BY ALL RIGHTS, by 2019, South Sudan should have been a country on the mend and on the rise.
A largely Christian nation comprising many different nomadic tribes of cattle keepers and farmers, South Sudan had won its independence from Arabic, Islamic rule of Sudan eight years earlier, in 2011. As part of that independence, two leaders from rival tribes had, in a show of unity, taken roles as president and vice president of the new South Sudan.
There was brief hope that the murders, cattle thefts, child kidnappings, rapes, and other atrocities that had marked the decades of war between the Sudanese and the South Sudanese might finally end. South Sudan could build out its infrastructure, educational system, and industry, using the billions of dollars worth of oil that sat under its land.
But it was not to be.
Barely two years passed before political mistrust, unresolved tribal conflicts, billions of dollars of missing oil revenue, and accusations of corruption, power hoarding, or attempted coups toppled the country into its very own civil war. This time the war was largely along tribal lines: the majority Dinka to which President Salva Kiir belonged, and their longtime rivals for land and power, the Nuers, to which Vice President Riek Machar belonged.
In the ensuing years, for millions of South Sudanese— especially in lands inhabited by Dinka and Nuer, including the Upper Nile, Equatoria, and Bentiu—life as people knew it was over.
Sometimes called to violence by warring tribal members serving in the national military, members of Dinka and Nuer tribes in rural areas engaged in five years of horrific back-and-forth rampages—killings, rape, and violent raids of homes and farms.
Entire communities were forced to flee, leaving their homes, their farms, or cattle, and travel dangerous long distances to faraway refugee sites in Kenya, Uganda, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. And even there, violence would erupt as rival tribes vied for resources at the camps.
Driving through even the relatively “safe” regions of South Sudan at that time, evidence of the violence and trauma was everywhere.
“I’d drive across the south of the country, and see rebels in the bush, government army installations,” recalls Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, S.J., dean of the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, who was then the provincial of the Eastern Africa Province. There was a pervasive sense of trauma and lawlessness. “So many people were suffering from the effects of war: displaced, destitute, without access to health care or education.”
And guns were everywhere. “There was this sense that these are people who could behave with impunity because they were armed, and not be held accountable for their actions,” Orobator recalls.
One refugee described it to a nonprofit organization: “That war killed thousands of citizens. Some died of hunger. There was an economic crisis. Prices rose very high. Things got so tough in the city. Life was threatening, with unknown gunmen killing people at night. My life was not safe anymore.”
A TENUOUS PLAN FOR PEACE
By 2019, 400,000 South Sudanese had died, two million fled to neighboring countries, and another two million were internally displaced. Perhaps bowing to years of global political pressure, in 2018 the two leaders of South Sudan signed a power-sharing and unity agreement.
But by 2019, it had yet to take effect, and the country feared the agreement would fall through as had so many other peace attempts before it.
It was at this tenuous moment that, 700 miles away, Orobator received an unexpected and unusual email from someone claiming to be Bishop Precious Omuku from the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury in London. At first, he thought he was being phished, but ultimately Orobator confirmed that Omuku was indeed Archbishop Justin Welby’s delegate for reconciliation in sub-Saharan Africa.
Reconciliation from political trauma was an area that Welby had focused on for years. He had written eloquently about it in Encyclopedia Britannica’s Anniversary Edition in 2018: “Coexistence involves choosing not to seek the annihilation of the other. Reconciliation is about choosing to see the other in a radically different way: in their full humanity,” he wrote. He envisioned a goal where bitter rivals “may even reach the stage where the other person’s identity becomes a treasure to us, rather than a threat,” he wrote.
WHO WILL BELL THE CAT?
The path the archbishop and Omuku proposed to help South Sudan’s leaders reach reconciliation was a new, untested—and hopefully secret—approach: a religious retreat for the two volatile politicians, Kiir and Machar, whom the country needed to cement their power-sharing and peace agreement. Also invited would be Rebecca De Mabior, the politically influential widow of John Garang, the late founder of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, and another vice president, Taban Deng. Leaders from all seven Christian faiths in the region were to attend as well, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Francis.
The idea had originated with De Mabior, explains Martha Jarvis, who was previously the Archbishop of Canterbury’s reconciliation program manager and is now a permanent representative to the United Nations.
