Reading: Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship'

There's been a bit of a delay in posting while I carefully lower my expectations of colonialist morality (I'd thought they were pretty low already, actually, but it seems I was being unduly optimistic). The first reason for this is Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, which I'm about a third of the way through at the moment. So far it's excellent and should probably be mandatory reading for anyone who's the slightest bit interested in European imperialism.

The second reason is Cherry Leonardi's 'Violence, Sacrifice and Chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan' (2007, Africa, 77: 4, pp.535-558). Let's kick off with some anecdotes:

"Without any preliminary enquiry, the sheikh was seized and severely beaten, the Officer himself taking a leading part in belabouring the unfortunate man on the head, back or legs, indiscriminately. Having been thus treated he was ordered to show where the game was to be found." (p.544)

When Belgian soldiers arrived in the early 20th century, many local people ran and hid in local caves. Awate, wife of the local rain chief, went out with her child to confront the Belgians. Possibly she believed that a female negotiator would be more likely to be treated peacefully. She was held hostage for a while, but her husband negotiated her release. She went back to her community with a dead child and both hands amputated. It's not clear why the Belgians did this (p.545).

Lasu was a chief from the early twentieth century who is still famous in the area today for his courage and 'stubbornness' (this apparently means his commitment to resisting the demands of the colonial authorities). Leonardi interviewed a Headman about the outcome of one altercation between Lasu and the authorities (although it's not clear what the cause of the disagreement). The Headman reported that "when the French [Belgians] came they were beating Lasu, and they smeared his face with honey and burnt it with fire, but still he persevered." (p.545)

Taking that into consideration- Leonardi's essay is mainly about some modern-day local politics involving the question of what it means to be a chief in Southern Sudan. Chiefs have been criticised by some observers who would prefer a form of local government which is more democratic and/or more sympathetic to values like women's rights (p.538, 553). They've also been criticised on the basis that they're an artefact of colonialism (since the person who colonials decide must be the 'chief of the local natives' is rarely the person who actually held the leading political position before the colonials showed up, and since the chiefs generally strive to pass their office on to their descendants, the upshot is that the lineages which are currently politically powerful are quite different to those who were politically powerful in the time pre-colonial period) (p.536). In addition, many chiefs have played some role in assisting the SPLM (Sudanese People's Liberation Movement) in torturing political opponents (e.g. by allowing their own houses to be used as torture chambers) (p.535, 543).

But, as Leonardi points out, the picture is a bit more complicated than that. The role of chiefs, in general, has been to mediate between ordinary villagers and whichever set of people are currently in charge of Sudanese government (the latter being referred by villagers as the gela- the word used to mean 'white people', but now it also encompasses anyone associated with military, uniforms, offices etc. It sounds like generally it also implies 'urban person', but the rural SPLM guerrillas are referred to as 'the gela of the bush'. See p.540-1).

Basically, the ideal chief is often emically seen as someone who may not be able to make the gela go away, or convince them to stop enforcing hated policies, but who is at least able to reduce the amount of direct contact between the gela and the villagers (and hence reduce the amount of direct violence that the former are able to inflict on the latter). For example, chiefs may offer to personally collect food from villagers for SPLM troops, and then invite local SPLM leaders to dinner at their own house. As one interviewee explained to Leonardi, "if they [SPLM] came to you for food, you quickly collected the food from the people and gave it to them while they are seated with you, because if they entered the village, they would do damages, raping, robbing" (p.542).

But this direct contact with the gela is a double-edged sword for chiefs. On the one hand, it can sometimes bring them privileges, like the ability to take (limited) control of local politics and pass political office on to their sons. On the other hand, chiefs have often been assaulted or even killed by the gela. Also, even if local people agree in an abstract sense that their chief is a necessary buffer between themselves and the gela, they are unlikely to bear massively warm feelings towards the person who interacts with the gela so much, and who's personally responsible for collecting taxes and telling people that their sons have just been conscripted into the gela army (p.543).

