The culture of impunity in South Sudan — the world’s youngest nation — has spawned a civil war with no official body count. While government forces and rebels kill, rape and terrorize civilians, the United Nations refuses to estimate the death toll and ignores sites of mass burials.

Forgotten among the carnage is a new generation of trauma victims, waiting for peace and justice or, at the least, a time and a place to mourn the ones they’ve lost.

This is the final part of a four-part series. Read the rest here.

by NATHANIEL ROSS KELLY

In the fight to survive the war, most displaced South Sudanese haven’t had the opportunity to bury the remains of their loved ones. The country possesses a rich multiplicity of funeral practices that are rooted in ancient traditions as well as religious beliefs about the afterlife. These vital forms of grieving have been irrevocably disrupted by the conflict.

Many will never find the bodies of their relatives and thus never have the experience of returning them to the dust, nor the experience of returning to them, from time to time, to the pay their respects in the long, non-linear process of grief.

One of the most common funeral rituals in South Sudan involves family members and friends gathering at the home of the deceased. They mourn, they reminisce, they pray, and they eat together. Sometimes they remain at the home for a few days or even an entire week. In rural areas throughout South Sudan, families inter the bodies of their loved ones near their homes.

The dead and the living exist side by side.

The nearness of a grave to the front door of a house demonstrates to every one in the community that the deceased is still loved, still cared for, and still considered a family member.

Though traditional funerals have several positive attributes, they also reveal some of the inequalities that afflict the heart of South Sudanese society. Richard Lobban Jr., an anthropologist and author who has been visiting the region that is now South Sudan since the 1970s, notes that protracted and elaborate funerals are, in most cases, reserved for men who possess high social and economic status.

The funerals of distinguished Nuer and Dinka men often include cattle sacrifices and feasts. Among ethnic groups in the southern part of the country, mourners will sometimes tie a string to the thumb of a deceased man of rank. As family members cover the body with dirt the other end of the string is held above the ground to, in Lobban’s words, “maintain a symbolic contact between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

The remains of women and children are not afforded such honors.

South Sudan is a patriarchal society so the disproportionate attention given to adult males, even in death, should come as no surprise. The funerals of women and children are often short and devoid of ceremony, especially if the family of the deceased is impoverished. Sometimes their graves are not even marked.

Families living in extreme poverty are often incapable of honoring those they’ve lost with even a basic funeral. Thus, men, women and children are all put in the ground the same way. “Sometimes [families] don’t have much of a shovel, and they don’t have much time,” Lobban told me on the phone last month. “All the normal civilized attributes of a burial could be missing.”

Though traditional customs and poverty stop many from providing a “civilized” burial, the bereaved are still human. Men yearn for the company of their wives, who were taken away from them too soon. Women let out howls of pain for their lost children.

Their grief is paralleled in the ancient cultures of the region. Roughly 120 miles northeast of Khartoum, near a town called Shendi, Lobban helped to unearth the bones of over two dozen members of the Kingdom of Meroe, which ruled a large portion of what is today Sudan between 350 B.C. and 350 A.D. The bodies were carefully laid out in their graves and “presumably tears were shed over them, because it’s a human tragedy — a human loss — when someone in your kin group dies.”

John, a member of the Madi tribe and a pastor in Eastern Equatoria, offers another perspective on the relationship between the dead and the living. “Here in South Sudan … funerals are really [an] honor. There’s no way of throwing any dead person away,” he told me in January and added that, at least in Eastern Equatoria, the socioeconomic status of a person does not matter when the time comes to lay them to rest. All must be given a proper burial.

“The community must come together and bury that person in a right way, in an honorable way, because people have [the] belief that if you don’t respect the dead — if you don’t bury that person in the right way — then that will cause problems for the family.”

John explained that many believe “the lingering spirit will possess people” and cause mental illness, infertility, and even death. “Not only that, the dead will also continue crying.”

To appease the unsatisfied spirit and heal the afflicted, family members will perform rituals. In some cases they will cook food for the dead and place it over the grave. If they don’t have the remains then they will demonstrate a “right burial” by planting an object — a stone or a piece of wood — in the ground and covering it in dirt.

A significant number of casualties in South Sudan’s latest war have not been honored with either formal burials or rituals of conciliation. Lobban told me that the bodies left behind in the wake of battles and extrajudicial killings quickly become sanitation problems. And they are treated accordingly. Corpses are picked up by burial details that dig a site with a bulldozer, and then “with little rigmarole and practically no identification of the deceased, they just get rid of the bodies.”

In the minds of those who adhere to indigenous religions, the world is full of discontented spirits, waiting for funeral ceremonies that may never commence. The country’s true believers fear that the yearnings of the departed — to be honored, to be close to home, to be loved — may never be satisfied. There is, after all, an established precedent of disrespect for both the living and the dead — a culture of killing that clashes with the culture that values life and venerates the souls of the deceased.

In South Sudan, Lobban explained, people dying anonymously is nothing really new.