Bishop Omuku, a Nigeria-born Anglican, had been one of the few people allowed to visit Machar when he had fied to South Africa in 2016 amid a major spasm of violence. In the ensuing years, Omuku began conversing with De Mabior, who knew that the country did not have the dialogue, relationships, or mood for reconciliation necessary to cement peace despite the 2018 agreement.
Jarvis remembers De Mabior using a phrase from a children’s story about mice wishing they could put a bell on the cat in order to hear danger approaching. She and Omuku knew the warring parties needed to be brought together, but De Mabior asked, “Who will bell the cat?”
She had an answer, says Jarvis. “She said it needs to be the church. ‘The church has to walk into this space and bring us together.’”
So the archbishop sent Omuku and Jarvis to Pope Francis’ Secretary for Relations with the States, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, and began a process of brainstorming that led to the idea of a retreat
“Because the three churches, Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians, are so big in South Sudan, it needed to be a unified effort, because of the message for potential reconciliation that could send,” says Jarvis.
The group needed a person to craft and lead the retreat, and Orobator’s name “was the first name suggested and unanimously agreed upon by all of us,” Jarvis says. “He has this selfless ability to be faithful to a process and yet not be so self-effacing that he has a shrinking role,” recalls Jarvis. “It was amazing to watch his gift around peacemaking, his ability to bring people together and bring states into it, with so much knowledge and so much humility. It was phenomenal to watch.”
When Omuku first broached the idea, Orobator was intrigued, eager to help, but also keenly aware of the vast import of the ask.
“The first thing I thought about was this is potentially quite significant, and I needed to notify the Jesuit Superior General, knowing that there was this crisis that had been really protracted, and devastated the country,” recalls Orobator. Not surprisingly, the Superior General Arturo Sosa “was absolutely in favor of me doing this,” Orobator says, with Sosa stressing how this summit was aligned with the Jesuit apostolic preferences, the Order’s highest priorities, which include showing the way to God and walking with the excluded.
A CHRISTIAN NATION
Part of the hope was based on the fact that the majority of South Sudanese were Christian, having embraced the faith brought to them since the 1840s by missionaries. The start of the Sudanese independence movement in 1955, in fact, was a key moment that had spurred many South Sudanese to officially convert to Christianity. They did so as a show of defiance to the Islamic leadership in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, says Christopher Tounsel, a professor and director of the African Studies Program at the University of Washington.
“In the face of state-sponsored Islamization, to convert to Christianity was more than just to claim a certain worldview or spiritual view, it was also basically claimed or framed as an oppositional identity,” explains Tounsel.
Organizers also were counting on the fact that the warring leaders were themselves professed Christians (Kiir a devout Catholic, and Machar Presbyterian). Although Christian churches had a lot of social capital at that time, having spoken out against Khartoum leadership in Sudan during South Sudan’s fight for independence, they were under increasingly dangerous pressure not to preach against the atrocities being committed by the Dinka and Nuer tribes, Tounsel says.
“Imagine being in a Sunday Mass in 2015 in Juba, publicly calling out President Kiir, whose compound is two miles away, for leading his people to ruin or being an unjust leader,” he says. “This idea of a summit was not without its risk.”
A PLAN IS HATCHED
Nonetheless, through a series of marathon meetings in Nairobi and over Zoom, Orobator, Omuku, Jarvis, and a small group of organizers dug in to plan the structure of the event, which they called “A Retreat of Prayer, Healing, Cleansing and Missioning for Peace in South Sudan.”
Orobator envisioned a retreat modeled after Ignatian spiritual practices: inspirational spiritual talks, numerous opportunities for silence and interior reflection, followed by sharing what was happening inside themselves. For two men who were constantly in the spotlight, posturing for power, steeped in violence, “I wasn’t sure whether they even had the experience of contemplation or meditation,” Orobator recalls.
During the planning, some language and symbols had to be rejected for their political implications. Using the word “blessing” to describe the event, for instance, was viewed as validating the violence precipitated by the participants. Various crosses that could have been incorporated bore too close a resemblance to the symbols of one tribe or another.
Orobator decided to center his talk on the national anthem of South Sudan, which he says is “suffused with Christian themes, and actually reads as a prayer.” He learned to sing it so he could sing it at the start of the retreat.
To drive home the importance of the event, it was to be held at Pope Francis’ own residence, Domus Sanctae Marthae, adjacent to St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. Originally built to be a sort of guest house for visiting Cardinals, Pope Francis famously opted to live there upon becoming pope, choosing it over the grander Apostolic Palace.
