,
although they do enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, ease and abundance (there
was rumored to be a storehouse of plundered wealth and certain clans were
charged with periodically bringing the reth tasty morsels), and also engaged in
39. I might add here that many of the more exotic-seeming practices of the capital
seem to be adopted from ordinary Shilluk practice. All women, for example, were
expected to leave their husbands and return to their natal villages in the sixth month
of pregnancy (C. G. Seligman and B. Z. Seligman 1932: 69)—though in the case of
nonroyals, they returned with their baby shortly after giving birth—and old people
deemed to be suffering unduly from incurable conditions were often “helped to die”
(Hofmayr 1925: 299). According to Howell, even the effigies had a kind of demotic
precedent, since if someone dies far from home, her kin can hold a ceremony to pass
her soul to a stick of ambatch, which is also the wood used to make effigies, so that
it can be buried in her stead (P. P. Howell 1952a: 159; see also Oyler 1918b: 291).
THE DIVINE KINGSHIP OF THE SHILLUK
107
agricultur
al production—if, like the original couple, Garang and Abuk, only just
a little bit.
Fashoda is, then, an undoing of the dilemma of the human condition. Obvi-
ously, it could only be a partial, provisional one. The Shilluk reth was, as Burkhard
Schnepel aptly put it (1995), “temporarily immortal.” He was Nyikang, but he
was also not Nyikang; Nyikang was God, but Nyikang was also not God. And
even this limited degree of perfection could only be brought about by a complex
play of balanced antagonism that would inevitably engulf him in the end.
THE INSTALLATION RITUAL: DESCRIPTION
All of this, I think, gives us the tools with which to interpret the famous Shilluk
installation ceremonies.
One must bear in mind here that this ritual was one of the few occasions
during which an ordinary Shilluk was likely to actually see a reth (the others
were while he was administering justice, and, possibly, during raids or war).
Almost every clan played some role in the proceedings, whether in the prepara-
tion of rebuilding of royal dwellings beforehand, by bringing sacrificial animals
or regalia, or by presiding over certain stages of the rituals themselves. It was in
this sense the only real “national” ritual. The sense of popular participation was
made all the more lively since, the rituals being so endlessly complicated and
there usually having been such a long a time since they had last been performed,
each step would tend to be accompanied by animated debate by all concerned as
to what the correct procedure was.
When a king dies, he is not said to have died but to have “vanished,” or to
have “gone across the river”—much as was said of Nyikang. Normally, Nyikang
is immanent both in the person of the king and in an effigy kept in a temple in
the settlement of Akurwa, north of Fashoda. This effigy too is destroyed after a
king’s death. The reth’s body is conveyed to a sealed hut and left there for about
a year, or at least until it is certain that nothing remains but bones; at that point,
the Ororo will convey the skeleton to its permanent tomb in the reth’s natal
village, and conduct a public funeral dance. It is only afterwards that a new reth
can be installed.
This interim period, while the king’s body lies decomposing and Nyikang’s
