Methods, ethics, and positionality

The issues addressed in this article have, in many ways, framed the horizon of my ethnographic research over the past fourteen years. Questions surrounding Murle infertility, child abduction, and interethnic violence have surfaced—sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely—within every other theme I have explored. They constitute not merely a topic of inquiry but the discursive and sociopolitical context through which social life in Greater Pibor is lived, narrated, and contested.

In 2024, I conducted a study on abductions across Pibor and Jonglei for an international organization (Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024). It involved fifty-eight semi-structured interviews, twenty-four focus group discussions, and the review of colonial, administrative, and humanitarian documentation, and examined abduction dynamics comparatively across Murle, Dinka, and Nuer communities.Footnote ¹ In those conversations, infertility was discussed more directly—as both explanation and accusation—revealing how narratives of reproductive difference continue to mediate moral interpretations of violence. This article draws on that material, integrating it with longer-term ethnographic observations and archival analysis. It reframes those findings within a broader anthropological analysis of how the infertility–abduction nexus operates as a rumor-myth embedded in South Sudan’s political history.

The research draws on long-term ethnographic research and multi-source analysis conducted between 2012 and 2024 in the Greater Pibor Administrative Area. It combines participant observation, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, and archival, medical, anthropological, and humanitarian document review. Interlocutors included Murle youth, chiefs, women, and local administrators, as well as Dinka and Nuer village interlocutors, state officials, and humanitarian actors. Interviews were conducted by the author in Murle and English, with translation assistance when required. The ethnographic and historical material was triangulated with medical, policy, and media sources to trace how infertility rumors circulate across different institutional arenas. All interviews were voluntary and anonymized. Given the sensitivity of intercommunal relations and the circulation of harmful rumors, particular care was taken to avoid reproducing stereotypes or language that could reinforce stigma.

My positionality inevitably shapes both access and interpretation. Having worked for over a decade among Murle communities, I occupy an ambivalent position. I am simultaneously trusted by interlocutors and aware of the power asymmetries embedded in knowledge production about them. Reflexive practice, collaborative verification with interlocutors, and attentiveness to unequal epistemic power informed the design, ethics, and analysis of this research. These commitments also shape how I read the infertility rumor-myth: not as a cultural curiosity but as a product of historically situated relations of power and (mis-)representation (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2001; Clifford and Marcus Reference Clifford and Marcus1986).

Theoretical framework: rumor-myth and necropolitics

Rumors and myths are not neutral. They circulate in specific political and historical contexts, shaping how communities perceive and respond to social realities. Scholars have long shown that rumors are not merely misinformation but productive social forces that mediate power, construct moral hierarchies, and explain uncertainty (Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2004; Kapferer Reference Kapferer1989; Allport and Postman Reference Allport and Postman1946). Their appeal lies less in factual accuracy than in their ability to make sense of complex, often violent, environments (Finnström Reference Finnström2008). As White (Reference White2000, 30) notes, rumors are “stories [that] help people understand incomprehensible events.”

This article reframes these discussions through the concept of the rumor-myth, a hybrid analytic that captures how speculative talk under insecurity can become institutionalized as ideology, transforming from commentary into durable common sense that orders social and political life. Whereas Lévi-Strauss (Reference Lévi-Strauss1955) treated myth as a structural logic of oppositions, I adopt a Barthesian conception of myth as an ideological language that naturalizes contingent hierarchies and renders them self-evident (Barthes Reference Barthes1972).Footnote ² In this view, myths do not simply explain the world; they legitimize it.

The Murle infertility claim operates across these registers. As a rumor, it circulates in response to insecurity and violence, shaping immediate perceptions and actions. As a myth, it underpins long-term narratives of Murle deviance and exclusion in South Sudan’s ethno-political landscape. The rumor-myth thus extends existing theory by linking the ephemeral logic of rumor with the ideological durability of myth, showing how speculation can become structure.

The power of the rumor-turned-myth of infertility lies in its ability to recast Murle identity, even existence, as biological deviance. In this narrative, Murle reproduction is not only abnormal but threatening—positioning Murle society as a reproductive danger to others. Despite lacking medical or demographic evidence, the claim persists because it offers moral clarity amid chronic uncertainty. Its force derives not from empirical validity but from its ability to justify marginalization. Stewart and Strathern (Reference Stewart and Strathern2004, 198) describe rumor and gossip as interpretive tools that “give shape and meaning” to experience. Such narratives may also incite action, even hate (Das Reference Das1998). The infertility rumor works in this way: it casts Murle reproduction as socially and biologically unnatural, legitimizing violence, securitization, and political abandonment. In short, rumor-myth turns symbolic classification into material consequence. Its endurance reflects how consensus is built through fear and suspicion.

