‘Bringing what people want’: shrine politics among the Agar Dinka

Abstract

AbstractLarge shrines are built by Dinka in parts of the central southern Sudan. In early 1983, coinciding with the deepening political crisis which led to the current devastating civil war in Sudan, the byre of the divinity Mayual, a shrine of the Agar Dinka of southern Bahr al-Ghazal, was rebuilt by representatives of several subtribes with lands around the town of Rumbek.The byre shrine stood for the community of its rebuilders, a community that recognised the politico-religious centrality of the subclan Panamacot, the senior subclan of a group of religiously powerful subclans known as rordior, the sons women. The senior religious figure from Panamacot was the master of the byre. The master of the byre was also President of Rumbek Town Court, a secular office created by the government. Until his election in 1976 Agar had maintained that the institutions of religious leader and secular court official could not be combined in the same man.In late 1982 and early 1983 the imminent rebuilding of the shrine became the focus of a politico-religious dispute between the master of the byre and a divinely inspired rival from a different subclan. The dispute was a struggle for influence within the rebuilding community. The form and logic of the dispute were in part created by the particular nature of each man's religious abilities, which in turn derived from his possession by particular manifestations of Divinity, manifestations which imaged differing (but not distinct) areas of historically constituted experience and were intrinsic to the creation of that experience. A politico-religious crisis was created by the coming together of people's experience of the activities of different manifestations of Divinity and the differing abilities of each religious leader with experience of daily life, perceptions of the past, and fears about the way national and regional politics were unfolding. The episode demonstrated the way that, among Agar Dinka at least, divinely inspired leadership depends upon an interpretive deal continually negotiated between a leader and his followers, a deal in which all parties are speculating on the future in the light of both the present and the past.