Listen to the Voice of Wutnyang Gatkek: An Armed Nuer Prophet of Peace

Copyright © 2023 Sharon E. Hutchinson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Prophet Wutnyang Gatkek,1992 in Ketbek.

Photo by Sharon E. Hutchinson

The renowned Nuer Prophet Wutnyang Gatkek gained public recognition of his divinely sanction powers in the late 1980s by demonstrating his abilities to curse and bless others with his words. Between 1988 and his death just over a decade later, Wutnyang rose to become the most charismatic and powerful Nuer prophet to have emerged during the lengthy course of Sudan’s, second, north/south civil war (1983-2005). During his brief lifetime, the Prophet Wutnyang attracted several thousand loyal followers, many of whom were armed Nuer men and boys. Many hundreds of these armed supporters would accompany the Prophet as he journeyed for various missions between distant Nuer communities. Nearly all of them wore identical white knee-length jallabiyas and were known by Wutnyang and others during the early 1990s as his “white soldiers” (dec in bor). Historically, this was the first instance of a socio-cultural institution that continued to evolve in novel ways under the spiritual direction of a variety of different Nuer prophets that emerged long after Wutnyang’s death during later periods of regional violence and civil warfare.

Following a tragic 1991 splitting of the SPLA/SPLM into two rival southern military factions, Wutnyang managed to convince several regional Nuer commanders who had allied themselves with the Khartoum Government—including a mercurial Bul Nuer commander named Paulino Matiep—to switch sides and join forces with Riek Machar’s spin-off “SPLA-Nasir Faction,” as distinct from the “SPLA-Torit/Mainstream SPLA Faction” commanded by the SPLA’s long-standing, Commander-in-Chief, John Garang. Although this military consolidation of Nuer military forces under the commands of Machar and Matiep was short-lived, Wutnyang’s pivotal role in its creation was unprecedented and widely regarded among Nuer men and women at the time as a diplomatic coup in favor intra-regional Nuer peace.

From the perspective of John Garang’s “SPLA Torit-faction” forces, however, Wutnyang and his “white soldiers” were anything but “peace-makers.” They were reviled for having participated, together with Machar’s regular “SPLA-Nasir” soldiers, in an unprovoked and devastatingly brutal attack on a wide swath of ordinary Dinka villages and cattle camps in Garang’s home region of Bor, Jonglei State, just two months after the SPLA’s 1991 rupture. For these reasons, Wutnyang’s complex historical legacy as an “armed prophet of peace” to have emerged at the height of a much broader and devastating civil war remains controversial among South Sudanese men and women to this day.

When I first interviewed Wutnyang Gatkek in Ketbek, Northern Upper Nile State, in early June 1992, he appeared to be a young man in his mid-to-late twenties. Dressed in a blue jellabiya and a white rosary necklace, complete with a cross, Wutnyang maintained that there was no inherent tension or conflict between his divinity’s powers and those worshipped by local Nuer Christian converts. He encouraged people to continue praying in their churches at the same time as he stressed the complementary power and truth of his prophetic powers. Operating as a one-man peripatetic court, he devoted most of his waking hours when I knew him to resolving the personal problems and disputes brought to him each day by scores of people seeking his spiritual guidance. Unlike other Nuer prophets that I have met and interviewed, Wutnyang was not known to lapse into deep states of possession. Nor had he revealed any divinely inspired songs of his own. Indeed, he struck me as a calm and mild-mannered man, whose spiritual powers to both curse or bless others nevertheless inspired widespread fear and respect.

When I knew him, Wutnyang was engaged in an extensive public campaign to reduce local dependence on UN relief supplies. In a series of public addresses, Wutnyang urged local citizens to reject “the shameful status of being refugees in their own lands” by cultivating and working harder to life themselves out of poverty. “If you think the United Nations is helping you to get rich, then you are blind and underdeveloped! The White Man is helping only a little and he is doing something beneficial to him—he can take something [oil] from your ground here that can help him for centuries!”

During this same period, Wutnyang’s many supporters built him an enormous, cross-shaped luak or byre, used as a meeting house, as may be seen in the two photos taken by the author and included in this Historical Module.

A more in-depth discussion of Wutnyang’s spiritual activities and pivotal impact on the course of Sudan’s second civil war may be found in the 2023 edition of Nuer Dilemmas (pp. 338-350). For the moment, I would like to provide an opportunity for visitors to this website to listen to the voice of the Prophet Wutnyang himself, recorded during a public address he gave in Ketbek in June 1992 to several thousand Nuer women and men who had gathered to hear him. This recording was the shortest and, in many ways, the least significant of three major public addresses he delivered that month. However, it is the only full recording of Wutnyang’s three public speeches in my possession. It captures the somewhat chaotic atmosphere of Wutnyang's large community assemblies during an especially tense time in Sudan’s long and grueling second civil war. This audio-recording includes Wutnyang’s speech in the Nuer language as well as a simultaneous translation of it into Sudanese Arabic.

The Cross-shaped Byre/Meeting House built for the Prophet Wutnyang in Ketbek, 1992.

Photograph taken by Dr. Sharon E. Hutchinson