onkings Read online

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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

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  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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  ON KINGS

  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.

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  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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  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.

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  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