In war-affected Uganda, Finnström (Reference Finnström2008, 168) observed that “as most rumors cannot be confirmed, they add to the uncertainty of everyday life.” Similarly, within some African contexts, Chabal and Daloz (Reference Chabal and Daloz1999) describe an informalization of politics where rumors circulate outside official discourse while shaping political action. In South Sudan, the infertility rumor enables a discourse in which the Murle are uniquely responsible for aggression—especially child abduction and cattle-raiding—while diverting attention from broader dynamics of state violence and marginalization. Over time, repetition across humanitarian, media, and governmental arenas has solidified this discourse into myth, naturalizing exclusion and legitimizing inaction in the face of Murle suffering.

The power of such narratives lies not only in their content but in who controls their circulation. As Anne Laudati (Reference Laudati2011) shows, dominant actors in Jonglei have strategically deployed victimhood narratives to mobilize international sympathy while framing the Murle as aggressors. This recalls James Scott’s (Reference Scott1992) distinction between “public” and “hidden” transcripts, whereby dominant groups impose official narratives while suppressing subaltern ones. In South Sudan, access to media, humanitarian platforms, and state institutions is unevenly distributed. Certain groups can amplify discourses that serve their interests, while others—like the Murle—are spoken about but rarely heard. The repeated circulation of the infertility claim reflects this asymmetry, reinforcing structures of exclusion under the guise of humanitarian concern.

This pattern is not unique to South Sudan. Geschiere (Reference Geschiere1997) shows how rumors of witchcraft in Cameroon demarcate moral boundaries and consolidate elite power. Malkki (Reference Malkki1995) demonstrates how racialized myths about Tutsi identity in Rwanda framed them as existential threats, paving the way for genocidal violence. During Liberia’s civil war, Ellis (Reference Ellis2007) documents how political actors weaponized rumors of supernatural forces to justify brutality. In each case, rumor and myth operate together to legitimize structural violence. The Murle infertility claim mirrors these dynamics: speculation has crystallized into a durable narrative that rationalizes exclusion.

This discourse also operates within a necropolitical logic. Drawing on Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003, Reference Mbembe2019) extension of Foucault’s biopolitics, sovereignty is exercised through decisions over who may live and who must die. Here, the framework is adapted from extraordinary colonial and Holocaust violence to the quotidian politics of abandonment that characterize South Sudan’s postwar state. In many postcolonial contexts, domination works not only through killing but through the social and administrative abandonment of populations deemed unworthy of care.

The rumor-myth of Murle infertility exemplifies this logic: it redefines reproduction as pathology, marking Murle bodies as threats to the nation’s moral and biological order. The state need not (always) kill directly; it governs through abandonment—through the withdrawal of protection and recognition.

The rumor-myth thus functions as a necropolitical technology, transforming discourse into governance. By recoding reproduction as pathology, it renders Murle lives expendable while allowing neglect and dispossession to appear rational and even necessary. This adaptation of necropolitics extends Mbembe’s (Reference Mbembe2003) concept beyond sites of spectacular sovereign violence to the social death of populations erased through marginalization, vilification, and exclusion from empathy.

Yet rumors and myths are not solely tools of domination. Bayart (Reference Bayart2009, 243) reminds us that subaltern groups often reappropriate “rumors, jokes, and gossip” to subvert dominant narratives. In South Sudan, Murle youth and diaspora are increasingly using digital platforms to contest their portrayal as aggressors (McCallum Reference McCallum2013). Social media has become a site where counter-narratives circulate, challenging state and humanitarian representations even as they risk new forms of surveillance and misinterpretation. These practices underscore how rumor-myths are not static; they are arenas of struggle over legitimacy, memory, and belonging.

Understanding the politics of rumor and myth in South Sudan therefore requires situating them within broader Africanist debates on power, knowledge, and exclusion. As White (Reference White2000) and Comaroff and Comaroff (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff1997) argue, rumors are indicative of the moral economy of power: they reveal not only what is believed but how authority is produced. The Murle infertility rumor-myth operates within this field, structuring how violence is imagined, justified, and enacted. Exposing its political function is thus both an analytical and an ethical task: to make visible how discourse renders some lives less grievable than others and to challenge the epistemic violence that sustains exclusion.

If the rumor-myth functions as an ideological technology, its durability lies in the sedimentation of earlier representations. The next section traces how colonial and postcolonial narratives of Murle deviance created the epistemic ground on which the infertility claim could later take root. The infertility rumor-myth travels across scientific, humanitarian, and political domains, accumulating authority through repetition.

Tracing historical (mis-)representations and stereotypes of the Murle

Across South Sudan and beyond, the Murle people—a self-identified agro-pastoralist minority group living in the Greater Pibor area of eastern South Sudan—have long been demonized, portrayed as perpetual aggressors in Jonglei and beyond (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2023). Despite their political and economic marginalization (Laudati Reference Laudati2011), they are stereotyped as violent aggressors and subjected to state repression and exclusion (McCallum and Okech Reference McCallum and Okech2013). This framing has shaped policy and discourse, legitimizing punitive actions. This section shows how such representations—originating in colonial governance—laid the groundwork for the later rumor-myth of Murle infertility, embedding racialized assumptions about violence, morality, and belonging. As one informant put it: “Wherever we go, when they find you’re a Murle, we’re abused. But we’re human beings.”Footnote ³ His words reflect how Murle identity is framed as inherently threatening—less a group of citizens than a danger to be contained.

