A study of Nuer expansionism with implications for research into the relationship between social and material causes of change

The documents edited here cover the significant events in the contact, conquest, and pacification of the Nuer from 1898 to 1930. They contain some of the earliest 20th-century ethnographic descriptions of the Nuer and their Dinka and Mabaan neighbors. Together these sources provide a historical context for further understanding Evans-Pritchard's ethnography, as well as a more detailed understanding of the events that led to incorporation of the Nuer into the colonial state.

This is the first major study of the Nuer based on primary research since Evans-Pritchard's classic Nuer Religion. It is also the first full-length historical study of indigenous African prophets operating outside the context of the world's main religions, and as such builds on Evans-Pritchard's pioneering work in promoting collaboration and dialogue between the disciplines of anthropology and history. Prophets first emerged as significant figures among the Nuer in the nineteenth century. They fashioned the religious idiom of prophecy from a range of spiritual ideas, and enunciated the social principles which broadened and sustained a moral community across political and ethnic boundaries. Douglas Johnson argues that, contrary to the standard anthropological interpretation, the major prophets' lasting contribution was their vision of peace, not their role in war. This vision is particularly relevant today, and the book concludes with a detailed discussion of events in the Sudan since independence in 1956, describing how modern Nuer, and many other southern Sudanese, still find the message of the nineteenth-century prophets relevant to their experiences in the current civil war.

For twenty years, southern Sudan has been the site of a tragic and brutal civil war, pitting the northern-based Arab and Islamic government against rebels in African marginalized areas, especially the south. More than two million people have died and four million have been displaced as a result. In 1999, anew element radically changed the war: Sudanese oil, located in the south, was firs exported by the central government. The human price of this bonanza is immeasurable. The government, using oil revenues and aided by co-opted southerners, rained a scorched earth campaign of mass displacement, bombing, and terror on the agro-pastoral southern civilians living in and near the oil zones. The displaced number in the hundreds of thousands.