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the severing of the rope and people separating (Buxton 1963, 20–25). Among the Koman-speaking Uduk and Western Nilotic Mabaan of the Ethiopian foothills, the mythical tree has the Western Nilotic–sounding name “Birapinya,” echoing the Western Nilotic imperative for “come down,” for instance, biä piny in Shilluk and bir piny in Nuer. Its destruction has a more poignant ending. The tree is burned and people are stranded in the sky, all except those who are able to carry others on their backs as they jump down to earth. Caught between powerful kingdoms along the Sudan-Ethiopian borderland as they were, the Uduk have had the historical experience of being scattered by raiders: survival depended on mutual protection in common flight, but survivors lost all contact with those left behind (James 1979, 68–73). The Mandari and Uduk might have borrowed details of the myth from Western Nilotes, but they refashioned the themes to express different historical experiences. Yet the association of the tree with separation is found even among the Western Nilotic Jo-Luo of Bahr el-Ghazal. They locate the historical division between the ancestors of two major Luo groups at Wuncwei, “the place of the tamarind tree,” northeast of Tonj (Santandrea 1968, 114–15, 160–61).

      There are other explanations for segmentation and separation more rooted in everyday experience than in a mythical connection with the sky. A recurring motif repeated among the Jo-Luo, Shilluk, Anuak, Dinka, and Nuer; the Lotuho, Pari, and Bari of Equatoria; and even the Alur and Acholi of Uganda is the story of the lost spear and the stolen bead. The common theme is the breach of relations between neighbors or relatives. A borrowed spear is lost and the owner insists on the return of the exact same spear rather than its replacement, forcing the borrower to go to extreme lengths to retrieve it. The child of the spear’s owner is accused of swallowing a bead belonging to the borrower, who retaliates by insisting on the return of the exact same bead and the evisceration of the child. Because of these acts the groups of the two protagonists are unable to live together and part company (Lienhardt 1975, 221–33).

      The story is repeated in so many versions among so many societies over such a large area that it cannot, of course, be attributed to a historical event. It accounts, for instance, for the separation of Nyikang and Dimo, the founders of the respective Shilluk and Anuak royal dynasties, that some say took place at Wuncwei. As with the myths of the tree, the interpretation of the symbolism varies. For the Nilotic kingdoms—the Shilluk, Pari, Anuak, Acholi, Alur, and Lotuho—the myth represents dynastic politics, the spear and the bead becoming royal emblems with one branch of the royal house attempting to absorb or destroy the other. For the Dinka and Nuer, the sequence of events threatens to upset the balanced system of exchanges on which their segmentary political systems depend, alternating between the extremes of total assimilation of one group by another and total separation (Lienhardt 1975). For others, such as the Lokoya and Lopit in Equatoria, it accounts for the separation of related groups (Simonse 1992, 53, 303–6). Among the Bari the story explains the origin of a taboo between two clans (Beaton 1936, 114–15).

      The myths of the spear and the bead may be schematic versions of the historical experiences of dynastic rivalries or segmentary opposition, but there is a moral point that is of broader relevance to all communities within South Sudan today. In his analysis of these myths the anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt pointed out that “the common moral theme is obviously that getting your very own back, a kind of reciprocation without exchange, leads to the permanent alienation of neighbours so that they can never again live together as members of the same community” (1975, 216).

      There are other remembered causes of separation and migration that might in fact be rooted in historical events, though told in stereotypic forms. Given the importance of primary pastoral communities in the ancient history of the Nile Valley mentioned in chapter 2, it is not surprising that the peopling of the Nile Basin is often attributed to people following their cattle. Wandering bulls, thematically the opposite of trees as fixed points of communal origin, have had an actual as well as a mythical role in history.