This perception has led to repeated state-sanctioned violence, documented in multiple human rights reports (Amnesty International 2012, 2013; Human Rights Watch 2013b, 2013a). In 2008, President Salva Kiir, justifying one of many aggressive disarmament campaigns (Garfield Reference Garfield2007; Young Reference Young2010), remarked: “Either I leave them with guns and they terrorize the rest of the people, or I crush them to liberate the other people from being always attacked by the Murle.”Footnote ⁴

In 2013, a local administrator from Pibor displaced in Juba cautioned: “They are looking to wipe out the Murle community.”Footnote ⁵ A point also made by the then United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General in South Sudan, Hilde Johnson (Reference Johnson2016). These accounts reflect how Murle are treated not as citizens to be governed but as hostile actors to be subdued. Even NGO reports have echoed such narratives, referring to “an established culture of stealing within their population” (Akuei and Jok Reference Akuei and Jok2010, 28). Circulated through media, reports, and official discourse, such depictions reinforce the stigmatization of the Murle.

Blaming Murle cattle-raids and abductions on a supposed cultural disposition obscures the socioeconomic and political contexts of reciprocal violence. In some areas, Murle attacks are even attributed to supernatural powers. Along the Ethiopian border and in parts of South Sudan, people claim Murle people possess mystical abilities to evade capture (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2016). One anthropologist notes that in neighboring Dinka Twic communities, “solidarity at the group level is secured by seeing almost all banditry that takes place in the county as having been done by Murle or (more rarely) Nuer raiders” (Harragin Reference Harragin2012, 10). Harragin (Reference Harragin2012, 4) observes that Dinka youth violence is often redirected as blame on the Murle: “Some of the most violent acts are committed by youth beyond the control of tribal elders, and in Twic there are persistent rumors that they commit many of the crimes blamed on the Murle.”

This scapegoating has historical depth. From the colonial era to the present, Dinka elites have shaped how the Murle are seen and governed. In 1949, colonial officer turned ethnographer B.A. Lewis noted “The tribe calls itself ‘Murle’. It is better known to the world as the ‘Beir Tribe’, but this is the name given to it by the Bor Dinka.”Footnote ⁶ The colonial administration’s use of a Dinka term to refer to the Murle reflects how the Murle community’s relationship to the government was mediated by Dinka voices—a dynamic that persists today in framing the Murle as aggressors (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2023). Edward Thomas (Reference Thomas2015, 70) explains that “Bor people paid tax, while Murle and Nuer people did not. Both Murle and Nuer groups raided Dinka areas, and British punitive patrols on non-taxpaying groups, using Dinka irregulars, were sometimes cast as ‘protection’ of taxpayers from raids.”

This logic justified the infamous “Beir Patrols”—aggressive military expeditions against the Murle. In 1908, Governor R.C.R. Owen ordered a patrol “to punish the Beir tribe for their annual raids on the Bor Dinka” (in Lewis Reference Lewis1972, 7). In 1912, Captain H.H. Kelly (Reference Kelly1912, 499) described further action as “punishment of the repeated raids on the peaceable Dinka of Bor district.” Lewis (Reference Lewis1972, 6) later recalled the colonial government “was anxious to protect the Dinka of the District.”

The Murle’s geographic isolation in the Lotilla-Pibor plains delayed colonial administration. Yet this isolation was reinforced by their reputation as “an aggressive and war-like people” (McCallum Reference McCallum2013, 27–28). Colonial representations of the eastern floodplains of Jonglei depicted these as spaces of unwavering violence (Thomas Reference Thomas2015, 73). Depictions of “ethnic ferocity” were not limited to the Murle; they were central to the ideological framing of societies outside the slavery system and colonial administration as “inherently violent” (Thomas Reference Thomas2015, 70), justifying colonial intervention and control.

Colonial portrayals of the Nuer as perpetual aggressors mirrored those applied to the Murle. Douglas Johnson (Reference Johnson1981, 512–22) deconstructs the “Fighting Nuer” colonial stereotype as “intractable and fierce,” showing how colonial officers often misread conflict and used it to justify preemptive force. He also notes how administrators often sided with “administered” peoples (like the Dinka) over “unadministered” ones (like the Murle), reinforcing hierarchies of legitimacy. The 1912 Beir Patrols punished the Murle for heavy attacks on Bor Dinka—yet later investigations revealed those “raids had been a response to considerable Bor Dinka provocation” (Johnson Reference Johnson1981, 523n5).