This leads to a situation where the person who winds up being chief is often someone who was previously a pretty low-status figure. The pre-colonial political establishment figures were reluctant to sign up for a job which meant risking torture, so the responsibility gets passed on to someone lower-status (p.545). It sounds as though a similar process has been seen with Kenyan Kipsigis chiefs (p.548). Theoretically, this new chief can then establish their own hereditary lineage of political leaders- although in practice, their descendants are often reluctant to accept the job, since they've seen first hand how much danger it puts people in (p.546).

It sounds like at the time when Leonardi was interviewing, the level of violence had dropped down from where it had been a few years previously, and refugees were starting to return to their homes. This led to tension involving people who felt like the current 'chiefs' had served their purpose as a short-term emergency buffer against the SPLM, and so the village could return to being led by the descendants of older ruling lineages (lineages founded by a previous generation of chiefs). Others argued that the current chiefs deserved to keep their positions, since their power had been 'bought in blood'. One elderly woman offered a challenge to anyone who wanted to claim the leadership role for themselves: "Count out your dead people who were slaughtered, through whom the chiefship was obtained! Count your dead ones, your blood poured!" (p.546). Leonardi refers to this as a conflict between "blood descent or blood poured" (p.548) as models of political succession.

(Oh, and while we're on the topic- Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, has just been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. It sounds like he's unlikely to actually get prosecuted in the near future. He's also a candidate in the presidential election that's been scheduled for this year- planned as Sudan's first democratic election with multiple parties participating for nine years.)

'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' part 2

Leonardi makes a really nice point here by stressing the fact that knowledge-dissemination is sometimes going to be perceived in a morally negative light. By which I mean: I get the impression that when it comes to magic practiced by colonised populations, the tendency is just to say that "magic = political resistance" (often with an implicit "and resistance to imperial authorities is always something that we as academics should sympathise with" tacked on). I think the 'magic as resistance' viewpoint is an interesting one, but it's an idea that needs to be developed a bit rather than just being the throwaway comment that it sometimes ends up being. In particular, we need to clarify what section of the colonised population is trying to use any particular type of magic to improve their position, and whether this is something which other sections of the colonised population approve of.

Caveat: off the top of my head, I can't think of any specific sources which I would say suffer from this problem, so I may be exaggerating the issue.

Leonardi argues that poisoning during the colonial period was something which may have been emically linked to colonialism (i.e., it sounds like the Kuku people of colonial-era Kajo Kaji may have seen poisonings as somehow being linked or similar to the disruptive practices of the colonial authorities). For example, she notes a 1939 case in which a poisoning attempt seems to have involved writing an Islamic charm on something, then washing the ink back into the ink bottle and painting it onto the body of a sleeping victim (p.44, 47). Leonardi argues that "the colonial economy was thus generating new opportunities for earning wealth, embodied in the new medium of cash, and which required and imparted new kinds of knowledge. The alleged poison in the ink bottle from the police station was a powerful symbol of such knowledge."

Leonardi also thinks that the problems which accompanied colonialism may have been emically interpreted as a type of poisoning. For example, it sounds like human and animal fertility rates may have fallen under colonialism, due to several colonial policies (in particular, the practice of relocating entire indigenous settlements in order to reduce the risk of sleeping sickness- but also other stuff like the economic changes which encouraged individual men to move away from their home settlements, increasing the chances that they would get STDs, etc.) (p.43, 46). In addition, the colonial authorities responded to outbreaks of sleeping sickness and meningitus with medical exams and treatments that were often very painful (e.g. lumbar punctures, or atoxyl injections- the latter carries a risk of blindness and death). Colonial sources from this period report that some members of the indigenous population linked these procedures to poison (p.43). Under these conditions of falling fertility, Leonardi thinks it's interesting that women who refused to inherit their mother's poisoning practices were said to be threatened with sterility (p.46). You could see this as an emic perception that as the community's overall fitness level falls, individual people will become more willing to be ruthless in pursuit of their own fertility (although I'm not sure if there's any data to support that idea).

I'd personally like a bit more information about the extent of our knowledge of emic attitudes from this period (e.g. do we know whether any Kuku explicitly linked the 1937 poisoning case to the idea that the poisoner had been influenced by his participation in the new wage-economy? Obviously there were space constraints on this essay, ) But it's an interesting counterpoint to the assumption that magical techniques must be age-old traditions (or at least represent a sort of resistance to modernity).