USING THE WORD ‘MIRACULOUS’
The structure decided, a flurry of activity followed to overcome steep logistical challenges. A big one: Machar, though nominally vice president, was under house arrest in Khartoum by order of the East African bloc, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. It was not fully clear who could help get the special dispensation he would need to attend, and whether conflict underway in Sudan would doom his departure. “Things were quite bad in Khartoum, and we thought he wouldn’t be able to leave,” recalls Jarvis.
A long list of government agencies had to be involved to plan the summit: the European Union, Norway, the U.S. Department of State, the Intergovernmental Agency for Development (IGAD), and a group of Eastern African countries. Numerous organizations focused on reconciliation and peace-building got wind of the event, and reached out to Orobator and the other organizers to help, including the International Crisis Group, Caritas and Community of Sant’Egidio.
The organizers also wanted to include warring members of the other, smaller South Sudanese groups, but it proved too hard. The South Sudan Opposition Alliance couldn’t agree on a representative to send. Another leading rebel group, the National Salvation Group (NAS), was considered “outside the tent” and was unwilling to sign the peace deal.
Machar ultimately got his visa just hours before the event, through a sequence of events culminating in the Italian ambassador to South Sudan rushing to the embassy in Khartoum in the north at midnight. The Sudan government shut down the airport just after Machar’s flight took off the next morning. When word came down that Machar was going to make it after all, Orobator wrote, “Everybody is using the word ‘miraculous’ to describe the events so far.”
Everyone was keenly aware that one wrong move could sink it all. “The parties to this conflict were highly antagonistic personalities,” Orobator says. Organizers “were careful not to do anything to either alienate or make it impossible for them to commit.”
That included the seating arrangements. Should the two men be seated apart or together? At the time, Orobator wrote, “I suggest(ed) we shouldn’t foster stereotypes, take risk, so keep them together. The others agree.”
But to be safe, he ended up rearranging the room into a circle, with Machar on one side of him, and Kiir on the other. “We had to make sure we didn’t give the impression that one party is being elevated above the other,” he recalled later. “There was a lot of intentionality before they arrived.”
Another decision was reached early on, too, as Orobator wrote: “No booze during meals.”
TENSE, CAUTIOUS, UNCERTAIN
The retreat was held April 10-12, 2019, Wednesday evening through Friday morning. Keeping attendance tight was a battle. Kiir boarded a plane with an entourage of 49 people, who had to be told to stay behind on the first day of the summit. Machar, whose plane landed in Rome one hour before the summit was to begin, was traveling with a delegation of his own.
Although international media had gotten wind of the event, it was to be closed to media as well, with the exception of the visit from Pope Francis scheduled at the close of the retreat.
On April 10, both men arrived—alone—to the summit house of Pope Francis. Kiir in dark shades and Machar “walking casually.” The atmosphere was polite but tense, formal. “Conversation is terse and body language is cautious, uncertain. Energy is low,” Orobator wrote at the time.
The men were eyeing one another and their relative positions in the room warily, Orobator recalls. “Each one wanted to have equal space, to stake their claims and their positions. It was quite palpable.”
As the religious leaders began to arrive, it was clear that they were treating the weekend not just as a somber retreat, but with “a sense of something special about to happen,” Orobator wrote. “Suddenly, everybody becomes formal,” with religious leaders dressed “in assorted, multicolored .owing clerical robes, almost intimidating.”
Once all attendees had arrived, Orobator made the introductions and shared how the retreat would go—a short liturgy and prayer, followed by internal reflection, then sharing.
The first round of silent reflection didn’t fare well.
“The first time we tried it, people were not really getting into it. They were just sort of hanging out in different spaces. Some of them were using their phones.”
So they changed the format for the second reflection, shepherding everyone into the pope’s private chapel. That stilled the participants, who sat quietly in reflection at last.
Midway through the conference, on April 11, a shockwave hit the group. As Orobator writes in his journal: “Breaking news: Coup in Sudan, leader Omar al-Bashir has been toppled.” Not only does this drive home the precariousness of peace in the region, it also becomes clear that if Machar had not left Sudan when he had, he would not have been able to attend.
The organizers decided to press the religious leaders in attendance to change their approach: to focus less on securing concrete peace commitments from the South Sudanese, and instead “engage as pastors and fellow pilgrims, not to hold back.”