Murle marginalization persisted after Sudan’s independence. During the Anyanya rebellion, Hassan ŋacingol, the first Murle District Commissioner, allied with Khartoum, fueling claims of collaboration (Thomas Reference Thomas2015). During the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army’s (SPLM/A) war, the Murle were divided. Some joined the SPLA while others supported Ismael Konyi’s Pibor Defence Force, a militia formed to protect the Murle from “predation by the neighboring Dinka and Nuer, who dominated the leadership of the SPLM/A” (McCallum Reference McCallum2017, 15). These alignments, driven more by survival than ideology (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2018, Reference Felix da Costa2023), reinforced narratives of the Murle as untrustworthy and politically ambiguous. By revisiting these early portrayals, we see how colonial epistemologies of difference hardened into the postcolonial state’s moral order—a lineage that makes contemporary rumor-myths intelligible and persuasive.

As Laudati notes, privileging Dinka stories, memories, and narratives over those of the Murle overwrites Murle historical legitimacy. This in turn legitimizes the Dinka-led SPLA’sFootnote ⁷ coercive actions against the Murle, often “with the help of international NGOs and national settlement schemes, [the Murle] may then be shape[d] into ‘educated and trustworthy’ citizens” (Laudati Reference Laudati2011, 23–24).

The legacies of this history remain visible. One Murle politician remarked:

His statement captures the frustration of a community structurally excluded from the nation’s social contract. Far from being innately violent, the Murle have been systematically positioned as South Sudan’s eternal outsiders, villainized in discourse and denied full participation in national life. Their marginalization has not been incidental but foundational to how the state has been imagined and constructed (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2016). These historical representations did not simply stigmatize the Murle; they institutionalized exclusion as governance.

Unpacking the rumor-myth of infertility

Among the many stigmatizing narratives deployed against the Murle, the one critically examined in this article—the infertility–abduction nexus—stands out for its persistence and political traction. Building on the historical foundations above, this section examines how the infertility claim rearticulates older colonial logics through medical and humanitarian idioms. Circulating across media, policy reports, political rhetoric, civil society commentary, and even academic publications (Dyment Reference Dyment2004; Dak Reference Dak2020; Makak Reference Makak2023; Yalew Reference Yalew2024), this rumor-myth presents itself as a reproductive concern but functions as biopolitical discourse that pathologizes Murle society.

The infertility rumor-myth has legitimized violence, justified state intervention, and reinforced ethnic marginalization, and even dehumanization, emasculating Murle men and devaluing Murle women. It operates as a narrative that cannot be conclusively proven, but also cannot be definitively falsified—a discursive trap that resists empirical resolution. This section traces how the infertility rumor-myth has been produced, sustained, and weaponized—despite the absence of credible medical evidence—and the political work it performs in South Sudan’s ethnicized landscape.

No credible medical study has confirmed widespread Murle infertility. Nevertheless, this section reviews the speculative literature—not to validate it, but to expose how repetition, not evidence, has sustained the claim. As earlier sections have shown, this myth aligns with broader processes of racialization and criminalization that render Murle people biologically and socially deviant within the national political imagination.

Among Nilotic communities of South Sudan, fertility, child-rearing, and cattle wealth are mutually constitutive of social value and personhood (Hutchinson Reference Hutchinson1996). Parenthood grants both men and women social status, while childlessness is stigmatized and often leads to exclusion (McCallum Reference McCallum2013). The infertility rumor thus inflicts affective injury: it not only dehumanizes but also undermines Murle cultural logics of value. Moreover, it repositions child abduction—a practice rooted in histories of warfare and intercommunal relations—as pathological compensation for demographic collapse. This framing recasts Murle social practice as a medicalized threat and a rationale for violence.

The rumor’s roots appear to lie in colonial speculation. In 1942, British officer B.A. Lewis (Reference Lewis1972, 15) speculated that “something [was] radically wrong with the Murle birth-rate.” In 1955, Dean Smith was commissioned to investigate. His Preliminary Enquiry into Reproduction Rate acknowledged that it lacked scientific rigor, and that “no absolute, irrefutable, statistical evidence” supported the idea “that the Murle have a population or fertility problem at all” (Smith Reference Smith1955, n.p.). He observed the presence of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that can cause infertility if untreated, but stressed that only a full census could produce reliable conclusions. After a targeted venereal disease campaign, Lewis (Reference Lewis1972, 15) reported that by 1958 Murle “women were again bearing children, with considerable gain to tribal morale and happiness.” The episode suggests the issue was—if at all—episodic and health-related rather than structural infertility.