Another really interesting point made here by Leonardi is the stress on the fact that knowledge-dissemination is often going to be seen in a morally neutral light. She notes that knowledge "has been shown to be a key resource in older political economies of pre-colonial patronage and survival... [This risks treating] knowledge as a positive resource without exploring its moral ambiguity and the debates over its composition within a community" (p.36).

I'm reminded here of Barth's really great paper on the idea of 'gurus' and 'conjurers' as different models of knowledge acquisition*. He argues that, basically, there are some cultural contexts where knowledgeable people gain prestige by trying to disseminate their knowledge to anyone who will listen. This is the dominant model in the modern West, seen in various forms (like Christian preaching, academia, the mass media, etc). But there are other cultures which have traditionally been dominated by the conjurer model, where knowledgeable people gain prestige by hoarding their knowledge and only doling it out slowly to a select few students (who are often expected to endure difficult initiation rituals). If people from a guru-dominant culture run across people from a conjurer-dominant culture, then we can expect tensions (e.g. anthropologists persuade a local religious specialist to teach them the details of some secret rituals. The ritualist assumes that the anthropologist will automatically see the benefits of keeping this knowledge secret from all except a select few- when in fact, the action which benefits the anthropologist most is actually to run off and publish the ritual in order to demonstrate to their colleagues how learned they are).

From Leonardi's description (and the stuff which Evans-Pritchard wrote about Zande 'secret societies'), it sounds like pre-colonial Sudanese cultures probably leaned closer towards the 'conjurer' end of the scale with regards to poison and magic (but not as close as the New Guinean societies which Barth uses as his archetype of a conjurer-dominant culture). That is, magical knowledge was seen as something secretive which always carried a price, but that price was relatively low (i.e. it was something that people could buy relatively easily, without having to go through years of arduous study or multiple painful initiations- not if I'm remembering Evans-Pritchard right, anyway).

It sounds like this meant that specific poisons and magical techniques were in higher demand when they were known by fewer people. This then creates an incentive for people to import exotic new poisons from foreign cultures (p.37-8).

One question: if people were interested in importing foreign poisons, and believed that the colonial authorities were in some sense 'poisoning' the people of Kajo Kaji, then is it worth asking whether anyone tried to acquire the knowledge of British-style poison for themselves? For example, if British medical procedures were seen as potentially poisonous, did anyone try to appropriate these poisons for use against their enemies? Leonardi does mention that "an overturned fertilizer lorry has rendered one [Sudanese] village notorious for poisoning" (p.35).

A few other random interesting points:

• The idea of witch hunts as an 'irrational' response to community stress was an emic belief of the colonial officers, as well being as a popular etic theory today (p.43)

• There are some parallels between the Kuku fear of poisoners and the fear which other communities have experienced over cannibals (which was also present at Kajo Kaji, but not as strong). Leonardi speculates that this is because Kajo Kaji had experienced relatively few problems with slave traders- so their fear was less that people would be abducted and 'eaten', more that their young men would go away to earn a wage and come back with some sort of dangerous knowledge (like new poisons, or like the kind of skills which were in high demand from the colonial authorities and so could be used to displace the authority of people with traditionally high-prestige skillsets, like the rain priests) (p.46).

• The fact that the secular colonial authorities were unwilling to support the idea of poisonings (for fear of endorsing superstition and thereby causing mass hysteria) may have helped push some Kuku people towards Christianity- on the basis that many missionaries were at least willing to seriously engage with the idea of hidden evil lurking within communities (in the form of Satanic influence) (p.50).

*Barth, Fredrik, 1990, 'The Guru and the Conjurer: transactions in knowledge and the shaping of culture in Southeast Asia and Melanesia', Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653

Reading: 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle' by Cherry Leonardi

Leonardi, Cherry, 2007, 'The Poison in the Ink Bottle: poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan', Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1:1, pp.34-56


This is a really interesting article, but it's a lot to assimilate at once (I think this is probably because it's from the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and so makes the reasonable assumption that people reading it already have a decent grasp of Eastern African history- that probably makes it easier to chunk the rest of the argument).

