Udier, Rumbek, South Sudan: Weak rays of early morning sun seep through the smoke rising from smouldering piles of dried dung, keeping flies away from the precious cattle. Children instinctively reach down for the white ash, a natural mosquito repellent, and rub it on their skin as women set to milking and men prepare for a long day seeking pasture at the peak of the dry season. The passing of centuries seems to have changed little in the ebb and flow of life for herders in remote South Sudan, whose cattle serve as a bank account and play a core role in every aspect of life. There has, however, been one devastating shift.
Instead of their traditional spears, cowherds now carry automatic rifles that have transformed cattle raids, a generations-old phenomenon, into massacres that have unleashed brutal cycles of vengeance. “It is good to have a weapon because it helps you to protect the cattle,” said Puk Duoth, 25, a herder from a camp outside the northeastern village of Udier. While South Sudan’s elites signed a power-sharing truce in September 2018, cattle raids have worsened, highlighting the herculean task required to resolve local conflicts in a society shattered by war.
According to the UN peacekeeping mission UNMISS, 218 members of herder communities were killed in January in tit-for-tat attacks — almost three times the toll of 73 in the four months from October 2017 to January 2018.
Observers blame a deadly cocktail of factors for the rising body count: a breakdown of law and order in the war-torn nation, an influx of guns and inflation in the bride price — paid in cattle.
In these parts, cows are everything. In the culture of the Nuer and Dinka peoples — South Sudan’s largest herder communities — boys are named after a favoured bull, and songs are written to glorify the long-horned beasts.
“If you are sick, then the cow can be sold and the money used for treatment,” says Beny Chuer, a Dinka chief from Amading camp outside the central city of Rumbek — one of the areas worst affected by raids and revenge killings.
“If a mother dies leaving a small baby, that child will live because a cow will be milked to feed it.”
Cattle is currency — each head worth about $500 (440 euros). The more a man owns, the more admiration he garners.
“If you are sitting in a community meeting and you are talking rubbish, but people know you have many cows, you will be honoured,” said Peter Machar, of the NGO Saferworld working on local conflicts.
In his 1940 study of the Nuer people, British anthropologist Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard found this single-minded preoccupation frustrating in much of his research efforts. — AFP
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