Nevertheless, later academic and humanitarian accounts continued to cite Murle infertility as an established problem, often pointing to syphilis as a causal factor without offering substantiating data. This repetition by researchers, rather than evidence, has produced the illusion of validity and scientific aura. These examples reveal how rumor acquires the authority of science through reiteration, a process central to its transformation into myth.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Andretta (Reference Andretta1985, 75) asserted that “by the end of the civil war, in 1972, venereal disease was so widespread in the Pibor area that fertility levels dropped dramatically.” She alluded to World Health Organization (WHO) data but provided no traceable source. Similarly, missionary and linguist-anthropologist Jonathan Arensen (Reference Arensen2012) claimed female infertility was linked to STDs and to the presence of (northern) Sudanese troops in the area during the 1950s–1970s. He claimed that fertility had improved after the WHO introduced penicillin to treat STDs and linked earlier infertility to the rise in child abductions. He concludes, however, “The current rumor that the Murle people have become largely sterile and are therefore stealing children is widely circulated, but is patently false” (J. Arensen Reference Arensen2012, n.p.).

This pattern—assertion without evidence—recurs in humanitarian literature. A 2004 Medair report on STD treatment in northern Pibor revealed that syphilis prevalence among Nuer peoples (16 percent) exceeded that of the Murle (Dyment Reference Dyment2004, 9). It estimated the true Murle prevalence to be between 10 and 15 percent, comparable to rates in Zambia and Swaziland in the 1980s. The report concluded: “further study would be necessary to clarify these issues,” noting that “no baseline data for comparisons within Sudan existed to determine if the Murle have more or less syphilis than other tribes in South Sudan” (Dyment Reference Dyment2004, 9). Similarly, a 2012 Master’s thesis citing medical nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Jonglei noted syphilis rates were “almost double in the Nuer town of Nasir than in Pibor,” and “found no statistical support behind the myth that Murle women are barren and struggle to have children” (M. Arensen Reference Arensen2012, 72).

Medical literature further dismantles the association between syphilis and population-wide infertility. Scientific literature underscores that syphilis is not a primary cause of infertility (WHO 2024). The major culprits are untreated chlamydia and gonorrhea, which cause pelvic inflammatory disease (Tsevat et al. Reference Tsevat, Wiesenfeld, Parks and Peipert2017). Medical studies show that even in communities where syphilis is endemic, widespread infertility is not the expected outcome (Kojima and Klausner Reference Kojima and Klausner2018). This further discredits studies that have linked Murle infertility to syphilis. The medical basis for Murle infertility is thus implausible.

Misconceptions and lack of knowledge on reproductive health also sustain the rumor. The Medair report noted that many who believed they were infertile had several children and and that “misconceptions about the timing of sex and becoming pregnant, with some people believing that you can become pregnant during menstruation,” skewed perceptions of reproductive failure (Dyment Reference Dyment2004, 5). Those closest to medical studies—Smith (Reference Smith1955), Dyment (Reference Dyment2004), Burtscher (Reference Burtscher2021)—highlight that no national reproductive health data exists to assess Murle fertility relative to other groups. A 2021 Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) qualitative study found Murle and Jiye communities cited syphilis as a main cause of infertility but again provided no empirical testing (Burtscher Reference Burtscher2021, 45).

What emerges is not evidence of infertility, but a co-production of rumor: internal anxieties amplified by external narratives. More recent studies challenge the infertility myth (McCallum Reference McCallum2013; M. Arensen Reference Arensen2012). Young (Reference Young2010, 7) feeds the rumor by noting that “infertility appears to be a factor” but adds this may be due to young marriages and miscarriages. Similarly, a 2008 study observed that “popular explanations for abductions have included a crisis of fertility among the Murle, but this has never been verified,” citing MSF sources (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, 3). It concludes that “the war has had an impact on reproduction in all of southern Sudan—in different ways in different locations—but there is no specific research to support this particular assertion among the Murle” (Gordon Reference Gordon2008, 3).

International organizations have reinforced the rumor through reporting and commissioned studies. In 2015, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) South Sudan Country Office issued Terms of Reference for a “Medical-Anthropological Study of Infertility in Pibor,” citing a 51 percent infertility rate from a 2008 factsheet and a 1979 study—neither traceable (United Nations Population Fund South Sudan Country Office 2015).Footnote ⁹ Although no study appears to have been conducted, its rationale illustrates how pseudo-scientific reasoning and “international expert” language (Mosse Reference Mosse2011), when institutionalized, transform speculation and rumor into perceived fact.

As Broch-Due (Reference Broch-Due and Broch-Due2004, 33) notes, dominant narratives reflect power: “Which narrative gets picked up, whose voice is authorized, which truth claims are conveyed and which genre of evidence is evoked depends largely on its location in the wider political economy.” In Jonglei, Laudati (Reference Laudati2011, 25) argues, Dinka elites leveraged “a victim narrative” and “entrenched stereotypes” of Murle hostility to claim moral legitimacy and secure resources. In this context, the infertility rumor becomes less about reproductive health and more about narrative control—shaping humanitarian, media, and state responses while reinforcing intercommunal inequalities.

Elite actors have also publicly endorsed the rumor. In 2008, South Sudan President Salva Kiir stated:

Infertility was thus cast as a medical crisis. Even organized diaspora groups have invoked it. A 2012 Nuer diaspora inflammatory statement offered intermarriage as a solution to Murle infertility, reinforcing the community’s discursive subordination: “If Murle’s women have fertility problems, the Nuer and Dinka are willing to accept intermarriage with Murle” (Nuer Youth in USA and Canada 2012).