      Fights between bulls of the same or neighboring herds are commonly recalled as the reason for lineages splitting up and moving apart, or for establishing the seniority of one chiefship over another (Evans-Pritchard 1940a, 33–34; F. Deng 1980, 269–70). They even figure in the foundation myths of kingdoms, and the founding of two royal capitals are attributed to wandering cattle. The first Funj king of what became the Muslim sultanate of Sinnar is said to have followed a bull from his home on Jebel Moya to the site of his new capital on the Blue Nile (Holt 1973, 76). Similarly Reth Tugo of the Shilluk followed his favorite hornless ox (cod in Shilluk) to the site near the White Nile that became known as Pachodo (Fashoda), “the village of the hornless ox” (Westermann 1970, 138). The Ngok Dinka adapted the Sinnar founding myth to explain their own migration from the region between the Niles to the Ngol river in what is now the disputed Abyei region between Sudan and South Sudan (F. Deng 1980, 256). Of these stories, probably only the founding of Pachodo can be considered historically true and datable to the end of the seventeenth century, but they are consistent not only with what we know of the transhumant patterns of movement of all cattle keepers in the Nile Basin but of the gradual penetration of southern Sudan by pastoral communities during the transition from wetter to drier periods.

      There are links to be made between different stories of migration, but weaving them all into one grand narrative has produced varying results. The closeness of the different Luo languages in eastern Africa suggests a very recent spreading of peoples and languages, but attempts to locate a Luo cradle land from different versions of the spear and the bead stories have produced no consensus. Father J. P. Crazzolara, who worked among Luo speakers in the southern Sudan and northern Uganda, located his cradle land along the border of the two countries. The Kenyan Luo historian B. A. Ogot placed his cradle land firmly in Kenya, while Evans-Pritchard and Simon Simonse, working in eastern Equatoria, postulated a Luo homeland there (Crazzolara 1951; Ogot 1967; Simonse 1992, 56–57). Tracing the itineraries of the Luo migrations through southern Sudan, the Great Lakes, and East Africa does at least highlight southern Sudan’s engagement with, rather than isolation from, neighboring regions and is why, for instance, a Kenyan Luo guest at the independence celebrations could say, “This is our home.” The itineraries are not necessarily only mythical. The Pari, an offshoot of the Anuak, established a route from lowland Ethiopia to Jebel Lafon in eastern Equatoria several centuries ago. It was through this route that they acted as middlemen in precolonial trade between western Ethiopia and the equatorial Nile, expanding their links in the nineteenth century to include the Great Lakes (Kurimoto 1995). The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) later followed this same route when infiltrating eastern Equatoria from its Ethiopian bases in the 1980s.

      The main historical point to emphasize here is that stories of migration do not tell the whole story, and possibly not even the most important story. People move, but not necessarily all at once. A people can expand its population and territory through the incorporation of smaller groups, through intermarriage, and through the adoption of individuals. Ethnic identity is not fixed; a person from one group can become a member of another. The clan histories of the Anuak, Pari, Bari, and Mandari, among others, record many with foreign origins (Evans-Pritchard 1940b, 31–33; Simonse 1992, 54–56; Buxton 1963, 18–19, 32–33; Leonardi 2013a, 22), and a number of Shilluk clan names are shared with more distant peoples (Westermann 1970, 128–33; Crazzolara 1951, 156–59; 1954, 391–92). Languages also spread, sometimes farther and faster than people. As Noel Stringham acutely observes, “‘Nilotic migrations’ had more to do with people changing who they were than where they were” (2016, chap. 1). The Western Nilotic words for village or territory, pa and pan, are found in a variety of forms (fa/fam/fan, and possibly ba/bam/ban) well beyond the current area inhabited by Western Nilotes: Fanyar in Kordofan, Basham in White Nile, Fazoqli and Bani Mayu in Blue Nile, and Bambashi, Fadasi, and Famaka in western Ethiopia. Mabaan is currently classed as a Western Nilotic language related to Shilluk, Dinka, and Nuer, yet the Mabaan are socially and culturally closer to their Koman-speaking Uduk neighbors (they are both matrilineal) than to the nearest Western Nilotic speakers (who are all patrilineal). The as yet unanswered question is: Are the Mabaan an offshoot of the ancestral Western Nilotes who were influenced by the surrounding Koman people, or are they Koman-speakers who adopted a Western Nilotic language? And could the answer be: a bit of both?

      There

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