The article's a response to the body of work surrounding the idea that colonised peoples will often attempt to use magic as a means of political resistance. This is an interesting way to look at the issue, and Leonardi gets a lot of mileage out of it- but she also notes limitations in the way the idea is typically applied, and suggests a new angle we could consider.

Let's start off with Evans-Pritchard's witchcraft vs sorcery framework. Evans-Pritchard (also working in Sudan, though with different ethnic groups and time periods than Leonardi) argued that some cultures draw an important distinction between two kind of magic, which for convenience he labelled 'witchcraft' and 'sorcery'. He defined 'witchcraft' as being basically psychic-style powers which come from within the witch (e.g. the Azande, one of the ethnic groups he studied, held that certain people are born with a special organ inside them, and this gives them the ability to curse people). Conversely, he defined 'sorcery' as magical techniques which involve using tools or substances external to the individual (as with traditions like alchemy and herbalism). These definitions are an endless source of frustration to those of us sad people who grew up on stuff like Pratchett and Dungeons and Dragons (which define 'sorcery' as something very much internal to the individual and 'witchcraft' as something which usually benefits from external tools); but as academic terms they're a useful starting point.

Obviously, as with any other binary dichotomy in the social sciences, it's going to be more complicated than that in practice. For example, in Kajo Kaji (the part of Sudan Leonardi studied), people don't seem to have been very worried about Azande-style witchcraft (i.e., the idea that if someone feels resentful enough towards you, they can somehow cause you to suffer from bad luck even if they don't consciously choose to hurt you). Instead, they were concerned about poisoners: people who take some dangerous external substance and apply it to someone else's food or skin in order to kill them.

So, on the face of things, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of 'sorcery'. But the waters are muddied by the fact that the local Kuku people apparently believed that the propensity to poison is to some extent inborn or fixed- that is, certain individuals or families just have a sort of inbuilt tendency to try to poison people. Such people were thought to be mostly women- so, while men were sometimes also accused of poisoning, it was believed "that certain women have, and pass on to their daughters, a propensity to poison which is inborn, involuntary and indiscriminate". Such women, however, were believed to require access to means and opportunity in order to satisfy this inbuilt tendency- one British DC reports that Kuku women learned to poison after hearing "tales about the Relli, a tribe away to the south,notorious for their poisonous sorceries" (p.37). Other reports state that knowledge of the art of nyanya poisoning was passed from mother to daughter, "with the threat that if a daughter refused to practise she would become infertile" (p.45).

This is interesting, and I'm wondering how this set of beliefs was perceived by the British (given that we're concerned with the 1930s, and so the idea that certain families or ethnic groups just had an inborn tendency towards malice was kind of a hot topic at the time). Leonardi reports that reports written by the colonisers "largely accepted that women at least intended to poison", even if they were sceptical that local poisoning techniques really worked (p.37). Leonardi goes on to say that this attitude "is unsurprising in the context of the belief among officials that native women were ‘whores at heart’ [...] Female poisoners were reported to poison only the ‘menfolk’, using this threat in the ‘battle of the sexes’. Officials puzzled by their apparent willingness to confess to poisoning recognised that, ‘the power wielded by a reputed poisoner is a bait she cannot resist’." (p.42)

Kuku poisoning cases are an ambiguous category in another way too- while they seem to fill pretty similar social niches as 'sorcery' (and to some extent 'witchcraft' as well), they're not always an overtly 'magical' thing. This made it difficult for the colonial legal system to work out how to deal with them. In the West, we're used to drawing the distinction between 'real' poisons (which can be recognised via forensic analysis) and 'magical' substances (which are said to harm people by means outside any known scientific principle). The legal system is very interested in accusations involving the former, not interested at all in accusations involving the latter. This distinction doesn't seem to have existed in traditional Kuku cultures. This created ambiguity over the role of the colonial courts.

Lots more stuff going on here, so I think I'll shunt responsibility onto my future self. Tune in for part 2!