Yet local narratives counter these elite framings. In Akobo in 2024, Nuer informants rejected the infertility claim (while reproducing other stereotypes). One youth leader remarked:

A former women’s leader echoed: “Who told you there is infertility among the Murle? There is nothing like that . . . I have been to Murle[land] several times, I saw pregnant women, little children, young ones.”Footnote ¹¹

Most incisive was a Nuer chief: “That is your educated people theory but it’s not true, we think that it’s not correct. Whoever created it has his or her own reasons. But the Murle have no infertility issues. Their men and their women are producing children. How do you explain the age-sets that increase every year?”Footnote ¹²

These quotes encapsulate the rupture between elite discourse—grounded in speculative pseudo-science, humanitarian programming, and political rhetoric—and local knowledge, grounded in direct observation and social proximity. These community leaders not only rejected the infertility myth but also challenged the authority behind it, framing it as an external imposition divorced from empirical reality. The Nuer chief’s emphasis on age-sets—a culturally embedded way of tracking generational growth (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2025)—reasserts an indigenous epistemology of fertility, in contrast to the clinical gaze of colonial officers, international agencies, and state actors.

These counter-narratives show the infertility rumor-myth as a vertically circulating discourse: it travels through diaspora-driven media, bureaucracies, reports and articles, and elite speech acts, but falters when it meets everyday social observation. It persists not due to accuracy, but utility: it explains violence in ethnicized terms, justifies control, and consolidates political narratives of Murle deviance.

In this sense, the infertility rumor is not a mistaken belief awaiting correction by medical science. It is, rather, a rumor-myth in the full anthropological sense: a politically consequential narrative whose power lies not in its empirical accuracy but in its capacity to shape perception and justify action. As scholars of rumor and violence have long argued, such narratives are not simply reflections of anxiety or misinformation—they name enemies, legitimize violence, and sustain structures of exclusion (White Reference White2000; Stewart and Strathern Reference Stewart and Strathern2004; Finnström Reference Finnström2008).

This particular rumor-myth draws on a colonial archive that once portrayed the Murle as diseased and ungovernable. In the postcolonial moment, it reemerges in the guise of humanitarian concern, calling for reproductive interventions. Its persistence—despite the absence of credible evidence—is not a failure of science but a testament to its political utility. It serves those who benefit from pathologizing Murle identity, from portraying them as deficient and socially threatening.

In South Sudan, the claim of Murle infertility has functioned as an explanatory device for child abduction, a justification for intercommunal hostility, and a rationale for punitive state intervention. Its harm lies not only in what it asserts but in what it enables. That it persists in the face of contradictory data is precisely the point: it is not sustained by truth, but by usefulness.

Yet this is not a story of uncontested domination. Local testimony challenges elite discourses, exposes the politics underpinning rumor’s persistence, and offers a powerful epistemological counter-narrative. References to growing age-sets, visible pregnancies, and healthy children are not merely anecdotal rebuttals; they articulate an alternative order of knowledge, one that is embodied, grounded, and lived (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2025). These voices challenge elite, medicalized, and securitized discourses, revealing the infertility rumor-myth not simply as false but as a political technology that enacts harm through classification and sustains marginalization through repetition.

To listen to those who contest it is to recognize observation as resistance. Counter-narratives shared by neighboring Nuer leaders and community members subvert official discourse and expose asymmetries in who produces knowledge about whom. The infertility rumor-myth is a racialized fiction with material effects, upheld through institutional complicity—from state actors to humanitarian agencies and sometimes even researchers. To unpack it is not merely to disprove a falsehood but to dismantle the structures that give it authority.

The origins and contemporary political economy of child abductions

Child abduction in South Sudan has involved multiple communities and evolved within wider political and economic transformations. Yet contemporary narratives recast it as a uniquely Murle pathology, linked to infertility and moral decline. This section traces how a once relational practice became criminalized and politicized through changing regimes of governance and value.

“Child abduction is prevalent throughout South Sudan, yet most non-Murle South Sudanese describe it as a ‘Murle problem,’” observed a Small Arms Survey Reference Survey2012 briefing. Evidence shows that abduction is not uniquely Murle—it is a historical, relational, multiethnic practice involving Murle, Nuer, and Dinka communities across Jonglei and Pibor, as well as more widely across the Sudans.

Recent data reveals that Murle communities have been disproportionately targeted. A 2021 UN Human Rights report documented 686 abductions in Greater Jonglei between January and August 2020, of which 638 victims were Murle. Ninety-three percent were abducted by Dinka-Nuer militia coalitions; only seven percent were attributed to Murle groups (United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Mission in South Sudan 2021, 13). These figures undermine claims of Murle exceptionalism, exposing instead a selective framing that casts the Murle as uniquely deviant.

