Deng

At the end of the dry season the country along the White Nile is the colour of straw. The rivers have shrunk into their beds, the grass has been burned off, and the cattle stand in the dust of the camps with their ribs showing. Then one afternoon the sky to the south goes dark, the wind turns cool and wet, and somebody says the word. In the language of the Dinka the word for what is coming and the name of the one who sends it are the same. Deng.

He is rain, and he is more than rain. The Dinka, cattle herders of what is now South Sudan, speak of a single Divinity called Nhialic, a word that means simply the above. Below that vast and distant power stand a handful of named divinities who come and go among people as they please, and Deng is the first of them. Thunder is his, and lightning, and the long soaking storms that turn the plain green in a week. Because rain is life in a place with a dry season that can kill, Deng is bound up with birth and increase as well, with children and calves and the grain coming up.

How he came to be is told in more than one way. The most common account makes him the son of Abuk, the first woman, who is honoured as the divinity of women and gardens, and the hymns the Dinka sing to him address him as her child. Garang, the first man, is sometimes set beside them. One older story, written down among the Dinka in the early twentieth century by the anthropologist Charles Seligman, tells it differently. A young woman came down out of the sky in a great rain, already carrying a child. The child was born with a full set of teeth, grew up to rule as a rainmaker, lived to a great age and then vanished in a storm. That child was Dengdit, Deng the Great. In the western Dinka country many people go further still and use Dengdit as a name for Divinity itself. The Dinka do not seem troubled by this. Asking whether Deng is the son of God or God is a little like asking whether the rain is the sky.

What nobody offers is a description. Deng has no face, no height, no weapon that anyone has drawn or carved. He is known by what he does. The fullest account of him comes from Godfrey Lienhardt, who lived among the western Dinka between 1947 and 1950 and published his study in 1961, and Lienhardt was careful to say that the Dinka do not picture their divinities so much as meet them. The meeting can be rough.

A young man sits by the dung fire in a cattle camp at dusk, and something goes wrong with him. He starts to shake. He gets up and runs, falls, sings in a voice that is not quite his own, and the people around him go quiet and watch. Someone asks the thing in him for its name. If the answer is Deng, the family knows what it is dealing with. A beast is promised or killed, a small shrine is set up in the homestead, and from then on that household has a divinity to look after. Illness works the same way. A sickness that will not lift may be a divinity asking for attention, and a diviner is called to find out which one.

Boys are named for him by the thousand. Deng is among the commonest names a Dinka man can carry, often given to a child born when rain was falling.

The neighbours took him too. The Nuer, who live beside the Dinka and have raided and married them for centuries, count Deng as the greatest of their spirits of the air, and they say openly that he came to them from the Dinka. Edward Evans-Pritchard, who studied Nuer religion in the 1930s, found him spoken of as a son of God whose mother is Buk, a spirit of the rivers. Among the Nuer he has a harder edge. He is as likely to be named as the cause of a sickness as thanked for a storm.

His greatest moment on the Nuer side belongs to history as much as to myth. In the later nineteenth century a man of the Lou Nuer called Ngundeng Bong began to act strangely, and his people came to understand that Deng had taken hold of him. Ngundeng became the most famous prophet the Nuer have ever had. He set his followers to work heaping up earth, ash and cattle bones into a great cone, a mound that stood some fifty or sixty feet high when it was done, raised in honour of the divinity that spoke through him. He died in 1906. In 1928 the British government of the Sudan, nervous about prophets, sent aircraft and explosives against the mound and broke part of it down. The following year soldiers killed his son Guek beside it. The historian Douglas Johnson has set the whole story out, and he also describes an older shrine called Luang Deng, the cattle byre of Deng, standing in the borderland where both Dinka and Nuer brought their offerings.

His power is the power of weather in a country that lives or starves by it. He can end a drought. He can fill a woman’s arms and a man’s herd. He can pick one person out of a crowd and speak through that mouth, and a whole people will rearrange itself around what is said. Lightning is the sharp end of the same gift. It kills. The Nuer hold that a person struck down by it has been taken directly by the sky and becomes a spirit in turn.

His limits are quieter. Deng is never quite his own master, since everything he is can be folded back into the Divinity above him, and the closer people look the less sure they are where one ends and the other begins. He has no dwelling on earth except the shrines and the bodies people lend him. He can be asked, sung to and fed with sacrifice, and none of that compels him. Some years the cloud builds in the south and passes by.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Deng in Dinka religion?

Deng is the divinity of rain, thunder and lightning among the Dinka people of South Sudan. He is the most important of the named divinities that stand below Nhialic, the one Divinity above. His name is also the ordinary Dinka word for rain.

Who are the parents of Deng?

Most Dinka accounts make Deng the son of Abuk, the first woman and the divinity of women and gardens. Garang, the first man, is sometimes placed alongside them. An older story recorded by Charles Seligman says Dengdit was born to a young woman who came down from the sky in a great rain.

Is Deng the same as Nhialic?

Deng and Nhialic are usually treated as distinct, with Deng as a divinity below the supreme Divinity Nhialic. In parts of the western Dinka country, however, the name Dengdit, meaning Deng the Great, is used for Divinity itself. The Dinka do not draw a firm line between the two.

How does Deng show himself to people?

Deng shows himself in rainstorms, thunder and lightning, and by taking possession of men and women. A possessed person shakes, runs or sings, and the divinity is asked to give its name. Families answer with cattle sacrifice, hymns and a shrine in the homestead.

What is the link between Deng and the Nuer prophet Ngundeng?

The Nuer adopted Deng from the Dinka and regard him as the greatest of their spirits of the air. The Lou Nuer prophet Ngundeng Bong, who died in 1906, was understood to be possessed by Deng. Ngundeng had a great earth mound built in the divinity’s honour, which British forces partly destroyed in 1928.

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