South Sudan’s renewed violence has brought an unusual political prop to the center of the conflict: a sacred stick associated with Ngundeng Bong, a prophet whose legend includes a deadly thunderbolt and predictions tied by believers to a messianic Nuer leader. In the current struggle between President Salva Kiir and opposition leader Riek Machar, the dang’s reputation and symbolic authority are seen by many followers as more than folklore as fighting has intensified and authorities have ordered civilians to evacuate rebel-held towns.
According to the reporting, the dang has emerged as a contentious relic in the quarrel between Kiir and Machar, who both draw on the stick’s legacy in ways that shape loyalties. Machar’s supporters believe the prophecies identify a “gap-toothed, left-handed” man whom they say would become president, and they connect that description to Machar, while opponents have treated him as a target amid the belief that he holds the dang.
The article describes how the conflict that began after Kiir and Machar split in 2013 grew into a deadly civil war that left an estimated 400,000 people dead. It also says fighting again escalated along ethnic lines after a peace deal in 2018 collapsed, and it frames the current phase as particularly intense, with a general filmed urging government troops to “spare no lives.”
Spiritual motives are presented as a factor in how the conflict is understood on the ground. Mawal Marko, an independent researcher in Juba, said: “Very much of the conflict is linked to spirituality,” adding that people fighting, especially eastern Nuer, “you find so many fighting in the name of Ngundeng.” The reporting also notes South Sudanese mythology about cruelty, describing the Kiir-Machar struggle as the latest installment of the hatred Ngundeng himself witnessed and later sought to stop: Dinka against Nuer and Nuer against Dinka.
Ngundeng’s prophecies are tied to songs that some people play online while searching for revelations about the country’s fate. But Christopher Tounsel, a historian of greater Sudan who teaches at the University of Washington, cautioned that believers can interpret the prophecies differently, saying: “If we look at a prophecy progressively, there is always room for doubt,” and that “the most powerful thing” is what people think and feel—“not what it is, but what people perceive to be.”
The reporting also traces how the dang changed hands over time and how its ownership became part of political narratives. It says Ngundeng died in 1906 and was believed to have predicted South Sudan’s independence, and that the messianic prophecy described a Nuer leader with distinctive physical traits and a personal detail involving a white woman. The article says that Machar is said to match those traits, including being left-handed and gap-toothed.
The account of the stick’s history includes the 1878 battle in which, in the story’s telling, Ngundeng wielded the dang and summoned a thunderbolt. It adds that the stick was about 110 centimeters long and made from the root of a tamarind tree, decorated with copper wire, with one end broken during the battle won by the Nuer, and it describes a later period in which a son of Ngundeng was shot dead while trying to use it against colonial troops and was said to cry when nothing happened.
It further says that the stick was treated as a trophy for a time, before Douglas H. Johnson, a prominent South Sudan specialist, found it in the British town of Bournemouth and sought to return it to South Sudan. The article says Machar received the dang in Juba in 2009, in a ritual overseen by Machar that included the slaughter of a white ox, and that Machar was photographed holding the dang aloft.
Johnson compared the stick’s authority to a parliamentary speaker’s mace, saying it is needed for official business to proceed, and the reporting quotes Alex Miskin of the Rift Valley Institute think tank on the uncertainty around whether the stick can be used to “speak power” into it. “We know it can have power,” Miskin said, referring to Ngundeng’s dang, and questioned whether Machar can “speak power into that stick,” while also saying, “Who has the stick and what is the story may make some people a bit frightened” of Machar.
The current location of the dang remains unclear in the reporting, but archival figures and officials have addressed what is known. Peter Tako, an archivist, said: “The stick ‘is the heritage of South Sudan,’” and added, “We hear it is with Riek Machar,” saying he “don’t even talk about it” and that the dang was a sacred item “embedded” with political authority that made him feel unqualified to discuss it. The account also says Kiir welcomed the dang’s return in a statement warning it should not be used to wage war, and it reports that the AP was unable to reach Machar for comment.