Abductions are rooted in historical practices of conflict and exchange across Sudan and South Sudan—from the slave trade and Condominium periods through the civil wars (Jok Reference Jok2001; Collins Reference Collins1999). Dominant discourse, however, portrays Murle abductions as expressions of infertility or cultural pathology, while casting Nuer and Dinka abductions as justified retaliation (Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024; Khor Reference Khor2023). This trope feeds into the representation of the Murle as a “primitive and ungovernable community” (McCallum Reference McCallum2017, 14).

Despite contradicting available data, such narratives persist, shaping elite discourse, securitized responses, and humanitarian policy. As the preceding section showed, this logic is reinforced by the infertility rumor-myth and broader processes of racialization and scapegoating. Understanding abduction thus requires an analysis grounded not in Murle exceptionalism but in intercommunal and political-economic dynamics of violence.

Archival sources shed light on the origins of child abduction, tracing it to a practice whereby Dinka families sold children born out of wedlock or incestuous unions to Murle families (Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024). These were socially sanctioned exchanges shaped by moral taboos and survival logics. Colonial archives show that from at least 1940, Dinka families sold “incest children”—those born from relations deemed illicit—to Murle families in exchange for cattle.Footnote ¹³ Captain A. Forbes, District Commissioner in Bor, noted that the practice gave “the poor ‘so-called incest’ children a chance to live,”Footnote ¹⁴ recording that Murle families paid up to twelve cattle per child—three times the customary rate. “I hope you’ll allow this custom to continue,” he wrote to his counterpart in Pibor. His attached lists identified parents, children, chiefs, buyers, and cattle exchanged. These transactions, meticulously recorded in colonial files and corroborated by oral histories, endured into the 1970s.

A Dinka elder, interviewed by Akuei and Jok (Reference Akuei and Jok2010, 11), explained that children at risk of infanticide were instead offered to the Murle: “If a Dinka girl [was] impregnated by one of her male relatives, after the birth the child would be taken to the bush, or put in a basket and hung from a tree, until something happened to it. Murle were aware of this and started offering to take the children. It was easy for us to give them to them because they were not so far from us.”

These exchanges were morally complex rather than coercive, shaped by kinship taboos and survival strategies. Another Dinka woman recalled: “The reason was that a child born out of incest can result in death within the clan. So some people would sell the child and leave the mother, others would sell the mother and the child.”Footnote ¹⁵ Far from aggression, these transfers reflected a moral economy of kinship and survival that later discourse erased.

By the 1970s and 1980s, child exchange had formalized into Suuk Wawu, the market of children named after Murle chief Wawu, who co-managed it with Dinka chief Kur Lang on the border between the two areas (Adikir Reference Adikir2013).Footnote ¹⁶ Because the exchanges were sealed with cattle—the basis of social value and legitimacy—the children became full members of their adoptive families, with equal rights to the herd (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2015). When colonial laws later criminalized these exchanges, they went underground, fueling mistrust and leading to abductions (McCallum Reference McCallum2013). Murle oral histories recall Dinka families exploiting this by selling children to Murle and later reporting them as stolen, thus reclaiming both child and cattle. Historical transformation, not cultural pathology, explains this shift: legal and political change turned relational practices into criminalized acts.

The mutual abduction of children in Jonglei and Pibor increased dramatically from independence onwards, after the post-2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which coincided with an escalation of intercommunal violence (International Crisis Group 2009). During this period, Nuer groups began retaliating for small-scale Murle child abductions with large-scale abductions of women and children (United Nations Mission in South Sudan 2012). One Nuer informant explained the logic of retaliation:

In turn, Dinka groups started large-scale abductions from 2017 onwards, following a major Murle raid in Duk that year in which over seventy women and children abducted. As explained by one intellectual from Duk: “We saw no intervention from government. If fighting and dying is the price, then we’ll go. And that’s what we see now.”Footnote ¹⁸

In the postindependence period, abductions became increasingly commercialized across all communities. They were no longer only linked to war-related strategies but were also driven by economic incentives. Contemporary abduction practices have been reshaped by war and economic collapse. The breakdown of customary dispute resolution, the proliferation of small arms, and the essentialization and militarization of ethnicities, and economic hardship have radically altered moral codes of warfare (Jok Reference Jok2005; Jok and Hutchinson Reference Jok and Hutchinson1999). In this context, abduction and cattle-raiding are part of a militarized political economy. As observed elsewhere (Felix da Costa, Pendle and Tubiana, Reference Felix da Costa, Pendle, Tubiana, Bach, Abbink and Willis2022; Wild, Jok and Patel, Reference Wild, Jok Madut and Patel2018), abductions became “tactics of war,” intended to inflict pain, assert power, and extract resources.