Eventually, the atmosphere relaxed. John Chalmers, a leader in the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, gave a reflection that moved the group, including a provocative line about “destroying my enemy by making him my friend.”
After the reflection in the pope’s chapel and a round of sharing, Kiir, Machar, De Mabior, and Deng decided to meet by themselves. As Orobator recalled in his journal: “Without a warning, SKM, RM, Taban Deng, and Rebecca De Mabior announce they are to hold a side meeting. … It is a good development. What to do? We wait, we pray. … I decide to be hands off and let the Spirit take control.”
“It was the first time they had been in a room together since the shootout in 2016,” Jarvis recalls.
The foursome declined to share the results of their meeting when they emerged 45 minutes later. But things were decidedly warmer. When Kiir would speak later, he would refer to Machar several times as “my brother, my brother.”
Perhaps the most pivotal moment of the day, however, was Pope Francis’s visit. The plan was for him to arrive at the close of the summit, offer words of encouragement, and give each South Sudanese leader a Bible as a symbol of peace.
“He kind of stood in the middle of the circle, and said, ‘As a brother, from my heart, I implore you, keep the peace,’” recalls Jarvis. “He went on to say, there will be disagreements, but make sure that those are behind closed doors within the home, not in front of the people. Like fathers of the nation.”
Then, as captured by international media, he gingerly knelt and kissed the feet of each South Sudanese attendee.
“Everyone just stopped,” Jarvis says. “You could feel the Holy Spirit in the room.”
“That took everybody by surprise,” recalls Orobator. “The symbolism of it was so strong, and you could see that they were all emotionally moved by it. Machar was trying to prevent this from happening because he just couldn’t take it. But the pope kept saying, ‘Allow me, allow me.’”
Orobator fought back tears. De Mabior cried. Kiir was moved as well, Orobator recalls. “I remember after this, Salva Kiir then spoke and promised, ‘We will make peace happen in South Sudan.’”
Orobator received the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation award from the Archbishop of Canterbury for his peacemaking work.
Six years later, fragile peace is once again in jeopardy in South Sudan—this time from different warring factions. The peace between Kiir and Machar holds.
“I think they left with the fact that they had an obligation in conscience to work for the peace in their country,” says Orobator of the 2019 summit. “For me, it was really an act of God. It wasn’t anybody’s brilliant insight. It was the Holy Spirit at work. The spirit of peace and reconciliation and justice.”
ON TO SYNODALITY
The type of listening that brought two warring factions together is key to the Catholic faith and core to Jesuit values. It is embedded in the pope’s effort to advance the global Catholic Church through the Synod on Synodality.
Again, Orobator has been a key participant in this process of deep listening, collective discernment, and decision-making. He helped lead the African continent’s pre-synodal gatherings, and was one of the 364 voting members who attended two monthlong synod gatherings in Rome.
Orobator describes the Synod as being “about mutual listening, where the Pope says everyone has something to learn. Interestingly, he doesn’t only say everyone has something to say, but something to learn. It is all about listening to one another as well as listening to the Holy Spirit.”
As he did in South Sudan, Orobator finds hope in this Ignatian approach, even for a Catholic Church that seems paralyzed by polar views on things such as LGBTQ acceptance or women’s leadership in the Church.
“If we can lean into our deeply held values of faith and beliefs, perhaps we can find a place where we connect or encounter one another that is not contentious, not controversial, not antagonistic,” he says.
This spring, JST-SCU hosted one of the first major international gathering since the synod itself, featuring key synod leader Cardinal Mario Grech who heads the General Secretariat for the Synod at the Vatican. The day was spent engaging in synodal listening and sharing on how to move synodality further into Catholic dioceses, theologates, and more.
Orobator sees JST-SCU as vital to such work. “The first thing for me is that we realize that what we do here is not isolated. What we do here has significance. We say we do contextual theology. That means we pay attention to context, we are attentive to situations, to conditions that affect people’s lives,” he says.
“One of the taglines from Impact 2030 (SCU’s strategic plan) is ‘what the world needs,’ and I deeply believe that, it might look insignificant, but what we do here must respond to what the world needs, and that is through the people who come here as students, as faculty, as staff,” Orobator says.
Whether among South Sudanese leaders or with one another in Berkeley and Santa Clara, the listening—and learning—we do matters.