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  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

  80

  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