Among Murle groups, abductions tend to be small-scale, opportunistic, and financially motivated. They are often explained in terms of necessity, with phrases like “we are hungry” signaling how abductions are interpreted as a source of survival.Footnote ¹⁹ Children are exchanged for cattle—twenty to fifty head—depending on gender and age.Footnote ²⁰ Girls are valued for dowry, boys for lineage continuity. While neighboring groups increasingly monetize abductions through ransom, Murle practices remain rooted in cattle-based exchanges that bind social relations (Felix da Costa Reference Felix da Costa2015; Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024). Among the Murle, cattle-based transactions reinforce abductees’ integration into their new families. Because cattle have been exchanged, abducted children gain full rights and status within the adopting family.

The economic dimensions of abduction, however, are no longer limited to Murle actors. Mass abductions by Nuer and Dinka youth in Greater Pibor (December 2022–January 2023) demonstrate abduction’s growing commodification (Craze Reference Craze2023; United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan 2024). In some cases, Nuer and Dinka abductors have directly negotiated with families, demanded payment for the release of children, and even sought compensation for the costs incurred during their captivity, reflecting the emergence of a broader ransom market that transcends communal lines (Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024; United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan 2024).

There is mounting evidence that government actors have paid ransoms to secure the release of abducted Murle women and children. In January 2023, following an unprecedented series of attacks by Nuer and Dinka armed youth on Greater Pibor, marked by large-scale cattle-raids and mass abductions, the government reportedly intervened to facilitate the return of over sixty abductees. Craze (Reference Craze2023) reports that these transactions were brokered by a company owned by Benjamin Bol Mel, who was, until November 2025, a close ally of President Salva Kiir and South Sudan’s vice-president. Payments of approximately US$500 per person were allegedly made, and the women and children were flown back to Pibor.

While framed as a humanitarian gesture, these payments set a dangerous precedent: they further formalized abduction as an income-generating activity and blurred the line between rescue and complicity in trafficking (United Nations Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan 2024; Felix da Costa and Diing Reference Felix da Costa and Diing2024). As one Nuer intellectual in Akobo cautioned:

His warning underscores the unintended consequences of such interventions: they may temporarily reduce suffering, but they risk entrenching a political economy of abduction in which all parties—abductors, intermediaries, and state actors—become complicit.

Retaliation remains a second major driver. While Nuer and Dinka communities often frame their abductions as acts of retribution against Murle raids, these explanations must be understood in conjunction with the increasing economic incentives behind abductions. Narratives of revenge, however, obscure how cycles of violence are often initiated and sustained by broader systemic factors.

Abduction has also become a political bargaining tool. One Dinka informant remarked, “Violence has become a means of bargaining power,”Footnote ²² with abductions and cattle-raids being used to increase bargaining power, draw attention to grievances, and negotiate with state actors. “Abduction has become a ladder to talk to communities. Whatever crimes by Nuer, Dinka and Murle [are] happening are used as an escape-board for leadership. It is a playing game politicians are using,”Footnote ²³ one Murle intellectual in Pibor noted. UN Human Rights reports document how politico-military elites have supported armed youth in exchange for loyalty, protection of assets, or mobilization (UN OHCHR and UNMISS 2021; Pinaud Reference Pinaud2016; de Waal Reference de Waal2014).

Since independence, these interactions have become more frequent, contributing to a rise in violent incidents, as observed by some Nuer elders: “We are community elders, sometimes we don’t understand politics but the educated politics is dirty, it does not have rules, there are some lines that cannot be crossed in gentlemen politics. However, the behaviors of the Murle do tell us something. These things intensified after we have our government, the killing increased.”Footnote ²⁴

In some instances, abductees have been used to leverage political concessions, or to bolster local leaders’ influence with armed youth. The involvement of government officials in ransom payments—either directly or indirectly—has further entrenched the system, transforming what was once a form of kinship-building into a transactional, strategic and militarized practice (Craze Reference Craze2023).

These dynamics mirror broader trends in African war economies, where violence serves both survival and accumulation (Dolan Reference Dolan2009; Richards Reference Richards1996). In Sierra Leone and northern Uganda, abduction was weaponized by armed actors to support war efforts and assert power. In South Sudan, abduction has likewise shifted from kinship to commerce, from ritual to strategy. Its persistence is not evidence of Murle “culture”—as popular discourse insists—but of wider conditions of insecurity, structural impunity, and political manipulation.

To dismantle the myth of Murle exceptionalism, abductions must be situated within these broader systems of violence: as relational, systemic, and politically and economically embedded. They are not driven by infertility or cultural deviance but by relational dynamics of war, scarcity, and political opportunism. The real pathology lies not in Murle identity but in the logics of governance and exclusion that sustain this economy of violence. Recognizing this complexity is essential to challenging the moral hierarchies that underpin securitization and scapegoating in South Sudan. In doing so, this section has repositioned abduction not as evidence of Murle deviance but as a mirror of South Sudan’s fractured governance and political economy of violence, linking the analysis back to the article’s central argument about rumor-myth and necropolitics.